An anthem uplifts, galvanizes, bestirs and inspires. It summons our courage, our patriotism, our commitment and our best.
This explains why an anthem is often rendered before a national or group endeavor. Nigeria’s anthems, the first one being NIGERA, WE HAIL THEE and the second one that replaced it, in 1978, being, ARISE, O COMPATRIOTS, seek to meet the above elevating benchmarks.
While the lyrics of NIGERIA, WE HAIL THEE, written by Lillian Jean Williams in 1959, heralded our independence in 1960, the lyrics of ARISE, O COMPATRIOTS were authored by five Nigerians, namely:John A. Ilechukwu, Eme Etim Akpan, B.A. Ogunnaike, Sota Omogui and P.O. Aderibigbe on the watch of General Olusegun Obasanjo, Head of State, as he then was. It was an amalgam of words and phrases taken from five of the best entries following a national contest.
It is instructive that the first anthem faced stiff opposition when it was created and its lyrics rendered into song/music by Frances Berda in 1959. The defunct DAILY SERVICE, an organ of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, led the charge.
Much later, and in spite of its disparaging reference to our ethnic nationalities as “tribes” and “tongues”, the old anthem was to be preferred by some of our grandees. For instance, the late erudite Justice Chukwudifu Oputa, wrote a number of treatises making a pitch for it and canvassing that Nigeria revert to the old anthem.
This nostalgia seems to have played out in favor of the old anthem a week ago. A bill seeking the country to revert to the old anthem passed the first, second and third readings, within minutes, in the House of Representatives. The bill received the same swift passage in the Senate last Monday and assented to by the president almost immediately . Rarely, in our annals, has a bill passed with such lightening speed.
Nigerians are flummoxed and bewildered at the alacrity with which this bill passed. Many Nigerians cannot fathom how a mere recourse to the old anthem can suddenly improve their weal or make their onerous challenges to vanish.
Most Nigerians wonder why the national anthem should pre-occupy the National Assembly at a time when hundreds of Nigerians are being abducted with abandon or killed outright by bandits on a daily basis. These are the travails, of woe and trauma, that visit Zamfara, Katsina, Niger,
Plateau and Borno States every day. As I write, not less than 3.3 million Nigerians are pinning away in Internally Displaced Persons(IDP) Camps across the country. Millions of others have taken refuge in “safe” havens. In Plateau State, 151 communities have been occupied by bandits and their inhabitants displaced.
Many Nigerians wonder why members of the National Assembly should be obsessed with our reverting to the old national anthem at a time when inflation, as at 11.30a.m. on 15th May 2024, stood at 33.69% and food inflation, which is also upward bound, is rated at 40.53%.
Many Nigerians cannot understand why the country’s national anthem has become so pivotal as to dominate discussion at the National Assembly at a time when our schools, hospitals and roads are decrepit and millions of graduates are trudging the streets without jobs. Nigeria’s out of school(OOS) population accounts for 15% of the global total. One in three of Nigerian children are out of school:10.2 million at the Primary level and 1.8million at the Junior Secondary School(JSS) level. 12.4 million never attended school and 5.9 million deserted school early.
Nigerians cannot figure out why the national anthem should concern members of the National Assembly when the economy is in a terrible shape. The country continues to get burrowed in debt peonage. Its foreign reserves continue to shrink and to plummet. Multinationals continue to leave the country in droves. Investors such as TOTALEnergies, continue to shun us like the plague.
By pre-occupying themselves with the national anthem in these dire and challenging times, it is clear that members of the National Assembly are out of kilter and out of joint with what ail Nigerians.
It is obvious that they have lost touch with the suffering, pains and destitution of their compatriots who they profess to represent. As at now, 133 million Nigerians, representing 63% of the population, are multidimensionally poor.
It is also crystal clear that they do not empathize with Nigerians. Neither do they care a hoot what becomes of us. If they did, they would have focused, like the laser beam, on the aforesaid challenges.
But come to think of it: why would they care? These are law makers who feed fat on the land. They are paid such mouth watering salaries and allowances as to put them out of sync with Nigeria’s squalid reality. These are legislators who earlier showed undisguised preference for Sports Utility Vehicles(SUVs) manufactured abroad to the detriment of their home-made ones.
These, too, are legislators who excel in collecting money in hard currency from the Executive branch in order to do its bidding rather than to perform their oversight tasks.
With sumptuous provisioning such as aforementioned and with largesse accruing from the Executive branch to boot, surely our legislators must live in some luxuriant extraterrestrial, devoid of the destitution faced by their countrymen. Little wonder, they can afford to amuse us with the circus they carried out in the past one week. Did Nero not fiddle while Rome burned?