We have re-christened oddities and given them fine names as a people. We have designed a social order that cherishes lies and half-truths built on a platform of ethnicity and sentiments. An order raised on the pillar of greed, corruption and theft, cemented by inordinate cravings for things rather than meaning. We have turned every rational thought over its head. We justify failure with vigour, we resent progress with passion, and we give new meaning to wealth by making ourselves poorer when we become richer. The divisions that exist amongst us are now permanently being seared into our brains and the inner recesses of our consciousness. We constantly strive to tear down rather than build, we have bought into the lie that wealth is only created by selling our collective assets by a few privileged thieves.
We have re-christened oddities and given them fine names as a people. We have designed a social order that cherishes lies and half-truths built on a platform of ethnicity and sentiments. An order raised on the pillar of greed, corruption and theft, cemented by inordinate cravings for things rather than meaning. We have turned every rational thought over its head. We justify failure with vigour, we resent progress with passion, and we give new meaning to wealth by making ourselves poorer when we become richer. The divisions that exist amongst us are now permanently being seared into our brains and the inner recesses of our consciousness. We constantly strive to tear down rather than build, we have bought into the lie that wealth is only created by selling our collective assets by a few privileged thieves.
We have become a nation where petty thieves are hanged by the noose, dragged in the market place, skinned and burnt alive. While we celebrate those who steal billions with valour and pomp! We have become a nation where the oppressed will vehemently defend the terrible acts of their oppressors!! Alas!! We have migrated from a nation of crook ‘stars’, of 419-ers, to kidnappers, and more recently, a nation of terrorists and senseless bombings and killings. How much is the worth of a life in Nigeria? Aren’t our labels bad enough as unsavory? We are just evil!
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We rationalize the impossible. We wish for oceans in the desert and have crucified honesty and hard work on political alters. We have made a lamb out of a hapless and helpless populace and turned their dreams into nightmares. Our schools teach but not knowledge, our churches preach but not values. We measure substance not by legacies but by cars, houses, bank accounts and more so by political positions.
We run abroad to treat headaches, mosquito bites and minor cuts yet we budget billions of naira every year to improve lives only to get people’s lives worsened than the year before. Our economy ‘grows’ yet no jobs, some of our wealthiest people are crooks, some of our most influential people are rotten, spewing out nothing but their putrid smell which is affecting every sphere of our society.
We produce Masters and PhD degree holders and one wonders what they do research in. Yet not a single invention to tackle our local needs and challenges in all the years that our educational institutions have existed. We are not even re-inventing the wheel, yet we can’t even have a single invention to our name! Are you telling me that after all these years, no University or Polytechnics in Nigeria can produce machines for mass use to tackle one form of our socio-economic challenges?
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We spend more money placating militants not to pick the gauntlet against the power-that-be, yet have no plans for teeming youth of unemployed Nigerians. Nigeria we hail thee!
How can militants incur more cost on society than all of the nation’s security apparatuses combined? Yes seriously, the Police and Military! This is no hyperbole. Check the 2014 budget.
That is the length to which we have been so manipulated by an inimical system that is fueled by senseless leadership and a followership that is under some kind of spell that is inexplicable. Defending their oppressors and making it seem that the biggest problem Nigeria has is the fact that Hausa or Fulani wants to rule forever. Or the lie that Nigeria can only work if secession prevails, another lie from the pit of hell. With the same lot in power, not a single thing will change! Absolute nonsense! How well can one justify the apparent lack of leadership? How well will one justify that billions of naira go missing and Nigerians ask the wrong questions? How long will impunity reign supreme?
How well can you rationalize the fact that applicants that are jobless were asked to cough out a thousand naira each to take a test for a job that was obviously non-existent? When does it start to make sense that in ‘saner climes the government actually gives benefits to the unemployed? How can one make any sense that hundreds of millions were raised through this devilish means and yet it is being justified by saying the ridiculous sum was to settle ‘consultants’ who carried out the exercise on their behalf.
When will religious institutions stop being part of the scam by getting out and using their measured influence in a nation that seems to be hypnotized by some whimsical forces, rather than preach watery messages like prosperity and crap? Most of them know that a prosperous Nigeria will put them out of business.
How? If Osarentin finishes secondary school by 17, gains admission to higher institution by 18, finishes his first degree at 22, completes NYSC by 23 and starts working. By the time he works for 3 to 4 years, he will find nothing naturally wrong in settling down with a wife at 28. If this is interpolated to be the norm amongst our youth, there will be no one graduating at 25 and still not finding a decent work at 35. There wouldn’t be a pastor telling one of my younger siblings that the reason she is unmarried at 34 is because of the ‘otumokpo’ in her village. Why will men of marriageable age think of marriage, when they are not financially independent?
