I love Nigeria. Like crazy. Lord knows I do. It´s MY country, so I pretty much HAVE to love it anyway. But my heart bleeds at the pathetic state the country is in at the moment. The mediocrity and unintelligence of its leaders still baffle me. Even worse still is the fact that it is most likely that the future of the country is going to be bleak for a long time to come except we seriously do something about it.

Last week, I took a flight from Doha to Geneva. My seat partner, a German Journalist was only too eager to ask me a lot of questions.

´Is your President still sick,´ she asked.

´Yes, I replied.´

´Last time I heard, he was brain-dead,´ she said, and then paused for a little while. Then she said the most insulting thing:

´I think your country is brain-dead.´

I could not believe that she, a Swiss national was telling me this. My impulse was to call her a bitch. I didn´t, partly because I am working on this Christian thing, and partly because I am a gentleman. Swallowing my anger, I proceeded to ask her why she said that.

She regaled me with tales of how she had lived in Nigeria, a country rich with oil, but still the nation was living in poverty. Our terrible power failure, our corruption, insecurity and all the stories we are all so familiar with. And then last week while in Switzerland, a friend called to inform me of religious violence in Jos which has killed several people. I don´t understand why a people cannot just learn to love their fellow man and make away with all this religious crap. We´ve seen the bloodshed that has happened in the past, and still we let it continue.

Nigerians are as sick as President Yaradua.

And then it dawned on me. Maybe Nigeria shares President´s Yaradua´s ailment:

We are Brain-damaged.

How else will you explain the fact that a people refuse to learn from history. We have seen similar religious violence in the past occur and witnessed the damaged they did to us economically and on our reputation as a nation. We still do them, shedding blood of our brothers and sisters with our own hands.

I find it hard to believe that the President of a nation has been missing for 60 days and he has not given the powers to his Vice to rule. How is a country supposed to be coordinated without a coordinator? And our senators have taken this long to pass a vote which will make the Vice-President take the helms of power in an acting capacity for the meantime. That has not happened. And so you just wonder.

Source: Web

Photo Credit: Web