Yunusa Abubakar
No country in this world can survive the level of impunity spuriously hurl at its polity with no modicum of restraint from the governed and the government.
The moment of Truth will surely consume us all in the long run. We are all victims of our programmed educational system.
The quality of education we collectively give and take is deficient in terms of rigorous and incisive training of the mind.
It is only in Nigeria that our curriculum has vexatiously remained unchanged despite our most taunted attainment of political independence.
We are a people who see epistemology from the western prism as undiluted and pristine with no expedious needs for local content to assert our differences in global competition.
We glorify everything external and denigrate our internal homespun wisdom. We have developed unhealthy taste for everything foreign as against our local production.
Our intelligentsia is more interested in copycatting the western epistemology, rather than evolving novel ideas that can contest favourably with others in global competition. We churn out millions of graduates with no requisite training in skills and respect for menial jobs.
Skill acquisition is the global direction in global competitiveness. The curriculum we use in all our levels of education has remained unchanged for obvious reason of lack of creativity and self worth. We are simply a people luxuriating in self hate and loathing.
China and India have consistently maintained their pristine past, though tainted by historical contact with others.
In India, they have evolved subaltern history that fiercely counters their misrepresentation in world history. There is nothing like world history but the history of western world disguised in flawless English and imbued with prejudices and justifications for colonialism and all its inhibiting trends.
Here in Nigeria, colonial gazzetts and colonial history are used to determine ownership of land and legitimacy of kingship in most domains in the country. We use distorted colonial history as admissible documents in our courts to win cases.
We kill one another when Muslims are attacked in other countries and defend Israelites genocidal proclivity because of religious leaning.
We bask in euphoria of self delusion by denigrating anything local and copiously use other countries as an exemplar of perfect and idyllic nations.
We have lost our identity and no country can prosper without an identity that has national ethos and sense of self dignity and worth.
Today, we cry more than the bereaved for the suspension of Twitter in our country. We fight for others who see us as demographical statistics they can obnoxiously utilise to better their economic fortune.
Our curriculum must be radicalized to reflect our existential reality. We must have a curriculum that will inspire that spirit of nationalism and patriotism in our children. We must evolve an alternative platform that can speak to the world about us with dignity and self worth.
There is no culture that is Technicolor idyll as every culture has its good and bad sides.
Our culture is not perfect as no culture is ever one. Why do we take pride in exposing our bad sides to the world, while others are effacing the good sides of theirs?
People with weird trends in lesbianism and homosexuality are protected by external forces, while the cultured ones among us are tagged prehistoric and uncivilised.
Most journalists and writers who painstakingly expose our foibles and deface our cultural heritage are extolled and rewarded, while those with patriotic minds that speak a little good of ourselves are considered as inane and simplistic.
No country in the world can love you more the way you love yourselves.
We use others; Arabs and Europeans as our binary opposition in the binary of good and bad, light and darkness, progression and retrogression, white and black.
Everything about us is bad and everything about others is seen as an exemplar of perfection.
How can you ever be respected in the comity of nations when you have pathologically lost your identity?
Nigerians are more Christian than the Europeans, as our Muslims are more fanatically Islamic than the Arabs.
We never speak well of our own as we keep relishing in speaking the goods of others.
In the global competition for scarce resources, every country is an economic threat to another. There are no permanent friends or foes but permanent interest. What is our interest in the global competition?
Interest is the driving force in global competitions. We have not aggregated nor articulated our interest and as such, we are not competing as worthy competitors in the global competition.
Our competitive edge is evinced when we are fighting along our primordial fault lines; us against them. Politics is now played in mosques, churches and shrines with the tribal language of disunity and destruction.
Politicians don’t longer use markets, ideology, vision and mission to win elections. They use the cheapest means of ascending to position of leadership at all levels.
The language of disunity and tribal loyalty is cheaper and more convincing to them. We have politicians in our National Assembly who are more concerned with fighting for only their tribal regional or religious interest, rather than the most needed national interest.
They only seek to impress their highly sentimentalized constituents, rather than fighting for national growth and development.
A road built in Kano, Anambra, Lagos or Edo is built for all Nigerians as we are always on transit as a people. The cars we use do not know the geopolitical reason for building roads, but are more concerned about their longevity and durability.
Continue playing the cheapest politics of dividing the citizenry along primordial sentiments as a day of reckoning shall consume us all.
The conflagration we are all consciously fanning is incapable of protecting anyone.
A word is enough for the wise!