THE NIGERIAN PRICE: PAY WHEN IT IS AFFORDABLE.

Recent events in Nigeria will leave her patriotic citizens with no choice than to think of when it will be better. The country has faced countless threat to its unity and emerged victorious but failed to address the core of these threats.

The most persisting of all these threats is insecurity which is actually increasing on a large scale and leaving many battle fronts for the Nigerian state.

The Niger Delta Avengers were suppressed diplomatically with an element of coercion. Boko Haram came into the scene carting away many lives, abducted ten of thousands and displacing millions. These two threats can be clearly defined.

But what do we term the new character that enjoys killing human beings in the stead of cattle. This imbroglio started like a melodrama when many people were killed on their way from church on January 1. The drama has changed the chain of event to tragedy. Countless lives have been lost in a space of four months hideous stand.
The killing has transcend regions because the kinsmen of the slaughtered refuse to be pacified. If care is not taken, at this pace, it can degenerate into full blown ethnic war.

Warnings have been coming from concerned quarters that we are moving unconsciously into the similar situation that birthed the Rwandan genocide that saw 800,000 people killed within hundred days.

The Nigerian state is posing a curative stand rather than preventive position. The primary function of a state according to John Locke, one of the proponents of social contact theory is the protection of lives and property. But the Nigeria state is failing abysmally in this regard.

Polybius, an ancient Greek philosopher (200-118 BC) asserted that all nations follow a cycle of: democracy, oligarchy, dictatorship, tyranny and collapse. I believe we have had our fair share of the conceptual stages. We are unconsciously moving to the latter stages. It happens to the almighty USSR, the great Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire also collapsed. The Magreb nations also had their shares during the Arab Spring. If we keep stabbing the huge Elephants thinking it won’t fall, we should reminisce about all these bigger Elephants that have fallen.

I believed a comprehensive dialogue with the basis of the unity well negotiated and a consensus reached on the mode of governance, restructuring the country along regional lines, creating a new constitution that practiced true federalism like the United State America we claimed to copy. Building strong institutions that can ensure strict adherence to the dictate of the constitution.

We have to pay this price when it is affordable else we will have no choice than to pay the ultimate price.

May God Bless Nigeria.

WRITTEN BY; SOLOMON TEMITOPE