A critical analysis of democracy with our current leadership as a case study.
Note: this article is a non partisan analysis of our current state of affairs. At the personal level, I do not like politrictian whether at the local or international level because I believe the world will fare better without them, what we need at the critical stage as a specie is leaders not politicians.
What we have is a leadership that reflects our most cherished ideals hence they are the same thing. None is better than the other and non is worse than the other.
Democracy is a government of the people by and for the people.
By this definition, it implies each individual has a responsibility to play in the grand scheme. It is our personal effort that gives birth to the collective sucex or failure we experience as a nation. If we cherish and exemplify value or high morality then our nation will range high in the hall of great nations but if we cherish and exemplify irresponsibility, no external helper may be able to help us.
By this definition our leadership is a reflection of the best minds from us or they are a representation of our most cherished ideal or ideals we give our consent to. This way, we say the leadership of a people is a reflection of the minds of the people: a good people cannot tolerate a bad leadership and a bad people cannot tolerate good leadership.
Towing this line, I make bold to say that our political class is not the cause of our challenges, they are an indication of the actual stage of our mental development as a people.
We as 9gerians need to contribute aright to democracy,
?how do I mean.
In the preamble to the declaration of American independence, it is stated that leadership derive their just powers from the consent of the people.
Consent implies all the ideals cherished and exemplified by the people. If a people are habitually good then bad men cannot find their way into exulted seats and if a people are bad, good men cannot get to the leadership offices.
Lets paint a picture. If you (yes, you reading this), if you are made an office holder in a place where a large amount of money passes through your table whether as a manager in a company, a temple (temple here implies all the religious organisations such as church mosque ashram or any other) and you serve your term effectively, after a few years your tenure passes and another person comes in there. Then you still live in a modest house and have modest cars, you friends and family will curse you forever because they will say you are a stupid person who God blessed but refused to utilise his office very well, even your village people will disregard you and some people may ostracise you.
The reason they do this is because they see service offices as avenue to material wealth. This negative mentality robes us off any real desire to create value for society and or follow our passion to sucex thereby leaving us at the whims of insatiable desire for material things since we are not creating but collecting them for free from a people who are exactly like us. This way we say that if they were the ones in the position where we are, they will do the same hence disregard their shouts and cry of fowl play cos we know its not genuine (dog eat dog)
This makes us celebrate those who loot from their place of work since its an ideal that has our consent.
My point is that the ideals we cherish in as a nation are not those that support any growth. Our inability to create any value makes the white man still develop us till date even after colonising us. We have almost nothing to offer him hence we are treated like a stubborn child who has reused to grow up. I make a distinction between growth and development.
Development is when the factors that contribute to sucex are external, i.e. They come from outside while growth is when the factors that contribute to sucex come from inside.
To use an illustration, supposing you are a student and you have a friend called john. John is the person that makes you attend class, or do whatever you need to do as a student, without John, you will fail or get carried away with frivolous of school environment. John is the person developing you this is because you still lack the necessary discipline to do what you are supposed to do hence John becomes your strength.
But if as a student, you know you have to attend classes and do your homework by reading to know(not to pass exam) then you are growing yourself.
The development of the white man can be seen in his heavy loans, assistance, support and aid on various nonsense that we alone can finance if we stop funds from getting into private pocket.
We have become so uncreative every fathead wants to be a politician, some people say politics is their profession and i wonder if they understand what they are saying. Ask an average undergraduate what he wants to do after school, even the one doing engineering will tell you he will get into politics. Though they cannot even defend their course of study nor understand the latest trend in their field. Rather the latest trend they know about is the kitchen details of morally insane music celebrities, they know how much he is worth, how many song he has sang and can repeat all for you, know the last girl he recklessly impregnated, the last beef he had, the last babe he ditched and even the position he adopts while sleeping. As this same person what chapter he is in his academic book and he will stare at you like an alien that accidentally fell of a spaceship travelling to the next galaxy. Our ladies know the best hotels and joint where you can get everything you need, they will give you a detailed description of the rooms and services of all these places, carry big phones and snap half naked pictures for social media.
Ask then the name of their HOD and they will scold you for giving them jamb question.
This does not mean that we do not have good brains capable of adding value to society, we have but i believe they are less than 10% of the populace hence they are like tiny fishes in rivers infested with sharks and crocodiles.
National development is a collective thing, if we must grow then all hands should be on deck, we have to start thinking of how to contribute to the nation.
By this, we have to look beyond APC/PDP or any other political party, they did not cause our problems, our problems are deeper than these fellas can solve, some of them do not even know what our main problems are and they are happy for that cos a proper knowledge of what are our problems places the responsibility to remedy it on their shoulder, a responsibility they are barely ready for…….so ignorance is bliss here in this case. Some of them only take advantage of the insatiable greed in us and use our stupidity to sustain themselves in power. It is our stupidity that puts them in power cos i don’t understand why somebody will come and promise me light or road and everybody is happy, he should be ashamed that in this age and time, we are still grappling with basic amenities and even after office, he will not do 10% of his promises. I want to see a government that will say “ok since we have destroyed this earth, NASA is going to mars, me i want to take us to Jupiter or Pegasus galaxy” eheee, then i will know we have started not when am not even able to charge my phone or concentrate to write at night because of all the Garry engine (generators) that awaken at night and somebody is telling me he will give me light. A light that will exist mainly in my imagination even after his tenure in office.
