How Much of a Nigerian’s Hope Can Buy Nigeria a New Dawn?

One thing is clear, Nigeria is not free from strike actions. In fact, the Labour unions had prepared one in celebration of its 63rd year of independence but for their negotiations with the Federal Government and their consequent decision to suspend the strike—only for thirty days.

Hope is the central message of many of the sermons often dished to Nigerians for this occasion. We should hope for the best—in our lifetime, Nigeria will be great again. But how much hope can send this same old dusk that stays through new governments and new years of independence?

James Baldwin once opined that “it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country.” “You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet, I don’t think you can escape it … If you try to pretend you don’t see the immediate reality that formed you I think you’ll go blind,” he said.

This is a view that holds true especially when applied to Nigerian students and youths. Life as a young Nigerian is one repleted with constant battles and challenges that can only be supplied by the country. In fact, being a Nigerian and growing up in the country automatically places you at a disadvantage, part of which is the hard luck of attending a Nigerian federal university, where each academic session is often punctuated with a strike action comma and enduring the horrifying deterioration of the economy.

That you may be forced to leave your country as Baldwin said is how many Nigerian youths yearn to find or build an actual home away from home and be patriotic to the country from there, but there’s no total escape else a Nigerian will go blind if they fail to see that they are a product of the society, shaped by the “immediate reality”. One of those immediate realities is how the (leadership/political) rot has spread from Nigeria’s head and penetrated every part of her body. In university communities and tertiary institutions as a whole today, budding leaders are gradually taking traits of the country’s leaders. Behind them are trains of misconduct and ineptitude which makes their promises of a new dawn ironical.

If the present is making a hopeless nostalgic out of Nigerians because it gets progressively worse, of what use is hope?