It is high time these rulers stop using God as a currency for their own inefficiency and incompetence. No one should tell us “God willing, we will provide…
Nigeria’s democracy is a choiceless democracy at best. When it comes to choices, the people of Nigeria are left with options that leave them with no options. The reason why the only solution to all the problems Nigerians face is a common phrase amongst Nigerians is because as a people we all seem to agree on one thing, that saving Nigeria is beyond us. The only solution to every Nigerian problem according to an average Nigerian is, “Let us pray.” We have become so helpless as a people even our rulers – I’d have preferred leaders but “rulers” would be apt here because Nigerians are not being led but ruled – quickly use the name of God to calm nerves.
Self-interest is normal and nobody should feel cheated when an individual protects his/hers. But when you take up public office, public interest becomes your primary interest when you take decisions as a public officer. Too many times, Nigerian politicians award contracts to their companies at rates that’d have even the devil cringe in jealousy if he ran his own company. From ministers to governors to even figure head and even so called clueless rulers, self-interest has eroded our national interest.
We make money at the expense of the people; we fail the people then call on God to help us help the people. Maybe we should even set up a National Prayers Commission, we will not have a hard time choosing the DG if CAN will spare us its leadership.
If God charged a premium and converted the returns as loans to Nigerians, based on the number of times His name has been falsely used to defraud Nigerians, every Nigerian would have more than enough to invest even for a centillion generations to come.
Do you know that “let us pray” is as a matter of fact a phrase that depicts helplessness in Nigeria? There are times we say it to pray at gatherings and other conventional places like the places of worship that are just normal and expected but when you speak in terms of Nigerian problems and as it is the norm someone says “let us pray” you just know the situation is as though the solutions are beyond us. But are they?
Considering the fact that God is yet to come down to develop any nation by Himself, ours may just be the exception. Prayer is good but only the combination of faith and work gets results.
These words are as much for individuals as it is for our country. All those collecting state funds to organise prayer sessions, all I will say is God dey. Do we need prayers to prosecute those that were indicted in the fuel subsidy report? If we recover half of that loot alone, we will not need to embark on the quest to further deepen our unsustainable debt profile by another $7.9 billion.
No matter how hard we pray, a nation that does not work cannot feed itself. As long as we continue to depend on expatriates to exploit our resources and give us returns according to what they tell us that they have taken off our land, we will never attain development.
It is high time these rulers stop using God as a currency for their own inefficiency and incompetence. No one should tell us “God willing, we will provide (add anything here) ” because God already said he wanted us to use all the resources available to us to make our lives better. To say “God willing” to the people is to set up a caveat for excuses tomorrow. Nobody campaigned on “God will do it,” so why the whole blackmail on God when the time to fulfil campaign promises come?
The people who run the Nigerian State also have the biggest interests in private firms.* Now, tell me how God is responsible for such a double standard. In fact, I have always thought that one of the reasons we are where we are is because we are one of the nations where God is mostly lied against per time. Ministers own companies and then go about the excuse of renovations to award contracts to themselves under the guise of public interest.* You can hardly find a Nigerian minister who does not represent at least one private interest. *
Nigeria is growing every year and if you ever doubt this assertion, there are at least 112 million poor people in this country who will tell you to keep quiet because their lives are being transformed, corruption is being tackled heads on even as we witness the greatest moments in our history as a people. If the poor don’t agree what will they do sef? They are poor, they are down and they have to be lied to every day on NTA that there is a transformation agenda in place and all we all have to do is obey the sign “Silence: Transformation in Progress.”
Those who don’t agree with these assertions are enemies of the state. It is very much true, the various scams and the many failings and failures of this administration in the past two years is a testament to the fact that the Transformation Agenda is working. Pray, that by the time this gang is done, we even have a nation to call Nigeria as all roads, as this path of transformation seem to portend, lead to a future that’d leave us transformed from at least an African power to just another poor, wretched country with all the potentials in the world yet remains one of the world’s poorest. How do we avoid this? Let us pray.
This is @omojuwa
Editor’s note: Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.
* This assertion cannot be independently verified.