On the threshold: Building a new Nigeria

On the threshold: Building a new Nigeria

On the threshold: Building a new Nigeria

A cursory look at life situations and the persisting
vagaries of everyday existence, leads us to realise
an inescapable fact – we live life everyday on the
edge, on the brink, on the very threshold of life
itself. For, as humans, with an active rational
capacity, we are constantly seeking to define
ourselves, to define the compelling verve of our
experiences, the people around us, and our
remote and proximate environs. Thus, our quest
for self-definition is one task that we face each
day and one that sets us on the very threshold
that thin line that runs clean through all
individual hearts that delineates the good from
the bad, the beautiful from the ugly.
Relevantly so, in the breath and
euphoria of a new Nigeria, bright and
endearing expectations have berthed in
the very sequestered harbours of each
Nigerian heart. We pray for an end to
corruption, an end to tribalism, an end
to unemployment and
underemployment, an end to war and a
new era of peace, unity and progress.
For truly, Nigeria has endured through
the most trying circumstances like the
fortunate mosquito, one observes,
surviving the hazardous applause it
keeps inviting in its journey across the
parlor to the safety of the ceiling.
However, matter-of-factly, the happy-
ending fairytale world is loads different
from the real world of hard knocks and
weighty lessons. Sometimes, the answers
we seek to the questions that trouble us
lie, not in the far-away illusions of
theory, but in the deep orientations of
human intuition and praxis. Therefore,
our initial gaze at life on the threshold
becomes quite cursory, quite superficial
indeed.
Like Plato, that icon of ancient wisdom,
tells insightfully, “an unexamined life is
not worth living”. To appreciate the
uniqueness of life and its opportunities,
we do not stand aloof as ‘care-less’
wayfarers following a pre-programmed
course of life, but brace the task of
understanding our role and
responsibility in the ever-changing
world of ours. A deeper gaze takes us
beyond the superficial threshold that
severs the rich elite from the bourgeois,
the learned from the unlearned, and the
popular from the unpopular, to the very
delicate distinctions that make us who
we eventually turn out to be. Living
becomes not simply a blind struggle to
succeed, to survive in the midst of few
resources. That would be reducing life to
brute instinct like Darwin’s survival-of-
the-fittest theorising. It was upon this
that Nietzsche thrived his ugly concept of
society where the enduring cardinal
virtues of society were witnessed in the
paradox of force and fraud, as men were
unable to engender trust in themselves
and neither were they able to cooperate
with themselves. Such society, thus,
champions a willing to power
characterised by a striving only to be
greater, to exceed, to surpass every limit.
It sets itself to defy all limitations,
making every possible being existed.
True, this represents the general
character of our Nigerian society, of our
world. We want popularity, even the
cheapest popularity, we want learning,
content with the mediocre, and we want
wealth, even if we lose our very soul and
humanity in the striving. In the end, we
only create anarchy, a Nigeria of
unresolved tensions. And so, gazing at
the Nigerian society, we can easily detect
traces of this corrupting hubris.
Corruption leverages the rich and
influential above the middling masses, as
they attempt control of all facets of the
nation’s economy, and in the
disappointment of a static second, they
end up bankrupting the nation’s
economic capacity. The sphere of
education is not spared the debilitating
effect as mediocrity is unceremoniously
rewarded, with unqualified graduates
churned out with little or no competence
to show for it. We cannot even begin to
talk in the area of tribe and religion, as
the Boko Haram insurgency only has to
show the tide of hate and violence raging
in the heart of the average Nigerian
youth. Achebe, given the entire issue at
hand, observed metaphorically, that
Nigeria had long since passed the
alarming, and entered the fatal stage,
and was due for its demise, if we kept
pretending that she were only slightly
indisposed. One can only measure the
blanket level of angst and frustration
that fuels the grotesque motive of
Nigerian children transforming
themselves into human bombs,
detonated at will, at the hands of
mindless terrorists. The war against Boko
Haram only reveals this ugly sore.
Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the
most gruesome wars are not merely
fought in the sweat and grime of battle
in the Sambisa or the Nigerian
landscapes, but within the selfsame
sacrosanct walls of each individual
Nigerian heart. It is here that the choice
of bad over good, wrong over right, hate
over love, can wreak the dastardliest of
havocs. It is here that individuals choose
to hurt and maim instead of mending
wounds and broken hearts. So also, such
battles are not fought with the
paraphernalia of war, with the noise and
brutality of machine guns and machetes,
but with the convincing force of right
doctrine, of the enlightening glimmer of
promised hope. Therefore, the clamour
for a new Nigeria should not merely be
the passing word on the lips of each
oblivious bystander, but a determination
springing from each eager heart. Our
struggle for development should not
merely be defined in terms of besting
the other, or succeeding more, in
rancorous competition, with a larger
fleet of cars and harem of concubines to
go with all the wealth.
It should not be to strive to embezzle
more funds, to be shipped to foreign
accounts, outsmarting all, even one’s
very conscience (as if that were strangely
possible). It should neither entail
responding in hate and violence to the
horrid status quo. As popular Hollywood
actor, Will Smith, once rightly mused,
“people will make you mad, disrespect
you and treat you bad…Let God deal with
the things they do, ‘cause hate in your
heart will consume you too”. Sometimes,
the more lasting revolutions are not the
quasi-Napoleonic wars of discontent and
social unrest, but the powerful
revolution of ideas, of attitudes.
Embracing a right attitude to the
Nigerian predicament would engender
creativity. The drive for excellence would
not be mere competition with the other,
but concern for the other, the quest to
give birth to newer ideas for general
social development and well-being, to
assist floundering society with
innovative concepts, in scientific
research, political and economic
theorizing, computer technology, public
philanthropy. In the very end, the onus
rests on the youths, the very same youths
that are easy prey to the corrupting
indoctrinations of terrorist agendas,
mindless criminal schemes or power-
hungry political leaders. On us, the
youths rest the task of discovery, the
culturing of ingenuity in the striving for
learning in our universities, in our
workplaces or in the service of our great
nation. We can build a new future for
Nigeria. Paulo Coelho in his book, The
Alchemist, directs that the future is
guessed at on the omens of the present,
for “if one improves on the present,
what comes later will also be better”.
Together, then, we will direct our steps
on the Nigerian shore, to calmer tides on
the horizon. We will grasp lasting
excellence like that mythic philosopher’s
stone that gave unending life. Not the
superficial life of material existence, but
the eternal ‘living’ born of immortalising
our contributions to the Nigerian society,
of ingraining our contributions to the
Nigerian society in the great
reminiscence of collective consciousness,
building a Nigeria, worthy of her heroes
past.