Today invokes instant reflection of our yesterdays and vision for our tomorrow will be born from whatever we believe is the right thing to do. Today they have gathered to celebrate our 50th Independence Day.
Today invokes instant reflection of our yesterdays and vision for our tomorrow will be born from whatever we believe is the right thing to do. Today they have gathered to celebrate our 50th Independence Day.
As a citizen of Nigeria, I would have been so proud to talk to you about my mother Nigeria, a 50years old woman who in spite of troubled marriage lived very well. But such is not the state of our case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us.
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I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Our independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us (Rich and Poor, South and North). The blessings in which we should, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by our founding fathers is shared by few, not by us. The sunlight that brought light and healing to them, has brought stripes and death to us. This October 1st is theirs, not mine and certainly not that of the depressed 140million Nigerians. They may rejoice, I must mourn with the continually oppressed, depressed and uncared-for Nigerians.
To tell a man in darkness and hunger to join them in joyous anthems, is inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, are happy with the experience of Nigeria till date? Oh! please don’t mock me by telling me there is something worthy of celebration. Let me warn that it is dangerous to copy nations whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that looted our treasury away, required of us a song; and they who wasted our resources required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a confused land without basic things of life? In the same land where justice is for them that stole from us?Please tell me a new thing!
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Fellow Nigerians, above this national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose pains, heavy-hearts and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the independence shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children without medicine and food, or the thousands dying on our roads this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.
I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this October 1st! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. Nigeria is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and dying children on this occasion, "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just....
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty (Justice), to work them without wages (Pensioners), to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men (education), to beat them with sticks (Mopol), to hunt them with guns (Armed Robbers), to sunder their families (Kidnappers), Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply....
What to the average Nigerian, is this October 1st celebration? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the Nigeria at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through forests of Africa, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, Nigeria reigns without a rival.
Our country’s strength was to find, “Unity in diversity”. But, there are numerous incidents that test our secularism. Are the people of Nigeria ready to sacrifice anything for the cause of unity? Today I remember the great leaders who gave their lives for the nation’s freedom and prosperity. Dr. Azikwe gave us de-tribalisation. Obafemi Awolowo worked for an industrialised Nigeria. Tafawa Belewa taught us non-violent leadership. Aminu Kano inducted courage in us, Samuel Ajayi Crowther and Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi gave us spiritual power.
Yes, with these contributions, Nigeria would have been a super power at 50, but no signs we are going to get better in the coming years. Our founding fathers called the children of Nigeria to dream to build a strong Nation with aim and perseverance. Indeed! This was not a word of past men, It was the words of many across the world. But this dream vanished without a trace.
Today as you celebrate, I sympathised with the depressed, jobless youths, the dying mothers and children, the economically, physically and emotionally challenged Nigerians for striving to survive in the same land where government failed in its constitutional duties to protect and care for the masses. Let me assure them that in me they have a friend and a partner.
As Nigerians Heal Their Land,
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