Who will fix Nigeria? A call to reprogramming ourselves!

I have a burden! It’s so easy to disparage this burden that I have and what I am about to say. I can hear you saying, “So what’s the big deal in having a burden?” Everyone has a burden you will say. You have yours too. Even those who have no burdens can easily take up a burden for someone else. So you may wonder, how is my having a burden a news?

But I have a burden. I have a burden for this country; for the people of this country. No, it’s not actually for all the people of this country. It is not a burden for my generation or those who are before us. It is a burden for the generation of our children? Yes, I have a burden for the generations after us; those of my Uncles and Aunts’ children and more importantly those of my own children. This burden has been compelling me to look for answers, and to look for solutions. So far, I have seen none in sight, but I still continue to look, and to search.

The burden is simple! Who will fix Nigeria for our children? Who will fix Nigeria for those who are supposed to be innocent, but are already being corrupted? Who will fix Nigeria for those who are supposed to live even a better life than we have lived, but for whom there seem to be none in sight?

I have, every now and again, a nostalgia for my past. I remember clearly those things that happened while I was growing up. I read novels written by novelists who are in my age group, and whether they lived in Lagos, Ibadan, Port Harcourt or Kano, Kaduna or Nsukka, Enugu or Ilorin, wherever they lived, their stories tell me they lived like me; a mostly gay childhood; a full adolescent and teenage years; and an adulthood that at least showed a lot of promise even if it was only at the beginning.

I know that even as at that time, Nigeria already had problems, but we also had one thing that was in more abundance at that time, than in our today. Most people had personal integrity. Most families had a foundation based on morals. Most kids were thought to know what was good and what was not. No matter what you chose to turn out to be, you at least knew the truth, you knew the values of the society. You knew that people will challenge you when you do wrong. I grew up knowing that it was not only my parents who could discipline me. I grew up knowing that all other mums in the areas were cooperative in watching over all the kids around then. I grew up doing chores at home (even though I hated my mum for a long time for making me suffer). I grew up knowing that what I had access to was a privilege and not my right. I grew up mixing with kids from all areas and walks of life. I lived close to a police barrack. I went to school with kids from these places. I saw a whole family of 10 living in one room and palour, but they had values, they had integrity, and they held their heads up high. I grew up in a house with no fence around for years. I grew up playing street soccer. I grew up knowing that if I lied to my parents, God will come in the night and knock my head (even though it didn’t stop me from lying when I have really gotten myself in a hole). I grew up in a Nigeria where at a time, we didn’t know what power outage was, what fuel scarcity was; and what armed robbery was.

What is the point of all these? My point is that at least, at a time in our lives, we knew a Nigeria where people had morals, where the core of societal values was not how to get rich quick; where people were measure not by how much they had, but how much integrity they have displayed; where every family was a unit, but part of an overall network (or mostly so).

Today, I look at my own kids, and for some reasons I think they are living in a different world; a world out of touch with reality; a world where they are mostly isolated from people from the other side. A world where they have cars and drivers and nannies, and houseboys and cleaners and gardeners and lesson teachers, and music teachers and taekwondo teachers, and language teachers! A world where all the social skills that children should learn in a social setting are now being taught to them outside of the same society. A world where they are afraid (or where we are afraid for them) to walk on the streets, or run errands to the next street to buy sugar or blend pepper. A world where their beds are made for them, their breakfast is served before they wake up, their toilets are washed, and their under wears are washed by house girls and mummy sometimes.

They now live in a world of loose morality or low morality, a world where they are deliberately and inadvertently exposed to technologies that may ultimately destroy them. A world where they are helped to pay for examinations; a world where parents routinely slap their children’s teachers and talk down on them simply because now, the parents earn several hundred thousand nairas more than the teachers. A world where parents are not teaching the moral values we are supposed to be teaching them but rather concerned about the christian school where they can be taught.

Sadly, our kids live in a world of luxury that does not, in the real sense, give as much of luxury as the simple world their and mothers lived. They live in exotic houses full of gadgets but no NEPA light to run it with. They have more toys than books, but this only makes them to develop an attention deficit disorder (because there are simply too many things to play with).

You will agree with me now that we live in a world where there is no clear line of demarcation in the morality models that children should develop. They are not taught, they are not led, and they are not disciple. I am not saying that each family is not teaching their own kids, but there is too much general dilution of the society values now that it has become “to your tents O Israel”.

More so, because most parents are doing things that they know is wrong, they are not able to caution the children when they step out of line. Or how else will the principal of a secondary school who is sending his/her child to UK for university education explain the source of the income? And because the child knows that the money is not from salary, he must have learnt from the parents that you can put your hands in iniquity as long as the end justify the means, or he must have come to the conclusion that his parents who go to church and raise holy hands and speak in tongues of angels are in the real sense an unrepentant Ananias and Saphiras! So the child develops either his own set of values or lives the one handed down not from the parents pulpit but from their actions.

A lot is wrong with our country today. Societal moral fabric is torn. Infrastructure don’t work. There is no leadership, kids don’t understand if there have even been a Nigeria that was different from what they know today. My child does not believe that at a time in this country, there was uninterrupted power supply! She wants to live in the UK, because there everything works, or in Dubai, or even in Ghana (until recently).

Who will fix this country for us? Who will bring us to a place where we can have the things lacking now restored? Who will help us hand over a healed (or even healing) Nigeria to our kids? If you are reading my thoughts, I have given up on the politicians, even though we still vote and hope that God is going to use one of them. I have given up on a leader who will come with a fiat and change our country. I hear people long for a leader like Jerry Rawlings who will come and execute the corrupt leaders and people around them. When I hear such, I just laugh in my mind.

If such a leader were to come (and it may come in the form of GMB), can you please imagine how many layers of leadership he will have to execute before he can eradicate corruption in the land?

In all of this country, every family will have at least one person executed because most, if not all of us, are corrupt in our mind but we just don’t have an avenue to loot the economy yet. Corruption is a mind thing. You are first corrupt in your mind, and then when you say half of a chance, you jump at it. In every home, in every church, in every mosque, people will be dying in their dozens by firing squad. I make no apology when I say that most Nigerians are corrupt, or at least have corrupt tendencies including me. The body of sin, or doing what is not right is the garment all of us wear, but most of us resist the enemy and the seduction of sin because of our love for a Holy God who does not want anyone who is His to go about with a stained hand and a soiled garment.

To fix this country, I believe that we need to first reprogramme ourselves individually and collectively. Starting from the units where are all drawn from, let us uphold a high moral standard. Let us change our thinking. The problem is that most of us don’t even know what is right. I teach a bible study group and I talk to youths sometimes, and the things I hear from them which they think is okay shocks me. We don’t know the truth anymore because most of us are not practicing it. Sometimes we know the truth but we lack the will to carry it out because of the seduction of pleasure and profit.

So those who still have a vestige of morality should begin to help reprogramme the youths. The old men and the ageing men like us should be left alone. We are too formed in this habit it is unlikely that we can change, except of course we go back into the days of public flogging on the streets. But we can help the youth change, we can show them what we know, and we walk with them to reprograming their ideologies.

I don’t know if it will be successful in the immediate. Perhaps while God is reforming the coming generation, He will let everyone of us corrupted and ill formed Nigerians to die first.