WE MUST FOCUS...

The first image on this post is a newspaper headline from 1973, and the second image is also from the archives…

Nigeria, a country of over 200 million people, whose citizens are making a mark in different fields of human endevour worldwide, a nation that has produced great intellectuals like Profs Wole Soyinka and Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, that has churned great minds like the late Fela Akinulapo Kuti and Ken Saro-Wiwa, in the past 60 years since independence, have since failed to solve the problem of electricity, election rigging and violence, and petrol scarcity!Even rulers who are products of adversity like former president Goodluck Jonathan who once lamented; “I had no shoes”, got elected and then become worse, going on to perpetuate the same adversity he experienced growing up!

What other evidence do we need to know that Nigeria’s perpetual retrogression and decline goes way deeper than mere corruption and the greed of political leaders? Why can’t we all just see the bigger picture –that there are powerful foreign interest groups who are determined to employ the usage of puppet leaders to continue keeping us in a state of perpetual misery, and thus let this knowledge inspire us to come together as one people to find solutions?

Let us ask ourselves why former President Obasanjo for example, who was reported to be having a bath sometimes ago as a young officer, and electricity went out and soapy water entered his eyes, giving him a very bad experience that day, an experience that illustrated the bad situation of electricity at the time. How can such a man become president and then go on to sink over 16 billion US dollars into a failed electricity project, how?

Why is it that, from Angola to Nigeria, to Congo, any African country where there are rich mineral resources, the people always end up sliding into chaos, retrogression, lawlessness and conflicts, WHY?

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for example, is the world’s single largest producer of cobalt. The mineral is a vital element needed for the production of batteries, including those in electric vehicles. In fact, recent research showed that because of the country’s immense cobalt deposits, local decisions and politics in the DRC can have massive ramifications for global battery supply chains. And this is just one example because the DRC can arguable be tagged the richest country on earth in terms of mineral resources…so much so that almost 80% of America’s military hardware production is alleged to rely, almost 90% on raw materials from Congo…and there is hardly a mobile phone anywhere on earth today, that doesn’t have an imprint of the DRC in it…

Yet, Congo has been in chaos and conflict since its independence…Patrice Lumumba and Laurent Kabila were both leaders who wanted the status co changed in that country, they were brutally assassinated…

No puppet leader like Nigeria’s current ruler can save any African country, none of them can! Our salvation is in leaders who are willing to risk life, and on us waking up as a people. Anything short of this is a total waste of time. We will just be going in cycle, Tinubu will do his 8 years, leave office and the next leader will come and be asking for patience and more time...

Instead of Nigerians to focus, see the bigger picture and unite, we are not only allowing tribalism and religion destroy us, we are also running after religious charlatans parading themselves as men of God, who are selling us delusions!