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REGIME OF HOPE: FLASHBACK

The title of this article should ring a bell to any Nigerian who was an adult or a youth between 1979 and 1984. I was born in1985, therefore I was only able to read about the Regime of Hope in history and because I was born during this regime this makes me believe strongly that the principles of this regime were imbibed in me at birth and that has made me a disciplined and upright person even in a society filled with moral decadence. That is my own superstition!

The Regime of Hope was the military regime that took over government from the civilian government of the Alhaji Usman Aliyu Shehu Shagari-led administration of 1979-1983 in Nigeria. The democratic government was actually overthrown by a military coup. Although I prefer a democratic rule to a military one because of the Rule of Law, Freedom of Speech, Respect for Human Rights, etc. which are the basis of a true democracy. But because of the kind of democracy practiced in Nigeria in the past, the military had reasons to take over government from the civilian. The military government of Major General Muhammadu Buhari and his Chief of Staff, Brigadier Babatunde A. Idiagbon which began on December 31, 1983 was called the REGIME OF HOPE. And after reading about most of the activities of this regime, I had always hoped for a regime like that in Nigeria which I will not read about but experience it myself.

Before I begin my discussion proper, I would like to give a short excerpt from a 42 paged booklet which is titled Regime of Hope. This booklet was actually produced by that same regime of hope I talked about in the previous paragraph to orientate Nigerians about the regime.

Introduction

This booklet as the title suggests becomes necessary and important because of the return to power of the military in this country barely four years after they had relinquished power to civilians.

The chequered history of Nigeria since Independence has seen her through many changes of government. Within this period, Nigeria has had fluctuating fortunes as a country. Often she had stood on the brink of political disaster but had been saved by some timely intervention.

The Civilian governments throughout the country, denuded and eroded all hopes of the average Nigerian citizen for a better life and a greater tomorrow.

Brazen acts of indiscipline in all its ramifications were the other of the day. Misappropriation of public funds amounting to billions of naira from the nation’s treasury went on unchallenged.

Oil merchants and agents emerged overnight owing their massive wealth to illegal oil deals.

Contracts were over inflated in order to raise the amount of kick-backs for unscrupulous officials.

Food prices began to rise. Salaries of civil servants and teachers fell into arrears by several months, schools lacked text-books and hospitals ran short of drugs.

Life and property became unsafe as everyone became a law unto himself.

At this point, the average Nigerian citizen yearned for a change. He prayed for a better government. And when the military intervened in the early hours of December 31, 1983, all Nigerians jubilated for the dawn of a new era, the beginning of A REGIME OF HOPE.

This booklet is a catalogue of measures and efforts made by the new military regime since it came to power to give the nation a fresh lease of life.

(Excerpt from REGIME OF HOPE, produced and published by Federal Ministry of Information, Social Welfare, Youth, Sports and Culture, Domestic Publicity Division, Ikoyi Road, Ikoyi-Lagos.)

According to the reasons given in this excerpt and in the spirit of patriotism and love for the fatherland, I agree that the military seizure of power in Nigeria in 1983 was justifiable owing to the political and economic abyss in the country at that time. And what prompted me to write this article is not just to analyze the governments of Nigeria in the past, but to also compare them with the current situation in the country. In other to achieve this aim, it is mandatory to make a quick comparison between the governments of Nigeria in the past and the present. Starting with the democratic government of Nigeria from 1979 to 1983, this government proved weak in the building of a country on democratic values. And the military took over. Now another era of democracy began in 1999 in the country. These regimes were not only similar to the 1979 to 1983 regime in terms of corrupt practices; these regimes took corruption to the highest level. In this period in time, the political, economic and societal decadence in the country was far more than that of the 1979 to 1983 situation that led the military to take over. But why couldn’t the military take over since 1999 democratic or civilian regime? The administration of these regimes did not only increase the deplorable state of the nation’s economy, politics and level of corruption, it also crippled the military to prevent it from taking over government again by retiring its generals who are capable of organizing a military intervention.

A Flashback to the history of politics in Nigeria is sincerely necessary to help explain and discuss the aims in this article. It also helps us to better understand and analyze the present politics in the country. Since 1979, the best government that served Nigerians well was the Regime of Hope, because it practiced a government based on discipline, true patriotism, responsibility, respect and protection for life, etc. And having read much about the regime of hope, I had always wished to experience that kind of regime myself and even imagined a government in Nigeria where Major Gen. Muhammadu Buhari or Brigadier Babatunde Idiagbon would be the president or head of state as the case may be just to have a taste of it.

The administration in Nigeria from 2007 to date is the only administration which from my experience of democracy since 1999 has attempted and is still attempting to practice a true democracy. It tries to destroy the structures and principles of the Nigerian Democracy (democracy of deceit) which it met on ground. By so doing this government is definitely the present prototype of the Regime of Hope. It is upon this basis that Nigerians must stop ethnical, partial and partisan politics and be ready to support any government which is re-creating and re-branding our democracy according to the real principles of democracy. As a Nigerian and a political observer, I discovered that the present democratic administration in Nigeria is getting closer to the type of democratic government we have been praying for although we still wish for something better and that is why I believe this is our present Regime of Hope, only that it takes a non-partial observer to see this clearly.

