EDITORIAL

BUILD THE NATION, THEN YOU FEEL SAFE

Dateline: August 15, 2009

It is very easy to brainwash a people who are ignorant of their history.  People who do not know their history, are doomed to repetitive failures.  Why is that?  This is because the wise men of history have since realized that life evolves in circles.  Just as the creative force spins in spiraling circles in its continued growth, clearly evident from the umbilical cord of the new born baby, to the shell of the snail in the sea, to the design of the ever growing and expanding galaxy like the milky way.  When such a circle returns and finds you stationery where you were since it departed the last time, it may crash into you (chaos).  To be alive and living is to make advances and achievements, no matter how little, so when the tides of time comes around again you have advanced further using resources and lessons from the past.  Only then can you stand at a distance and observe its returning tide, learning yet again all the new things and ideas it brought back with it.

People who have understood this, have made headway since.  The world looks up to them and admire their advances.  And this, by the way, is not because they are the most deserving or have employed the most just and righteous attitude and action.  After all, there are as many ideas, values, cultures and ways as there are individual countries.  It is simply because they understood that if you want something done to your own satisfaction, you have to do it yourself.  So they chart their own courses, studied it carefully for shortcomings, when they became confident in their plan and their direction, they then followed it to the letter.  They continued to guard the plan and its implementation with their laws, might and all their resources. Finally success became theirs.

Nigerians and many other African countries have a different attitude altogether.  They forgot who they are, failed to define what they want, and failed to learn from their past.  Worse still, just like other minorities, including those minorities living in the developed countries, they look up to the people on top who enjoy the status quo to define for them who to emulate.  Those who invested in keeping them down choose who the heroes and heroines of the communities are.  They define what makes them their heroes, and sit back and watch, as the hypnotized communities embrace such manufactured values to their detriment.  All this is happening because these same Africans forgot that all these great prophets the world boast of today either grew up in Africa (Moses), or else ran there when their own corrupt communities oppressed and chased then out.   Ibrahim (AS) also came down from the land of his birth Ur of modern day Iraq to Egypt when he needed peace.  Our Prophet of Islam, sent his followers to modern day Ethiopia for refuge.   Yes, Africans in those years were the keepers of knowledge, civilizations and respect for Godly people and scriptures.

Nigerians north and south, have many examples of strong and righteous people in their past, who have in their own ways found either by ardent search or sheer hard work, what the key is to developing their communities.  They put those values into practice, guiding their community and progeny to peace, love for each other, and prosperity.  Just stop for a minute and think, you might come up with one in your immediate community, but most probably that individual was not celebrated, nor his contribution acknowledged.  It may even take more time than usual for you to come up with a name, because such people have long been forgotten.

I do not wish to come down that hard, for it is not only Nigerians who have folded their arms as massive propaganda, action and counteractions have been taken to ensure their continued beleaguered and demoralized state.  For a people engrossed in self pity, hopelessness and sheer lack of motivation, will not achieve much.  A nation at war with itself, because some of its members have been foolishly made to feel superior either in ethnicity or religion, or both.  The past ten years have seen more bloodshed than probably at any time in Nigerian history.  Most were either religious or ethnic in nature.   It is an irony, because after yearning and calling on the world to help the nation find its way back to rule by consent of the governed following years of military dictatorships, the democratic years have not given the people much hope.

We have a lot of heroes who fought hard and for the right reasons in our midst.  By this I mean those who fought for everyone, but themselves, in the way of God’s universal law of righteousness, wishing for their brothers what they wished for themselves.  It is hard not to believe that, had we followed in their footstep, the nation would have been the focus of our attention, its growth and prosperity the main goal.  But the nation has failed to raise the bright torches of our heroes up, even if to make the little boy or girl from the upcoming generation confident, that people like him or her has the ability to build something original using the resources readily available. 

We have for example from the intellectual perspective, people like Sa’adu Zungur, whom we featured on this new medium last edition.  This was a person who was engaging leaders with the truth boldly, both colonialists and native leadership.  A man who was responsible for forming the first northern political party, so we could be free from foreign domination to chart our own course. He did not just talked the talk, he walked the walk.  He did that in person and through publications in order to fight for the right reasons since the 1940s. But today if you stop a boy on the street and ask him who Sa’adu Zungur is, he does not know.

