Nigeria : A nation at Crossroads
I do not relish in deprecating the image of Nigeria. Unfortunately this is what the people of Nigeria have allowed themselves to become as a nation. Regardless of what some might wish, this is the reality of the people. However it is only over if Nigerians continue to embark on the same measures as the last years have witnessed. Ignore the lessons of history, deny the fact they voted incompetence into their polity and colluded in the propping up of vacuous leadership. Nigerians are at crossroads as a nation. Some may say erstwhile socio-political agitators from the South East and South West, Mazi Namdi Kanu or Sunday Igboho, are irrelevant. Its harder to say terrorist groups Boko Haram or ISISWA can be dismissed as such. Symptoms are indeed what they are but with attendant signs, the diagnosis of the malady afflicting Nigeria is evident to the cursory observer.
Perhaps the greatness of a nation is heralded by the calamities it overcomes. Perhaps through these perturbations, a disequilibrium is essential before recalibration to an enharmonic syntony. The leaders have fanned the embers of discord. They now stand to accuse the citizens for refusing to accept the preposterous circumstances of their existences. Well the world may have been complicit, yes they encouraged the duplicitous leaders, granting loans and aids through the front door yet welcoming laundered funds into secret Western economies.
The king's robe is beautiful the people cried. It's lovely they chanted. Until the astonished child blurted, but the King has no clothes! The kingsmen turned scornfully, trying to hush the child.
Inaction vs Impotence of leadership
We know we have a dud leadership. We know we have corruption personified in all spheres of governance and we know the poor and vulnerable yesterday, today and perhaps tomorrow stands no chance in today's Nigeria. But hey, we remain docile, and accept a helplessness that is paralytic to the point of coma.
The Government of Nigeria is perhaps the terrorist in our midst. Lives of average Nigerians means little. The institutions of state do more harm to majority of its citizens than BKH or its sister groups combined. The common wealth of of the nation is in a few hands who flaunt their jets across the skies of the arid land rather than transform the lives of their kinsmen.
May wisdom rule. I hope for another Nigeria. Another country where all tribes and tongue are one at heart and would sing a tune for the succour of the other.
This is not a bitter pill. It is poison. We must end the annihilation of a nation and its people by a few through what is now become callous indifference to the poor and vulnerable.
A nation at a crossroad. There is only one way to turn. But that is the way its people have refused to go this past six decades. The opportunity cost, the forgone alternative has become the singsong and lamentation of a once promising entity.
