We have to be worried that we are not producing much in tangible terms. We import our food, our technology and every machine from abroad… What I think we should be doing is work, work, work… for our unborn children. There is a time for hard, back-breaking, unrelenting work. This is the time for us. We need to be planting the trees under whose shade our children will bask. We cannot sing and dance and joke our ways to greatness.
I have never been to South Korea before, but Singapore I have. Upfront, I didn’t like their food. It was too watery. So, one day I decided to hustle to some Nigerian restaurant I was told was around the corner. I missed my way and got lost.
And so, we line up daily, struggling hard to destroy our country. People from other countries are looking at us in disbelief as we destroy a perfect country. Because we don’t read any history – ours and others – we carry around in our oversized cranium, fantastic stories which are so utopian, they are laughable. No matter how many times we are reminded that every, I mean EVERY nation on earth was formed by internal or external conquerors or manipulators, we just don’t want to hear.
I should have known. When Buhari clocked 100 days in office, I had cause to take issue with one article written by his media adviser, Garba Shehu, in which he extoled his boss, and very foolishly said his Buhari was better than Lee Kuan Yew and Narendra Modi PUT TOGETHER. It was the age of foolishness and unfounded cockiness. I don’t think the Buhari government spent one day without taking very foolish decisions.
There is a video of his circulating on social media presently, where Lee Kuan Yew said if they didn’t take some decisions that bordered on people’s personal choices, they wouldn’t have achieved anything. We must be bothered with personal choices which aggregate to national choices, if we must save ourselves. This is a memo to the next Nigerian government.
We need to be planting the trees under whose shade our children will bask. We cannot sing and dance and joke our ways to greatness. If Lee Kuan Yew was a Nigerian, I’m sure this is what he will teach us. It’s blindingly obvious. And he will break a few heads while at it. We need a national ethos of productivity and a sense of urgency. We are merely drifting as it is.