Long gone are the Aminu Kanos and his likes, whose house in Dallah neighborhood of Kano is hard to pick out among his neighbors' even while he was alive, for it blends with that of the ordinary people living in that part of town.  This in spite of the fact that he was a Minister for Works and Transport at a time when the currency has significant value, and a leading political leader with lots of influence until he breathed his last. He was among a breed of people whose principles could not be bought or compromised with the temptation of wealth or position.  Likewise, many still buy the propaganda that Sir Ahmadu Bello the Sardauna of Sokoto and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa the first Prime Minister of Nigeria were killed because they were corrupt, even though we live in their localities and know not the mansions they built, or any account they held.  Their families are among us today struggling like anyone of us to put their kids through school and make a living.

Religiously, we have bought into the global shenanigan that our religion Islam is in collision course with modern ideals of development.  The world’s most quoted intellectual still alive, according to academic records, is Professor Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.  When questioned about the “Clash of Civilizations” coined to describe the Islamic world, he outrightly rejected the idea. If however any two people on the planet are trying hard to create one where there isn’t, he named them as Former President George Bush and Osama bin Laden.  Another authority in the field of religious studies from Georgetown University, John Esposito, also disagrees.  This stereotypical boxing he says, serves no one positively. 

Where then is the problem? Esposito says “often the West denies yearning poor in Islamic countries the same human rights and political process participation support as in other Judeo-Christian nations – further providing excuses for Islamic stereotyping and neglect by the West” We see vivid examples of this today, not only in African countries like Algeria some years back, but in the non recognition of an election by the oppressed Palestinians, and a complete neglect of their elected leaders. This inspite of the fact that those who witness the election mainly from Western countries and humanitarian organizations say it was free, and represents the voice of the Palestinian people.

While all these positive momentum and ideas spread, those with vested interest to continue along the path of negativism are still at it.  We kept being reminded of the stereotyping, as we see news flashes of people dressed in turbans and shabby clothes in the wild, on mountains or mud villages, every single day on our television screens.  They won’t even allow us the courtesy of rest, so we can think for ourselves, because someone is paying the bills to make sure we keep being reminded, true or not.  The stereotypical picture then is that; Muslims live in shabby dwellings, dress awfully and carry guns always. 

Those who buy into the propagandist mind set and define themselves as such, become unmotivated and demoralized.  Instead of proactively working to better their lot and their communities, they move into the defense mode.  Others say, “Well, we agree we are different and we say we have better values than you, so it is you against us.”  So they become active, but how do they spend their energies?  Not for nation building, peace and love?  If all works the way of the propagandist, you now have a divided people with no sense of direction.  Many Africans you see today on the screen engaged in rebellion or civil wars makes you stop and wonder; neither them nor their parents look like they have one decent meal at home, yet they have sophisticated machine guns complete with ammunitions around their waists. How do they come by those weapons?

The religion of Islam is in no collision course with anyone.  It has been on the planet for more than one thousand four hundred years, and no one with knowledge of the historical past will even dream of tagging it that way.  We all know the truth because history has indisputably recorded it.  The problem is we do not take the time to check it out. No one can avoid the reality of how Islamic knowledge sparked the renaissance, a period of great burst of knowledge and enlightenment that gripped the world. In the early years of the spread of Islam, it opened the doors to the acceptance of vast amount of knowledge, which was before that time, cut off by authorities of earlier scriptures who called geniuses heretics and even put them to death.

Islam and early Muslims embraced nature and its laws and declared for the first time in human history that religion is not contradictory to knowledge including the sciences.  They bequeathed to the world scientific method of inquiry, after studying and finding out where some past useful knowledge had steered off course. They were the ones that determined that diseases were caused by airborne micro-organisms.  They were performing surgeries, at a time when Europe was burning people at the stakes calling them witches.  They cherished knowledge and built great libraries, which were later on burnt down, not by the Muslims, but those who today turned the tables in trying to show the world they cherish knowledge more than anyone.

I am not saying that to make anyone pompous and arrogant.  I am just saying we have enough motivation to rise up and shatter the shackles of propaganda and lies that has kept us in bondage. And always remember, information and ideas will forever remain ideas until you put them into action.  Great philosophers say when you have no concrete principles good enough to live and die for, then you might as well have lived for nothing.  No one really misses you when you die.   Only through positive actions of nation building and caring for your people more than yourself, can you make a difference to your community, and probably leave a legacy that your people will cherish for years.

 

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