The Nihilistic Decay of National Identity

To JAPA is the ultimate form of self-preservation.There is nuance to be explored in this perspective especially when seeing it as a form of betrayal towards the betterment of the nation at hand, part of the reason being that it creates a brain drain that carries the brightest minds the nation can offer to foreign nations that have better use of their potential that is lost in the destabilizing nature of Nigeria itself.I say this as a Nigerian that will never JAPA out of this country.Although I have this perspective, I still respect people's choice of finding better horizons, freedom and personal autonomy, making your way to seek a better life under a more functioning society with adequate infrastructure. I recognize this as I've also enjoyed the benefits, spoils of their labour, most of them being older from millennials to boomers.So I will say again I completely understand the JAPA perspective but we have to recognize in a collective sense that our current mode of organization lacks collective understanding of power especially in terms of governance, this is due to the brain drain Nigeria's has experienced over the past decades, due to Nigeria further destabilization and poor maintenance of it's economy, infrastructure, national identity, collective consciousness and so on, due to the neo-imperialistic nature of our previous colonial masters and a complacent subservience to the dominant ideology that pervades our very minds to form a social code.I seek to explore this subservience that can predominantly be found in the actions and class interests of the ruling class, to be more specific in Nigeria's context, the incompetency of the government class to create a better quality of life in the society we find ourselves in.The contemporary ruling class of Nigeria seeks dependence towards imperialistic colonial powers and forces due to its inability to achieve sovereign power in a socio-economical sense over it's own resources and human capital becoming more susceptible to the demands of colonial powers seeking short-term solutions to attaining power and money at the cost of the living conditions of the average Nigerian.Which further creates a space of immense competition where a sense of communalism is lost especially pertaining to Nigeria's national identity. Power inverses in on itself to justify these deplorable conditions where every man looks out for themselves, their family and maybe their friends as they ultimately abandon a collective consciousness that doesn't subscribe to groups and identities that demand subservience and self-preservation for all, this is especially true in our electoral system, economy, how the government functions and so on.With this psychophysical reality in mind, one can further understand why JAPA is so popular, why even Nigerians at home find it difficult to build independence and infrastructure.These are the points, the lines of reasoning that arrive in my mind as I ask why Nigeria is in such a deplorable state. If we are serious about building Nigeria we have to understand the culture that promotes the JAPA movement creating a Nigerian in his own nation to be inadequate, to create better quality of life for all. I will start as a Nigerian living in Lagos currently exploring this inadequacy that leads to helplessness. <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/20261001_063718.jpg"/> This is the core to me, helplessness to our social condition that leads to individual acts that aren't seeped in a national identity and understanding of collective consciousness building with a guided truth of how society operates and our participation in it leading to better change. As Rudolf Rocker states in Nationalism and Culture "Since the area of the Greek municipality extended to only a few square miles every citizen was easily able to keep track of the entire public life and to form his own judgment about everything— a circumstance of great importance, which is utterly inconceivable in our modern state organization with the wide ramifications of its governmental machinery and the complicated gearing of its bureaucratic institutions. Hence the perplexed helplessness of the citizen of the modern state, his exaggerated overvaluation of governmental proclamations and of political leadership, which deprive him of all personal initiative." Pg 276 The municipality in a definite term is an urban or local district, such as a city, town or village that has corporation status and the power of local self-government that has evolved over the years which has further distanced us from the processes of self-governance primarily by our labour for the sake of the accumulation of Capital as Power in our society, by those that benefit from it's spoils and luxuries of the system which requires this distance to have control over the nation we live in, due to this governmental interface, it leads to an individual's ignorant evaluation of their own government. This creates a metamorphosis of our psychophysical reality, where forms of pessimism bordering to nihilism, the idea that"nothing can be done to save this country just focus on making money" affects and limits our imagination and actions of what can be done in bettering our society.Due to the failure of our institutions we forget the social relations we have with each other in our local community that are influenced by the institutions and vice versa, unaware of the power imbalances in society, that is in terms of class, gender, age and so on, which causes divides due to the misunderstanding of the divide itself that are incompatible to better modes of being.We have to see this complacency towards our own suffering through inaction irrespective of one's choice to JAPA or not, that especially goes for us that decide to stay in Nigeria, we have to recognize our inadequacy to build infrastructure in a psychophysical sense to seek better quality of life as those outside the country can support us even if that means to resist, even rebel against systems of power that goes against such a goal.

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