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, 2nd 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.
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