Gradually, our dearly beloved country is coming to realize the harsh reality of our collective shame and eternal guilt as reward for arrant topsy-turvy knack for elevating disorder above order, truth above falsehood, tribe above humanity, wrong above right, mediocrity above excellence, religion above righteousness, oppression above justice and greed above moral rectitude. For one, I am not the least surprised by the horrifying scenes witnessed across the country and the accompanying needless deaths of struggling everyday Nigerians during the sordid episode of the Nigeria Immigration Service recruitment fiasco of yesterday. I pay special respects to the dead, who have once more shed their precious blood for a society insatiably adept at drinking the blood of its own! I shudder to think that somebody would subject 6 million applicants through the pangs of a written test in 37 centers! That equates an average of 163,000 people per center! And I do not know of any facility in our country that can accommodate 100,000 people seated in an atmosphere for examination! That in itself, is an indicator that the administrators of the test had no plan to use it for any other purpose than to generate the 6 billion Naira windfall gotten from the scam! The fact that 6 million people filed applications to be recruited into NIS point to an unthinkable level of unemployment and underemployment. This portends very serious, grave and ominous signs that we are sitting on a time bomb. And the blames are enough to go round. First the people. Yes, I mean the people carry the greatest chunk of the blame! A society gets the type of leadership it deserves. And the leadership creates the type of society it wants! We the people have for years allowed trivial differences such as ethnic group, color of God, mode of worship, geography and filial attachments determine how we see and solve common problems. We forget to remember that unemployment has no tribe or religion. Hunger has no state of origin or tribal marks. Poverty has neither a mosque nor a church. Lack of electricity is not a member of Ohaneze, OPC, MEND, ACF, IYC, NYCN, PDP or Boko Haram! We chose to see life only from the narrow prisms of Niger-Delta, South-West and core north! We see politicians as them against us! We accept that a petrol station attendant is entitled to collecting extra gratification from motorists after dispensing fuel, but we cry and shout if the policemen do the same at checkpoints! We worship God on Sundays inside the church, but beat the red traffic light on our way from church! We fight and kill to ensure that one of our own is the President, Governor, Senator, Council Chairman and then complain to high heavens that he has not performed after. And when the next time comes, we still do the same fighting to ensure the Presidency is retained in the core north, south-west or south-south, no matter who occupies the seat! Then the next round of complains...! Second, the leadership. Unfortunately, they are completely detached from reality and are surrounded by people who only tell them what they want to hear! Their children are cocooned in the ambience of America and Europe where they are being groomed to take over and continue the pillage when the parents are too aged and too weak! Their houses are powered by giant sized generators bought and fuelled by the peoples money! At the sight of malaria, they fly out to Germany for medical check-up and rest! And when they return, some of those unfortunate NIS applicants would adorn T-shirts with special eulogies inscribed on them and troop to the airports to welcome them back! The Pastors and Imams would organize thanksgiving services for them when they return! That is our tragedy. My take is that our countrys DNA needs to be completely reprogrammed. Sadly, this generation has lost it. Redemption would come from a new engineering of our lives and our values. A new moral code is required. The people must learn to stand up for what is right. We are all losers in the long run!
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 07:07:47 +0000
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