Where Will This Road Lead Us

The first time I read that quote by Denis Waitley, I wondered if it was crafted in Nigeria because it fits into our plight. And I quote. “There are three primary choices in life: accept conditions as they exist or accept the responsibility for changing them”

It is no longer news that Nigeria is blessed with an enviable amount of natural resources neither is it news that it is one of the most corrupt and among the poorest countries in the world, what is news is that it is ironical that a country so blessed could as well be among the poorest of countries and has no plans of saving its self. Where then are the blessings. Every day we talk, every day we proffer solutions to the problems. If we have the answers, then, why are we going down, deeper than we were years before?

Every year, millions of young people graduate from the country’s high institutions with the aim of landing decent jobs after all the struggles and challenges of acquiring education in the country, but to their dismay, majority of this young people never make it. The few who do were either extremely lucky or have some representatives in the high places. 

It becomes laughable when government and some corrupt non-governmental organizations arrive with their job creation plans, then you wonder if that is what this country believe is the way forward. What is expected of a country who in order to create employment, beacons on her graduates to learn the art of barbing, textile making and many other funny activities while their expertise and knowledge are in dire need somewhere in the running of the country but has been occupied by an incompetent individual from somewhere who have refused to go on retirement or have someone at the top who said it must be him whether he knows the job or not. In such a country, I still wonder where that road leads.

A few years ago we feared that illiteracy will someday be worse than blindness, but it has turned out in the recent time that illiteracy may have become better than unemployment because when an individual don’t have the capacity to own a thing, he don’t aspire to get it but when he knows that he deserves something and don’t have it, then it could be a problem for the individual, the people around him and the country in a whole. That is when crime erupts, that is when kidnapping grows, that is when both the poor and the rich become insecure. A situation that has become prevalent in our time. 

Boko-Haram, Niger Delta insurgency and many other militant activities that have cropped up in the recent time would not have taken place if the individuals involved had something lucrative doing. Many have lost their lives aimlessly to a problem created by all, spilling innocent blood with no solution at all and you keep wondering with me if we know where this road leads us. 

In a more reasonable country, everybody would put on their thinking cap, try and see how to curb the challenges they face, but unfortunately here, we exploit every single weakness we notice to our advantage. Many have done so with the Niger-Delta insurgency when it was at its peak, at the moment, it is Boko Haram, many who would have helped put an end to it decided to take advantage of it to their benefit, sponsoring the unreasonable massacre of the innocent. But for what gain, every reasonable man should ask.

Even though poverty should not be linked in any way to crime, it has the tendency to bring out the evil genus in an individual especially when a few in the society dubiously circulate the wealth among themselves without any recourse for the poor masses on whose back they climbed to the top. 

It is always startling when it becomes obvious that an elected government doesn’t care about its electorates, when it becomes so glaring that a government elected by a people cares more about securing its seat than improving the lives of the people it leads, honouring those who disgraced the country and keeping in oblivion those who sacrificed their youth and energy for this dying nations health. A good example is the immediate past centenary celebration where many like me wondered why some people were seen as worthy to be named in the annals of this country’s history by the government. That has been the major problem with Nigeria since it cropped up to take a seat among the committee of nations. It is also amazing that a government under whose protection a country is, chose to celebrate a fictional centenary celebration on the eve of the massacre of over forty nine young students who died just because they were Nigerians. 

These young people were the future and this is how they left, unceremoniously for a problem they didn’t cause and nobody asked why. Many more young people are still out there without a future. Those who were privileged to be educated among them have come out to roam the streets because there is no job and the government that is meant to create the jobs marshaled their propaganda tools, crying that they are unemployable because it could not admit that it has failed. Those who could not gain education because of poverty and government insensitivity to the plight of the people sits back at home jobless, with no clue of what becomes of them, looking at those who don’t deserve the money packing it home, sending their wards to better countries where reasonable governments exists, paralyzing every system that works, killing the dreams of young people and crippling the country’s economy. If this is the case, where then is the future of a country like this. 

It will be good for us all if we could look back and think about the choices we made. Have we decided to accept the situation as it is or are we eager and hungry to accept responsibility for changing it. 

It is very important that the government removes the hands of the monkey from the pot before it turns to a human hand. Otherwise, I wonder where this road leads us.