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HOW DID WE BECOME A NATION OF TAKERS?

SATURDAY BREAKFAST with TONY OKOROJI

Yes, I verily believe that the biggest problem we have today is that we have too many takers and very few givers. Poverty and hopelessness bestride our land because many give nothing and few take everything.

Okoroji

Give a Nigerian civil servant the nation’s pension funds to manage and he takes all the money and leaves the pensioners hungry on the streets. Give a Nigerian Army General money to buy arms to fight the bandits traumatizing our people, the General will take all the money and bury it in a soak-away pit and send innocent soldiers without weapons to go and die in Sambisa Forest.

Across the country, everyone is in a mad scramble to take. Very few are willing to give. Pastors are on the take, civil servants are on the take, policemen are on the take… everybody is on the take!
Give a Nigerian governor allocation to run his state and he grabs all the land he can see and builds mansions for himself, his wife, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and generations unimagined. Meanwhile, he leaves the roads without maintenance, hospitals without drugs, government workers without pay and citizens without hope.

In my service in different organizations in the creative industry, I have witnessed people fight tooth and nail to lead different sectors, with very little idea of what they want to do for anyone. The struggle is not because they want to provide service or leave a legacy, but because they want to ‘chop’. Because they want to chop, they are willing to destroy everyone and everything, with so much noise and nuisance.

Our nation is supposed to be engaged in a democracy. The electoral process, of course, is the key way of choosing our leaders who are meant to deploy public resources for the public good.
Sadly… sadly… sadly, everywhere you look, the crazy struggle for power is not a struggle for the development of the people but a struggle to conquer and to appropriate everything that belongs to everyone, to oneself and to deploy it all to a brazen and continuous display of the conquest of the people.

The “winners” of our elections and their cliques are of course, the conquerors. They share the loot among themselves. The people are the conquered. The “winners” will go ahead and revel in their long convoys of choice automobiles constantly driving from nowhere to nowhere, always with blaring horns and loud sirens. Their many noisy parties and rallies are to constantly remind the conquered who their conquerors are. Of course, the citizens are supposed to applaud if they are given any opportunity to pick up the after-party crumbs.

So, how then can we grow when it should be clear that there is no nation, no state, no organization and no family that can make progress when the only game in town is: “The Takers Conquest”?
This would be a comedy, or at the best, a social media skit, if not for the tremendous suffering that millions of real people go through as a result.

So, what is it? A tragicomedy.

See you next week.

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