Nigeria: Awaiting The Second Colonization

By Abraham Ogbodo

Why are we what we are in Nigeria? Nothing is ever promptly handled to create maximum benefits. If it is road construction or rehabilitation, government waits until a tiny pothole becomes a dangerous crater and lives lost through accidents caused by the failed part of the road and after a deafening public outcry too, before a contract is awarded for the fixing.

This national lethargy is even more manifest in government – labour relations. No proposed strike action by workers union is ever nipped in the bud. Government usually lives through the build-up and in a fire-fighting approach sets up committees to negotiate a cease-fire with the warring union after everywhere had been put on fire. It is all a measure of our inability to sift through the issues of today and articulate a proper future. More or less, we live by the day or in everyday language, from hand to mouth. No nation attains greatness operating on pay-as-you-go basis.

Is the fault in our star or style? I mean is there anything about our geo-ethnic locations that makes perception difficult? We are incapable of perceiving danger even if it is just an inch away. An online trending statement allegedly by South African Apartheid President P.W Botha, but which has been reworked or adapted to suit the personalities of Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and American President Donald Trump, is very hard on the Black race.

The summary of it all is that the Negro lacks completely in the essentials to cultivate a high culture. He is neither innovative nor resilient and hides under the circumstances of his social evolution to always remain under his challenges instead of rising above them. It is a damning verdict, nevertheless, supported by ample evidence in the observable political leadership of the Black world. Also, a video of an American Black preacher, Dr. David Manning of Atlam World Missionary Church in Harlem, New York on the same subject matter of the copious and inexplicable inadequacies of the Black race went viral.

The narratives in both instances came close to creating a separate taxonomy outside the homo-sapiens specie for the Black race. The commentators only stopped short of branding black people sub-human. The temptation is to lash out at these bigots and proclaim (not prove) that Blacks and Whites are denominated in a common humanity and the so-called difference between them is not any more substantial than illusive perception of pigmentation. And that is largely true because even President Trump, in a moment of absolute sanity, said in his inauguration speech that the same red blood runs in the veins of everybody.