Before and beyond 2015

This is the time for Nigeria! This is the time for Africa to put its best legs forward!! This is no time fore mediocre posturing. This is no time for emotional, tribal, clannish and religious filibustering. This is no time for celebration of corruption, idiocy, militocracy, dictatorship and one-step-forward and two-steps-backward political engineering! This is […]

This is the time for Nigeria! This is the time for Africa to put its best legs forward!! This is no time fore mediocre posturing. This is no time for emotional, tribal, clannish and religious filibustering. This is no time for celebration of corruption, idiocy, militocracy, dictatorship and one-step-forward and two-steps-backward political engineering! This is the time for the real transformation of our socio-political and economic landscape! This is the time to actualize the Nigerian dream.

We are now in a knowledge economy. A knowledge that glaringly shows that the good, the bad and the ugly are in all political parties and ideological posturing; A knowledge economy that is not rooted in feudal, tribal and religiously inclined emotional leaders. A knowledge economy that has nothing to do with mystical majority or emotional minority power blocks of our traumatized nation in search of a direction to join the commity of great nations. For this to happen, we need an overhaul of our systems.
We need an army that will not break from the regimented military tradition of discipline and protection of our national territorial integrity because of one religious or cultic emotion or the other. We need an army that will not bend to cultic beckoning or religious emotions rooted in Canon laws of our land!
We need new crops, not bastardized new breeds of politicians, that are properly rooted in the institutional culture and ethos of political dividends practicalised in servant leadership. We do not need feudal leaders, religious fanatics or bigot, tribal and cultic irredentist analogue politicians that will pollute our land of equal opportunities, thereby fouling the entire country with the emotions of Canon laws.
We need new oversight functions not rooted in arm-twisting  of the executive and intimidations of the ministries and parastatals in over bloating or inflation of budgets that look  good only on radio, TV  and on the pages of newspapers but are practically non-implementable or useless to better the  lives or living standards of our people.
Our media have to change their language. They need to be changed from being regional centres of emotional outburst that tend to polarize our people along religious, ethnic and clannish lines. The media need to come out of brown envelope journalism, yellow journalism, kith and kin journalism; journalism of blackmail and labelling of those ideologically opposed to their geographically jaundiced; religiously biased and clannishly stunted journalism.
Our Judiciary must come out of their charge and bail mentality by not protecting criminals and enemies of our nation. Their barrage of contradictory judgments and interlocutory injunctions tend to derail our collective dream.
There must be a new deal, a new way of making our dear nation great in our time. We must all collectively brainstorm and find these new ways willy-nilly for a new Nigeria of our dream.
We want an alternate base for revenue in our country that has grown or is growing to be the largest economy in Africa!  For some examples, the potentials of our agricultural sector should be developed. We have no business satisfying our gluttonous appetites by continuous importation of agricultural products. Our time has come to export our agricultural products/commodities.
We should do away with Stone Age cattle rearing by roaming with our cattle all over the nation, thereby creating security hazards all over the places. Professional grazing/farmland, not political or conduct pipe grazing or farmlands, should be created all over our country.
We must take a close look at our creative industry. Our radio, television, film and music industries are not only money spinners but fertile ground for the creative engagement of our unemployed youths and adults.
In 2015 and beyond, we have been primed and doomed to failure by two forces ideologically opposed to themselves. The Western and Eastern forces are the two forces that do not want Nigeria to really succeed. While the Western forces wear the gab of palliative tranquillity of democracy and good governance, the Eastern forces wear the debilitating appeal of the opium of religion on the people, and drug the opium into the medulla of our people to be comfortable in Zion, dreaming strange dreams in untested primitive simplicity. Some of these stone-age principles and home-grown hypotheses cannot stand the test of time. We must open our eyes to the third force – the force of the people for the people and of the people that are hell-bent on bringing actual liberation and development for the people. But the forces of the Western and Eastern diversions   and alienations from our core values are too formidable in emasculating and suppressing the voice/force of the people. The people themselves, long pauperized by the forces that are debilitating, may prefer the ease and tranquillity of the lesser evil as they are battle weary and may not have the strength again to endure to the end for real democracy and good governance.  Only the voice of the people opposed to strange emotional majority and minority capsules can guarantee this. Our attempt to offer them alternatives yielded no success for many years and decades in our continent.
Oh that we may know that only the best of these two jangling discords of present forces are good for our people – not the bad and the ugly.
In this knowledge economy, it is our prayer that we may imbibe these best and discards the jangling discords and make our country the pride of the world in our time at such a time like this.
Let us shine our eyes now and beyond 2015.
Dr Shaibu was a Director General of the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria and presently the coordinator of New Initiatives, Department of Mass Communication, Bingham University Nigeria.