Nigeria is the Victim!!

Hello Friends,
I have been away for too long, and I know it. You have a right to abandon this blog...but I hope you will come back. Things are about to get really interesting... I have been working on a book, and it should be out in December. I will keep you posted. 

Second thing, I am working on updating this blog site, so it can be more responsive to your needs and you can interact with it better. So please if you get a notice from me to do something to make your reading experience better, please oblige me.

Third, I have a dear friend who I have managed to help rekindle her passion for writing... I am glad she is back in the groove. She now writes frequently, and she has written this piece that resonated so well with me. I made a few edits so it can fit into our style in this blog, but all the credits go to her.. Please enjoy this piece from Eberechi May Okoh..


----------

Recently, I found myself journeying by road from where I live to a neighbouring state within Nigeria. As we travelled, my vision was besieged by weighty evidences of underdevelopment. This could very well be a sci-fiction movie where people travel back to the past. Only difference is the past would be better as there would be no tarred roads at all which is better than these so-called tarred roads bedevilled with potholes giant enough to qualify as gutters. I am talking about roads which are so bad and ‘unmotorable’, every motorist uses the opposite lane and not even the traffic wardens dare ask why. The past would be better because there would only be mud houses with thatched roofs, not block houses that stopped being habitable well over twenty-five years ago. I see broken down vehicles dusty beyond recognition, dirt piles, scantily dressed hawkers; all along a major road, the type we call an express road!

I have seen this sight in so many parts of the country, that I have come to believe that it doesn’t matter which State it is. It is a Nigerian state! We are as strong as our weakest link! Underdevelopment rides roughshod over the entire country.

I begin to wonder why development has eluded us. It is as though a deity of underdevelopment has taken residence in Nigeria and the people have been hypnotised into submission. I try to close my eyes and imagine a different Nigeria, one with good roads, lovely landscapes, big bold and beautiful buildings, a country with signs of development on every turn. I am jolted back to reality by the incessant horning of a police vehicle behind our car. Now with my eyes open I see again, but not with my eyes, I see with my mind. It is not the roads that are in a sorry state; It is not the land that is underdeveloped; It is the minds of the people that are underdeveloped!

The physical world around us is but a reproduction of the minds of the men that occupy that time and space. It is the one who embezzled the development funds who has an underdeveloped mind. It is the one who thrashes his litter on the road that has an underdeveloped mind. It the one who blocks the drain with his garbage; who builds on the path of the river, who sees no wrong in what is obviously wrong; who justifies wrong doing as norms; he is the one who is underdeveloped in his mind!

Nigeria is not unde-rdeveloped, it is merely a victim of too many underdeveloped predators.