Page Nav

SHOW

Trending

popular

My Outrage Fatigue About Nigeria

 By Farooq A. Kperogi Twitter: @farooqkperogi In the last few months, I’ve noticeably scaled down the frequency and intensity of my social m...

 By Farooq A. Kperogi

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

In the last few months, I’ve noticeably scaled down the frequency and intensity of my social media involvement with Nigeria, and scores of people have reached out to ask why. The short answer is that I am suffering from a psychological phenomenon called outrage fatigue.

Late African-American civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer colorfully characterized this state of mind as being sick and tired of being sick and tired. It is instigated by sustained sensations of powerlessness, hopelessness, mental exhaustion, and cynicism, which ultimately lead to indifference and even compassion fatigue.

My outrage usually flows from a wellspring of righteous indignation over injustice, avoidably missed opportunities, elite cruelty, and preventable existential catastrophes. It is nourished by expectations that its forceful ventilation will jolt people to act and cause policymakers to make amends for the good of the society.

That was what Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist James Earle “Jimmy” Breslin meant when he said, “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

But outrage, rage, and even compassion are not a permanent condition; they are intrinsically temporary. It’s impossible to keep your sanity while you are in a perpetually agitative emotional state. In other words, outrage fatigue is an unconscious self-defense mechanism. It’s the mind’s way to decompress and regain equanimity.  

It’s bad enough when outrage changes nothing and when both the people on whose behalf you’re outraged and the people whose bone-headedness activated your outrage use you for target practice in throwing vituperative darts for daring to be outraged. But it’s worse when people pretend that the consequences of ignoring well-intentioned outrage are unanticipated. 

Today, every section of Nigeria is enveloped in profound existential turmoil thanks to both the inability and unwillingness of the Muhammadu Buhari regime to confront the problems that afflict the country. 

Boko Haram, which the regime used to brag about “technically defeating,” has now established a foothold in Niger State; several rural communities there now periodically pay the terrorist group millions of naira that they can’t afford just to buy fleeting peace. And Niger State is contiguous with the Federal Capital Territory. It’s only a matter of time before the group takes over Abuja.

This is in addition to daily and ceaseless mass deaths and abductions in almost every part of the country—and calls for dissolving the Nigerian union in the East and in the West. Even for those of us who live outside Nigeria, the emotional toll is enormous.

But in several past columns, I’d warned about the dangers of allowing Buhari to come back for a second term. I warned that Buhari’s almost congenital incompetence and degenerative mental decline, not to mention the coterie of duncical babysitters that surround him and rule on his behalf, should cause the nation to not allow him to rule for a second term.

 The persistence of my warnings, in fact, caused the presidency to pressure Daily Trust to stop my column in December 2018, but the paper wrote a front-page comment this week lamenting exactly the same things I prevised the nation of. 

I foretold what is unravelling now since at least 2017. For instance, in a December 16, 2017 column titled “There Must be an Alternative to Buhari and Atiku,” I wrote: “Given Buhari’s provable incompetence and undisguisedly subnationalist proclivities, which have plunged the nation to the nadir of fissiparity, allowing him to rule for another four years could sound the death knell for the country. This is no hyperbole.”

In an April 21, 2018 column titled “Buhari: From Criminalizing and Dividing Nigerians to Dissing Nigerian Youth,” I wrote: “If Buhari’s second term, which he appears poised to get, doesn’t end Nigeria as we know it, nothing ever will again.”

In an October 13, 2018 column titled, “Atiku’s Emergence and End of the Road for Buhari,” I observed that “There is no question that Buhari is the absolute worst president Nigeria has ever had the misfortune to be burdened with. He is thoroughly and irredeemably incompetent, not to mention unapologetically bigoted and lazy. Only a sick country would reward such a person with a second term.”

I ended the column with the following ominous words: “A Buhari second term will end Nigeria as we know it. Of that, I am sure.”

In a November 19, 2018 Facebook update titled, “NextLevel: Follow Detached Leaders to Your Death,” which I later developed into a full-length column, I wrote the following:

“The creativity deficit in APC’s NEXT LEVEL campaign slogan and graphic is truly unnerving, but it powerfully encapsulates, without intending to, the frighteningly escalating sense of foreboding that a Buhari second term would mean for Nigeria. The photo shows Buhari and Osinbajo insouciantly detached from the people they are leading. Buhari appears as a clumsy, clueless leader who can’t even get his steps right: unlike Osinbajo, he skips a step on the staircase as he leads Nigerians to perdition.

“Both the leaders and the led wear sheepish, vacuous grins as they head to their damnation like moths to a flame. The photo shows them climbing up the edge of a cliff from where they'd fall into the cruel, unforgiving blue ocean that surrounds them. This is a depressing graphic, but I give it credit for its fidelity in capturing the ruination that Buhari is inexorably leading Nigeria to.

