Tanimomo’s Piece of Mind (TPoM): Three-And-A-Half Thoughts
by ahjotnaija
Mr. Tanimomo is a scholar resident in Germany. He guest-blogs on http://www.ahjotnaija.wordpress.com He is author of the popular bi-weekly: Tanimomo’s Piece of Mind (TPoM).
Many thoughts on my mind, all seeking for attention, I will develop them into something more elaborate in the future, but in the meantime, these thoughts outdid others.
Thought 1: Nigeria is not a bad country because we are bad people, Nigeria is bad because we have no structures. This thought seems trite but let’s look at it this way. As a student at Obafemi Awolowo University, someone who looked like a professor chided us for trying to cross a lawn through a clearly cut footpath around the faculty of Social Sciences. He took us all the way to America and Germany; places he claimed he had visited and he did not find such footpaths on lawns. So today I saw on German soil, one highly organized country in the world and I am like ‘this professor can lie for Africa sef!’
It proves that as humans, we all want the fast route. What sensible governments have done is to place rewards and punishments for law upholders and law offenders respectively, at least to a very large extent. It has not been as easy as getting LaCasera in a hold-up though – it’s a process that has undergone trial and errors, re-workings and adjustments.
Thought 2: Let the search for an alternative opposition party begin; the PDP is a bad party bereft of initiatives and sound arguments. Innovation is as scarce in their meetings as finding a man of integrity is in their party. Since after elections, they seem to have lost their voices until the president-elect took a wrong step by barring AIT from reporting his activities. Nothing on the PWC report, not that APC was that constructive as the opposition but you could find an atom of constructive criticism and intelligent hooliganism in their oppositions.
In the light of this, the All Progressives Congress needs close monitoring. I don’t know about other states but Lagos, which has the poster-boy of APC’s good governance (Gov Fashola) as its governor, has on several occasions experienced the high handedness of the bespectacled barrister-governor. Apart from the LASU fees which was rescinded after the party lost in Ekiti, the government has not been known to withdraw on its decisions. Think of the toll gates.
Thought 3: Can we talk about this ethnicity business? It is an open-secret that the various nations that make up Nigeria have not seem themselves as one yet. The last elections are testimony to this. So, should we revert to regionalism or form our own system of government the way we like it not necessarily within the scopes of what Western powers call democracy. This system of government and federalism should be built to recognize all the nations that make up Nigeria.
Also, the pretense and hypocrisy around the civil war has lasted a long time. In my opinion, there has been no other period in our collective history as a country when an overwhelming number of Nigerians have followed a conviction to that extent. So we have been thinking that the horrors of the civil war that saw extra-intelligent minds like Christopher Okigbo could be wished away General Gowon’s 3 R’s a la Reconstruction, Rehabilitation and ReCONciliation (You google that! 🙂 ).
The recent reference to this horrific event by a number of opinion writers and intellectuals is a reminder of what is wrong with us. The war has no closure, the earlier we accept and retrace our steps the better. We are one big pretentious country! I read that at least 10,000 books have been written on the American civil war. We run away from our past praying it won’t catch up with us. I shake my head.
Thought 4: Why do girlfriends ask their boyfriends (and vice versa) to scream ‘I love you’ in crowded places? Most times, ‘victims’ of this emotional bullying know it is not for affection but a stamp, a roar to scare intruders away!
ajagunna 