By Princewill Ekwujuru
The MTN entrepreneurial seminar has come and gone, but it has left an indelible mark on our eroded family system which brings to fore the biblical saying, ‘train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he won’t depart from it’.  Accordingly, a well trained child is a great asset for national development, thus Nation building starts at home. This was part of the messages from Dr. Farrah Gray.

Over the years, an anatomy of the Nigerian structure reveals an absolute social decadence and gross erosion of our value-system.  The country moved swiftly from institutionalizing corruption to the internationalization of the menace to society-corruption.

Materialism and love for money now replaced the hitherto deep-rooted social values and existentialism. Materialism has eaten deep into the fabric of the society not because Nigerians are the poorest but because our minds are traumatized by the ignoble effects of greed, avarice and easy virtues, while the thrust of power is vested in a person rather than the people.  So also immorality rules the roost in the Nigeria system and credibility of conduct both at public and private levels are at its lowest ebb.

Moral Crises;

Based on these crooking infiltrations into the fiber of the Nigerian society, the moral crises had also tendered a lack of appreciation of the core value systems that make a society achieve efficiency, progress and accuracy in public service, transparency and justice in governance.  All of these started happening mostly as a result of negligence on the part of the family to imbibe in their children core family values which should later make them great assets to national development.

The social fabric and nucleus of the society is held together by the standards of morality that we maintain and practice. Values are our personal set of beliefs about what is important, unimportant, right, wrong, good and bad. In other words, values are a kind of map in our minds of how things are or should be.

Just as a map is not the territory, values are only our perception of the principles of nature that govern our lives or the universe, not the principles themselves. These values are usually handed over from generation to generation, given children the structure and boundaries in which to function and thrive.

How family value help mode life;

Citing an example of how family values help mode the life of an individual, a case in point is the that of Dr Farrah Gray, who despite growing up in the sidewalk and poor household in Chicago, US;  a high profile gangster environment,  he defied the odds to become one of America’s biggest assets of  all time. How did he manage to pull himself up and turn his situation to the success he is today?

Gray explained during the seminar that, he was handed over great family values, rare assets most people don’t have now. His grandmother saw to it that he learnt the lessons and blessings of integrity, honesty, sincerity, hard work, patience, resilience and all of that.

“I am so spiritual that even I can’t put anything in my mouth without praying. These where some of the things, I was taught. One of my publications failed because it was going to compromise my integrity. Because it was popular among the youths, the tobacco and alcoholic companies wanted to advertise on it. But I wouldn’t buy into it because of my belief,” he commented.