NIGERIA’S CANOE SINKING

Nigeria is a canoe on the stormy ‘River Nigeria’ depending for its survival on the cooperation of all its passengers and crew. The crew rotates but seems forced on the passengers by the more powerful who boast, bribe and intimidate. Any one of the passengers can sink the canoe by standing up, dancing, fighting, and shooting, rioting or stealing. If too many of them, rich or poor, stood or sat on one side of the canoe it would capsize and sink.
In other words, many passengers choose not to sink the canoe in spite of the humiliations and insults they receive. Perhaps I would prefer to compare Nigeria to the Titanic as it headed towards the iceberg, blinded by arrogance and circumstance. Our own River Nigeria has no iceberg but it does have rocks which are man-made, deliberately placed to destroy our canoe.
Our canoe even has those aboard in it, our people in America, UK among others. We are all in the sinking canoe and so is our wealth and we are not as poor as politicians say. In fact, Nigeria is very wealthy. Look at the load in the canoe- food, fruit, fish, oil, minerals, tourist attractions, internationally acceptable intellectual wealth earning billions abroad, common business sense- now called entrepreneurial skills- keeping alive pensioners and workers unpaid for years where their pension funds etc. were raped by government political appointees. The problem is that the wealth is not going around. We are not our brother’s keeper but the murderer of our brother’s children.
Behind our canoe is a huge raft of the possessions of the secretly wealthy at our expense. They are the financial criminals with funds made by denying the dead typhoid children preventive care and now in banks abroad or with fronts in major corporate interests in Nigeria.
The canoe does not make progress because while many are rowing forward, others are still rowing backwards. They wrongly think that Nigeria’s salvation lies in the old feudal ways of the ‘King and I’ when unitary government allowed kings to phone the CBN governor for cash and contracts that were never to be executed.
While man was inventing railways to move man and machine at minimum cost and maximum safety, these rowers backwards killed the railways in favour of personally owned trailers and tankers on every road, ruining the road and clogging it with traffic. Ruining the railways was the back-rowers specialty preventing even intra-city Lagos railway. Such backward ‘leaders’ are nationwide.
We Nigerians want to know whether the back-rowers can move forward. Nigeria is not sacrosanct. It is just a canoe and it needs all of us to stay afloat. We no longer row as slaves. For the past 11 years, we have rowed through very rough waters. Nigeria has been sold several times on the brink of liberation. Will it happen again? We are tired of sweet promises without delivering.
This time if things are not improved, the canoe will sink, but some of us have life jackets. Can the real leaders’ willing to help row Nigeria forward please stand up? Think where the canoe called Nigeria; railways and electricity would be if we had rowed in the same direction since the 60s.