NIGERIANS FALSE IMAGE. What brought the exportation of this topical issue was as a result of Magunya, a doughnut that I bought on December 25th, 2014 from a vendor. The doughnut was wrapped with a stale newspaper of 1979 to the degree that I couldnt locate the nameplate. But the headline carries Thank You Tour of Olusegun Obasanjo to Ogun State. The Former General made this statement, Nigeria will become one of the ten leading nations in the world by the end of the century. This a flamboyant, imaginary self-concept statement. Listen to Nigerian leaders and you will frequently hear the phrase this great country of ours. Nigeria is not a great country. It is one of the most pandemonium countries in the world. It is one of the most corrupt, insensitive inefficient places under the sun. It is one of the most expensive countries and one of those that gives least value to peace, justice, honesty and money. It is dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar. In short, it is among the most unpleasant places under the earth! One of the poverty of thoughts in Nigeria today is what is inscribed on our National Coat of Arm, Unity and Faith, Peace and Progress. Does this reflects our inner beings? This concept of Unity is so important to us that the blood of millions of Nigeria are being massacred as a result of insurgency. How valid is the notion of Unity as an absolute good? Quite clearly, it is nonsensical jives. Unity can only be as good as the purpose for which it is desired. Obviously, it is good for a group of Islamic Clerics to build a Mosque or Priests to build a capacious church. But supposing a group of other people get together in order to rob a bank. Their Unity is deemed undesirable. Therefore, we cannot extol the virtues of Unity without first satisfying ourselves that the end to which the Unity is directed is unimpeachable. Nigerian leaders should not left the nation unenlightened. We must wake up to the danger of our false image. We must now begin to ask the crucial question: how can we redeem and strengthen our image? And we must treat the easy answer in accordance to justice and honesty. Virtues like Unity and Faith are not absolute but conditional on their satisfaction of other purposes. Their social validity depends on the willingness or the ability of the citizens to ask the searching question. This calls for a habit of mental rigour, for which unfortunately, Nigerians are not famous. The collapse of the first republic was due to bad leadership that led Nigeria into military regime. Since the incursion of the military regime, the nations development has continue to be marred with various accounts of gory details. One of the Military Presidents, General Babangida, in His Dream of a New Dawn in Nigeria quoted in Issues in Nigerian Peoples And Culture stated, our faith in the future of this country and her people remains unshakable. We are therefore convinced that we should not be prisoners of the past. We need to look forward to the future. We have to put the past behind us and create an atmosphere that will encourage the emergence of new leaders whose motive for going into politics is service and patriotism. It is the firm belief of the Armed Forces Ruling Council that it is not too late to make a new start. However, this is only but to mention a few of the speeches of the usurpers of Nigerias mirth of freedom. But the really interesting question is why were we drawn in the first place to concepts like Unity and Faith with their potentialities for looseness? Why did we dont think, for instance, of such concepts as Justice and Honesty which cannot be so easily directed to undesirable ends? Justice never prompts the question: Justice for what? Neither does honesty nor truth. Is it possible that as a nation we instinctively chose to extol easy virtues which are amenable to the manipulation of hypocrites rather than difficult ones which would have imposed the strain of seriousness upon us? It will be juicy to assert that past Generals and leaders have designed a Machiavellian plans to the collapse of Nbigerian leadership. The leadership mess of the country, as it is today, is to be attributed to the military regime. The dividends of the barely forty-eight years of Nigerian leadership is nothing to write home about. Almost all the past leaders and Governors fall victims of gross financial impropriety for looting, money laundering and all other known and unknown fiscal vices. These are monies that would have been channeled to effective national development. But a much worse tragedy is looming over us. A crop of newcomers in Nigerian politics are seeing politics as a springboard to accumulate wealth whose manifest mission should have been to inaugurate a new philosophy and dock the nation to a new era. But they chose instead to become a revivalists of a bankrupt and totally unuseable tradition of political manoeuvering, tribal expediency and consummate selfishness Surely, the electorate should find the courage to tell them that inasmuch as they have a right to dream their dreams of the past, they must not be allowed to block our vision of the present or mortgage our childrens success in years to come. I do not think that bad as it is our condition, but I am only setting the records straight. I do not mean that our condition is totally bereft of hope or that our citizens are too dense to appreciate the explosive potentialities of the self-centered politics and false image of ourselves. Undoubtedly, there are simply too many political actors on our stage whose prime purpose in grabbing power seems to be no higher than a desire to free themselves from every form of civilized restraint in their public and private lives. But there is also in todays Nigeria social consciousness, a powerful impulse towards a new image and identity, and fair play. This impulse may be held temporarily in check by the dead grip of the patriarchs of an obsolescent dispensation. But the moment we can free our minds from their unwholesome spell, a powerful ground swell which is gathering force even now will launch forth generation of politicians able to respond appropriately to the challenge of our critical time (false image). Pen Corp
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 10:52:48 +0000
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