by Ifeanyi Igbokwe

While we are busy pointing accusing fingers at GEJ, Sanusi, NNPC and everyone else we have also cheated in our exams, both professional and academic. We have made money exchange hands just to seour kids gain admission.

In a rather small reception office of one of the major Generation Y media firms, a group of visibly intelligent bunch of young people sat wondering what would be coming their way next. They were going to be interviewed for a job opening they’d all applied for.

Too occupied with the enormous responsibility of trying to anticipate what the uncertainty the next few hours held for each one, like an unuttered unanimous agreement, all allowed the voice of some very disturbingly loud silence to shroud densely the threshold of that very room, often to be chattered every now and then by the voice of a laughing and visibly excited female employee.

Then, after a few neighbour-to-neighbour small talks that sounded more like whispers than actual conversation, subjects began popping up and soon, the once tensely silent room began to come to life. In the middle of that conversation which by now was becoming a heated debate that fielded a thousand perspectives, one young man asked the question that inspired this article.

He went somewhat “Why is Nigeria still together?’’ While naturally I would have given that question a thought before delving into any answer whatsoever, another brilliant-looking young chap answered very nearly without thinking ‘Corruption’. Now when this happened, the other young man sitting close to him took his hand in his and gave him a particularly warm handshake that only did more to inform me that he took those words right out of his mouth.

I have been keenly interested on the subject of our national unity and have asked myself so many questions but have never really thought of it this way. If you’d followed closely the events and interviews that flooded the various media after the announcement of the intention of a national conference was fielded, if there was any subject on which many notable political analysts and commentators whose views had never tallied much earlier agreed on, it was the question of deciding if we really want to stay together as a people. To put it bluntly (without respect to my opinion), the average Yoruba young man, is tired and strongly believes he can do far much better if he is allowed to govern himself; he’d always make reference to Lagos state and believes those feats can be replicated. My resourceful merchant brothers from the other side of the River Niger, have always said from the outset that they are better off a people with their own flag, although their earlier attempt at achieving this dented the pages of our history, standing out as a particularly unsavoury event in its already broken pages. Amongst these three tribes what strikes me as particularly worthy of note is the fact that if you pick a hundred young people randomly selected from different part of northern Nigeria, more than 70 would not mince any word in telling you in the words of Abraham Lincoln how that we cannot not be friends.

Could it be that like the faces of the proverbial coin, a vice can have both a good side and a bad one? While corruption is the reason why PHCN cannot supply us good electricity, while it may account for the 20 billion (or whatever the amount actually is) that evaporated from the NNPC account or be the reason while Ajaokuta Steel industry cannot dream of functioning after untold billions have been invested therein, we may well have something to be thankful for about it.

While we are busy pointing accusing fingers at GEJ, Sanusi, NNPC and everyone else we have also cheated in our exams, both professional and academic. We have made money exchange hands just to secure kids gain admission. We have slipped a fifty naira note now and then into the hand of the policeman that otherwise would have discovered that our Driver’s Licence is expired, so he’d let us walk free while the state loses the demurrage we’d have paid as fine. We are quick to poke holes in Stella Oduah’s defence of why she spent N255 million of taxpayer’s money to acquire bullet-proofed cars she didn’t need in the first place while we still offer ’tips’ to Road Safety Corps so our driving skills won’t get tested while getting a Driver’s Licence; not to mention the untold billions we evade in tax each month and still decry our government’s failure to provide us with basic amenities that should naturally accrue to us.

As those young men sat there, poking strategically engineered holes in each other’s arguments, agreeing and disagreeing, it became clearer and clearer that although corruption has brought us from the glory of being the giant of Africa to becoming the mediocre of the world, while it has brought our international passport from being well-respected the world over to being an object of shame and victimization it has driven our leaders to hide their misgivings and distaste for each individual constituent tribal nations under a smiling face as long as they feed fat from the national pot and that, they don’t dream of quitting anytime soon.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.