With 8 months to go till Nigeria’s Independence anniversary, it’s never too early to start to figure out ways to celebrate our journey so far. However one question looms over our heads as a nation; is there a cause to celebrate? Already THISDAY C.E.O Nduka has marred our celebration in my opinion, by inviting former Prime Minister Tony Blair, former U.S President George W. Bush and his one-time crony former U.S Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to the 15th annual THISDAY awards which took place this month. I spoke against this on this very blog under the title “We don’t war criminals celebrating our independence”. I even started a group on facebook of the same name to little fanfare, so you could imagine my surprise on Sunday evening when I found out about 100 protesters led by Shehu Sani were arrested for protesting the invitation of said individuals.
To my surprise, there wasn’t much outrage from the media earlier on or even leading up to the event and/or against the invitations. I doubt the protest was even covered by the local media, let alone for it to be shown on international TV. I think it was from Ishaq Kawu Modibbo of Daily Trust that I first heard of Nduka’s invitation of Blair and Rice (Bush was not yet mentioned, perhaps for obvious reasons) about a month ago, that sprung me into action. The most common response I got from people, whenever I raised the issue of the irony of the invite was that Nduka is a businessman. Clearly, but where’s his patriotism? On Nduka’s behalf (not that I’m standing for him), perhaps we should ask if our patriotism still exist in the first place? But even if it didn’t, one can clearly see the irony of inviting these individuals who participated in orchestrating a war that robbed a people of their freedom celebrating that of another. Our independence celebration is starting off on a bad step, not to mention until recently we didn’t have a captain to stir the nation… and the one we presently have is just acting, lest we forget.
Other basic issues come to the table when discussing Nigeria at 50 like education (how far have we gone or regressed rather), health (people are still being flown out of the country. Exhibit A: Yar’adau), international bodies (should we still be borrowing from the IMF, the World Bank and such), unemployment. The list is endless. I purposely did not mention corruption, because that can easily be credited for the cause of all our problems, but is it? If it is the people who participate in corruption, then aren’t the people or rather aren’t we the problem? Clearly it must be a psyche problem as corruption has become a bona fide part of the Nigerian experience. I refuse to accept it as a Nigerian culture. So without much ado, what are we celebrating?
