I have very poignant memories of growing up in Nigeria. When I tell my children stories of my Nigeria, it seems so hard to reconcile with their Nigeria – today’s Nigeria.
What went wrong then? Did development in some way stunt our growth that at 50 years we still find it hard to decipher left from right; we keep turning around in circles grappling with under-developed infrastructure, ineffective educational systems, zero healthcare, rampart poverty and totally non-existent security systems.
In my Nigeria, I remember being fed lunch at a neighbour’s house on several occasions. These
neighbours were not my relations, but this didn’t matter in the Nigeria I remember. We were safe with neighbours. Today, children barely know their neighbours and live their lives behind highly secured homes – window bars and high fences. How can we reconcile my Nigeria with theirs?
A friend of mine recently moved houses because her 4-year old son was amazed when he saw water coming out of a kitchen tap in a friend’s house. She had lived for 4 years in an apartment with no water, resorting to fetching and storing water in buckets and drums. Recently a family lost their father and husband to domestic fire – the generator exploded in his face. I read last week about a woman whose son was shot before her by hoodlums; they had ordered him to sleep with his mother and shot him because he refused to succumb to their evil command. How about the bus load of 15 children who were kidnapped on their way to school one morning only a few weeks back. I hear Aba is now a ghost town; the once bustling and commercial trading centre of the east is a shadow of the town it used to be.
Edmund Burke’s popular quote says ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’. Today’s Nigeria triumphs in evil. Many people queried the 50th anniversary celebration; the stupendous spending compared to the lack of growth and development in the country, the abject poverty. Who would spend N72 million on a cake – even a national one when we have tender children sleeping the streets with no food, no clothes, no home? I got several emails on the state of the country, each one proclaiming the evils that have engulfed Nigeria.
Why is evil increasingly rampant in our country? Like Edmund Burke says and I fully agree – good men do nothing. Do we not have good men in this country? Do we not have intelligent and strong men in this country? Do we not have honest leaders? Like our population, good Nigerians are plentiful in number. Our only crime which has become our greatest failing is that the good men do NOTHING!
Sorry, we do something – we complain. We gather in groups to deride and complain about our leaders. We leave those groups shaking our heads wondering what will become of Nigeria. We forward sms’ and text messages highlighting our national failings. For those of us who can afford it, we recreate our lives in the safety and security of foreign countries. Yes, that’s what we do. And when we meet in our gatherings again, we ask why we are stunted in growth. Are we cursed? Why are we captured in strangleholds of paralysis? Impotent to think, to speak and to act.
A paragraph in Alan Paton’s novel ‘cry the beloved country’ captures my thoughts as I ponder these things; Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.
Our reticence to ‘do something’, that fear to think, to speak out and to act will be the same fear that will eventually rob us of all. It is time to arise, good men and act.
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