Nigeria: The path to Freedom

Nigeria: The path to Freedom

By Osadolo Solomon (@soloxpress)

God of creation direct our noble cause,

Guide our leaders right, help our youths the truth to know,

 In love and honesty to grow, and living just and true.

Great lofty heights attained,

To build a nation where peace and justice shall reign.

 -Nigeria national anthem, 2^nd stanza.          

I have a link to about 1000people-most of them in their twenties. There are 200 contacts on my SIM card and the number of contacts on my phone is pushing 200.My friends list on the internet is just under 600 (quite a number of them are same contacts on my phone, by the way). Looking at the situation broadly, considering the fact that each of these people also have their own different loops of contacts that are by no means exclusive to them, it is almost safe to assume that I am-wait for it-somehow connected to most, if not all, of the youths around in Nigeria(okay, I know that's a long stretch. But it seems plausible, though oddly).

Point is, in the not-too-distant years from now, one of these persons is going to be president of Nigeria; some of them are going to be distinguished ministers, governors, business moguls, media and entertainment gurus, top-notch scientists, technocrats, administrators of industries and so on. Many of them will be regular people, by no means irrelevant, carrying on with their lives, being part of the relevant links in the long chain that'll form the fabric of Nigeria's future. The fact is that every single one of these persons has the potential of being what'll be the great or terrible factor about Nigeria's future. However any of us eventually turns out will be a product of all the investment we make NOW. We (i.e. the youths) are at an age where we automatically start molding out into the kind of men/women we'll be known as for the rest of our lives. Believe it or not, your habits are sticking faster and harder now, your mentality is getting more grounded now, and you're growing older. There's no stopping it. It's happening.

How many of you are pissed of with the generation of our fathers? How many of you think they didn't do a good job with the country they got from The Britons and are bequeathing to us? Isn’t it funny how we're kind of like how they were at our age? Majoring on frivolities, showing gross disdain and apathy towards the way we're being governed, and being unforgivably nonchalant towards issues of morality, values, self development and faith. Does that describe most youths today or what? Do we honestly think we are going to fare any better with this country when it becomes our turn to call the shots? Are our choices going to be better informed? Will we live a better country for our own children? I don't mean to bore you with questions on end. But imagine if every Nigerian youth out there had the same values system as yours. Do you think we'd make a great nation when it becomes our turn to run it? Truth is, we are going to need a great force of goodwill to overturn the cancerous nature of corruption that has eaten deep into the fabric of our public and private lives. We are saddled with a myriad of challenges and we can’t afford to (as young chaps are prone to) wish them all away. Youthful exuberance and relying on luck is not going to cut it.

Our fathers fought to have Nigeria. The founding fathers longed for a country they could call their own; a country united across tribal and political divides, prosperous, and, most importantly, without the presence of a white-skinned man in the position of leadership. They got the independence they sought, but they either were ill-prepared or just weren't ready for self governance. Truly, Nigeria on Independence Day in 1960 was a country showing a lot of promise. We were the next big thing. Rave reviews were agog in both the local and international media about how this nation with the largest collection of black people on earth was going to set out to govern themselves, and, with their inherent potential, achieve developmental strides of epic proportions. That didn’t happen. The years immediately following independence revealed the depth (or was it the lack of it?) of planning, organization and patriotism resident in those at the helm of affairs. From the very onset of self governance, Nigerian leaders started to make a lot of poor decisions, and, just like in business, if you do enough things poorly, things would go awry. Critical decisions bothering on governmental policies and national development were made to sate tribal and personal sentiments. Soon afterwards, a handful of young men in the army set out to right the wrongs. Enter the era of coups and counter coups. Bloodbaths marred the coups which were originally meant to be bloodless. But absolute power usually overwhelms the one who wields it, and the saviours (I bet they’d have called themselves that), intending to restore sanity to the country, plunged into profound depths of corruption deeper than they intended to wipe out in the first place. And Nigeria was worse off for it. We lost our place in The League of Nations. A couple of coups and a blistering civil war after, it began to dawn on us as a nation that, if we didn’t put our differences aside and work together, we could lose what was left of the ties that bound us together as one people. The military handed over power, came back again, and again until, after intense pressure from the international community, they handed over power back to a civilian democracy on May 29, 1999 (but not before putting the economy on stilts). The rebuilding process kicked off and, just over a decade after, here we are. We’ve made many false starts as a nation and a few good decisions since this democracy commenced. But we’re still standing, and that’s important. It points to our resilience as a people, and how much we want to remain undivided as one nation. But there probably isn’t a more apt time than now, when we’re on the verge of a generational shift in power, to send a wake up call to our youths every where to stand up and stake in their efforts to re-engineer Nigeria. All our institutions (political, economic, education, health, finance, etc) are failing. We are going to have to ensure the next crop of people going to run these institutions are properly equipped and possess the depth of character required to revamp them. It can no longer be business as usual because whenever history repeats itself, the price is usually higher.

As the German writer Johann W.V. Goethe quipped: “Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of those [things] which matter least.” I believe this generation cannot afford to allow sentiments of any kind cloud our sense of reasoning. I believe we can be different. It's going to take a collective effort. Be different where you are (and influence your network of friends). Just blithely hoping things would get better is not a good strategy. If we want good results, we are going to have to make good preparations. We have got to build and cultivate personal integrity, pristine ethics; and make a consistent effort to improve on ourselves intellectually, morally and spiritually. We'll have to be strong for Nigeria. We are going to need to be ready. There’s a program called Vision 20; 2020 instituted by the present government which intends to put Nigeria among the top twenty economies of the world at the year 2020. Unless the youths buy in to it and decide to up their level of participation in building Nigeria, it’s not going to happen as intended. It would have been another pipe dream.

Soon, our generation will bear the torch. The dead - ends at the paths our predecessors towed should point us in the right direction. Destiny awaits our input. We're going to have to turn this country around and take our rightful place in the League of Nations. We must work together to make Nigeria work and foil the threats of disintegration lurking in on us. Then we must pass on the torch with a flame that burns brighter and hotter to our children. But we must start acting now. If we wait we’ll waste away. This is our moment.