War is evil and do not pray for it for your enemy. As I continue reading New York Times archives to understand Nigeria in the 1960s, I see pictures that push me to ask “What happened to Nigeria? How did we miss it as a nation?” You read of bravery and uncommon creativity. Stories of the palm oil, rubber, etc yield-improving innovations.
On Biafra war, the story of how a recruiter would go to workshops, recruit young men and put them in weapons development programs, and within months those men will create extremely sophisticated tools for warfare will put a chill. In most cases, none of the men had entered a secondary school as it was a luxury then.
They used pencils and created maps with young people, usually below 23, leading ambushes, carrying the mortar, trekking miles from the factory to installation! The women used local herbs to make food last longer before spoiling!
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They innovated on silos, irrigation, etc, building better ways to preserve groundnuts. The kola nuts and cocoa flourished. They created local vaccines, etc. Practically, Nigeria was like the America we admire today.
What happened? Where are the children of these Nigerians? Did crude oil take our brains?
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Prof. We banned those great stories from being told by banning history. Israel do the opposite.
Biafra during the Civil War was a classic example of “When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.” The young country had all to gain and all to loose. This brought out the best in them. Imagine you survived a plane crash in the wild. You must improvise, innovative and invent to survive.
I am extremely proud of my ancestors and big uncles, they didn’t write or speak plenty English, but they had in abundance the finest possession out there: PRACTICAL WISDOM!
Nigeria deteriorated from the moment quality of thinking became subpar, there’s a cap on what you can do as a mediocre; that is where we have stuck for a long time now.
It is not about shouting or claiming whose turn is it to rule Nigeria, if you don’t have it in you, if like – go across the globe in search of good education, you will still return here dumber, only to further mess up Nigeria.
A certain Ojukwu was able to inspire a tribe to fight with basically nothing! That’s what you call leadership! If you think it’s easy to get large number of people to believe in a cause, try it in your village, you will know if you can actually lead anyone.
The people jostling for political offices, how many of them can inspire a generation to believe in something worthwhile? You can bully or use propaganda to capture office, but leadership will elude you, for sure!
The only way to make progress is to plead and appeal to those who have both the intellectual capital and practical wisdom on how to get things done to step in, else the wobbling will continue forever.