By Denrele Animasaun

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”— Winston S. Churchill

By now, it is becoming clear   which way the political climate will be for the next five years. Whatever the decision, I pray that there will be calm and acceptance. We hold in our hands the power to shape Nigeria, no matter what our opinions and political affiliation is, we have to strive whatever the majority decision to contribute to nation building.

According to BLOOMBERG NEWS, Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy and lead oil producer, generating about $70 billion in state revenue each year and more than two-thirds of which comes from exports in gas and oil. But very little revenue trickles down to help the rural population because more than 70 per cent of the federal budget is spent on the salaries and benefits of a million public officials.

This is wrong. And we cannot reward failure and greed.We have to hold people in public office accountable. They have got to answer to the people not the other way round.

We know that government corruption has worsened under Jonathan’s administration, and Nigerian lawmakers seem to be in politics to get rich rather than improve the welfare of the Nigerian people.

Anyone taking the mantle of power has got to be determined to change the mind-set of our people that you do not go into politics to enrich your pocket. Rather you go into politics to make a positive difference in the lives of our people. We have to reduce the level of corruption in Nigeria. Corruption has a knock on effect on progress, it slows down the advancement. This is not going to be easy but that is not to say it cannot be done. We have no choice for chat the choppy waters only then we can make it out of the storm and into calm waters.

We should aspire to greatness and our nation deserves better and our children more so.

We have a steep mountain to climb nonetheless. If the truth be told, Nigerians are reluctant to work together to seek solution to our problems.  This time will not be different but, it is necessary for us to see growth and peace in our country and be at peace with our neighbours.

“A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.” — Chinua Achebe

We are always looking for someone else to get us out of the hole that we are in. That hole was created collectively and it has taken so long to get this bad and no one but ourselves can do that and lift us out.

We are territorial and that limits our vision for greatness. We have got to look beyond the immediate and plan far into the future.

We have a problem and we need to have the conversation and reconciliation. We have harboured far too long in resentment of one another, it is hampering our progress and it stops us from moving ahead.  We have got to talk of the past injustices and address our grievances in order to heal.

“On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politics? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.”-Martin Luther King Jr.

The time is now. We have got to talk of the big elephants in the room; Biafra, religion, north and south divide, politicians have capitalised on this to their advantage and to the detriment of our people.

Our reputation at home and abroad- we are seen as corrupt and ruthless, that every Nigerian is on the make, a place where nothing works with our greasing someone’s palm. We have become so dysfunctional that it seems abnormal if you do the right thing. Once upon a time we were kings and queens, proud people with morals and dignity.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”– Frederick Douglass

We have become morally vacuous, valuing money over integrity and respect.  We need to bring integrity back, pride in working hard and for an honest day’s pay and pride that hard work pays and pride matters in what we do; hard work has to be seen as better than hustling.

We have got to stop promoting mediocrity; we need to stop short changing our  services, providing services  with the right equipment to-do their jobs, provide a better standard of  care and service for our  army to  fight insurgency, provide  basic amenities for all electricity, water, better roads, law and order and good  quality infrastructure

“We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends”.-Chinua Achebe

We have been a failing state for far too long; where everything fails to work, chaos reigns, impunity has been made to thrive without scrutiny  we have bandits for public office and pay lips service to them while they rob us dry.  We take their brand of Robbin Hood as act of altruism while they rob the nation and give us crumbs.

“The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood”-Chinua Achebe

Our young people have been shut out for far too long- they are the future and yet they have not witnessed good leadership examples. They have been fed on a diet of excess; gluttony, avarice and unattainable and stupendous excessive display of wealth. They have been fed a message that the only way you get recognition and a place in society is to lie, cheat and make money by all means necessary.

“You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”– Malcolm X

Nigerians often are people of extremes we either love you or detest you in equal measures and we look for reasons to justify our hatred and mostly these do not make sense and in hatred nothing ever does because we are not rational when we become resentful, we cannot think straight.  We stick to our resentment even to the point of abject failure and retrogression.

“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these”.-

George Washington Carver