I am particular about marriage because it is probably what drives most women to church apart from the promise of prosperity. The corollary of this is that, there will be fewer people that religious leaders can hoodwink into empty sermons of prosperity or fanaticism, if Nigeria lived up to its potentials. A prosperous Nigeria would mean that those who actually go to church or mosque do so because of conviction not because of problems. Not because they can’t get a job, not because they can’t get a wife or a husband, not because some witch is holding down their destiny but the State. This in turn will mean fewer number of people going to church because, if one were to do that it will be out of genuine faith, love of God and zeal to serve Him. As such, less money for the pastors, fewer pastors will probably fly jets then. In other words these manipulative charlatans will cease to see this bunch of opiated ignoramuses as a cash cow to finance their expensive life styles because they do not ‘worship a poor God’.
Rather than being channels for deepening positive values, they have reduced God to a sorcerer who bestows riches only on the rich and the greedy, a god that is not a ‘poor’ god and that is now sold and served like a commodity on the alters of ignorance, falsehood and exploitation. Yes! Everything-goes-in Jesus name! To know and watch men of God preach prosperity on a weekend where so many girls were abducted by Boko Haram, drew my annoyance in no small measure. We sure need to do some soul searching!
How did we get here really? How did we get to this point where wealth is sought and made without work? Where we seek pleasure without conscience? Where we choose to worship without making sacrifice? Like M. Ghandi would say, God bless his soul!
Great societies are built on values, values that cherish dignity, that celebrate hard work and raise success on a pedestal that is reachable. Most progressive societies are built on social values that have their roots from religious values at some point in their history! Someone once said, that the societal impacts of fake lawyers, fake doctors, fake engineers etc. are not the same as the effect of fake pastors or imams because of this singular reason. Since religion determines social values and social values as highlighted earlier can translate into the economy by extension. Ours is not a country of the haves and the have-nots. No! It is a country of the dying and the living.
My vituperations are not directed at the meat sellers in Oyingbo, not to the plantain sellers in New Benin market, neither is it towards the petty traders in Eket market. No, not these Nigerians! These are probably the hardest working members of our society. You see them toiling away with a deep sense of hope and commitment, striving to make meaning out of life despite their precarious situations.
My anger is equally not to the ‘uneducated’, poorly educated or half educated ones. It will be rather unfair, and unrealistic to expect so much from the lot that have been dehumanised, stripped of their dreams and impoverished to an extent where the extant hope or the nursing of it is seen as a form of luxury. These people have been dehumanised to an extent where even they, cannot accommodate their own thoughts. Their thoughts of the future and circumstances have gotten them imprisoned in a cycle of poverty, relished in hopelessness, in a halo of existence which makes living frightening and subtly minimalist. This group of people can be excused because the effect of corruption cannot be made vivid enough to them; they can only subtly understand it within the sphere of their real world; no water, but ‘pure water’, no power but candles, no food, no road. They cannot comprehend how much 20 billion US dollars is not to talk of what can be done with it, which in actual fact could eliminate abject poverty from our land if used to genuinely fund programs affecting the poor.They understand very little about their place in the society and can never be in the know of the strength of their sheer number in a democracy.
My anger is geared towards those that should know better; the middle class, the graduates who are in their millions but who will rather use their numerical strength to go to crusades and sham arrangements like the NIS recruiting jamboree. My anger is at those who have got their thinking patterns warped up to bring ethnicity, religion and nepotism into objective criticisms. Check social media comments on burning national issues to see how quickly things degenerate into this myopic line of thoughts when people objectively criticise the evil acts of government and then, the internet is awash with comments, for example, justifying why a serving minister can use 10 billion naira on travel expenses, because as they claim her predecessors have done worse.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and those who wish to govern themselves must arm themselves with the power that knowledge provides. Those who can actually say enough is enough but who choose not to do anything, but are rather content on chasing vague dreams of becoming Nigeria’s newest elites, and those who fail to acknowledge that corruption is rife in government, but keep saying that it did not start with the present government, will at one time in the future confront their own nightmares.
We have become a people who will discuss football with so much passion, people who will discuss the game between Arsenal vs Man U and even kill ourselves over such discourses. While the killings of people in the North West seem like acts in faraway Baghdad. If we can show much passion for such trivial matters, why should we not be enraged at people mortgaging our future for their self-interests?
While we pray to that sorcerer of a God, obviously not the one Jesus preached about, to keep blessing us while we do evil. The truth is that I do not see light at the end of the tunnel. At this pace, Nigeria can NEVER and WILL never be a land of our dreams. At least not in my lifetime. Who sows corn and reaps cassava? We can’t be heading west and yet sailing our ships eastward.
It is the petty plans of small minded men that rob nations of their destinies. Like Jesse Jags said in his latest single, until we learn to get mad, get really mad and say I am a human being, God damn it! My life has got value, this must stop! Some would lie that it has not always been like this. Don’t be fooled it has always been and will continue to be, it will never get better.
Charles Adagbon
[email protected]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of SaharaReporters
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