Not a Time For Lamentation, Please!

This is not a time of lamentation on the years that locusts have eaten. Lamentation hasn’t been and will never be a strategy to manage change. It is indeed a time to reflect on how to rise from the rubble the locusts have left us. It is time to find some architecture in our ruins. It is a time to reflect on how to retrieve some pearl we cast before a swine in 1966, 1983 up to May 28, 1999. It is a time of forgiveness to clear our heads for proper planning for our dear country. It is a time to appeal to the elders in the land that they should wake up from their deep slumber. The elders have dozed off for so long and the enemies have sown tares, yes tares that have under-developed us. We need to stop agonising so that we can organise and restructure Nigeria that Nelson Mandela identified as the only source of pride and confidence for the black people of the world! A former American envoy to Nigeria, John Campbell wrote a book that our country is ‘on the brink’. We do not need a John Campbell anymore to repeat that to us that our country needs a Nehemiah to rebuild our many broken walls.’ As we celebrate, we need to remind our greedy, careless and lazy leaders in Abuja and 36 state capitals that 2023 they are already plotting to dominate again may not come to them as envisaged if they do not face an urgent but credible project of nation-building.

There is a sense in which we can say that democracy has been demonised by democrats in the country. Never in the history of democracy has a state been so run down and looted by those elected and hired to run it like Nigeria, our Nigeria. We should not be discouraged. We should call on those who would like to join the Nehemiah Band to rebuild this country from its rubble. And so here is the thing, we should organise to isolate all these dealers who masquerade as leaders especially since 1966. The younger ones who have tolerated the locusts thus far should not allow the destruction they have unleashed on this beautiful country to provoke us into break-up warfare. Yes, they don’t care if Nigeria comes to harm. We elected them to improve the economy, they looted the treasury and cried foul and set up anti-graft agencies to search and try only petty thieves. We elected them to improve education standard but they destroyed the schools and set up their own schools and universities with their loot that anti-corruption agencies can’t detect. We elected them to provide good roads. They are looting road infrastructure funds to buy private jets to fly over the bad roads. Nigerian wicked power elite knows that Nigeria can work, but not under them. The world powers to know that Nigeria can be great and become a big player on the world stage. The seven big men in suits (G-7 leaders) know enough to know that Nigeria has inestimable brainpower that can be harnessed to be one of the greatest powers on earth. They all know from White House though Kremlin to Whitehall that Nigeria is Africa’s Power House. They have not forgotten that it was Nigeria that (spoke for Africa) in January 1976 looked them in the face and told them point-blank, Africa has come of age…Yes, they know more than Mandela that Nigeria is the face of Africa and indeed the black race. That is why they can sell even deadly weapons to insurgents that can fast track Nigeria’s failure. Yes, in the main, I believe, that we do not need to break up before we can restructure to develop. Yes, we can emerge as a world power only if we can sacrifice to defeat the current wicked political class that continues to rule and ruin our efforts to get the world to respect Africa through Nigeria, yes Nigeria that can earn that respect as even the legend, Madiba saw it.