Nudging 51

Whenever I consider the words of President Eisenhower spoken in 1953, ("A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."), I never seem to be able to ignore the relevance to the Nigerian society today, no matter how much I try.

When untold misery piles up on unspeakable suffering, hope, no matter how strong, fades. Fading hope breeds, first, exasperation, then, desperation. It does not require much debate to know what desperation breeds. We see it around us every minute of every day. Highly intelligent and motivated people being cast on the heap of helplessness and hopelessness; our well-educated youth being driven into the wilderness of despair and robbed of their moral compass.
The unabated assault on our country's future is there for all to see and, yet, we fold our arms and continue to let loose gangsters to continue feasting on our commonwealth. In the final analysis, we're all complicit in this unprecedented looting of our nation's coffers.
Didn't we think putting 'educated' and young people in the corridors of power would herald the beginning of a new dawn? Look where that got us! Those we had high hopes in turned out, and are still turning out, to be even more wolfish than the old lot. It is at this juncture that I find the words of Albert Einstein quite poignant ("The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.") We need a thoroughly radical rethink of the way Nigeria is run.
We have no hope in hell if we continue to let garrulous peculators run our affairs and continue to dip their grubby hands into our collective pockets. There have been zillions of fulminatory speeches over the decades, most of them brazenly made by the same callous pilferers! While I'm not advocating mass unrest (yet), I think it's time we started getting more vociferous and clamouring for real change in double-quick time , afterall, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." (Edmund Burke)
Nigerians have been bruised and battered for far too long. Most of these glorified politicians are not even fit enough to run a bakery! Yet they distribute billions among themselves like candies, buy fancy cars and houses for girlfriends. Most Nigerian politicians have taken immorality to a new low and they should be held to account as Nigeria is nudging 51.