THE Advanced Learners Oxford Dictionary defines honour as great respect and admiration.

The debate about what is and what is not honourable has raged through the ages and will continue to have currency as long as man inhabits planet earth.

Can honour be relative or is it environmentally determined?  A good number of people are of the view that practitioners in Nigeria public life, and these include civil servants, the judiciary, politicians, members of the Armed Forces, are not capable of operating in an honourable manner.

Is the nation therefore doomed?For if honour is lost everything is lost, as the hackneyed saying goes.

They go further to buttress their view point by quoting the various political party marriages and alliances which dissolve even before the ink dries on the dotted lines they were signed.  Honour, like truth, must be constant.

The recently INEC-registered All Progressives Congress, APC, will be an acid test if honour still exists.  It is time to debunk the myth that in politics anything goes.

A number of the top brass of the Nigerian military had their polishing schools abroad and a large percentage in the United Kingdom.  The military in the UK have a high social profile and standing and are generally referred to as officers and gentlemen whose words are their bonds.

For the better part of our life as a nation since independence, the governance of this country has been 57 percent military and the rest pure civilian with a sprinkling of the Obasanjo eight years of more Agbada than Khaki government.  I am not part of the blame game but one would like to know where we missed the honour train, for this seems to be at the root of our problems.

The earlier crop of Sandhurst-trained officers of the Nigerian Army performed along lines which could be described as altruistic, although their end results got enveloped in clouds of controversy.

Honour is the foundation for any progress; even among robbers it is enforced rigidly as this story illustrates.  “Some robbers in their line of business stopped one of the night luxury buses operating between Onitsha and Lagos.  All passengers were ordered to surrender all valuables as was the usual practice.

At the end of the operation, the ‘Boyz Commander’ did a quick check on the passengers to estimate their take for the night and each passenger was quickly asked to say what had been given up.

It happened that a gold watch was taken from a lady but no gold watch was returned to the general pool.  The commander summoned his ‘Ahoy’ boys and the robber who had stolen the gold watch was identified and sentenced to summary execution for being ‘one of the people spoiling Nigeria’’’.  This is military justice of honour among thieves.

The question that needs addressing is whether a country can make meaningful progress if there is a dearth of honour among those running her affairs.  You hear this all the time that in politics anything goes.  Must it necessarily be so?

This leads to another dimension which concerns the health status of public officers and public knowledge.  The late President Umaru Musa Y’Ardua was ill for a long time and most Nigerians did not equate the slow pace of governance to his ill health because they were completely ignorant of the seriousness of his ailment.  Contrast this with the recent illness of former American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who had a blood clot in her veins.

The whole world literally followed on television the movement of the clot through X-rays, MRI scans, etc.  When there was a possibility of the clot domiciling itself on her brain, there were serious medical discussions about the resultant effects on world diplomacy.

This might be stretching it to the extreme but it is necessary to strike a balance between the rights of the citizens to privacy and that of the public to be informed.  Information shrouded in secrecy only leads to rumours, gossips, innuendos and sometimes national instability.

I commend the maturity of the Ransome-Kuti family, for when Fela died his elder brother Olikoye openly informed the nation that Fela’s death was linked to AIDS-related causes.

During the last World War, Japanese soldiers would honourably commit hara-kiri than be caught alive by Allied Forces.  Honour was second god to them.

It has been said that corruption thrives in Nigeria because as a nation we are completely depleted of honour and shame has no meaning.  Odium and opprobrium are no longer part of the political lexicon.

It has become the norm for people who are jailed for stealing hefty amounts of public funds to be celebrated by their communities on release from prison as conquering gladiators.  This is called rehabilitation of a favourite son.  Some have received the ultimate which is Presidential pardon.

The thrust of this contribution is to stimulate discourse, for unless we have honour and integrity in the conduct of our personal lives, it is virtually impossible to transmit these to the national scene.  The task is indeed herculean and the time to start is now, so help us God.

Dr. EDDIE MBADIWE,  wrote from Lagos.