The importance of laying our beds

“Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard and […]

“Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack – that’s Navy talk for bed.
It was a simple task – mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle-hardened SEALs, but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.
If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.
And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made – that you made – and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.
If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed”.
At a recent book launching event in Abuja, I used the above part of a commencement speech at University of Texas at Austin by Navy Admiral William McRaven. I recall someone in the crowd asking whether I made my own bed. Later on, I went searching for the same speech for the purpose of this article, and I saw comments by Americans, who totally misconstrued the message. One guy said he was a very sweaty person, and because of that, he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for him to make his bed each morning! In spite of all the means of communication available these days, and even the cheap and sometimes free education available as a result of rapid interactions between people, the world seem to be regressing mentally.  I mean these people are totally blind to the essence of the message!
The message by the Navy Seal Admiral has little to do with laying one’s physical bed. Well, if you can, do it. Many of us today, raising our overfed and over-pampered children have forgotten to inculcate this age-long dictum in them anyway. Since there are housegirls and houseboys running all over the place, why should they have to learn the habit of cleaning up after themselves and taking charge of their environments? Why should they have to learn work ethics?  There is a Yoruba saying that translates to ‘the person who sweeps the floor is the first to appreciate it’. Not for us anymore. All that matters is for them to do well in school (if they can), go to foreign universities on stolen money and become lost to the country. 
McRaven’s real message is however deeper.
Nigeria as a country has pointedly refused to lay its bed. We are a country that has shown unconcern with the very basic issues and then we often wonder what hit us as small issues become big and intractable.  Nigerian leaders love to talk big; big power projects, big road infrastructures, new skyscrapers, oil and gas, new shipping lines. Their idea of diversification is intertwined with dollars. They often start the process of reinventing Nigeria from the end, not the beginning. When we talk of job creation, they look to profit-oriented private sector entities for ‘manufacturing’ jobs.
I have written about this a number of times. But it bears repeating because over a year after what we hoped will be a rapid rejuvenation, we are still basically dancing around in circles. I once likened Nigeria to a family living in a household. The father and mother are very ambitious people. The children also want to do well in school. To that extent, everyone rushes out of the house to fulfill their ambitions of getting to the zenith of their professions, while no one pays attention to the state of the house. The house thus decays and collapses where it stands because no one deals with the maintenance issues. The gardeners, maidens and even maiguards that the household has employed, are equally disconcerted, because all they can think about is how to ‘hammer’ big like oga. That is the fate of this country. No one takes care of the maintenance issues. Nobody cares anymore. Everybody wants to be a billionaire. That shapes everything.
For any one who has bothered to consider our problems with a clear mind, we would see that we CANNOT have a problem of job availability. There is too much to do in and around Nigeria, just that no one is doing the jobs. This country can provide jobs for 500,000 sanitary inspectors this minute. And they will have too much to do. In all our urban areas, we have stinky stagnant gutters, full of debris and pure water sachets. Someone needs to clear those gutters and ensure they flow properly and not cause flooding. Someone needs to ensure mosquitoes don’t breed in those gutters, causing malaria for children and sending many to death. Someone needs to ensure our public spaces do not look like playground for wild beasts (even wild beasts will revolt sometimes).  Someone needs to maintain what we have used immense amounts of money to built. Someone needs to ensure very keen focus on these issues because for as long as they exist, THERE IS WORK TO DO.
Foreigners will not do this for us. We must deploy our human resources to achieve this.  Our case is like what John Perkins described in his book on Economic Hitmen, about Saudi Arabia. The Americans were trying to get a hold of Saudi but were stomped. Then one day he was at the ministry of Agriculture. He looked out of the window and saw a heap of refuse, with goats eating from the dump, right in the city centre. A Saudi official told Perkins that no self-respecting Saudi man will ever descend so low as to clear refuse. The Americans thus went ahead and struck a deal with the Saudi Royal family, to help them create a modern country in exchange for crude oil. The USA has been managing Saudi oil proceeds ever since!  Well, if Nigeria could strike such a deal, it will be great. But in the absence of that, we better do our work ourselves.
For a second time in about two years I jogged in Victoria Island on a brief visit to Lagos. It is what I saw that made me write this. For a place full of overpriced properties, we surely should do better.  The place stank!  More importantly, the amount of physical work that will be involved in regenerating our urban spaces will employ a tremendous amount of unskilled labour, keep our youth active, financially buoyant, useful and yes, too tired to make trouble all over the place, and this will lead to a gradual reunification of this splintered country. 
The first place to start from in achieving great leaps in development and modernization, is for a country to learn to lay its own bed. That is the least the world expects from us. No one spends money in a disorganized country.