The only problem I see with this present administration of Nigeria is that it takes only optimistic and long-sighted observers to see the real positivity in administration. Although that is in the real sense not a problem. And I have always wondered why it is so difficult for many Nigerians to sacrifice for the future of this nation. We want a better Nigeria but do not want to pay the price for it. If great men of America could pay huge sacrifice hundreds of years ago for the present Americans, why can we not sacrifice today for the unborn Nigerians? Issues are clear, I am not among Nigerians hoping for a better Nigeria, I already found Hope in this present administration and will support it to partake in the building of a better Nigeria, which many are still hoping for, and in life I will be proud to count myself among those who actively or passively built a better Nigeria.

By Kunle Adesokan

DO DREAMS HAVE MEANING?

DO DREAMS HAVE MEANING?

The phenomenon called dream has been seen by many as a spiritual insight into the future. Many people especially in Africa, where many still have strong belief in Myths or Superstition, believe dreams are revelations of future occurrences and make great efforts in finding meanings to dreams.

As a matter of fact, am using Nigeria as a case study in this article. In Nigeria, where we have many ethnic groups, people generally all have similar views to dreams. It is generally believed that when you dream, it must be taken seriously because it is a revelation and if not taken seriously, the unpalatable events in the dream would be unavoidable. So in other to avoid bad dreams from coming to pass is to know the meaning of the dream and take the appropriate preventive measures. In the end you find out that in the course of looking for meaning to dreams, people get out of their way just to know the interpretations to their dreams. That is, they go to the religious heads, depending on what faith they are, for assistance with the interpretation. Sometimes it even gets to the point where the dreamer is asked to perform a ritual just to avert the bad dream from becoming reality.

In the world of the “Enlightened People” (where I would like to be classified) on the other hand, a dream is just a mere drama performed by the brain while the subject is at sleep. To psychologists, dreams are just a replay of events that are stored in our unconscious mind: that is, out of all events and experiences that happen in the human conscious mind, some unimportant information drawn from the scenes of our visual experience by the brain are automatically stored in the unconscious mind. And during sleep (since the brain still works while we sleep), the brain automatically replay those information that are stored in the unconscious mind and this is done randomly by the brain. While the brain randomly picks information that is stored into its memory, it not only picks them from the unconscious mind but also from the conscious mind. In a nutshell, it can be simply explained like this: this is just the same thing as the human mind thinking, imagining or fantasizing. The only difference is, the brain fantasizes, imagines or thinks while we are conscious or awake and while we are unconscious or asleep, the brain does the same (fantasizes, imagines or thinks) and we call that dream. To help a lay man understand this scenario, just know this fact: “when you sleep your brain doesn’t”. When your brain does the normal things it does when you are awake, you see that activity as a dream while asleep. With all these explanations, it is therefore easy to conclude if truly our dreams have any special meaning or not.

Before I or you draw any conclusion, I will also like to point out two important facts about dreams:

1.      “No matter how hard you try to, you can never remember where your dream started from”

2.      “It is impossible to see someone you have never met before in your dream”

The first fact points clearly to us how obvious it is that the brain just picks random experiences, pictures or images, events and faces from our unconscious mind or residual memory and the revisiting of these information create in our sleep a visual psychological film in form of a dream. So that is why you can never remember where your dream started from because the dream itself does not follow any organized pattern. To explain this further, can you remember exactly how you started the fantasy, imagination or thoughts (I am not talking about while sleeping now, I mean while you were awake yesterday and was thinking or fantasizing) you had the previous day? It is absolutely impossible, so also is dream because they are actually the same, one only happens in sleep and the other while awake.

The second fact about dream proves to us that the dream is a product of the brain. That is to say, what your mind has never conceived cannot be dreamt about. In other words, the brain needs the information, pictures or experiences stored in the residual memory to be able to form a dream. This fact is the simplest to understand, it means without the physical information, like places, names, faces and events, stored in the brain, the brain will be unable to create any event in form of dream.

In conclusion, it will totally be wrong to criticize those that attach meaning to dreams, because a person’s dream is just a replay of their imaginations, fantasies, fears and other conscious events in the brain. However, attaching a meaning to a dream is like attaching a meaning to a fantasy or imaginations. We all have imaginations at one point in time or the other: “I have imagined myself living in a very big house, with state-of-the-art electronics, swimming pool, basket ball court, garage packed with latest cars and so on.” This imagination goes in form of a replay of something that has been in my mind before or in form of a film but with scenes of earlier experiences. Even in imaginations, we still need information stored in our residual memory. An African for example, who is imagining being in Europe but has never been to Europe will only use the pictures of  a street, a house or a scene from one of the European movies he or she has seen or stories heard of or read about. Even sometimes our imaginations become obscure to we ourselves, this happens when there is no appropriate image of what we trying to imagine or its equivalent in our unconscious mind.

Even in Nigeria, where we attach so much meaning to dream, there is a popular Yoruba (a major ethnic group in Nigeria which dominates the Western part of the country) idiom about dream which when translated into English language means “If someone founds or sees money in the dream and he/she is happy, he/she should be advised to work harder or else he/she will die of hunger”. The moral lesson in this idiom is that “when you found money in your dream and you believe that the dream is a revelation that you will become rich in reality, you are deceiving yourself and will die in poverty if you don’t work hard”. This idiom emphasizes the meaninglessness of dreams even though the idiom comes from a society which strongly believe in the meaningfulness and spirituality of dreams. In fact this is the strongest point that proves that dreams have no meaning.

I will therefore personally conclude that, trying to give a meaning to a dream is like dreaming. Because a dream itself is a fantasy while you sleep and attaching a meaning to that dream is also an act of fantasizing.

By Kunle Adesokan