THE NIGERIAN DREAM: The Past, Present and the Future. For a society or country like ours to record laudable success in all ramifications, she needs committed leaders and citizens, men and women that thrive in matching their positive words with action. The Nigeria we have at the present is in sharp contrast to the one we all fought, worked and envisaged for. For the dream of a new Nigeria to come alive, she desire visionary individuals and personnel who could display their unalloyed and topmost commitment to bringing a new order to birth in our dear nation. We need sound, vibrant and young minds to steer the country’s affairs, rather than a cyclic chain of old, recurrent and unproductive set of leaders. We need leaders who have a dream (for not just Nigeria alone, but for all black people) and vision of a truly free and prosperous global community of Africans. The parasite economic structure of the entire African continent is a heritage of our direct colonial enslavement. Today, we are a destitute humanity and the earth’s most wretched not because we are jinxed, but because our birthright has been hijacked. We have been robbed in time past, and have continued to be robbed of our rights and resources till the present day. The wicked and massive extraction of our gold, oil, timber, diamond, bauxite, tin, talents, potentials et al, to our collective impoverishment is still on! At the present, there are debilitating tumors growing in the body and working up the psyche of Nigeria. I fear, and I sincerely hope my fear is unfounded, that one of them, Boko Haram, is already cancerous. And there are many others. Corruption among the elites, across board, which is the root cause of all these problems, continues unabated, with greater intensity and scientific precision. Democracy, the channel of expression of the sovereignty of the people, has been subverted, as democracy is now the democracy of he who can rig bigger. With the corruption, coupled with the intimidation, of the judiciary, the erosion of the rule of law is virtually complete. The fundamental imbalance in the structure of the country and in the distribution of its wealth remains unaddressed. Unemployment and ‘mis-employment’ among youths continue to rise at exponential rate. Of course, nobody talks anymore about the continuous decay in the existing over-stretched infrastructures, and so on. Nigeria is groaning under these and other myriads of problems. Yet, the political leadership wakes up every day and pretend that these are normal climes. In order to face and tackle all of our serious problems, what we need at this stage is a consensus, not an emergency. Nigeria, at this point in time needs a statesman, not a politician. Given that God, in His unquestionable discretion, allows and grants power to whoever He wishes, President Jonathan, by virtue of where God has allowed him to be, is still the person best-positioned and best-suited to rally the required National Consensus to save our dear nation. We as citizens also have great roles to play towards a great and NEW NIGERIA. The opportunity is still there for us all, because ‘the only way to have a bright and rewarding future is for us to start working on it today’. I pray that the statesman in all of us will rise, and we will do the right thing. Otherwise, we can as well start getting ready to say ‘There was a Country’. Prepared by Tosin Oyeniran Dept. of Physiology, College of Health Sciences, UDU, Sokoto, Nigeria.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 01:52:15 +0000
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