I am more than convinced that Nigerians are very smart and intelligent people with very rich intellectual history. Nigerians are well read, vast and part of the very best professionals and even entrepreneurs that the world have to offer. We have a very strong intellectual history, an average Nigerian spends over 20 years in school, studying to be specialist in various field of human endeavours. However, a lot of us waste those number of years we have spent learning, doing irrelevant things. Many Nigerians do not even know why they go to school, a lot more go to school, with the hope of securing a job only, some go to school simply to get the title and be classed degree holders.
A lot of Nigerians read under very debilitating and stressful condition, but only very few Nigerians commit their years of knowledge to any tangible use. Our years of study usually ends with getting just any job and surviving, however we need to understand that our educational attainment goes beyond only surviving, we need to put the ideas we acquire to good use and use it for the development of our nation.
Nigerians are rich in knowledge and we have the ideas to build a modest country, we have intellectuals who can contribute their ideas towards building the nation into a world-class model to the admiration of other countries, however we are often enmeshed in political quagmire, tribal and religious differences, making us ignore the work at hand and the need to build a virile nation. We keep nursing our dissonance that Nigeria cannot work due to our history of bad leadership. Our 'best brains' are now scattered all over the world in search of greener pastures and commuting our nation into the hands of non-intellectuals, with no ideas. This group of people who we have recycled since the nation got its independence have failed us over the years and do not have any idea of moving the nation forward. It is very disheartening to know that Nigeria with so much educated elites and a bank of intellectual history have continually left the country to be ruled by semi-illiterates and non-intellectuals who are only committed to swindling the rest of the larger population of its rights.
Nigerian have placed so much power into the hands of these clueless leaders who clearly do not have an inkling of what needs to be done to change the nation. These set of Politicians have sunk the nation into an abyss, leaving us with a lot of efforts to put us back on track. They only occupy the seat of power to protect their wages and fat-foreign bank accounts, with no sense of direction or intellectual capacity to move the nation forward. These set of leaders have continuously equated their leadership role as opportunity to rule and not to serve, they embezzle public money because they have no ideas of implementing any useful project and those of them who knew what to do, chose to ignore them.
Intellectual Nigerians needs to take up their responsibility of participating in the recovery of the Nation, It is the only way we have to move our great nation forward. We need to be guided that ideas do not develop in isolation from the people who create and use them and that we must study ideas not as abstract propositions but in terms of the culture, lives and historical contexts that produced them. All Intellectual Nigerians home and abroad needs to come together and participate in the drive to implement developmental projects and schemes that can kick start the wheel of our great nation. We have now sworn-in the new leaders to steer the wheel of the nation for the next 4 years, it is important we all team up with our fresh ideas and assist the new dispensation to achieve the goals of developing our great country.
We all should come together together to use our ideas in developing a nation we can be proud of, we do not have to leave everything in the hands of our leaders alone, we all need to come together with our pool of ideas garnered from our experience all over the world and look for ways to develop our Nation. We need the involvement of individuals and corporate organization to come up with ideas that can galvanize us into a model nation. Let us bring home ideas of developing our nation in the the areas of transportation, power, water distribution, policing and security, employment, manufacturing and many more. Let us pool together our ideas and offer our suggestions to help our various sectors develop. This way we can build a nation we are proud to live in, with peace of mind.
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