By Haroun Muhammed
No one will teach you how to love your skin; how to gauge your taste for everything around you. No one will teach you how to love your country. It boils down to your common sense; the reality before you, the stuff you are made of.
Whether you listen to the professors of psychology at Harvard or you listen to the sociologists from Cambridge and Oxford combined — somethings are naturally built-in — and further share the iterative growth in us.
Recent events showed how we could match the present and past events together in order to make sense of the future. This isn’t a prophetic sentiment, rather than, a wake up call. Countries over all the world are being built on the overwhelming sense of patriotism. Whether you worship the West, the Middle East, or even those that speak in different tongues, the logic is the same: indigenes build their country not foreigners. A country is as good as its people, says the cerebral MS II.
Back to the events. Our love for foreign “things” is legendary. Anything tag “foreign” is given a special treatment. This is us; a country with a fashionable love for foreign things (Nigeria itself needs to travel abroad, said a frustrated Nigerian.) EndSars protest would continue to weigh a huge mark in our books of history — its spontaneous negative impact, and perhaps, its undermine positive impact.
What we had back then was the rebirth of our love for foreign affairs. At some particular stage, we jettisoned our local media and clear facts before us to blindly absorb the “foreign unsubstantiated sentiments”. This time around we rally around and allowed others to have taken an advantage of what’s meant to be a good precedent — infiltrated the good cause with cornucopia of deceitfulness.
Can we really be that shortsighted? (I’m trying to be nice here. The word I was going to use was “stupid.”)! There was also a wave of ignorance that swept our sense of reasoning away. Imagine an overrated foreign-based Medic saying if protest lasted for 30 days UN will intervene and sack the people in charge. Seriously? Even the shortest route to the Google search-engine seemed to have disappeared from some people’s head then. Some didn’t logically and thoroughly ask for more details regarding that… na to Soro Soke dey go!
And then, there was a noise of holding the Nigerian flag, there was one of inviting economic sanctions, of signing funny signatures, there was another one of asking the UK to ask the president to resign, there was so many colourful rumours and lies peddled on and off the media streets. And then, the almighty “massacre” gracefully landed. Up till now, we are still looking for the unknown dead bodies to honor their deaths. They truly deserve our final respect. They do!
Instead to gather around our senses and set our house in order, we consequently fell back into lawlessness, lashing out the unknown, starving our economy in the back by roadblocks, huddling against the darkness, killings of our own security men, robbing our countrymen, etc. We were never casted in that mould, I didn’t know how we got ourselves there. Believe me, I didn’t!
If we could learn something from the past, it’s that of, no one can help us set our house in order while we take a step back and watch the magic to happen. The people we consciously invited will leave us, the way rats leave a sinking, when we set our nation on fire. Developing countries like ours thrive on a painstaking patriotism regardless of who is in charge of the country.
Unlike us, they passionately despise anything that will bring their country down. Unlike us, they don’t adopt “fashionable foreign love”, they are contented with home-based love cast in the mould of patriotism. Chip in any developing country like us, their story of success lies in their patriotism.
There was an attack on the Capitol, an insurrection they say, days ago. But, all we had was Americans solving their own problems. Of course, it’s arguable to say no one can dare interfere in their internal affairs, though, we have adopted “foreign love”, we can, as well, learn something from them — that’s the love of our own country.
Let me repeat this one more time: Nigeria is the only country we have. Unless, you are preparing to rent a house in Elon’s self-sustaining city on Mars, the politics of this country affect all of us; directly or indirectly.
We should all frown at the shabby-driven-system in our country. We should all be actively involved in shaping the future of this country. It doesn’t matter which industry you belong to; if we keep on producing half-baked politicians as our leaders, nobody’s going to be safe in this country. Their infectious incompetency will locate us, on the road, home, on our beds, wherever we are. The Nigeria of yesterday, that of today, is a textbook reference for this.
We can join hands and rebuild this country —make it whatever we want it to be — or watch it bounce into a valley of nothingness under the influence of never-ending blames and staggering perfidiousness.
The choice is ours.
May Nigeria succeed!
