Inequality is no new thing – appropriately, it dates back to the Stone Age. Early Neolithic women were more likely to move where their men lived than the other way round and the trait that still greets many cultures to this day. Not until the white man explored the coast of Africa hundreds of years back that the Dark Continent had a taste of the missing supreme knowhow, which influenced new socio-political and economic order in the region. By the time the dust marking the end of slave trade settled down and Africa were freed once again, Nigeria got a new identity from the despondent merger of the South and North of Niger area in 1914. At times though, compulsorily working for a foreign master seemed helpful and enhancing where personal freedom to life lacked such relief. An egalitarian Nigeria has seen, shackled and pegged back on the world map of science emancipation, technology breakthrough and management knowhow. As if that is not enough punishment for a hollowed freedom from Westminster, politics in turn continues to short-change Nigerians in all fronts of endless calculus arrangement fashioned to bring the country’s chicken to roost.
Nigeria has gone through both Democratic and Military Parliamentary Systems of governance but to no avail. The country is at the moment knee-dip in American Presidential formula and all indications are sharply pointing to nothing but reverberating failure. Even so, all setbacks from our past should inspire our resolve to improve tactically and strategically if only to unravel new approaches to better outcomes. Informed by Anthony robbins’ assertion, if we don’t see a failure as a challenge to modify our approach, but rather as a problem with ourselves, as a personality defect, we will immediately feel overwhelmed. The current ruling party – People’s Democratic Party, PDP could be credited with injecting some sort of stability in the polity since 1979 without the uncommon haphazard interjection of the restive Military.
Apart from this reprieve, PDP has for long remained a party out of sort in everything that could be ascribed as politics of purpose. They are not only short-sighted; also they are hopeless, rigid and empty. Under their dispensation, it is one step forward and ten backward for Nigeria. The magnitude of corruption and social disorderliness of Dr Jonathan Ebele Goodluck’s PDP is atrocious and lamentable. PDP with their catchphrase POWER has lost every right to be called People’s party; they are not, as they are very selfish, naïve, parochial and idealess of what to do with power. After all, it is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
In the world of Lao Tzu, the belief is that pride attaches undue importance to the superiority of one’s status in the eyes of others; and shame is fear of humiliation at one’s inferior status in the estimation of others. When one sets his heart of being highly esteemed, and achieves such rating, then he is automatically involved in fear of losing his status. Dr Goodluck could be very proud of his achievement of presiding over the largest Black Country on earth but has offered little respite to his comrades in academia from loathing him on leadership platform where his education could have been an article of pride and success. How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them.
The PDP Chief, ‘President Dr Goodluck’ has run out of workable ideas to tackle the Boko Haram menace in the country, and the killings continue unabated. To compound his woes is his uninformed decision to unilaterally change the name of the iconic University of Lagos to Moshood Abiola University, Lagos before rushing a belated bill of ascent to the legislature seeking a posthumous approval. Such move devoid of intellectual ability may still haunt him for years to come as it became an unpopular decision. His ears might have been vibrating ceaselessly even in his sleep with vituperating shouts of disapproval from members of the public who believed that their president had been caught in lopsided logicality – doing it before thinking it, leaping before walking, approving before consulting. Surely, these indications are Jonathan’s weak points that could with time turn a bad luck than being a good luck not for him alone but the entire Nation. Better and more satisfying would MKO Abiola in his grave and living legends of UNILAG alumni be by renaming the Eagle Square in Abuja after the generous philanthropist. Or what benefit would a nation derive from having two different Universities in the same country named after a single person by the time the MKO Abiola Polytechnic Abeokuta received elevation to a University status. Perhaps, Jonathan would like to tell the Yorubas why their people are unsuitable to be honoured anywhere in Nigeria beside their own yard in spite many landmarks on Yoruba soil gratifying the Hausa/Fulani from the North. To whom much is given much is expected. Nigeria deserves better treatments.
Dr Sam Aruleba, PhD; Email: samarus@rocketmail.com