There is no hope for Nigeria
I’m guilty of occasionally assuming that there’s hope for a dramatic change in the general state of things in my home country. But luckily, frequently enough, something happens that resets my head to reality mode.
I saw some news yesterday, that in retrospect, is pretty normal as far as news in Nigeria goes. A lot of us Nigerians have heard the same news, and we just continued our day, like nothing happened.
Anyway, this news made me eschew any notion of hope, at least for the next few months.
- Muhammadu Buhari, in his campaign to become the President, promised that he shall increase the quality of all federal government-owned hospitals to world class standard within five years so that nobody would need to leave the country anymore to get quality treatment.
- In 2017, President Buhari spent more than 150 days (in total) outside the country receiving medical treatment.
- Yesterday, the president returned to us. He will be working from home because rodents damaged furniture and air conditioning fittings in the president’s official Abuja office.
Rodents. Damaged. The. Office.
He has been away for more than 100 days this time around, but that, apparently isn’t enough time for the damage from rodents to be detected and fixed.
What are rodents even doing there? Isn’t the president’s office clean? What kind of rodents are these?
This “news” isn’t the reason I feel hopeless. No that’s not it. I’m hopeless because since I’ve been old enough to understand, there has always been ridiculous occurrences like this, with remarkable frequency.
A lot of the time (a lot unlike this case), these incidents directly or indirectly cause deaths or affect the lives of millions of Nigerians in many negative ways.
But these incidents, however, are not enough for me to throw away my hope. What does it every single time is the fact that we Nigerians (including myself) always do nothing.
We do nothing.
We read the news, be it about billions of dollars “going missing”, or super strength rodents, get outraged for about an hour on social media, and do nothing.
Because of this inaction, nothing will change.
