Failing in the national call

Failing in the national call

“When the Nigerian National Anthem was played before the commencement of the World Cup qualifier between Nigeria and Mozambique in Abuja on Saturday, October 10, 2009, rather than obeying Nigeria ’s call, a large section of the football fans booed.”

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2009/10/29/“arise-o-compatriots…”-booooo/

Is this the formation of the National Social Resistance Brigade?

A government that cannot bend to reason will break. When it does, the splinters hurt the ruled like fragments of an exploded bomb. The defence minister should watch out for assault to our national prestige by internal dissidents who shun the symbols of our nationhood. This is a build-up of resistance to bad governance and may culminate in a national social constipation. It shows that the National Orientation Agency is doing little and Akunyili's campaign is yielding negatively. Where do we go from here? The national anthem is laden with statements about where we are heading as a nation, but the words are meaningless in the actions of our national actors and operators. You can refuse to cheer a team that is failing in a national call, but you can’t refuse a call to our national ethos. That is an issue which must be made clear to the citizenry. The trait of unalloyed loyalty to the ideals of a nation is learnt in the formative years of human development. We must go there to revalidate the basis of our nationhood. I am not saying that the older ones are a lost generation. It is a well known fact the use of the right hand can’t be learned by left-handed individuals in adulthood. Reformation from left-handedness is always possible when you are young. I am a good example. I can use both hands and either of them equally. In my culture, this linguistic expression portrays me as a double-dealer full of ambiguities, but I can make wise choices of what is good for me and others. The youth development programmes should be given attention and streamlined towards achieving our national goals by instilling the compelling desire to work for our national greatness.

Several people are failing in national calls because they are square pegs in round holes. In great nations, people who lack purposeful convictions in an arena or area of performance refuse national calls because they do not want to fail the nation in such calls. Mohammed Ali refused the call of his nation to serve in the army during the Vietam war, because he wouldn’t be a good soldier in a war he did not believe in. In Nigeria, people hardly refuse a call even when they have a great chance of failing or performing below the expected target for national growth. It is irrelevant because national development is an undefined quantity. What has a clear definition is the self- interest or group-interest that must be protected. It is the failing in national calls among the “servants” in government that neo-colonialism crystallizes. Those who are true nationals now see the country as a colony exploited by cabals wearing Nigerian gabs.

This is a country of antitheses. We know what national development is. We control developmental processes so that there is no lopsidedness. We want to balance the nation on a tripod and not on a fulcrum. We remove outright competition and structure opportunities to favour those with obvious disadvantage in a fare competition. It is executed everyday because it is lawful. We see this in federal character policy for employment, university admissions, rotation of offices to balance power of national administration. Those who are stronger often have been conceding to the weaker so that the nation may thrive. These are few of the regulations that are nationally expedient. Now, the neo-colonialist among us has remembered that the quality of competition and the survival of the fittest would invigorate a nation in the threshold of greatness. We are reminded that competitive pricing is the hallmark of great nations. Are we going to move from here to consider the competitive pricing of human resource and allow Nigeria to grow heavy in the head even as tall as we are as a nation, in order to be caricatured as a heavy-headed giant who spun and fell on tiny feet?

Deregulation, as an instrument of testing competitive prowess or as an opportunity to invite more players, is not an attribute of this nation. Those we are inviting to come and compete do not believe us. Our policies are ambivalent and inconsistent. They cannot trust us fully with their investment funds. A foreign investor cannot trust a country that boasts about shareholders losing their money without caring to help with supporting instruments; a country with various institutional malfeasances. Who will trust a country that nationalized foreign investments in the oil sector some decades ago? Any investor you see is going for a pound of flesh when the going is good. Give them the pricing fluidity they want, they will come with as little infrastructural commitment as possible. In fact, the neo-colonial structure is the best for them; like the crude from our country and the refined products from theirs and the pricing mechanisms will balance the scale so that they lose less from crude oil price surge. These facts are very clear that they are not only in the imagination. Without bilateral agreements having structures that offer protection to the weak through concessionary pricing of fuel like it is obtainable in crude oil-rich nations, there is no guarantee for any foreign investors’ funds, because I would be one of those that would frustrate any contrary arrangement that is not in our national interest.

As I am writing I am watching workers like me walk on the streets of Abuja, telling those with ossified will of punishing the poor in a rich nation, like they did in the Niger Delta, that we are no fools even if they go against our will. They can be neo-colonialists, but we are more comfortable being nationalists, because those who founded this nation were like us. Our patrons wrote, they marched the streets, they called for national development and they knew our exigencies which we reiterate for the present government. Those patrons dug deep to reinforce the foundation of this nation and we do the same looking out to mend the frailties that may jeopardized the future viability of our nationhood.