Let’s just say this piece was inspired by Adeola Aderounmu’s piece titled 13 years A Prisoner which was a sober call to Action as it pertains to Isaak Dawit, the Swedish/Eritrean citizen who has been imprisoned in Eritrea for the past 13 years without trial while the whole world has successfully looked the other way.
It is then I start to ask myself, Isn’t that all we’ve always done as a race? Look the other way as far as it doesn’t really affect us and in the case of Nigerians, as far as there is the opportunity of creating another way even if the other way did not exist ab initio?
We all quote the platonian adage that evil triumphs when good men do nothing, but unfortunately that’s where we stop. We don’t move on from there. We don’t ACT. In the case of Nigerians, We even give thanksgiving in churches that the evil done was not done to us or any of our relatives while we watch!
It is said that when you push a typical Nigerian to a wall , he’ll dig a hole in the wall. We then go ahead and console ourselves by calling it experience and the black man’s spirit. We seldom walk our talks and that’s just the few of talking. A large chunk of us are looking the other way and hoping the evil doesn’t get to us.
There are usually more conferences and talk shows and get togethers and analysing that Karl Marx will refer to as ArmChair Theorising every year about how Nigeria will be better and We are yet to take actions that will ensure that the Nigerian Dream comes to reality.
Majority of those who would come in contact with this piece will fall in the category of those who are talking but probably not walking their talks but for every one person that reads this, there are about 1 million other people who are looking the other way, those who are caught in the rat race trying to fend for themselves ranging from daily bread to corporate slavery, those who are being affected but have resigned to fate, those who are just diseased with political apathy by default, those who are caught in the addictive web of religious bigotry, et very much cetera. . .
We cannot afford to keep looking the other way as we accomodate evil and the wrongs that affect us individually and therefore as a society. We need to start walking our talks and much more importantly start facing the real issues that beset us and stop looking the other way and pretending these issues either do not exist or hoping we would survive the scourge. It’s high time we started Looking the right Way!
Jude ‘Feranmi
@juded27
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