Opinion: By Emmanuel Onwubiko / September 12, 2022
So, we march on, following our leaders, toward an “Armageddon” of our own making; said Noam Chomsky.
“A bad government cannot only be called as a ‘bad’ government; the real adjective should be this: Enemy! Yes, bad government is a real enemy for the country it governs, an enemy within!” …Mehmet Murat ildan.
In the last 7 years, Nigeria as a Country has miserably embarked on a journey to the dreaded abode of a Banana Republic which was aptly captured by Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century whereby he propounded what he called “natural law for a lawless people”.
A contemporary writer Adam J. Macleod who reviewed some of these thoughts of Thomas Hobbes stated that by “natural” Thomas Hobbes means “the infantile, in which the activity of right reason must be lacking.”
These people Hobbes said are everywhere, and it is not easy to detect them. So, in the state of nature, we all should be afraid of everyone else.
Thomas Hobbes defined life in the state of nature to be “solitary, poor nasty, brutish and short”.
Just as the aforementioned reviewer emphasized, I repeat by saying that in Nigeria of today, we see evidence of lawlessness all around us and life for millions of Nigerians is brutish, short, solitary and miserably doomed.
Just like the Hobbessian State of nature, in Nigeria of today there are looters embedded in government and rioters and so many cases of jail breaks whereby convicted terrorists, murderers, kidnappers, assassin and petty crooks in their thousands are still on the run even as we have seen these jail breaks about fifteen times since July 2022.
In the year 2021 December 1st a respected online publication gave verifiable data that about 5,000 inmates escaped from Nigerian prisons in one year. These jailbreaks tell you only but one thing – Nigeria has rapidly become a lawless place and has attained the same status just as Thomas Hobbes the English philosopher philosophized just as he was born on April5th 1588 in Malinesbuty, United Kingdom and he died on December 4th 1679 in National Trust-Hardwick in the United Kingdom. After five whole centuries, those at the helms of political affairs in Nigeria have used incompetence to railroad Nigeria into a state of nature in 2022. Nigeria is now a centre of indescribable crimes and those who managed to be caught and jailed usually break open these gates of prisons and disappear into thin air and mingle back into the larger society thereby hastening the decline of Nigeria and its rapid advance towards the state of nature as encapsulated in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes on Natural laws and a State of Nature.
Once this year, Nigerians woke up to behold a video of Kaduna terrorists flogging the daylight out of the over 100 kidnapped train passengers that they have kept for over 5 months without President Muhammadu Buhari’s government succeeding in rescuing them.
Last year in Kebbi State in the North west, students of a public secondary school kidnapped and taken into the forest spent 6 months before being released after heavy ransom was paid.
Trust TV and British Broadcasting Corporation also showed where terror kingpin of Zamfara Fulani origin was turbaned a traditional title holder, yet we claim to have a government. The same government that tolerated the expansion of terrorists and their activities in the North West, then imposed sanctions on the media houses that aired the interviews the untouchable northern terror kingpins of Zamfara freely gave without fear of ever being caught. And true to his posturing, Zamfara state’s government ruled out any possibility of arresting and prosecution of this terrorist with blood of hundreds of people of mainly Hausa people in his hands just because he …