Article published in The Nation Newspaper
18/08/2010
Nigeria is YOU! You are Nigeria. Be proud of yourself and your survival success, if not Nigeria even if you are unemployed and hungry or without your pension. That is not Nigeria’s fault, it is Nigerian politicians’ fault! Just 43 days to go in our CountdowNigeria@50. At corporate, community and individual level, plan and execute something, many things, unusual and yet useful to mark Nigeria@50 on FaceBook, MySpace,Twitter, U-Tube etc! There is still time to get ‘MAD’ and ‘Make A Difference’ in your own corner of Nigeria at home, in the community and abroad. Do something for your motherland, community, the needy. Donation, artwork, sculture, painting, poetry, song. Even a meal will be a big deal for someone hungry that day. There is a song competition announced on TV. Participate. Feeding the less privileged by buying some reading books for their brains and and a kongo or bag of rice and chicken for orphanage stomachs will be a good start! If you are abroad, subscribe to National Geographic or Readers Digest or Young Scientist or send money for library books for your old school back home in Nigeria.
Nigeria is YOU! You are Nigeria, regardless of ‘where from’ or your views on ‘Zoning’ and ‘ethnicity’ and ‘power failure’ –electrical and political. Some new mathematics: To mark Nigeria@50, if every ‘Fellow Nigerian’ does something good for another ‘Fellow Nigerian’, good or bad, that will be 50+million of us doing good to 50+m others and perhaps visa versa because the poor and needy are usually the most generous with their time, their smiles and their wealth, or widow’s mite. This would mean that there would be 100m ‘good deeds’ of Nigeria@50 costing more than N100m.
Of course for those ‘Fellow Nigerians’ with billions and millions of naira and dollars, all made in Nigeria, their ‘burden’ is so much greater-like for those given a $1.5billion oil well. Is there any difference between Charles Taylor’s alledged blood diamonds given to Naomi Campbell and Abacha giving out ‘blood oil wells’? Diamonds and oil wells should be returned! Therefore we expect them to do so much more- 50th Anniversary Nigeria@50 scholarships, libraries and laboratories and school buses for old schools and they should ‘Build for the Youth’ by building Museums, exhibition halls and Youth centres named after then if they like. Nobody and no Fellow Nigerian will live forever and life is not about taking or having but about giving. Many Nigerians, even graduates, are desperately poor. Poverty does not mean laziness but misfortune. Add to this the disgraceful situation with unpaid pensioners, low wages relative to the mega-wages and hyper-allowances of political office holders. If there was electric power, there would be 60-70 % less poor in Nigeria from increased work opportunities.
If Nigeria does not give to the less fortunate or the youth, the merciless greedy will take everything and the youth will rise, rightly or wrongly, in revolt. The deadly high level of ‘new’ creative criminality is a clear manifestation of how dangerous life is. The world wide disasters are frightening and a lesson. Imagine wiping out the history and livelihood of hundreds of millions of good citizens leaving many without a name, photograph, piece of paper or recognisable relatives to know who they are or where they are from. Imagine you were reduced to nothing, a nonperson! This should be a lesson to us here in Nigeria where almost all our disasters are man-made –fires, erosion, floods with the leading one being the catastrophic negative impact of a ‘greedy’ politics. Nigeria is so blessed in everything but politics, where it is definitely cursed or worse.
We actually have many fine leaders across Nigeria, North, South, East and West, willing and able to work politically who are sidelined, suspended, sacked, paid off, threatened, beaten up, murdered or marginalised to make way for mediocrity and brute force- ‘brawn’ over ‘brain’. There are also many millions who ‘de manage’ and therefore keep Nigeria going from day to day while the politicians and civil servants do their best to mess up everyone’s life at meetings in favoured venues similar to the Ladi Kwali Hall in Abuja.
We have mostly man-made environmental catastrophies. Let us pray that no one comes to pour engine oil into our borehole, gacuzzi, sitting room or fine garden so that we can get the Niger delta feel and smell the destructive power of ‘oil spills’ a la Mexican Coast BP. However apart from these, we have nothing like the Russian, Californian, Chinese and Pakistani fires, megafloods and landslides. God is good to us but are we good to ourselves and each other? Of course corruption cuts across ethnicity and is not the preserve of the ‘North’ against the ‘South’ or visa versa. Yes, it reaches down in every LGA and the LGA thug/thief but ethnic federal corruption is huge by comparison and has cost the most. Some simple mathematics of ethnic corruption! What are the losses in billions of federal income incured by Lagos State by being federally given only 20 LGA while Kano State got 77 LGAs and then into Kano and Jigawa States leaving Kano with 44 or so LGAs? Where is the justice in that warped Mathematics, Federal fraud and theft. For true federalism reverse this by 1-10-2010. Nigeria is YOU! You are Nigeria-but will ‘zoning’ politics kill us or allow us to grow? CountdowNigeria@50 is 43 days away.