Imagine for a moment how it would feel to wake up each morning in a clean comfortable home and as you prepare for a new day, you flip on the light and it shines as sure as the sun would rise everyday, you go to the bathroom and turn on the faucet, clean water, cold or hot, whichever you choose, rushes out as sure as spring water would flow. Before you leave home you pop your wife a kiss and hug you kids. They would’ve been up while you were busy sprucing up and are now eager to share warmth with you before you all leave for your various chores outside your home.

You leave for work rest assured that your family would be alright. The school-aged kids would soon be off to school, conveyed in excellently maintained school vehicles in a well organized transportation system. In fact, apart from little worries about unexpected mishaps, which are, generally, inevitable life’s attendants, you know that your kids have a secured future as long as they grew up sound and healthy. You know it because you went through the same process they are now undergoing, the same continual procedures that made you who you are now.

As a young man you most probably would have attended the same schools your kids are now attending with the only difference that the schools have now been upgraded to meet with the demands of the time. You are confident they’ll get the best possible education because you know the schools are well equipped, not only with state of the art teaching and learning aids but also with well-trained teachers and dedicated in loco parentis’.

You do not have to worry about the cost of your children’s education because yours is a society that places the education of her youth on the highest priority level because they are the most valuable asset for the future of a people. She does not abdicate her obligation to fund the education of her young ones because she recognizes that the society benefits most of all from educated children, not their biological parents.

When your children are ready for tertiary education or whatever professions they might choose, they do not have to bribe their way into malfunctioning institutions. They would excel purely on merit no matter their ethnic extraction. You are rest assured that they would, under normal circumstances, grow up to attain whatever their aspiration may be as long they work diligently for it.

Whoever or whatever they eventually turn out to be, bricklayer, painter, carpenter, road mender, cook, nurse, artiste, teacher, technocrat, you name it, they would live a decent and humanly dignified life, respected and given a sense of importance in the society by everyone including their bosses and employers. If they wished, they could start their own families and raise their kids as soon as they felt up to it. Above all, they would never have to flee their fatherland to go seek greener pastures in faraway and uncertain firmaments where they may not be welcomed.            

Meanwhile, you are well on your way to your place of work. You have been traveling either in your own vehicle or with public transportation - not mass transportation, connotes cattle haulage. The running schedules of the public transportation systems are consistent and the intervals are brisk. The roads are solid, smooth and clean. You arrive at work unruffled, ready to start another day of maximum productivity. After work you go home fulfilled, back to the warmth and comfort of a happy family.

You have never had to worry about your personal safety. Security system is very reliable. Getting mugged, robbed or falling victim to any brutal crime is extremely seldom. Adequate healthcare services are available, not only to everybody but also to every domestic animal. The other day, in your neighborhood, an elderly lady’s cat got trapped in her chimney, she picked up the telephone and the fire service arrived in no time, with blaring sirens, to rescue the poor animal. That old lady might not have survived another week if anything had happened to her cat. 

You are just an average citizen in your mid forties or thereabout. As far back as you care to remember things have generally been this auspicious in your native home. Even your parents and grandparents enjoyed similar circumstances in their youth except that your generation has seen a lot more improved conditions than your predecessors saw, thanks to the robust polity they put in place and the passion with which they guarded their laws and constitution, which your generation inherited and are now passing on to your children and future generations.

It must be incredible, wouldn’t it, to be endowed with such life’s circumstances, to be a daughter or son of the soil in a nation where one generation bequeaths the next a life that is worth living, a fatherland to be proud of, where one enjoys the rainfalls and the sunshine with equal intensity. You distort your face incredulously and declare that there is no place like that?

Believe it or not, there are! There are people in this world who, driven by strong instincts of indebtedness to posterity, have created powerful and functioning nation states; a self preservation instinct of sorts. There are societies in this world of ours where highly placed and prominent individuals see themselves as public idols, duty-bound to live exemplarily, where holders of public offices never consider themselves holders of life mandates. There are societies on earth where public officials have so much self-esteem they would bow out gracefully whenever their personal integrity is legitimately impugned, where the unwritten motto is, do and let do, not “do or die.” The wonderful thing about these societies is that they are only humans!    

This is the crux of the matter; is the Blackman really a fully developed human or are there still some evolutionary huddles to scale before he can legitimately make this claim? Admittedly, there are quite a few Blacks who have notched up some highly laudable achievements in almost all fields of human endeavors. But great individual achievements,  per se, do not make humanity. It is the collective attitudinal input of the masses into human affairs that matter. Without a positive weltanschauung, individual achievements would be grievously hampered.

Human history is replete with brutalities and exploitations by one group of people against another. The Trans-Atlantic trade of Africans into slavery was one of the most atrocious of such human tragedies. Even though there was some extent of internecine slavery within every distinct group of people, the black race, especially of the West African extraction, appeared to be the race mostly predisposed to alien enslavement. One reason for this egregious assumption is the Blackman’s self-preservation instinct which seems to have been programmed for individual survival on one hand and clinging to life by all means even when living makes no sense at all, on the other hand.

Another reason was that there were, indeed, African potentates who, for selfish gains, aided and abated the trade, and allowed it to go on a lot longer than it would have ordinarily lasted. Refusing to get drawn into the frustrating saga of Blackman’s miseries almost everywhere under the sun, I would rather narrow this down to the main object of this essay. I candidly beseech anyone who cares, to explain to me the raison d’etre, the goal of this nation called Nigeria . What really is the big deal behind this bizarre contraption? I would pay whatever he demands who accomplishes this feat.

Nearly fifty years of self-rule have yielded nothing more than a whole gamut of highly proficient exploiters whose highest ambitions seem to be to outdo their erstwhile foreign and indigenous counterparts in bastardizing their own folks. The two most outstanding agendas of those entrusted with state’s affairs, reinventing democracy and redefining the art of grand larceny, are working out perfectly and the results are there for everybody to see - a destitute polity and a hopelessly bamboozled people. Today many Nigerians would hilariously dive into slave ships moored at our harbors and even pay to be hauled into slavery. But who wants them? Just having another frightful nightmare, that’s all.      

Robot  # 1 | 08.11.2007 18:58

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