Nigeria: Living in Denial

If you haven't decided to turn a blind eye to events(both remote and current) that question our continued existence as one country so that it doesn't give you hypertension, then at one point or another you may have been tempted to ask yourself, or ask one of your interlocutors a question something like this:

How did we get here?

Errmm, allow me to give you some (not even close to being exhaustive) of the answers to that - which I have couched under a blanket of deniability.

We got here in denial; denial of how divided we are pretending to be united, denial of how desperately necessary it is to look beyond tribal links, ethnic patronages and religious persuasions to choose charismatic leaders with the intellectual wherewithal and sterling qualities to bring about progress, denial of how bankrupt our moral and ethical cleavages have become, denial of what constitutes corruption and how it differs from stealing, denial of the fact that oil remains the oxygen of our economy and no (mis)calculated rebasing can change that, denial of the knowledge that whenever we've adopted (nay, copied and pasted) economic policies of the Bretton Woods Institutes without the prerequisite conditions necessary for them to apply smoothly here, we have failed miserably, denial that Okonjo-Iweala's pedigree may (underline "MAY") be adequate for a more robust economy rather than one at its nosediving watershed like ours, denial of the damage done to our collective psyche by the Prosperity Gospel preachers who junket the world in the comfort of their private jets leaving their faithful yet poverty-stricken worshippers to the fate of the cockroach in a meeting of chickens, denial of the dumbing of our intellect and burying of our reason by the modern day faith-only, God-of-prosperity indoctrination that will not allow us question our loss of rights and privileges, denial that summarily, government will gladly sacrifice the rest of us on the altars of their convenience and their luxurious excesses.

We are cannon fodder. It isn't pretty, but neither is the truth. Just as it remains factual that you cannot help someone in perpetual denial.