Its because these fellas know we don’t have anything to offer hence will take the peanuts thrown at us, that makes them offer us peanuts during election or equip boys with arms to go and tumble others. It is because they know these boys are empty upstairs else why did that tricktian not get a bigger gun for his son or for himself to stand in front of these boys as they go to pull these hits . If these boys had any atom of integrity, these tricktians will not dare mention the idea of violence as the foundation of their politicking it will be more of an intellectual thing based on profile, antecedent and or capability.
I would have blamed the politicians if they were aliens from mars or Jupiter but they are chosen from among us.
One can say, it is their responsibility to stop us from our senseless way. First i think they cannot because they are just like us. 9ja is a place where even your wife (or babe) cooking a pot of soup for N3000 has a profit of N500 to herself.
As kids undergraduate going to school, who did not inflate his school fees at home (as an undergraduate my school fees always had about 30% atop of it) the only people who did not do this are those who if they tried it will be caught. Right now, if you send a kid on errand, he expects you to leave the change with him and if you collect it, you are a bad uncle. The sales person will pester you for tips, the security personal would feel you are a bad man if after he directs you park properly you don’t give him anything (a man who is paid salary), everywhere you go, it’s the same thing you see; insatiable greed.
A pot cannot clean a kettle.
Secondly, experience shows that a leader cannot take a people beyond where they are willing to go, if a people are bad and a good leader comes along to try and straighten us things, he will face the highest opposition from those he is trying to lead. Only those who have lead a group of people will understand this fact.
That is where Buhari comes into the picture, he is not a saint but this is a man who even his enemies vouch for his integrity and a man whose reputation makes the international community see us in good light for the first time in decades. But this is the same man we want to hang and even kill his ghost after we kill him, i do not think he is so bad, or are all those who saw him as a “Goodman” blind. Sometimes i want to see him like the principled teacher who is hated by his student and branded a wicked man. Or did he use juju to make everybody believe he is good when in reality he is a bad guy. Some people are even ready to kill the ghost of his ghost if that one comes out. In my humbles opinion (stand to be corrected with facts and figures), other nations who want to grow stops or makes effort to stop excessive dependence on imported goods. This makes the people start thinking and doing things that will contribute to their growth. Buhari knowing 9gerians are not a people you can manage with obedience to the rule of law hence banning goods is a waste of time so he tries to make it difficult for people to import things we can produce.
(please note-this interpretation is mine)
But instead of our people to understand the time is ripe to start producing, the biznes men took the opportunity to make trillions out of their fellow Nigerians. If the central bank sells a dollar for 197 and a black market person sells at 230,is he not making N33 gain, why try to jump the dollar to N500. I believe they did this cos they know how unthinking people can be hence they will blame the man at the helm of affairs(to think is difficult hence many take to criticism),so they will remain innocent while another person bears the blame.
If 9gerians were good to themselves then even with the ban from central bank will not have affected the money too adversely(we all know some 9ja people buy this money and keep at home only to resell at exorbitant rate later).
I believe that if our people start thinking, we will start developing our nation, then and then will we attain greatness anything. Lets not get deceived by the giant name and all that nonsense. We are giants only in landmass and population. How many oil wells are in Ghana or south Africa yet we stand no place when compared to this people. Ghanaian cedes is above a giants money….oh what an embarrassment from a people we named a bag after (Ghana must go). It will be easy for a simplistic thinker to say, Ghana succeeded because of the revolution but that cannot replicate itself here, ?why. Ghanaians are a people not divided against themselves, Ghanaians have a worth ethic that may take us light years to achieve. Ghanaians are dedicated to their efficiency, effectiveness and improvement. They don’t treat their employers biznes with the aim looting it dry. The good people in Ghana are more than the criminals hence the ratio of good people to bad people in makes it impossible for bad people to last when they want or rise to power. The ration of bad guys to good guys here is higher so even if you try to eliminate the bad men another group of bad men will replace them.
Using the opportunity of closed access to dollar should make us think of converting some of our resources to building our biznes life and the economy. Lets
Convert the money spent on importing bleaching cream to good use.
Lets reduce the amount of money spent on alcohol and spend it reasonably.
Let’s reduce the amount of luxury cars we buy and use the money to build our biznes.
Let all the people who buy and sell through multi level marketing use the money to open companies down here. There are cases where some spend over a million monthly buying beauty products. A million naira can open a factory which can produce 5,000 units of soap or cream daily. Imagine if this company make s this amount of sales or even 100,000 units monthly, if the profit per soap is N10.(ten naira) then the monthly earning is 1,000,000. That’s not a bad idea for a company started with one million.
The mentality we operate on is where a young man does not have money to eat but has money to smoke guff or drink beer, a girl that is not working spends hundreds of thousand every few months to buy her phones, make up and fashion stuff. Where if a young man makes some good cash, he does not think of investing rather he changes his status first, buys a big car, moves to a new and bigger apartment, buys gadgets worth hundreds of thousands then less than 2 years later when “owu don blow” he sells off everything and looks for his friend to put up with.
Even those who want to invest are scared cos they know there is no trustworthy person out there, anybody you employ will keep telling you biznes is bad till the biznes dies and later a person placed on N50,000 salary will open a bizness worth millions, you will now wonder if God gave him money in his dream. This is another factor which is militating against our growth.
We as a people need to see beyond our nose and become useful to ourself. The way is never great,the Chinese say it is man that makes the way great,not the way making man great. We must take the responsibility of building a better nation serious if we really want to come out this mess we are in.