By JOHNSON EBIGIDE
So many intelligentsias and economic pundits several decades before now had pontificated that the main problems with Nigeria were ethnicity and lack of patriotism on the part of the citizenry. They had argued that tribal considerations in policy formulations and unpatriotic implementations of the policy thrusts of governance at all levels had kept the country in inextricable quagmires.
Yes, true as that might sound, owing to the incompatibility of the conglomerating diverse ethnic nationalities put together by the British interest in 1884, the presents realities have shown that the erstwhile stated problems of Nigeria were nothing comparable to the real causes of its backwardness and underdevelopment.
Nigeria is like a rich father with lazy and proud children. Children who are not interested in capacity and proficiency, but hedonist and plundering in character ! There is one particularly Yoruba proverb that is quite germane and would elucidate the present situation of Nigeria. It simply states that a child that lays his hope in his father’s wealth awaits penury and hopelessness !
Yes, most Nigerians have laid their hopes in the abundant resources of Nigeria without thinking of how to ensure the sustainability of his wealth as their father. They have therefore, like the prodigal son, become hedonistic, unproductive and wasteful, if not plundering Nigeria’s wealth for the benefits of outsiders.
Again, it is true that the children of slaves most times turn around to lord it over princes. The reason is that while hardship sharpens the mentality of the slaves, the affluents in their abundance hardly believe that change is the only permanent phenomenon in human existence. Nigeria’s case is not an exemption.
It is even worsened when likened to a man with different children from three envious wives. Yes, Nigeria is struggling to put his matrimonial home together with mutual distrust ravaging his marriage to three waring wives ! The minds of the children have been poisoned against one another by the three wives and the only way out is a war of total annihilation by one another for an interloper to take over !
When mutual distrust crops up in a family, alliances for personal gains are always the inthing. Are the various geopolitical zones in the country not aligning and realigning with whichever other zones they hope to derive power from to undo the family called Nigeria ? Are they acting in the interest of their father, Nigeria ?
Why, for example, in George Orwell’s satiric Animal Farm, should the pigs unleash the dogs on the innocent Molly for disputing the existence of the nonexistent “Sugar Candy Mountain” ? Only recently, perhaps, for distrust of intent, the Nollywood superstar, Chiwetalu Agu, was frizzled by the Nigerian Army in Onitsha for putting on an apparel that suggested his soft spot for the Indigenous People of Biafra ! That can only happen where there is no love lost between two estranged members of a family.
Nigeria’s problems are growing by the days, while the citizenry, particularly the political class, pretend that all is well. Avariciousness, rapacity, indolence among the youths, complete lack of sanctity for human existence and and unnecessary showmanship in every facet of human endeavours have thrown a dark blanket on the future of the country which only divine intervention could lighten the horizon for the survival of Nigeria as a country.