Those who should make a difference will read this and understand me, I presume. “They can’t and they do not read,” some are probably interjecting this minute. “The Nigerian youth is not yet capable of such reasoning,” they would claim. I do not know whether to take such arrant cynicism as the truth.
I write for the youth; although I would love to think that I write for everyone, my toilsome and often tiresome endeavor resonates in rousing cadences for the youth; I assume. By youth, I make no references to age; for a man at 21, wrought of defeatist reasoning could give up on life. On the flipside, a man at 70 could tirelessly evince ardour and indomitable vim characteristic of a 21-year-old. Crabbed age and inclination to dither, a graying yet towering sense of resignation forever beclouds the mind of the one to whom every fresh vestige of hope evokes inklings of an infernal eclipse.
Shame, that we can look the sun in the face but cannot make our hay under the heat of its smoldering rays. Shame, that everybody loves to seek a hero but nobody wants to be a hero. And so we give to principled spinelessness even as we perpetuate a base and savage insensitivity in pursuit of everything and anything gilded with riches and shorn of the humane.
Murderous hate disintegrates our fatherland; humaneness and love depreciate for the love of heartwarming riches. Honesty dies a gruesome death and diligence gives to the lure of gratifying deceit; and within the haze of such grotesqueness and vile, we seek a true hero, a Nigerian hero.
How can we dream of having a hero without the crutch of a virtuous and enabling world? We do not need a hero but a nation fit for heroes; and having created such nation, we would be in no dire need of sacrificial idealists and pragmatists we love to call heroes. Let everybody be a hero. Falcons hunt for their young; crickets make their own music, and the untended herd determines the course of its own pasture; let you and I become our own heroes.
Arrogance and contemptible naïveté makes our craven and insolent ruling class contend that we are incapable of such noble enterprise. Cowardliness and incurable servility goads us to uphold the ‘truth’ as they love to see it. Who would have thought that at this time and age, we would be caught in the tangled thickets of greed, self-centeredness, retrogression and deceit?
Today’s youth like their forbears are given to bigotry…we perpetuate the worst kinds of ethnic chauvinism and idolatry you could ever think of. Driven by greed and inordinate lust for the good life, we seek the shortest possible bypass to riches. “Money talks, bullshit works,” becomes our hallowed creed; it leads us to revere criminals as our best of men even as it informs our tireless quest to circumvent the universe’s definite but slow, steady order.
We are at war with ourselves and the future of our dreams thus in spite of our fervent and inexorable clamour for change and everlasting progress, our enthusiasm is borne of the perverse, and our advancements of exasperating duplicity; never had an entire generation being so treacherous and full of ill-will against itself as we have now.
Goaded by platitudes and ideals that do very little to improve our circumstances and worth, we engage in a maddening march for the future of our dreams even as we become the cogs in our wheels of change; every time we get to the crossroads of change we could believe in, impotent will emasculates our zeal.
There is something wrong with the Nigerian ideal; makes it difficult to chart our way out of the bedlam of the past, turmoil of the present and barrenness of the future. Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously “measure by a scale of perfection the meagre product of reality” in this poor world of ours. Without doubt, Schiller envisioned the futility of such lofty expectations we have of ourselves even as we battle our inner demons. Any individual seeking such perfection shall in no way be deemed a wise man; he shall be deemed sickly, unrealistic and innately foolish.
And yet, on the other hand, it is worth remembering that ideals do exist. Even the villainy perpetrated by our venal and dishonourable ruling class is perpetuated on the strength of ideals they hold very dear to their hearts. To every individual, his heartfelt ethic. There is no man without an ideal, however dormant or active it is, something drives an average man towards his choice of conduct as part of a human society.
Truly, without the rampart of ideals, it would be impossible for our pioneer statesmen to fight for and attain the independence we so carelessly diminish today. Spurred by heartfelt ideals, officers of the Nigerian army staged the first military coup and subsequent ones. Incensed by ideals, the country plunged into a bloody civil war at the end of which over two million civilians and soldiers lay dead from starvation and “enemy” bullets.
It was on the steep planes of ideals that the country was continually thrust through sporadic military and civilian experiments until 1993 when Nigeria’s last military head of state handed over to a civilian administration. And spurred by earnest ideals, the executive and legislative arms of government have led Nigeria from one sorry pass to another. Enter President Goodluck Jonathan, the man whom many amongst us deemed the “ideal” man for the job. Many thought because his name is “Goodluck,” he must have good luck which would automatically rub off on us immediately he attains power. Goodluck Jonathan is in power and what manner of good luck he brings has been felt by all.
Like you and I, Mr. President is a man of ideals; thus it was from the moral ground of ideals that he budgeted about N1billion for presidential meals, removed fuel subsidy and allows a very “interesting” security situation on his watch. Being a man of ideals, Mr. President has surrounded himself with great men and women of ideals thus we have within his team, Reuben Abati, a very brilliant journalist who from a moral ground of ideals chose to abandon his calling to serve Mr. President, my bad, Nigeria; lest I forget Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Allison-Madueke et al; men and women of presumed worth and intelligence who are currently ruling Nigeria because it is not yet idyllically expedient to serve Nigeria.
And then we have you and me; human integers continually forced by the most expedient of ideals to endure such ruling class as we have now. It is on the strength of ideals that we evolve into what quality of youth we are now. Shall we begin to nurture such ideals that would trigger our oft hackneyed ‘revolution?’I speak of unimpeachable values and character that dwarfs our several cosmetic enterprises like our bungled “Occupy Nigeria” protest. There is little to cheer about such movement; the best we can do is to look back lustfully as shipwrecked mariners might at the disappearing shoreline while they are hurled and submerged beneath the fury of the surliest sea waves.
