BY PAUL OKADE Jr
I
can’t speak for anyone else but as
for me, I am sick and tired of people who constantly
complain about the state that Nigeria is in. There’s no
light, the schools are bad, the hospitals are terrible,
the roads are suicidal, kidnapping is rampant, HIV is
rapidly spreading, not enough jobs for graduates and
on and on and on. Since when did complaining about
a problem ever solved it? We can criticize the government till we’re blue in the face and accuse all the politicians of irresponsibility in the call of duty, but none of
these will fix Nigeria. It was John F Kennedy, a onetime
democratic president of the United States of America
that said and I quote “Don’t ask what your country can
do for you, but ask what you can do for your country”.
Nations are nothing more than a concentration
of individuals within an identified boundary. Human
beings make up countries (real deep stuff right? Lol!),
and it is the action/s of those individuals within that
country that makes the difference.
At the top of this article I have deliberately at
tached the pictures of our founding fathers, men that
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decided to do something about the freedom and destiny of our nation. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Tafawa Balewa and
Obafemi Awolowo were not Angels sent down from
Heaven, they were ordinary human beings just like you
and I who decided to stand up and be counted. What if
these three legendary figures decided to sit on their behinds and criticize the state of the nation, like most of
us do? Had they done that, Nigeria would never have
gotten its independence, and we would still be a colony
of the British Empire, instead of the sovereign nation
that we are today.
A population that believes that their destiny is in
the hands of their government, is simply delusional
and nothing more. There is no government on Earth
that has the ability to solve all the problems facing its
citizenry. Even the nations that we admire such as The
United States of America and Great Britain are nations
that were birthed by individual men and women with a
pioneering spirit. Many towns and Cities in both these
nations are named after their founders. Yes, individuals bought large expanses of land and began to develop
them.