Broken promises. Burnt bridges. Bleaching future. In just a matter of few decades the Nigerian leaders have succeeded in putting the country farther than where it originally before “Great Britain handed” it in 1960. On the surface, since governments control propaganda apparatus, it would appear that all is well by the face-saving leadership facade being worn. Yet, it does not require a magician to know that the country has been messed up in so much ways than could be imagined in a single write up.
Thanks to social media platforms –Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. –the youth of the country, although overwhelmingly unemployed in their teeming millions creatively busy themselves in several competitive and entrepreneurial ventures. Nigeria’s leaders fiddle while their Rome burns.
Cost of life in Nigeria may perhaps have gone up, higher from being cheaper than that of a pigeon on Trafalgar Square, to a little less than that of a dove. But from every indication, the old paradigms seems to have regurgitate themselves into something akin to Frankenstein’s monster. “All is not well,” one reporter stated.
How did Nigeria plunge from glory to opprobrium? What are actions and routes which decimated the pride of this once-giant-of-Africa country into an object of international disrepute? By the way, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is now assisting to with Nigeria’s security from California. This sorry state of Africa, and Nigeria in particular, ought to give serious leftists, and black activists who daily campaign for a return of black people to Africa, reason to be-come concerned about the Africa that never was, except through imaginative lenses. It is alright to talk about a glorious past when all African men and women were kings and queens; that is a fine King James version of Africa’s reality!
However, the truth of the matter is that as Africans need a reevaluation of its unexamined toxic selfish, self-destructive tendencies. Yes, darkening Africa is not a good idea, but, I do not imagine freedom or emancipation had it been it was Africa which enslaved anyone. Take a survey of some of our traditional structures, which by the way, is what our religious, public, and social institutions are imitating. What you’ll discover could be frustrating for the most part. And it does not matter whether you are in Africa or in America. (The comedian “I Go Die” says it better when joked about Nigeria’s heaven which uses generators and tarpaulined computers.) To assume that Nigerians or Africans have changed for the better because of arrival into different environment is fallacious. Well, same with Americans or any other people group; racists Americans are still racist, in fact, more racist when they enter into the church. (On the subjects of racisms, I am of the opinion that racism transcends color: black people could be as racist as white, or even far worst. All you need to do is just provide the right atmosphere and conditioning, and you’ll see what magnitude of evil and wickedness unchanged hearts are capable of showcasing. Same goes for police officers. That one is a uniformed police officer doesn’t mean that they have been cured of the social, racial, emotive, psychological maladies that are raging in American systems.)
Consequently, Nigeria allowed herself to be dragged through the decades of blindness and deafness to the cries of the power, weak and helpless. It is common practice for the
privileged, the elite, the powerful, religious or irreligious, to take total advantage of the needy, the weak and helpless. And this is not to state that Boko Haram was at any point weak as Barack Obama tells his American public; poverty did not create Boko Haram. That is malicious and misleading. It’s like saying poverty created Osama Bin Laden or ISIS/ISIL. If that kind of lie sells here in America, please, keep it here with Walmart. Rather, Boko Haram is a radical theological ideology, not economics, except we mean as implied in Michel de Certeau.
Thanks to our leaders and their leadership, the problems of their selfish creations, violence, has metastasized into a global phenom. Not only does Nigeria now rank as one of the countries with home grown terrorism, the country now ranks uncomfortably higher in that status than the dreaded Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
source: tradingeconomics.com