I have received several responses after
publishing the first part of this piece (I give up On Nigeria- Part 1), many
left comments and a lot more emailed me privately to express their disgust for
the country they loved so much, but have been repeatedly let down by its
leadership and level of development. As
a result of which many had left and many more are still leaving to other
countries so as to forget about the problems in Nigeria. So many vowed not to return to Nigeria ever again
and many others said there is still hope and I do not have to give up yet.
I am glad that the first part of this
piece have generated as much response from people as it did, this goes to show
that irrespective of where we are and what we are and the evil that our past
leaders have done, Nigerians still clearly have the interest of the country at
hearts.
Nigerians started travelling abroad in the
1950's, at the time it was majorly for
education and most of those going abroad then were sponsored through government
scholarship or their parents. Nigerians
like knowledge and spend enormous amount of money in search of it, they travel
wide, going to the best universities in the world, spending millions in hard
currencies, in order to be tutored by the best teachers in the world and gain
the best professional qualifications.
Many even borrow money to study abroad, some
families give up all they have to send their wards to those expensive schools
all over the world. This to me is good;
any money spent on learning is not a waste.
What bothers me however is that only very few come back home with their
new-status, to work in developing the country they have left behind, they
simply loose hope about Nigeria once they get to their new country where things
work. They prefer to milk the cow they
have not helped in grooming, but fail to realise that those countries did not
get to that level in one day; they have put so many human efforts into it.
Most Nigerian students that have gone
abroad to study prefer to stay in their new found land when they complete their
programmes; they can see things working and they work out ways to get permanent
residence through any available means. By
doing this, we have the best Nigerian professionals helping their host
countries to develop, leaving our countries in the hands of corrupt, confused
and clueless individuals. However, many
of this Nigerian graduates who refused to come back home where sponsored by
scholarship from our system, they would rather not go back to the mess at home,
but stay in their new adopted country and point accusing finger at the
leadership back home. These decades of neglect
is what has got us to where we are today.
We all stand ‘far far away’, from Europe
to the Middle East, Asia to Australia, America to the Antarctica; and point
accusing fingers at our under-performing leaders, while we all ignore the fact
that it is our fault that things have got so bad. Many Nigerian have located to what they consider
as better lives abroad and clearly abandon their land. Our best brains are
scattered everywhere abroad and we have committed our nation to rogues and
thieves who have shown us that they are experts in manipulating the country and
sieving the resources to their personal gain.
We have all abandoned our country for too long, committing our resources
to the best rascals and this is now starring us all in the face. We can
continue to clamour for a better Nigeria, but change doesn’t just happen, we
have to make it happen. No one will change Nigeria for us, if we all continue
to stay or run abroad, who will do it for us. Nobody leave their home with their door open
and expect to come back home to meet things better than they have left it.
The
desperation to move abroad has reached a dangerous peak. Nigeria was better for it before the door was
opened for us to go abroad, we were all in the country together and we all
worked for the development of the country,
at the time, every new graduates has a job ready once they graduate, companies
where springing up, they even offer official cars and houses. The public schools
were run by happy teachers and the students were all happy to go to school,
there was so much discipline in our schools, our parents had good jobs and
business and we always had food to eat.
We went to parks on the weekends and daddies stop over at Leventis
Stores to get snacks home on Friday evenings. Family, friends and neighbours all came
together on weekends to eat and dine; there was love and deep respect for our
lives. The demarcation between the rich
and poor was very slim. These lifestyles sadly have been thrown out of the
window. It is more like a jungle now and it is survival of the fittest. We all
now live in our different cages and very suspicious of ourselves, we are all
now very manipulative and looking for ways to out-play one another. The
relationship ladders have broken down completely.
Many who might want to come back home would
rather spend the best of their productive years abroad before coming back home,
they come back to meet the country worse than what they have left. We have subjected our country to corrupt and greedy
individuals for a long time that the country is in such a mess, and it would take
a lot of hard work to clean the mess. Let
us free our current leaders, we are expecting too much from them, they only run
the country; they are not the business men and women we need, let us bring home
all the innovation we have learnt abroad and help to create jobs and better
country. A lot of us are doing very well
where we are; let us bring the wealth home to develop our land. We need to come
back home, be involved now and play our part in the transformation process in
our little ways and in no long time, we can be back to our once happy country.
