“When I was growing up in this community, there were no latrine, bathroom and clinic,” former President Olusegun Obasanjo said while recalling his childhood in Ibogun village, a rural community in Ifo Local Government Area of Ogun State. “Today, several people would have died if the clinic we built through communal efforts had not been in existence,” he added. His message at the 2015 Ibogun-Olaogun Day focused on “village renewal”.
Obasanjo said:”As responsible people, we should not wait for the government…Each of us can encourage village renewal; we don’t need to wait for the government if we don’t want to tarry for too long. The need to raise fund for our community secondary school is borne out of the need that we cannot wait for government to do it for us. We have to carry our load by ourselves before we say the government should come to our aid. That is the reality today.”
He continued: “We don’t need to wait for government before developing our communities, particularly some of us who were raised in the village. We should not wait for any government ticket. Let us think of what we can do for ourselves and our communities; what can we do for ourselves to make the rural communities more habitable for us.”
It sounded like an old song, not to say that Obasanjo sounded like a broken record. Leaders, in power and out of power, sing the song all the time, every time they smell an opportunity to impress the people with their ideas on development.
The point is that development won’t come by lip service. It is always easy and convenient to preach rural development. It is not as easy to practise rural development. Remember the saying: Practise what you preach.
There are men and women of power and resources across the country that can be major instruments of rural development, if they put their money where their mouth is. Obasanjo is one of them. There is such a thing as leading by example.
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