Hearts and minds of all sentient beings are divinely configured to bubble with thoughts. Good or evil, the thoughts first begin as inner musings. If we obey the positive inner whispers, we receive rewarding results. If we disobey, we remain in status quo stagnancy. Precepts precede performance. Precepts are order and orderliness. Everything we see, feel, and experience are products of carefully-webbed precepts. Precept-by-precept do dreams manifest toward specific goals. The most powerful man or woman on earth is also a product of God’s orderly creation process. Even the thinking of evolutionists that everything on earth including you and I, ‘evolved’ from nothing to something was engineered by order.
Nigeria and Nigerians were not left out of God’s orderly creation process. Disorder, however, has enveloped the nation. From the acme of leadership authority to the basement of following, Nigerians seem enamoured to shun order and embrace disorderliness. Followers of my written and spoken thoughts all over the world have on several inquired of me: “When will Nigeria change? Who will change Nigeria? Can Nigeria and Nigerians ever change?” Those who pose these questions surreptitiously exculpate themselves from the triggers of the many evils besetting the country. We all love to wag accusatory tongues and point fingers of allegation in the directions of ‘others’; while we consider ourselves as not a part of Nigeria’s problems. We are all parts of the disorder. People with political authority and financial means capable of tipping the scale of events one way or the other, and others who do not know where the next meal will come from are all part of the protracted reign of confusion.
When will Nigeria change? Who knows? Nelson Mandela said that education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world. Conversely, a lack of it can destroy a man’s world. Education indicators in Nigeria are poor. Forty million Nigerian youths who have some form of education are unemployed. Eighty per cent of Nigerian graduates are unemployable; 85 per cent of them cannot read at a High School level while 92 per cent of Nigerian youths are alarmingly gullible, especially when baited with money. The stratagem behind killing a people is to first kill their minds. To entomb a nation in horizonless serfdom, poison her young minds with ignorance. Bit-by-bit, they die while they live. Our young people are dying daily, and they may not know it. If the young are left to die off, what then is left of the life of a nation hoping to stay alive? A nation wired for the future does not let her young grow in ignorance.
A dreadful part of Nigeria’s confusion are also the nation’s civil servants. They are men and women who serve us with evil venison on the nation’s dinner table. They are labouriously corrupt and deliberately destructive. If you brand them Nigeria’s number one enemies of the state, you are spot on. Politicians with big names and hefty titles may be complicit in the corruption cascades smothering the country; but Nigeria’s nightmares are many federal civil servants hiding in ministries and plum agencies. Corruption is the ventilator that keeps them alive. Greed and graft are their life-sustaining medicines. Reform efforts have even further deformed this machinery of government. The Morgan Commission of 1963; the Adebo Commission of 1971; the Udoji Commission of 1972-74; the Dotun Philips Panel of 1985; the 1988 Civil Service Reorganisation Decree promulgated by Gen Ibrahim Babangida, and Stephen Oronsaye reforms of 2009 ended up as odysseys in otiosity. Nigerian civil servants remain inveterate under an ambient of corruption and recklessness. They are adamantly incorrigible, irremediable, incurable, and dangerously delinquent. Any serious government that does not seriously fight these menaces is not fighting corruption. No country develops beyond the capacity of its civil service.
When will Nigeria change? I don’t know, but the country needs a revolution; not the revolving door of status quo stench and fetors in government where money in its nimiety helps enthrone perverts and pricks; and cash-and-carry politics assists in building their palaces. I heard two weeks ago that a guy who is running to become governor in a state where poverty is written even on the faces of the affluent gave away over a dozen Prado jeeps to lure those who will help him win. He also dished out many round-trip tickets to America on vacation and hundreds of motorbikes. If he becomes governor, will the people’s money not grow wings? On what ground will the people accuse him of corruption? How do you ever think he will recoup his money?
In a land of larceny, stealing is fair game. In a society robed with robbers, it is senseless filing a complaint of robbery. The prosecutors, adjudicators, and the listening audience are all robbers. Now, this is the practical definition of conundrum. If the obituary of Nigeria is one day announced; what will be the cause of death? Money! The destructive and subversive manner nabobs and nawabs in power use money to poison the waters of our political system has left the country’s vital organs gasping for life.
Nigeria is a patchwork of people who hate to work together. Sometimes I ponder if it’s better to start all over. Patchworks around breaches on our walls and the application of non-medicinal band-aid on wounds in our hearts aren’t remedying. We start over by confronting the truth. There is a missing link that’s not yet found; or discovered but ignored. Many things are not together. Our regions are far apart. Nigeria is living a lie; and lies don’t have long lives.
When will Nigeria change? Nigerians are only rhetorical about change, they aren’t prepared for it. We are all playing very dangerous games that are capable of asphyxiating and extirpating the soul of the country. Right now, the lyrical notes we read and write are in deep discordance. Nigeria will change when Nigerians agree that Nigeria must change. But that note of agreement has not been signed on to yet.
A black man’s semen in the fallopian tube of his black wife produces a black child. A white man’s semen in the fallopian tube of his white wife produces a white child. A political landscape impregnated with the semen of good hands and productive souls will produce a good and productive government. Anything short of this is a daydream that will end up in and inevitable nightmare. In the season of her ovulation, Nigeria was raped by peripatetic strangers, and a baby was born. The baby has grown, but do you wonder why she is still babbling while other babies born at the same time or later have grown into adults discovering and rediscovering?
Presently, our political landscape is inundated with defective and defecting goofballs. Where are our geniuses? Who and what must go for Nigeria’s good days to come? What and who must cease to exist for Nigeria’s many afflictions to cease? What and who must cease to exist for killing, bloodshed, stealing, profligacy, bigotry, and all to end?
The children of Israel stayed 430 years in Egypt and wandered 40 years in the wilderness. Nigeria is still in her Egypt and I know not for how long. I hope however, that she will one day overcome her many obstacles. The journey will be a marathon, not a sprint. And marathons take irritatingly and annoyingly forever.
@folaojotweet
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