Let’s Take Back Our Communities, Our Country… Together, Deliberately!

As we celebrate 100 years of being together as a nation, many of us ask, ‘why are we celebrating? What do we have to celebrate?’

Yes, we do have reasons to celebrate. We are the most populous country in Africa. In fact one out of any group of 5 blacks in the world is a Nigerian. Nigeria boasts of a nobel prize for literature in addition to other well known prizes in literature. Nigerian engineers, doctors and scientists are achieving great heights in various countries around the world. We have survived near-wars and security threats on every side.

However, most of our successes and achievements have been accidental. Accidental in the sense that, as a nation, we lack structures, systems and processes that are designed to lead us to progress, deliberately. There is no deliberate, sustainable and concerted effort towards progress in our nation. For years we have lived on accidents, miracles and good luck, for years we have done/ complained about the same thing over and over again and have expected a different result, for years we have developed what we term as a fire brigade approach to everything, even our personal lives.

Indeed, we have achieved unintentional successes by accident. However, imagine what could happen, the possibilities that awaits us, if we, not the government, if you and I come together and deliberately aspire and plan for progress and success in this land.

True the government’s role cannot be denied. However, while the government gets its acts together, which may take a very long time, we the citizens, the private sector, the educated, the learned, you and I need to come together and do something.

Let’s take back our communities, our country together, deliberately.

Let’s insist on literary and debating societies in our schools.

Let’s bring back science clubs and JETS competitions.

Let’s gather together and sponsor the children of the poor to the best of schools.

Let’s show good examples to our domestic staff and encourage them to unleash their potentials.

Let’s form community groups and build our own community health centres, hire our own doctors and nurses, we are already doing this with our neighbourhood security watch anyway.

Let’s stop converting our green spaces and football fields to housing estates.

Let’s encourage the artists, the athletes and the artisans towards excellence.

Let’s not forget our doctors, teachers and engineers.

Let’s return to agriculture, start from your gardens.

Let’s change our values, ethics and our definition of what is right.

And if you are a policy maker or have access to the politicians and policy makers, don’t keep quiet, stop playing ‘parlour politics’.

Lobby for scholarships, for better funding for education and for healthcare.

Lobby for an enabling environment for businesses to thrive.

Lobby through the social media, newspapers and magazine on practical steps to move forward as a nation.

Let’s do something!

This is not utopia, this is our future, our responsibility.

If we don’t take action now, and we think things are bad now, we will be at ground zero by the time we wake up. We will wake up, I’m sure about that, but I pray to God, that we will have something to wake up to and we wouldn’t have arrived too late.

Too late to restore our infrastructure, our fundamentals, our businesses

Too late to guarantee security of lives and property

Too late to stand in the committee of nations.

Too late, too late, too late

It’s already started happening, our children used to travel abroad for university education, secondary education has followed suit, very, very soon, if we sit down and do nothing, our children will start primary education from the UK and US.

Fellow Nigerians, enough of the fire brigade approach to everything, let’s take back our communities, our country together, deliberately!

Let’s do what we have to do, so that we can do what we want to do.

Photo Credit: madamenoire.com