The reason Nigeria is in such a great mess today is not because of the incompetent few mismanaging the life of the nation, but with the vast tolerant elites who do not genuinely care about the fortune of the nation and have always put self above society.
In almost my thirty years of public activism, I have seen the worst and the best of human tendencies in Nigerians, and I make bold to be categorical that the best of us are nothing but common opportunists at best, and charlatans at worst. Our professed love and concern for our dear nation is only lips deep and completely self-seeking.
The great misfortune of the African society today is not with the rogue leadership that is bent on driving the continent asunder, and into explosive and calamitous destruction, but the tragedy is comfortably lying with the rest and the so-called best of us who have tolerated and condoned the sustained barbarization of our people and the bastardization of our continent that is literally flowing with milk and honey. The elites wittingly or unwittingly sustain this illusion on the flimsy and frivolous pretext that their continued dialogue with the devil would lead to the Lucifer's repentance and change of heart. But if that repentance never happened before, even with God according to the Holy Books, it will most likely not happen now.
The "best of us" are the real problem with Africa and by necessary inclusion, Nigeria. Through active and passive commission, collaboration, compromise, cowardice, complacence and collectivism we have by our acquiescent, feeble and self-righteous posturing encouraged the traumatic, rapacious and beastly rape of our continent to the point of coma. We have always looked for easy and convenient ways out of all the challenges that confront us as individuals and as a group not minding the ultimate goals and aspirations that we share as a people, or the accompanying and natural consequences of those cheap, ephemeral and ill-considered solutions.
We have sheepishly or dubiously surrendered our capacity for creative individual interventions and possibilities to the tyrannical onslaught of a ruthless and oppressive groupthink that has confined Africa and the entire black world to the backwaters.
And by adopting deliberately or through default those simple and ungrounded solutions, we have, all of us WITHOUT EXCEPTION including any Nigerian reading this, we have all, willingly signed on to undertake the funeral of a nation, nay, a continent that is begging to be rescued and saved. Unfortunately, the fervent and passionate pleas from the distressed continent and nations of Africa have continuously fallen on deaf and uncaring ears, and have most times been met with scornful and disdainful reprimands except on few occasions where sadly, some parochial and egocentric desires are further facilitated.
The intensive and extensive battle of national survival has become an endless war in which all those who profess emotional concerns including loving and caring inspirations are either strategically seeking for ways to join in the nation's continued butchery and debauchery or are just on a half-hearted and self-serving stroll in the park.
May God open our inner eyes before this bubble bursts.
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