If someone says Nigeria is not a country of concern, I am listening to know from that person: what is Nigeria? At what stage will Nigeria qualify for this title?  Nigeria, today, is being ranked among the ten most difficult countries to live in, in the whole universe! We don’t feed our people and the number of out-of-school-children is among the highest in the world.

The dilapidated states of our basic infrastructures, disqualifies us from being called a nation. Our retirees who served our country, in their working life, sleep in hunger because their pensions are not being paid due to the shoddiness and complexity of our corruptly-managed pension system. After assigning eighty percent of our policemen to our politicians and their families, the rest of our people are on their own as the remaining twenty percent resume on the highways, carrying POS machines! Cutting corners is the rule of the game, everywhere.

Wait a minute, am I hearing some people talk about sovereignty? Oh my God! I looked into the dictionary and found that there is more to sovereignty than geography! We hardly had a government since the military misadventure of 1966! The entire system has been running on impunity, as people do just anything and get way with it on the heel of sentiments! The culture of discipline associated with security has vanished as our security institutions aren’t immune to virus of impunity! The question shouldn’t, really, be what outsiders say about us but what our own people say about us and how they feel! These are all about the irresponsive and irresponsible governance as we inadvertently, allowed street gangsters and all manner of ill-parented individuals to infiltrate our politics and calling the shot, sadly, dictating the pace of our national development! Having rendered our people deprived through the consistent looting of our national resources and mismanagement of our public institutions, they turn around to dangle the carrots of ethnicity, religion and other sentiments to divide our people making them vulnerable to oppression.

Redefining our politics and nationhood isn’t as difficult as it may seem but this would require that the citizens recognize politicians for who they are, servants, and stop dressing them in royal robes! Having been elected by the people, democracy defines them as our servants. People must realize this and be ready to ensure that politicians are held accountable, at all costs. Yorubas would say ‘iku ya jesin’. It’s better dead than live in ignominy. Collecting ten thousand naira from a man who stole your millions of naira to keep quiet isn’t anything but stupidity! Worse still, if, in return, you are ready to do fake fingerprinting, snatching of ballot boxes, buying of votes, or maiming/ killing of opposition candidates to enhance the re-election of the same animal. Nothing can be more humiliating than people stealing your property and flaunting it in your face.

Recent findings have shown that the huge crime empire that Nigeria became, is operated and managed by the very people who parade themselves as politicians. Is it electoral malpractices, kidnapping for ransom, terrorism, illegal mining, mass murder of citizens in a land grabbing process, our politicians are the operators and managers of these, today! How, on earth, do we watch politicians, or anybody, caressing armed murderers, in the guise of negotiations? Where is the list of sponsors of terrorism, alleged to have been sent by Saudi Arabia, which, also, has been sent to other countries? And, if I may ask, how does it take a foreign country to give us a list of terrorists tormenting our country? 

Nigerians must refuse to be deceived, any more, but demand that terrorists leave our country without further excuses! Nigerians, led by our labour unions and human right associations must, possibly, give an ultimatum to this government after which we mustn’t hear of killings in our communities. Government must expose, prosecute and, severely punish the sponsors of terror, most appropriately by killing. The killers of the two Deborahs, in the North, must be tried for murder among other charges and be made to serve as deterrents.

Finally, the process and update on the abduction of the Chibok girls should be investigated and all culprits brought to book.