Life in Nigeria has become so crucible, and the inchoate nature of politics and governance in the polity has worrisomely offers no viable choices. It’s griping in its finality!
Deep-seated in the ruling class is an unforgiving spirit of domination, control and conquest, leaving one with a deeper frustration that readily brings a premonition of an impending doom of cataclysmic proportion. I wonder what the dinosaurs must have felt before their fatalistic extinction!
Sadly but realistically, all Nigerians see themselves today through the prism of an ethnic group before the nation. The current #ENDSARS protests have exposed and opened further our fault lines to visceral attack aimed at the fabrics of our nationhood, that forecloses nothing but its gloomy outcome.
Nigeria is at a cross road, killing its future leaders instead of engaging them in an honest discussion to assuage their fears and walk with them to achive their vision of ‘Leaders of tomorrow” in their beloved Country.
Nigeria is a country abundantly blessed with human and material resources but paradoxically led by a person who is educationally ill equipped as president. Nigeria today is ironically considered the poverty capital of the world despite it huge potentials. The great wretched giant lying prostrate due largely to its failed leaderships.
Today, the World looks at us with a great confusion as to where this potentially great country’s trajectory lies. A country where senior advocates fight themselves in courts over a leader they will not employ as a filing clerk in their offices; a country where the academia shamelessly spew numbers and figures to produce a president they will not admit in their Universities for a structured degree programme. A country where academic excellence is lost due to policies that stifle rather than elevate. A country where an intellect is the trophied Vice President but fits only to douse the fires ignited by poorly conceived and implemented policies of his less endowed president, who bents on fostering an ethnic government that is brazenly incompetent.
This is Nigeria of today! A nation that has lost a sense of orientation and value; a place where hundreds of persons are killed daily without being at war. A country where a cow has an assured safety than humans beings; a country where dying in the hands of herdsmen and bandits is mathematically greater than being treated and saved from diseases in our hospitals. This is the country we call our own.
We take two steps forward and take ten backwards. A polity that feeds on the lives of its productive youths, battered with all forms of deprivation yet they excel in all areas of human endeavours outside their shores. The country bleeds with no one to stop the hemorrhage. One wonders what the end portends! Yet we have structures of government that are selfishly self-serving.
The president has spoken in the mien of a fascist dictator offering no respite but a stern warning to do even more in the destruction of lives if persist with their demands to hold the government accountable. No empathy, no discernments! No catharsis offered to the aggrieved youths but more retribution if they embark on their constitutional guaranteed right to peaceful assembly to petition government and register their dissent against the prebendal forces that seemed desperate to hold down the progress of its people. They were greeted with a hale of bullets and snuffing life out of hundred of youths in Lekki whose crime was wanting the best for themselves and their country – asking that their leaders should change and make them proud of what they can call their own, responsively, progressively and inconclusively.
This is Nigeria of President Mohammadu Buhari, the captain of the floundering ship. Nigerians deserve better!