“The ‘NEXT LEVEL’ slogan is also a powerful linguistic affirmation of the depressing future the graphic evokes. There’s no question that Buhari’s record as president these past three years has been an unrelieved disaster. Nigeria now leads the world from the bottom in almost everything. Insecurity used to be limited to the northeast, but it has now become democratized nationally. Prices of commodities have gone through the roof. Governance has ceased. Governing boards of several federal agencies are still not constituted, which means the nation is literally at a standstill. The economy has tanked, and everyday folks are writhing in unspeakable agony, but the president bragged about never being in ‘a hurry to do anything.’

“Imagine what the ‘next level’ of this would be. That’s what the Buhari campaign is warning you about.”

In a December 15, 2018 column titled “Death of the Electoral Bill and the Coming Electoral Theft,” I said Nigeria and the world “can't afford the tragedy of a war-torn Nigeria, which a Buhari second term will surely precipitate.”

In another update, I wrote: “Buhari isn't even misgoverning; he isn't governing at all. I call it ‘ungovernance.’ Buhari is by far the worst president Nigeria has ever had since independence. And I don't say this lightly. His second term would signal the death of Nigeria as we know it."

There are several such warnings littered liberally in most of my columns and social media interventions before the 2019 election. Of course, as l always remind my readers, I have no prescient or oracular powers. No human being does. But every perceptive person can make informed predictions about the future based on a knowledge of the past and the present.

It was always easy to see that a Buhari second term would spell doom for the country, democratize bloodbath, and push the country to the edge of the precipice. No one deserves admiration for knowing this.

A popular leftist American bumper-sticker slogan says, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Well, I am paying attention. It’s just that I have reached the elastic limit of my outrage because Nigeria’s current tragedy is self-inflicted, predictable, and preventable.

Related Article:

Young People Have Mentally Checked Out of Nigeria

13 comments

  1. It is a pity prof. I don't know, where do we go from here? I want to comment but do not even know how to. I just hope it will not be too late to ask for Allah's interventions.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You absolutely right in your prediction of what the future would be if Buhari got a second term. I had the same feeling and I believe many others did too. Sadly we are in the minority. Many others for what ever reason cared less about the present talk less about the future. Today we are at a crossroads. I hope we live to see a new dawn ater these disastrous years.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Those of us who were of age when PMB was the Military head of state were a witness to his incompetence.

    It was however difficult for us to convince the others of what we knew would happen because of the well oiled propaganda of APC.

    But I think this experience with all its tragedy will ultimately prove useful to Nigerians. Only after going through this will we prize competence over tribalism. Ideas have consequences after all.

    ReplyDelete
  4. What about those of us who never supported him from the beginning. If you are outraged and fatigued what should we be; the people who say the handwriting on the wall in 2015.

    ReplyDelete
  5. In 2019 when Buhari was reelected, northern voters were still under his spell so I was hoping the Southwest would save the country from his second term. Unfortunately, they also gave in and awarded him a second term. So I hope the Southwest will stop acting as if they had no part in the Buhari debacle.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Let's not forget that the election was rigged, which explains why INEC has still not released the raw data of the vote two years later--unlike what it did in the 2015 election. Buhari lost ground with the Northern, Southwestern,
      and Middle Belt electorate, and had no foothold in the Southeast and South-south to begin with. There was no way he won the election. The election was obviously rigged, but no one rose up to protest.

      Delete
    2. Do you believe that was an election? Then, you can believe anything.

      Delete
    3. @The Voiceless: your belief that the 2019 election was rigged isn't better than my belief that it wasn't, since you have no proof. Actually, it doesn't require any special talent to believe that a Nigerian election was rigged since that is a commonly held belief concerning virtually all our past elections. Therefore, there is no need for you to get on a high horse.

      Delete
  6. You are not alone. I even deactivated my FB account.
    We don enter one chance finish!

    ReplyDelete
  7. A prophet has been crying in wilderness for four years now that there in no living Buhari as the Nigerian president. That Buhari no longer belongs to the living but the dead.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Going by the rhetoric of sessetion, Nigeria wasn't divided under Apc led government, it wont be divided forever...

    ReplyDelete
  9. Dear Professor, I read your brief with admiration and curiosity. I might not be wrong to see that the stories is one sided, I can't believe that the Professor can't see anything meaningful or an achievement made. Although, I quite agree with some of the positions but it's not enough to make narrative that best describe the situation not the solution. Besides, a highly intellectual individual like you should be bold but speaks in unifying the country. I can't defend Buhari and his team, I agree many things are preventable and avoidable but in all, what lesson have we learn that maybe useful for us in 2023 and how can we navigate in this circumstances.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I was hoping you would provide us with the solutions and the way forward after your critic of the writer stance.

      Delete

Share your thoughts and opinions here. I read and appreciate all comments posted here. But I implore you to be respectful and professional. Trolls will be removed and toxic comments will be deleted.