By Reuben Abati
There is today in Nigeria an entire generation of Nigerian-passport wielding men and women who do not actually know, to borrow Achebe’s words that indeed “there was once a country”. These children born in a season of austerity, and raised during the years that the locusts ate, have become angry citizens.
They are angry because they live in a country that makes them feel less worthy than the human standard. The only Nigeria that they know is a country that makes them feel ashamed of their own origins. Many of them have enjoyed the privilege of foreign education and exposure to some of the best traditions in other parts of the world, but when they return to their own country, right from the airport, the snow of failure and inefficiency strikes them in the face, leaving them with no option but to wonder quo vadis Nigeria? It is the same question that their parents asked and the tragedy is that their own children except something else happens, are likely to ask exactly this same old and vexed question.
The angst of this young generation is made worse when they are told that Nigeria was not always like this. In their late 20s to thirties, these children have only known that Nigeria where fuel scarcity is a fact of daily life, and part of the mechanism of survival is to know how to draw fuel with your mouth, or negotiate black market purchase of fuel, while lugging jerry cans, either at the fuel station or a roadside corner where you cannot be sure of the quality of fuel- all of that in a country that is the world’s sixth largest producer of crude oil. These children have only known a country where the roads are bad, services are sub-standard, people …Read More
Source:: PM Newspaper
