One of the most annoying things that has happened to me since my boss left office as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is the habit of some people to either egg me on or bait me to criticize the new administration of the President, Muhammadu Buhari. I have said it before and I will say it again, whether in public or in private, I will always be for President Goodluck Jonathan.
It remains a fact that no other administration has achieved so much for Nigeria within so short a time as the Jonathan administration. With the fever pitch anti Jonathan sentiment now gripping the nation as a result of unbalanced one sided reports that Nigerians are being daily fed with, Jonathan’s legacy may not be so clear, but I am confident that just as the truth always overtakes falsehood, praise for Jonathan would have a renaissance in the not too distant future.
That being said, to those asking me why I am not joining the band wagon to criticize Buhari’s administration, I have got news for you-I HAVE MOVED ON. I will never hate on Buhari or criticize his government simply because my boss was not re-elected. I get better, I Never get bitter! One major problem that has consistently retarded Nigeria’s political and economic growth in the democratic dispensation of the last sixteen years is the fact that we are always in campaign mode. Nigerians will politicize anything.
The same thing that was done to President Jonathan is now being done to President Buhhari. The man has not spent up to a month on the hot seat and many Nigerians are making a mockery of him on Social Media to the glee of non Nigerians. Have we not learnt from the last four years? Even if we were not patient with President Jonathan, at least let us be patient with his successor. Nations are not built overnight. They are built over time. Your value as a citizen of planet earth is irrevocably tied to Nigeria’s value. When we build up Nigeria, we are not building up Buhari, we are building up ourselves.
Nigerians of all political persuasions need to understand that when siblings fight to death, it is strangers that end up inheriting their father’s estate. The elections are over. It is now time to preserve the estate (Nigeria). We will have another chance to fight for our father’s estate in four year’s time, but for now, that fight has been lost and won. It is time to either work or move on. There should be no room for standing still. That does not mean I subscribe to the criticism of President Buhari from the Social Media mafia who are calling him out for not hitting the ground running. To them I say, If a government hits the ground running without first taking stock of what is on the ground, they may run in the wrong direction and put more distance between them and the solutions they are looking for.
The average Nigerian intellectual loves to criticize and the average Nigerian reader of such intellectuals applaud them as if intelligence is judged by ones ability to identify problems rather than the ability to solve them. Great nations did not grow great because of their critics. They grew great because of those who introduced ideas that changed the world. The Nobel prizes are given to creative people and not to critics is because the world needs creativity more than it needs cynicism. Wealth and joy tend to gravitate to those who see need and respond with ideas to meet that need. Nigeria has so much need. Our intellectuals should ideate instead of criticizing! As a pastor, I have spent years teaching my congregants that regardless of events around Nigeria, they should speak about her with positive expectations and those events will bow to our collective optimism.
It is a fallacy to think that words were created by God for the purpose of communication. Communication is actually a secondary purpose for words. Thank God Christians and Muslims both accept the Old Testament of the Bible. I will now use it to prove what I have just said. In the first 25 verses of the Bible, God did not use words to communicate. He kept saying ‘let there be’ and what He said became a reality. God used words for creation! It was not until Genesis 1 verse 26 that God used words to communicate within the Godhead.
The future can be described as consequence catching up to our words of today. The present can be described as consequence catching up to our words of yesterday. So to change our future, what we have to do is change our words. I schooled in The United Kingdom and I have lived in The United States for a decade. One thing that is common to nationals of both countries is their propensity to bless their nation. God save the Queen and God bless America are probably the most regularly used phrases in the United Kingdom and the United States respectively. If you asked me the most used phrase in Nigeria, I would have to say it is-Nigeria is finished! I am not proud of this admission, but I think I am fairly accurate in my judgment.
The way Nigerians use Social Media and especially Twitter, it’s as if they received a memo from Twitter headquarters that the 140 characters they are allowed must be exclusively devoted to negativity! We cannot continue to speak evil about our country and speak good about ourselves and expect that we will progress. It is not possible to progress in your room while your house is on fire. Whatever progress is made in that room would be consumed by the fire over the house. Let me end this piece with a little advice to Nigeria and the Black race. Consider a buffalo and a wolf. One on one, the buffalo is stronger than the wolf. However, because buffalo will not unite to face wolves when wolves attack them, they become weaker because the wolves are united. The biggest culture shock Africans have when they travel to the West, especially for studies, is to find out that they are at least as intelligent, and in many cases, more intelligent than the average Westerner one on one. However, because black folk are not willing to unite, we are weaker as a people and as a result we are under the influence of more united people. Where other races naturally gravitate towards each other, the Black Race and especially Nigerians tend to gravitate away from each other except on the primordial level of tribe and even that is arguable. For the Black race it is almost a case of me and my nation against other Africans, me and my tribe against my nation, me and my clan against my tribe, me and my village against my clan, me and my family against my village, me and my brother against my family and me against my brother.
Genesis 11:6 reads: “the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do”. The most successful nations are those nations who understand the principle of Genesis 11:6. That is the idea behind the United States of America; that is the idea behind the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the British Isles; that is the idea behind the European Union and also the United Arab Emirates. If black people, and especially the Nigerian nation, do not key into this principle, if they remain disunited along tribal, ethnic, regional and religious lines, we will never be able to fulfill our potential as a people, and as a nation. This is my advice to Nigeria and to the Buhari administration.
Reno Omokri is a former Special Assistant (New Media) to President Goodluck Jonathan, and is now
pastor of Mind of Christ Christian Centre, California.
