(Published In The Peoples Daily Newspaper, Wednesday Column, 6th, November, 2024)
Does Nigeria have problems? Oh yes! Are we to do something urgent and cohesive to address the problems? Definitely yes! The reality is that we have real disturbing problems that must be made to go away as soon as possible; serious Problems at hand that we cannot afford to overlook any longer. We have to find immediate and lasting solutions to these problems. But unfortunately, even when we are being crushed by reality we still expend much of our energy on nonessentials, if not outright trivial matters and technically somewhat often divert our attention unconsciously from cruces such as the ones raised in this piece and many other serious concerns.
Should we have all these problems that are besetting us as a nation? Rationally, no! But unfortunately, here we are sixty-four years after independence, still struggling and crumbling on our knees like a nation bereft of developmental ideas and resources. Again and again, we have tried to theoretically establish what are the missing elements in our national path to desirable development, and probable solutions; but now, with a barrage of theoretical solutions on the table, and yet, we are still rigmarolling about around the same challenges we have been facing since several decades ago.
We have, however, gotten to the point where we have no alternative but to find the right pathway to the solutions we need, and like any desperate people facing an existential crisis, we have to do all it takes to set things right and get the right things done.
Another important thing to consider, which is the truth, is that regardless of what we say to ourselves today, our problems began at independence and we must retrace our steps back into history to make necessary corrections. In perspective, the truth is that over time, while we claim to be solving these problems, all we have been doing is fixation on secondary matters and irrelevancies; that is, expending personal and national strengths and resources on things that offered no lasting solutions or respite to our many challenges which are still staring at us.
From the onset, the issues that preoccupied our minds were never what we should have been discussing or bothered ourselves with. We were spending time discussing our many differences. We were too fixated on religious and tribal affiliations; well, probably because the former were relatively new in our societies and the latter started having significant interactions in the last century. And then about political party affiliations and interests. We could not, from that time, agree to come together to discuss the ways and means to a sustainable development of Nigeria. We laid feeble foundations across systems and institutions for the nation that cannot guarantee stability and sustainability. That our institutions aren't working well today is the direct consequence of the weak foundations we have laid because our attention was diverted to mundane, secondary and in many cases, parochial issues. And even in instances where we attempted something national and encompassing, they often failed because the foundations were weak and incapacitated.
It is about time we return and rebuild our institutions to carry the development we desire into the beckoning future. We must reorganise our education system to possess the capacity to drive the development the country dreams of; build a healthcare system that is available, affordable and accessible to all; and build an energy system that effectively drives the projected national industrialisation as much as for residential needs at the most affordable economic cost. We must consider an amendment to the national oil and gas industry blueprint and framework to finally respond to the needs of Nigerians and not individuals. We must build a sustainable structure to produce food enough to feed Nigerians and finally, we must build a foundation for a united inter-relationship platform for Nigerians across sociocultural lines to create a common robust front for the sake of the country.
What we need to focus on are the real and essential matters. Healthcare must be at the forefront; the issues of affordability and accessibility are not limited to the urban centres but the entire nation. We are currently experiencing an increasing limitation of access to medical care, and rather than a fixation on irrelevancies, we should, however, concentrate on what and how we can get this right for our people.
Then, we should focus more on our national economic development, fixating on what has to be done all across the board to grow our national GDP substantially by addressing the national education standards, settling the challenge of infrastructural deficiency, and solving our national security problems, among others.
If we can shift our focus in this direction as citizens, opposition and the government in power, our country would move faster, towards a more prosperous and equitable future for all Nigerians.
Our continuous unhealthy fixation on irrelevancies is attributed to factors that must also be recognised and abolished from our system and collective reasoning. Yes, the failure of consecutive past governments at all levels; failure to address pressing national issues; blatant failure to identify, develop and promote a coherent national value system; misdiagnosis of national essential issues, focusing on superficialities instead of the root causes of our national problems, have altered the mindset of Nigerians to become distracted as we are today. Giving room for preachers of religious differences, ethnic differences and political affiliations, for instance, to gain ground in modulating our actions and reactions to national issues.
We must therefore, move forward as far as possible and consciously away from the enshrined pathological practice of laying too much emphasis on political ambitions, and unproductive criticism from the opposition in the form we currently go about it, which is quite unhealthy and lacks every element of patriotism, and literarily turn off many more Nigerians from trusting the country and acting in the interest of the country. We must also move away from the fixations on nonessential social and cultural matters at the expense of pressing national concerns.
These and many others should command our responses and focus even now. But unfortunately, while we theoretically recognise what is wrong and do have ideas of what needs to be done, our inability to refrain from the pervasive fixations on irrelevancies, has continued to deny us of the capacity to move forward. This has become the major cause of our delayed progress, hindering our national pace of development, and hugely responsible for the perpetuation of our economic woes. For as long as we refuse to move away, and maintain our old fixations on the nonessentials, the trivialities and the secondary matters, we are bound to remain in abject poverty, because, our actions will continue to represent distractions that inhibit our national capacity to address our real problems, and would continue to precipitate predictable social issues, leading to more discontent, unrest and instability.
It is about time, we break this unproductive cycle consciously and completely. We must establish and increase a thorough sense of national awareness that we can only get to where we are going by starting to recognise the various elements of distractions from critical issues. We must then shift our focus to demanding transparency and accountability from all the elected and appointed political officials from the local government and state government to the centre. Then, we must see to the collective actions, altogether prioritising pressing concerns and working together as a unit to address our problems.
On the issue of the arrest of the young children who were allegedly involved in both political protest and public vandalism, we have raised a very strong concern for the country. Yet, the nature of our responses has not departed from the very fixation on the nonessential substances of issues. Yes, the authority failed woefully by not considering the age and vulnerability of the affected children, failed by not following laid down due process, and failed by ignoring the trauma and physiological consequences of the treatments on the children; but at the same time, rather than addressing the important issues thrown up by the event, including the issue of public vandalism which seems to be totally ignored by the public, we were more interested, once again, in using it as an attack weapon against the government, especially by the opposition. We see it already as an election-winning ingredient.
No one is really talking about the other systemic issues raised by the children's participation in the protest and the deeper societal problems we face as a result of their availability to be used by the main but unknown culprits. Nobody is talking about the inadequate education, inequality and poverty of the young minds in the country that must be effectively addressed to prevent future occurrences of such episodes.
As of today, we have refused to agree that the events of that day are totally wrong and should not be left unattended by the authorities. Why are we not talking about fishing out the main people who apparently mobilised the children to carry out such violence and vandalism? We do not care about striking out the poison in the midst of the system. What matters to us are those that feed our emotional, unproductive, and unpatriotic pathological fixations.
It is however a good decision that the president has ordered the immediate release of all the affected children - who were mere tools and victims of some yet unknown perpetrators - and ordered a holistic investigation of the entire case, including ordering the restoration of the children's mental health and psychological well-being as much as possible, while reuniting them with their families
I will end this piece for the week by reiterating the fact that until we start abandoning the path and stubborn penchant of wasting our energies, actions and reactions that do not profit the country in any significant way, and begin to place on the table for a thorough discussing and resolutions of essential matters of real national development within the context of the challenges we face now, we are going nowhere. If In the last year, we have all truly seen food inflation as a growing challenge and agreed to shelve aside our unnecessary fixations to put pressure on the local and state government, for instance, to engage effectively in all value chains of agriculture, we won't get to the worse state where we are today. Failure to see it now would mean that we might remain in the same spot tomorrow or even worse. We must begin to reason meaningfully together and start taking the right steps to make Nigeria a great nation.
*GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!*
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