HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Any Nigerian who is truly mindful of the future will be bothered about the present condition of things in this country.... I don’t want to over-flog certain issues, as such; I am looking away from the food crisis, unemployment rate and unemployability dilemma, financial corruption, insensitive political manipulation...

I am very vexed and deeply concerned about the moral future of the average Nigerian youths. At the moment, the picture of the future seems very bleak and depressing. We can’t keep pretending that it is nothing to worry much about. Fact is, each one of us will someday pay for our silence and docility regarding this issue. Sometimes one wonders if our conscience has taken sudden flight from us!

In today’s Nigeria, the average kid of 6, 7 and 8years is becoming very heartless, pitiless, brutal, ruthless and non-emotional. Visit our schools and you will hear of certain degrees of violence meted-out by these minors on their peers. Is this their reaction to what society has forced them to learn? When you hear how some of these violence and insensitivity is meted out by these toddlers, your ears will tingle, you will weep! One is forced to ask: “How did this start? What have we done to ourselves? How did we lose it? Where do we go from here?”

We can’t keep pretending this is not a problem that requires urgent consideration and attention. Deviously fighting financial corruption and other superficial vices without pondering on how to consciously build morals and instill values in the next generation of leaders is an exercise in futility... Insensitivity and moral bankruptcy is being handed down like some form of inheritance to the younger ones... The school system shouldn’t look away from this either; academics without character is not education!

In one of the ASA’s songs, she reeled her viewpoint this way: “There is fire on the mountain and nobody seems to be on the run.... One day the river will overflow and there will be no where for us to go, we will run, run… wishing we had put up a fight…”

Once upon a time, we were a people with high reverence for morals and values! All of a sudden, certain attitudes and actions we formerly considered as taboo, evil and wicked have suddenly become good, nice and right in the eyes of a lot of us... What's more, the spirit of communal living is dead. Everybody minds his/her private concerns... The days when every child was the responsibility of the community he/she lives in is long gone.... every parent now guards and defends their child from the discipline of others, notwithstanding the distasteful attitude he/she puts up.

Every sense of morality and values has since exiled from our midst. Our youths now live life like people who are beheaded; they don’t think before acting anymore! Our sense of the future is virtually comatose... If we keep hiding our heads and shifting responsibility, we may someday wake-up only to realize we have been wasting our national life, due to our downplaying issues concerning morality and values...

One wonders if there’s a future for any nation whose media constitute a deliberate threat to the moral fibre of her young ones. Our music and movies are not any good. Everything is being done with only financial gains in view... The belief of almost every Nigerian artiste and entertainer is that to make it big and rise to fame, you have to exploit the vulnerability of people... Unfortunately for our young ones, most of these morally bankrupt individuals are projected/endorsed as ‘ambassadors’ and role models... By these ones, our children and young ones are constantly bombarded with warped perspectives to life... We are gradually raising an MTV generation, in Nigeria! Nobody seems to worry about its effects!

While I am not [deliberately] trying to sermonize, I want to state here that any country that downplays spirituality, all in the name of modernization is sick and really needs help. It is evident to all that America started losing it when she opted for this path...

It’s time for us to tackle certain fundamental issues. We must hold the future dear to our heart and consciously work towards building it. A child not carefully and appropriately trained will someday become a treat and a dread to society. By this I also mean, an [awful] attitude not addressed in its infancy will someday develop to be a disgrace and a source of embarrassment to the ‘owner’ and her neighbours.

We can build a desirable future, if only we want to! We know exactly what to do, but have constantly focused on what we can do nothing about... It is time for the much needed paradigm shift – in our thinking pattern and attitude to life and our future!

We must speak against and fight anything [and anyone] that attempts to weaken and demoralize our collective future! Our younger ones [future] deserves something better!