A Heart for Nigeria

Can Nigeria ever be better? Can the country I was birthed into many years ago improve from where it is now to a better state? Will there ever be a time when her most promising ones find refuge in her and make her great instead of finding the way out of the hell of a country? Will there ever be a time when we would not remember what it was like not to have electricity, like my dear friend Joseph Adeosun has predicted? These questions and many more pour into my mind every day, making me stare into the open, numb with consciousness at the happenings in my immediate environment.

A month ago the school management of Obafemi Awolowo University (where I study) gave us the ultimate shocker: they hiked the school fees of fresh students by over 300 percent and then went later on to hike that of her returning students. As a body, the students for a few days stood up and in the best way they could, fought valiantly against this act of oppression. We staged a few days of protest until the management yet again did it; they shut down the university after just a day of protest (such a drastic action is only supposed to be taken after 72 hours of protest). But we would not be dismayed, we stood still yet and fought and such we did until…things started to fall apart. In the heat of the struggle, we could not with a singular decision come against our oppressor. Instead a good majority of students only wanted out and to go home. They did not want any part in the struggle. Now I sit at home, more like a conquered man than a victor.

This act of selfishness and self centeredness only makes me wonder if ever we will prevail over the forces of corruption in Nigeria, if at a small scale like in the university environment, we cannot stand as one, as a united force to demolish the gates of the stronghold of oppression from the management. If majority of Nigerians continue to exhibit a nonchalant, I-don’t-care attitude to issues, we would continue to have a ticking time bomb of a country. How much more shall we continue to be shoved, beaten, tricked and dribbled? Will we continue to look on while our motherland is laid to waste by political bigots, terrorists and a corrupt cabal? I don’t know how much longer we would continue to fold our arms and wait for a supposed savior to come and deliver us from ourselves. Until a few years ago, I had an unweaving belief in a better Nigeria, these days, that belief is far becoming a mirage. Instead of taking up a cause and pursing its fulfillment with all our hearts, Nigerians only prefer to ‘settle it in the place of prayer’; praying against demons, spirits and witches that have stood on the way to their breakthrough and financial prosperity like the Goliath of Gath. A little digression here though, not that I don’t believe in the power of prayer to change the nation, I also believe in the active engagement of ourselves to make a change. Where is the fighter spirit in us? Where are the Nigerians I saw that took on the Federal Government in January 2012? Where are the Nigerians that hold their leaders accountable for their actions with government funding? Where are the Nigerians that say no to corruption, injustice and political and religious bigotry?

I use this as an opportunity to awaken us to come alive and arise to be all God wants us to be. We can be more than this. In us is the potential to be the most desirable nation to live in and transact business, in Nigeria we can realize the dream of our founding fathers, in Nigeria I believe. So I say to all Nigerians, arise and fight!

Oluwatobi Gbemisola
Tweet me @TobiGbemisola

Where are the good guys?

    For the last three weeks I have been visiting this phone engineer in my area to fix my Nokia C5 phone. I initially had a bit of hesitancy in my decision to visit him for a remedy as I wanted a quick fix since most repairers in that vicinity had an unpleasant habit of delaying repairs. But because of the proximity to my home, with a shrug I decided to try him out, which ended up to be a fatal mistake. Arriving with my brother at his shop, I gave him the phone, he gave a diagnosis of what the problem was and I paid him in part to get the job done. He told me to return in a few hours of which I did but to my mild surprise, he gave me an excuse of needing to buy a part to the phone to finish the job.”Bros, your phone will be ready tomorrow, come and get it then”, was what he told me as I left that evening. Of course I returned on Day 2 to which he repeated the pattern of another ‘tales by moonlight’. “Ah!”, I sighed to myself as I left his shop and headed home, shaking my head and already regretting my decision to transact business with him. I kept making visits for my ‘sick’ phone till the end of the week when he finally gave me a half repaired phone. The unfortunate gist continues with daily visits and wasted airtime on calls with this guy ‘maradonaing’ me for three weeks, ending bitterly with lots of tension and shouting.
For the little time I have been at home in Lagos, I have tasted firsthand how much some Nigerians can get their hands dirty to make money. They lie, cheat, steal and resort to all manners of vile behaviors to achieve their intents. As this engineer guy kept lying to me in form of one excuse or the other, my mind did not need to search far for why things are this bad in the country. Even the ordinary Nigerian has swallowed the astringent pill of desperation to make it fast and big. Honesty and integrity have become alien values that my people live by. I was shocked by how low people can descend to make it. It therefore seems to me that it’s the ‘holy ones’, the small crop of honest Nigerians that are trying to thrive and break even in a system and culture that is counterprogressive.
This deadlier-than-Ebola virus can be traced from the terrible leadership marred with corruption and incompetence that we have in our economic and social systems of government. When the people can see that the very ones they voted into power are not looking out for them but themselves and their pockets, the people then seek their own path by turning on themselves because they know, from that point on, its OYO (Oyo is Your Own). Looking at my situation for instance, I have been at home for more than a month now due to a strike that came about from a showdown between the Student Union Government and the OAU school management. The management had reportedly increased the school fees by over 300 percent because the Federal Government’s funding of the education sector was not forthcoming, so in response they decided to act in haste by getting their money from the barely surviving masses of parents immersed in a horrid web of school fees payment to trying to pacify an angry landlord every other day. So here I sit, unable to secure a temporary job while my mates in other schools are making intellectual advancements. Employees would not employ a student that can take off back to school at any moment once the strike is halted. For many in my shoes, I strongly assume they are probably if not already strategizing for an armed robbery or the next ‘yahoo plus’ deal they would hammer.
Times are tough, things are hard but I firmly believe this is not an intelligible excuse to lose one’s integrity just for the porridge of hard and fast money. Patience is a long gone virtue in our faced paced world these days. While a few may decline to extreme measures to make it like kidnapping and ritual killing, some others take more elusive ways in ripping off their fellow Nigerians. If we keep on this path, we would create deeply pervasive culture of wickedness, venality, killings and subversion for the new generation of Nigerians. We need to ask ourselves, “what kind of future do we want for our children and children’s children?”. We can be better than this, we are more than this, and we are stronger than this. Let us throw aside our selfish aims this once and wear elegantly the raiment of love for one another. Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers all wrongs.* Do make a decision today to stand up for the right thing, eschewing evil out of our nation. Silence is golden, but only when justice is served. It’s time for us as Nigerians to come out of our shells and be counted and as we do this, together we would build a nation strong, pure and holy for our God, ourselves and generations to come.
Oluwatobi O. Gbemisola (@TobiGbemisola)
Nation Builder
*Holy Bible, Prov 10:12 (NIV)