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Yes, Libya is the rave right now, but I can’t get the people of Egypt out of my head.

I haven’t been to
many countries, but Egypt (make that Cairo) was one of my most
remarkable. It is not just a city of culture and history; it is a city
of breathless, relentless, liberating energy.

With elaborate
weddings on weekdays and hawkers ready to haggle you to a standstill,
Cairo is one of those poetic clichés – a sprawling, energetic mega city
with an aversion to sleep.

However, even as I
have romanticised the city, I cannot ever forget the plunging sense of
despair I sensed. I cannot claim to know the soul of a people based on
a 4-day trip, but, such as I could see, the Egyptian society had broken
down – people living in debilitating poverty, an absence of civic life,
a lack of shared values, a choking sense of every man for himself.

So when the people
of Egypt came out in their thousands, pitched their tents – literally –
against their leaders, and didn’t move until something gave, I
understood.

Many of the
circumstances that led to that explosion are exactly present in
Nigeria: widespread neglect, corruption in everything from police to
politics, stagnancy despite widespread resources, a lack of true
democracy, disrespect for the people, and almost 80 per cent of the
population poor.

But the tinderbox was Hosni Mubarak, the one symbol of all that was wrong.

Nigerians haven’t
had such a villain. Each time our anger is about to boil over like it
did in Egypt, a band-aid is put on it – an IBB ‘steps aside’, an Abacha
dies, an Abdulsalami hands over, an Obasanjo loses grip, a Yar’Adua
dies. You see, our politicians are much wiser than you think – rather
than disrupt the balance of power, they consistently offer an expiation
to quench our blood thirst, and we are soon back to our jolly lives.
Why, they even seduced Tunde Bakare to join their political rat race.

Because our anger
is so frequently evened out we never get to that boiling hot rage that
should bring big change – we have been duped with small, very small,
changes that make no real difference.

But, no matter how
much we intellectualise it, nothing ever really changes incrementally.
This is where I think writers like Okey Ndibe miss the point when they
turn up their noses at suggestions for radical – even violent – change
and believe small, steady changes in civil service bureaucracy,
electoral reform and anti-corruption laws will solve the problem.

The problem with
Nigeria is a culture that believes nothing can change and nothing will
change. Because no one believes Nigeria will make the bend, everyone is
just looking for a piece of the large pie. It’s a culture – and people
drive the culture. And no, the people will not change – you have to
remove them from the system.

The change has to be big, it has to be bold and it has to be drastic.

The Jerry Rawlings
example is a worn cliché, but it exactly mirrors the kind of change we
need – maybe not bloodshed, but something so radical, so fundamentally
disruptive, that it irrevocably changes the balance of power – in
favour of the people.

We should stop
comparing ourselves to America. Barrack Obama might have come in by the
ballot box, but this in a society already founded on fundamental,
disruptive change. To even compare their solutions to ours is
intellectual laziness – its society is not as fundamentally flawed
(politically and economically) and the work had already been long done.

We need to stop
allowing ourselves to be done in by an army of duplicitous motivational
speakers, pastors, conflict resolution experts and other
“change-workers” who insist that real change can come without real
sacrifice. All we need is a “Nigerian Dream” they say. Oh please. Is
there a “Ghanaian Dream”?

I suspect that in
our hearts we know that April 2011 will not give us the change we
really need. But we focus all our attention on it – media, civil
society, government – because we are not yet ready for the heavy
lifting.

And that is what
scares me senseless. It took Egypt three decades; the people of
Tunisia, one decade; the people of Libya, four.

Do we have to wait
that long? Are we going to wait until one man rules us for decades
before we say enough? Or will we get angry now like the American Tea
Party, and stop the government in its tracks, before it all gets really
bad?

Can we find our anger? Can we?