NIGERIA AT 48..........how far?

WITH WHOSE MIND DO YOU THINK?

I wonder today what my father, as a very young man and his own father, would have felt on this day, forty eight years ago. I can imagine the enthusiasm; the hope; the joy; the zest; the emotions must have been enormous. If you had asked my father then, I can imagine the kind of pictures he would have painted of Nigeria in the next forty eight years. My father and perhaps a whole lot of Nigerian fathers and mothers have been disillusioned today as we turned forty seven as a nation, with poverty, unsolved murders, unemployment, moral decadence and unimaginable crimes everywhere; with thieves and kleptomaniacs as political and opinion leaders today. Some times I try to picture the fears of an average Nigerian mother, of the future of her children.

Immediately we got independence in 1st October 1960, the white colonialists and imperialists left. And the nationalists raised their hands in victory; and they stopped fighting. But the whites left behind, black imperialists and colonialists who continued to do their bids, now unchecked because the locals saw them as brothers.

The white man told my grand and great grand father that their language was vernacular and inferior so he abandoned it for the white man’s language, even after the white man left. The white man told my father that his culture and religion were bad, barbaric and worthless. And he accepted. But the white man or would I say white evil, kept himself busy, decade after decade scavenging for artifacts, oracles and our heritage to make his cultureless society valuable.

They said we were black and in their dictionary they never said any thing good about black. Everything associated to black in the English dictionary was evil, negative, pessimistic or bad. I dare you to look up the meaning of black in any dictionary. Expressions like, soiled or stained with dirt; gloomy; pessimistic; dismal; without any moral quality or goodness. They hated us.

What about white? Around it you find words like pure, angelic, and saintly. There you find expressions like decent, honorable, or dependable; morally pure; innocent; without malice; harmless.

They never wished us well yet they are at the forefront of the campaign for our development. This cannot work. They told us that our medicine was poisonous and crude; that too, we accepted. But they just took the formulae to their country and just repackaged them and brought them back, branding themselves god.

The impoverished our minds to the extent that our leaders thought, not with their own minds but the mind of the whites who held them in slavery for a lot of years. They subjugated our minds. They made us poor in the mind so that we never stopped running to them with the least problems. Unfortunately, our leaders still think with the mind of the imperialists who could give anything to keep us poor. That is why we could only achieve so little in forty eight years.

Don’t label me a racist yet, or even anti-white because I am not one. I am only trying to bring out what kept us in this dilemma. This treatment or would I say ill-treatment, is not peculiar to Nigeria alone; or African countries, it has been meted out to blacks every where in the world. Do you remember Brother Malcolm X? Martin Luther King Jr.? Steven Biko? They fought and died trying to change the orientation of a second class people the white man gave us. Mandela went to jail for 27 years because he choose not to think like a slave.

We are the leaders this country would look up to in the nearest future. What I propose is that we change our orientation now. We must begin to think like Nigerians with beautiful social and cultural heritages. We must learn to solve our problems rather than use formulae that were developed for the west with a different political, cultural, social and economic society from ours.

In this generation, we have every reason to say that our leaders have failed us. And we are in the position too, to affect the future. Simply put, we lost the past but we have the future. Let us work for what our children would be proud of in the future.

Let’s just be Nigerian with Nigerian minds, not Nigerians with the minds of slaves of the whites. Nigeria is ours; we must make things work here.

Happy Independence Anniversary!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!! !!!!!

Izunii