If you happen to have served in government before and you dare to talk now Dr. Reuben Abati already has a blanket you will find comfort in – men and women of yesterday.

Nigeria as it is today is a joke! It is a tasteless joke if you really care about the country and a tragic one when you look it in a binary perspective. One thing is to fail and another is to fail woefully despite available resources to succeed exceedingly. Whether in terms of what it has or in terms of what it could have, Nigeria is today a failure on almost every positive count of nationhood. To deny this reality is to blame a mirror for the ugliness of the Orangutan.

Failure is not an end in itself when seen for what it is, a means to an end. It is okay to fail and move on, trying harder by learning how not to do things and then fashioning better ways to do them. In fact, many succeed because they’ve failed so much they now know how not to fail. “Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail.” Jonah Lehrer was writing in his book “How We Decide.” I hate to fail and for this reason I never fail at the same thing twice. The reason is not far fetched, my brain’s cells know the feeling and they do everything to avoid it. If you fail and you deny it, you will fail again because your denial sends the wrong signals to your brain. Remember that we cannot amount to much without our brains. I have gone to this length to explain failure because of a truth there is nothing wrong in failing. Having said that, everything is wrong with failing and not admitting it. It is even worse when you look to blame everyone but yourself for that failure.

They are never wrong! If you say they are wrong, you are either being sponsored by the opposition or some “vested interests” like the President himself put it on Christiane Amanpour’s show on CNN. If you happen to have served in government before and you dare to talk now Dr. Reuben Abati already has a blanket you will find comfort in – men and women of yesterday. On the Abati piece, it is sad that given a chance to put his government in good light, he chose to focus on shining the light on these so called “men and women of yesterday.”

It is a Nigerian pastime. If you are speaking too loud about an issue the government would rather no one speaks about, they get their goons to name tag you. This puerile stance is not exclusive to the government. When I praised the President for his quick response to #SaveBagega many said I had been bought. It did not matter that before these ones found their voices, I had found mine. Before it was cool to demonize bad governance on social media, I had been singled out as one with a voice. It is a Nigerian problem. Forget the message, forget the criticism – constructive or not – and face the messenger. Essentially this means that no matter what the President does, he is always wrong – for some – and for a few others he is always right. For me, it would never be about him but about what he does.

When we see it this way then we’d understand that he’d get knocked and he’d get praised depending on what he does. He gets a lot of knocks from my end because he fails too many times and unfortunately he is always out blaming anyone but himself for his failure. I wrote a piece about this last year. You don’t have the ability to solve a problem you deny exists. That’s what the Abati piece is all about. “We cannot be wrong, we are always right. Those who dare have a go at us are either of yesterday or their allies.” The biggest knock to the administration this year has come from Amanpour with yesterday’s “Open Mic.” I ask, who signed Christiane Amanpour to the “Yesterday Team”?

Dr. Abati should know better.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.