Nations Grow Over Time Not Overnight! by Ben Murray Bruce

Nigerian youths largely voted for President Muhammadu Buhari in the March 28th, 2015 election. I expected that they would be patient with his administration as he settles down in office and makes efforts to come to grips with the challenges facing the nation but I must say that I was not prepared for the level of impatience and anger directed the way of the newly sworn in President by youths on Social Media.

I have gotten myself a little Twitter addiction and when I read the tweets of young Nigerians I sometimes wonder if they think they elected a magician!

One youth posted on one of Nigeria’s most popular sites thus: ‘there is no better way of telling someone the truth. Buhari has not gotten a single pass mark since HE Resume (sic) office’.

When I saw the comment above, I had to check my calendar to be sure that Buhari had only been in office for one week!

These are the types of comments I am seeing on Social Media.

I actually supported President Goodluck Jonathan and believe he was the best for Nigeria, but once the majority of us have freely chosen a leader, we must support him and stand by him for our collective good.

A young Nigerian whom I admire recently tweeted as follows: ‘even if you were not patient with Jonathan, at least be patient with his successor. Nations are not built overnight. They are built overtime’.

How apt!

No nation is built overnight and our youths must realise this and not push President Buhari to hurry.

I am sure all of us can relate to haste because at one point or the other in our lives, we would have been in a hurry, whether to catch a flight, make an appointment or to meet a deadline.

Cast your mind back to the last time you hurried and consciously go over the mistakes you made. It is a fact that people make more mistakes than they would normally do when they are in a hurry and the work and time involved in fixing those mistakes take more time than it would have taken if they were composed in the first place and not in a hurry.

Let me give an illustration.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo is probably the most patriotic Nigerian alive. I worked with him and I lived with him and I can testify that the man loves his country.

But by 2004, President Obasanjo was frustrated with the slow pace of development in the power sector and he initiated the Nigerian National Integrated Power Project (NIPP) as a one stop agency to fast track the development of that sector.

The NIPP meant well and was staffed, headed and inspired by patriots. But they were in a hurry!

Power projects were built but the builders did not begin with the end in mind and we ended up with power plants that needed gas to work but did not even have gas pipelines in place.

Where they had pipelines in place, arrangements had not been made via contracts for the provision of gas.

But perhaps even more baffling were the power stations that were built without turbines and when the turbines eventually arrived from General Electric, it was discovered that the turbines were too heavy to be transported to the power plants on our existing road network.

If those turbines passed on most Nigerian roads and bridges, those roads and bridges would collapse.

And so, because of haste to provide democracy dividends to an impatient population, Nigeria did not put first things first and left turbines worth billions of dollars rotting away in our ports. Some are still there till this day!

We cannot afford to make such costly mistakes again where we spent billions of dollars in the power sector but because of waste occasioned by haste we did not get value for our money.

Our youths must be patient with Buhari.

I see some of them saying on Twitter that he should have hit the ground running. The thing is that if you hit the ground running without figuring out the direction in which you have to run you are likely to end up running in the wrong direction and you will put more distance between you and your destination.

No matter the amount of planning Buhari and his team made before the election, they will have to make a new set of plans because the view of the road changes when you move from the passenger’s seat to the driver’s seat.

I encourage President Buhari to plan.

I run several businesses and I have a thousand staff in the Silverbird Group and from my experience, I have found that every minute of planning saves me 10 minutes of execution time at the minimum.

This experience has taught me that the more I have to achieve, the longer I have to plan.

My staff and my friends may be in a hurry and would use non verbal cues to communicate their impatience to me but I close my eyes and ears to those cues and focus on planning because if my business should fail, no one would blame them; every finger would point to me.

Buhari is in the same situation.

And so I recommend that President Muhammadu Buhari should read Chinua Achebe’s last book, There Was a Country.

Young Nigerians should also read the book.

On page 247 of the book, Achebe advised Nigerians thus, “we must learn patience and not expect instant miracles”.

Going further, Achebe said “building a nation is not something a people does in one regime or even a few years’ time”.

Let me repeat the quote from that young man that “Nations Grow Over time and Not Overnight”!

So, I counsel Nigerian youths. It does not matter whether or not you voted for President Muhammadu Buhari or former President Goodluck Jonathan, or whether you support the All Progressive Congress or the Peoples Democratic Party. What matters is that we put Nigeria first and give President Buhari a chance to deliver the goods.

So, to those youths who are tweeting and facebooking that Nigeria has entered a ‘one chance bus’, look at your situation like this. Imagine you are in a car and you have a driver. It is in your interest that that driver is calm and composed. In that state, he is more likely to drive cautiously without making careless mistakes.

However, when you begin complaining and insulting your driver for driving too slow, he may begin to sacrifice cautiousness for speed and in that state he is more likely to make a mistake.

If the driver makes a mistake, the inevitable end result is that the vehicle will crash!

And one thing young Nigerians need to know about such crashes is that in many cases, it is the passenger who loses his or her life, not the driver.

So let us patiently allow this driver to drive to our destination at his own pace.

 

– Ben Murray Bruce is the senator representing Bayelsa East and is chairman of the Silverbird Entertainment Group.