“58 YEARS OF E GO BETTER” – ASUDEMADE HABEEB
A SPOKEN WORD DELIVERED AT SCRIBBLE YOUR FUTURE CONFERENCE.
We live in a world where words do not matter, because words occupy no space in our minds. A country where there is no shelter for the body, food for the stomach, let alone food for thought. Ours is country that sees opportunities as national cake which we can eat from, and not national development which which we should starve for, because the mentality of an average Nigerian is wired from lack of power supply, and you cannot expect a wiring to function properly when there is lack of electricity, which is why our mentalities do not function well, because majority suffer from orientation syndrome.
Or how better can you describe a country that has been continually tongue-lashed, and at 58 still enjoys nothing but a backlash.
How, how do you tell of a nation that tells nothing but stories of good old days, which makes me wonder why do good days have to always be old. Are they too young to run too? Or are they too old to rule?
How do you tell your children that home is not home because our leaders would rather embellish a farther land, other than the fatherland, leaving us to wallow in the pool of poverty?
How, how do you tell your children that home is a mouth of war and only sings songs of death? Of boys in Bornu who become men because their fathers left too soon, and start to fight battles in skins larger than theirs. and of girls who become women before knowing man, because facing hardship, plight, and having to hawk on the dark streets of Kogi are enough to make one attain puberty.
From time immemorial, we have been telling ourselves that it will be well, it will be fine. “E go better, e go better”, and that there is light at the end of the tunnel. 58 years down that lane, the tunnel is still dark. is that also because of our epileptic power supply too, or because of our epileptic mindset?
Today,
We claim to be independent, yet we depend on tribalism to make decisions, money to raise our voices, and on selfishness to make our choices. How can we be independent of rationality and common good, and expect to move forward. How do you take away the tyres of a vehicle, and expect it move forward. How do you plant onions and expect tubers of yam… pardon me, we probably do not even have enough fertile lands to plant these onions, simply because of our leaders who have constantly left us at the dregs of corruption.
We claim to be a secular state, yet we keep our circles small enough to only accommodate people of similar faith. When the cleric or pastor shouts be your brothers’ keeper, does he not mean that you keep your brother’s share? Whether or not he shares your belief in God. Could he not mean that you catch him when he falls? Whether he is your blood or just from Nigeria. but welcome to my country, where blood is thicker than water, religion: thicker than unity, and congregations: thicker nationality, why then do you wonder why our leaders deny us water, electricity, good health care, but yet go ahead to water the growth of their own children – their own blood?
We claim to practice democracy, but if this is what democracy is, what is oligarchy then, what is anarchy? It is even hard to preach the gospel of permanent voters card, when that does not translate to permanent voters’ right. When we can be easily declared inconclusive even when our thumbs have not been consulted.
But I blame people like you who merely dissect the problems of Nigeria on the altar of arguments and conversations without translating thoughts to actions, and if after this spoken word, i don’t do something As well, then I blame myself. We are endlessly following a dark tunnel.
That is not faith. Because when a story is bad, you do not continue to tell it, you rewrite it. You take the pen from being dependent, dent the image of the bad stories you have been told, look at the past, examine the present, and scribble the future.
What do you think?