SCRIPTURE says “Where no counsel is, the people fall: But in the multitude of counsellors there is safety” Nigeria is in such dire straits that its affairs can no longer be left solely to those in the corridors of power. Either they are short of ideas or the problem is just beyond them. I do not want to believe we have found ourselves, again, in the same bind that made one-time military dictator, Ibrahim Babangida, to exclaim that Nigeria’s economy defies solution.
So, all hands must be on deck. Solutions must be proffered right, left, and centre. Usually, those in government are deaf to the cries of “ordinary” people.
What to do, then, is to keep crying, like biblical Blind Bartimaeus, never getting weary and never allowing naysayers shut us up; confident that, if we faint not, we shall one day reap. If everyone else gives up, writers should not. Our duty is sacred – to inform; to educate; to entertain; and to hold the feet of those in power to the fire.
We are watchdogs. We are the conscience of the nation. The country’s grundnorm – its Constitution – obligates us to hold the government accountable to the people.
In a situation such as we find ourselves in Nigeria today, where the three arms of government – the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary – have miserably let the people down, I dare to say that writers remain not just the last but the only hope of the common man. Read Hamsik Dusan’s “Writers against rulers” and marvel at the heroic strug.
