Babylon By Molue, Okada And Keke NAPEP

PRESIDENT YAR'ADUA, WITH DAVID MARK, DIMEJI BANKOLE AND MAHMUD YAYALE AHMED. Photo; State House.

Ideological insurgences that were triggered by the philosophy of Negritude had promoted the socio-political ideals that would propel the black world towards civilization.

Songs like Sonny Okosun’s Papa’s Land and Bob Marley’s Zimbabwe, Africa, Unite, War and Exodus have waxed lyrical in singing the liberation of the African continent into our subconscious.

Sonny Okosun’s Papa’s Land has reminded us of the fulcrum of the theme of Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia Shall Be Free. Kaunda himself, echoing Arthur Mee’s Talk to Boys, has wondered why Europe is ruled by the Europeans, China is rule by the Chinese, Germany is ruled by the Germans and Africa could not be ruled by the Africans.

Those of us who caught the fire of such African nationalism through the path of O’ Level Certificate syllabus in non-African fiction had gone the whole hog to found and establish the Bob Marley Club in various Nigerian universities in the early 1980s.

Every May 11, the usual commemorative day of African nationalism along with the memorial day of the demise of Bob Marley, we would mount our public address system blaring the poignant songs of Bob Marley: Africa, Unite! /For we’re moving right out to Babylon/ And we’re moving to our father’s land.

How good and how pleasant it would be/ Before God and Man/ To see the unification of all Africans/ As it’s been said already/ We are the children of the Higher Man/ We are the children of the Rasta man/ So, Africa, Unite/ For we’re moving right out of Babylon/ And we’re moving to our father’s land.

From Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka, Peter Abraham’s Wild Conquest, Mine Boy, Tell Freedom, Albert Luthuli’s Let My People Go, Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, Nadine Gordimer’s Some Monday For Sure, Alex La Guma’s In The Fog of The Season’s End and several others, liberating Africa from the shackles of oppression had been the brimming passion in post-university education days.

At Heathrow Airport, immediately after the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme, this writer had carried his nose high up to answer to and unusually lengthy immigration questions in a manner that says: I CAN FLY BACK TO MY COUNTRY IF YOU ARE NOT GOING TO GRANT ME POINT-OF-ENTRY IMMIGRATION VISA! Why won’t I then? Currency exchange was one Nigerian Naira to one Pound Sterling! So what’s the big deal about going to Europe?

I didn’t know that would blow away with the smoke of wrongheaded economic history after which my fellow countrymen would soon become economic refugees, scavenging for immigration visas into foreign lands.

From the monstrous incursion of the military into Nigeria’s body polity up to now, we have receded time and again into antediluvian times.

Rather than transit from the era of assembling foreign brands like Peugeot and Volkswagen to manufacturing our homemade cars, having tarred all our roads from the huge resources of the petro-dollars and hydrocarbon, we now ride in ramshackle, menopausal wagon by the name of Molue to work!

In the brutishly, and badly ventilated vehicle, which the Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, is trying to ban, forty-nine people sit and thirty-nine people stand. Inside of it, street-preachers or drug peddlers still sermonize and advertise. And passengers brawl and quarrel at the slightest provocation. 

Motorcycles, otherwise known as Okada, tricycles, otherwise known as Keke Marwa or Keke NAPEP have since become our glorified means of transport. As part of the last administration’s shameful show of the bereavement of ideas of governance, television advertisements have displaced a brand of wagon-tricycle as KEKE NAPEP.

In that advert, a caricature of President Olusegun Obasanjo gleefully showcases Keke NAPEP as government’s effort in mass mobilization. That was our own home grown technology that we proudly show to the world in the twenty-first century! An oil-rich nation like Nigeria that had made more than $400 Billion from crude oil since the eve of political independence! If that is not a shame, what do we call it?

Lately, some tricylic buses have been imported into Nigeria as means of transport and shuttle in our rural and sub-urban roads.

It is the latest dummy the government has sold to the people. They have failed to fix the roads. Our roads are still impassable and decrepit. Is government saying Okada, tricycles or tricyclic buses are the solution to our roads?

The tragic thing is that Nigerians drive through the roads in imbecilic longsuffering to churches and mosques every Sunday and Friday to go and torment God or Allah with wails of petitions and prayers, rather than embarking on direct civil action like marching down the walls of Jericho that are the headquarters of their Local Government Areas or State Government Secretariat.

My people, keep driving through those rough roads to go and pray rather than taking your destinies in your hands. One thing I can assure you is that there must be a Rosa Park, a Martin Luther-King Jr. before you can have a Barack Obama. Let’s stop kidding ourselves. God has more matters arising on his agenda than the phantasmagoria of irresponsible creature he has created on a blue, beautiful, life-sustaining planet!