willieojo@yahoo.com
I purchased my first cellular phone in Baltimore, United States in 1991. It probably weighed as much as five pounds, and nearly as big as an African villager’s transistor radio. Over a period, telephone technology changed because men liberally applied the wisdom endowed on them by God to positively affect the world. Today, we have the Android and iPhone nearly as small as the battery of my old cellular phone. On them, we access the YouTube, and punch in inquiries on Google. On them, Facebook puts faces to names and Instagram pops out pictures in an instant. Technological interconnectivity was made possible because some minds working with the US Government envisioned a World Wide Web as early as the 1940s. History records that men like Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, and Vint Cerf later made the innovation better.
A blast from the not-too-distant past reminds us that road trips around American big cities and small towns were once made less complicated by a free online web-mapping service called MapQuest. The innovation helped generate maps and routes for travellers. Today, the Global Positioning System devices in our cars and applications on our phones have rendered MapQuest quasi-obsolete. Technological changes have taken place. God gave men wisdom who applied it appropriately. Innovations and creativity sprung forth from godly endowment of knowledge. The world is making progress because a set of human change agents surrendered to change nudges stirring up in their spirits.
The world around us is in a change mode. Nigeria is part of that godly design. We have men with zeal for true change, and in existence also are beings driven by pecuniary benefits of working in government. For the latter, it’s about money and how much they can amass. Some of them were born and christened in corruption; some baptised into the debauchery by harsh circumstances, and there are a lot more who learned the art swifter and smarter than their Mephistophelian mind-manoeuvrers and mentors. It is why some among us will fight corruption with sincerity; while some fight for fresh breath and thriving of the monster with determined dexterity. And the latter are men who want to change Nigeria. How does a man give what he possesses not? Without a whit of a doubt, and in all conceivable realms, the journey ahead of Nigeria is very, very far.
My friends, it is a hell of a task fighting corruption in a pervasively corrupt country where larceny is an entrenched lifestyle. Next time someone razzle-dazzles you that they are gospellers of ‘Change’, peruse their pedigrees and profiles. An unchanged person cannot effect a change except they are first changed. The zeal in a man does not necessarily bring about change; knowledge does. A man with much zeal must have a knowledge of what needs to be changed and how to bring reformation about. He may scream ‘change’ in slogans and sing it in hymnals, if his mind is unchanged, ‘change’ chants are nothing but a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. Because his mind is still warped and not changed, he will one day become a war-hawk against true change that sets the people free.
Your leaders have not changed, Nigeria. They act the same old script of pillage and plunder. Public service to them is a platform to feed fat. From political parties they defect wantonly and whoringly, from truth they deflect rabidly and recklessly, and then they infect the polity with unmedicated schizophrenia for money. These defecting, deflecting, and infecting human virulent viruses do not understand that public service is serving the public. Public service is sowing a seed. God honours public service because it is service to human beings. With these human viruses, the definition of public service has been perverted. Men serve, steal, lie that they steal, then later apologise for stealing. But the ravishing thirst and readiness to steal some more are not subdued. The journey ahead of Nigeria is very far.
This is a tale of three Nigerians not too long ago. Two men and a woman. The men lifted Nigerian crude oil. The men made three billion dollars. The men kept the proceeds. The men shared booty with the woman oil minister. A New Sheriff in Town blew the cover. Criminal investigations were launched in the US and the UK. Assets of all three forfeited, home and abroad. Crude and criminal behaviour around crude oil is behemoth in Nigeria. Love of money continues to make men crude. The god of money has hijacked the very soul of a sweet nation. Nigerian political and business terrains are a tenebrific tragicomedy. It seems as if Nigerians have bid good-bye to sanity in government. They have surrendered to the shackles of screwball leading lords. That Lord Lugard’s country is a dire and delicate convolution is no bone-breaking breaking news. Decency and morality in government dwell only in the realm of our imaginations and desiderata. People’s lives aren’t deemed as precious because we refuse to change our attitudes to government and politics.
I recently spoke to a lawmaker-friend in the present National Assembly. He lived in the US for many years before he went back home to run for office. He said to me: “I read some things you write, and I just laugh. You don’t know what’s on the ground. Nigerian politics is run mostly by charlatans who will never change. This is the life they have lived from infancy and they cannot change it even if they tried. The craving for money here is wild. Money keeps them going. The fear of not having enough money can make them do anything to anybody including selling their own souls”. My friend said he’s had enough of Nigeria’s headache. He is not running again after his tenure expires next year.
Some people who brought us much pain in the past are now begging and apologising. They admitted that once they were thieves who brought much grief, but now they will be chiefs who will bring a lot of relief. They agreed that once they were sinners who gave their victims no breather, but now they are saints who will make the people live a life of bigger thrillers. They confessed that once they killed dreams, but now, they want to resurrect the same and heal wounds. What will you do if these were confessions and promises of a dare-devil robber who once stripped you naked? This is what I’ll do. I will listen to him. I will give him all ears. And I will forgive him. You can befriend a repentant robber; and sit at the dinner table with an apologetic apostate. It’s a matter of choice. But, my friend, do not enthrone a remorseful armed robber as the CEO of your treasury. If your first experience in his hands was like a debilitating flashflood you managed to survive, his second coming will be a fiercer round of tsunami-stealing that will bring you and your life dreams under water. If I were you, I’ll avoid him like a plague. Do leopards change their skins?
Power-hungry, money-mongering, position-posturing orgulous ogres are the ones coming out seeking to lead. Who then is in trouble? Not them. It’s you. It’s the people. It’s ordinary Nigerians. It’s a waste of time getting angry at robbers who want to lead you. It is time to get angry at yourselves who surrendered to their leadership.
–Follow me on Twitter @folaojotweet
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