In my previous post, I touched on some topics especially partaining to christians, the reason I did that is this. I'm not a Muslim and I am not varse with the Islamic teachings so I cannot say much on that, but the one I know, God help me!! I will hammer it down as hard as I can. I get into irritative arguements with christians all the time because of their beliefs and not waking up to reality. The reason is because I'm a christian myself. I was a prayer warrior even when I was in secondary school. I was an active member of my church at university level, so I'm well grounded in the bible. I, however have always had problems with the way the bible is interpreted but I had not gotten a good grasp of what it truly means realistically. There is a clear difference between fantasy and reality. I was having a conversation with a fellow Nigerian the other day and I told him I was writing these blogs, and guess what he said, he said I was jobless. Well, I make way more money than he does and I work for myself. I don't have a traditional J.O.B like he does. I am an internet entrepreneur and make 6 figures in dollars a year. I go on holidays whenever I like, I work on days that I choose, I set my hours of work as I see fit. So you can say I'm financially free, so I have spare time to write my blogs.
It's not about the prayers, its about the action. i come to Nigeria during the harmattan to have a good time and after that I'm out because it starts to get unbearably hot. And what is the best thing we can do with the high solar intensity? Dry clothes and foodstuff for eating or preservation. How disgraceful!! We cannot tap into the immense energy given to us for free to do something reasonable? Example solar panels for electricity. Even if we can't go high scale on this, we can at least supply all the street lights or traffic lights with this technology.
People say information is vital and this is true but alot of youthful Nigerians invest in useless info. When I was in the university, I go to the cybercafes alot. I spend most of my time on youtube learning to dance some old school hiphop style, I did this because i loved to dance and I see myself dancing internationally. I teach the same styles here in Europe now as a hiphop dance teacher. Now that is useful information. I know many students then, especially guys, who would spend the whole night (up untill early hours of the morning), browsing soccer info. Who bought Drogba? How much he was bought for? Who was transferred from one club to the other?, Why were they transferred? All these is complete waste of time and money and energy and resources. If whoever is doing this intends to be an international soccer star or a soccer analyst, then it is good investment. But doing all that just to know whats going on in the football world is bullshit (pardon my language)
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I have ideas that can help the country. I have spoken to so many Nigerians even when I was serving the country in 2006, and I'm sorry to say that its not just that people (even the corp members) are not only uninterested in the topic, they have no idea whatsoever on what can be done. I have a passion for Nigeria to grow or I wouldn't be writing this, but it is not a do or die affair like some politicians think it is. My reasons are personal but not peculiar. let me share some with you. I went through alot of uneccessary hardship almost throughout my school years which is not strange. Every Nigerian student has been through or is going through the same thing. Another reason is because I promised myself, I wasn't going to give birth to children who are doomed to be in this country. They deserve better. It wasn't easy but I had to do it for my unborn children. The third and final reason is because I see the way people in developed world look at us and I never denied that I was Nigerian, but I'm always ashamed to say that I am. Most of our people do menial jobs even with our qualifications, subjected to special security checks by cops and so on and so forth. The worst of all is that, if you're dating a foreigner, it is generally believed that, it is because of papers for residency. Although this is widely practised but it doesn't apply to people like me who still have some sense of pride.
On my suggestions to solutions to the problems at hand, here we go.
Stop voting altogether. This is impossible but I'll tell you why I attacked the voting system first. Untill a candidate comes out and says, the very first thing he/she is going to do on ascending the mantle of responsibility is
DATABASE SYSTEM.
If a presidential candidate does not say this, stop wasting your bloody time. Running up to the last elections, I was reading how naive people were saying or leaving comments on facebook, that this candidate is the man or that candidate is the man. I laughed hysterically seeing this comments. How naive can people be? Non of all these people or parties will do anything for you. I never voted in Nigeria and I will never vote untill a candidate comes out and says this is the first thing he/she wants to do. Lets keep it simple here, the president is suppose to be the father of the nation. So how is a father suppose to cater for his children and even relatives if he is not sure of how many children he has. Think about this for a second, do you know that a national identification number of some sort is more important than your name in this century? In the developed world, the first thing any public office asks for or even any body of authority, is your identification number (this is called different things in different countries like social security number in the U.S, NI number in UK, PPSN in Ireland etc but its all the same concept). No two numbers are ever the same, this creates less confusion and more accuracy thereby enforcing efficiency.
When the population number is known, then a plan can be forged. The government is so happy sitting back and watching its people suffer. This is unfortunate, but can happen in/to any country if it is allowed. A national ID card was suggested some years back and the turnout was tremendous. People actually willingly came out to participate. That was a sign that people wanted a change, but they were not ready for the change. The project died only after the first step of getting people to leave their data. What exactly happened is known to the some people. The NEWS gave us some info and blah blah blah, the contractor died, etc. And so what if the contractor died. Shouldn't there be some kind of insurance/emergency protocol put in place in case something like that happens? Of course not, what am I saying? I forgot, that
'I shall not die but live to declare the works of the lord in the land of the living'. As long as this is in the bible, there will be no need to have a alternate plan because they have faith. Another misinterpretation of the word. I don't see how a country cannot get and maintain database if the banking sector alone have over half of the data of the Nigerian population.
In the advanced world, if you do not have this number, you dont exist because there are so many things you cannot do and will not be entitled to. The first is, no provision of jobs. I don't care how strong physically or mentally or even spiritually any human or living thing is, without food, you will grow weak and eventually die. And if you can't work, how'd you get money to feed. Another thing you will not be entitled to, is healthcare. No government subsidized healthcare package for you. When you're injured or fall ill, you pay the full cost of medication and it is enormous. Without this number, you cannot have a bank account. In fact, there are countless things you cannot do and are not entitled to if you don't have this number. In some cases, you even admission into schools. I know some people still don't care about all these, especially people living in the forests and very remote rural places, but thats fine because they will not be a liability to the government. They are able to take care of themselves and they have everything they need. But for the modern day man, you can't survive when you are denied all of these.
The second most important thing for the candidate or whoever is elected to do is
JOB CREATION. I know this sounds cliche and everyone says it all the time. But job creation is not the most important but second in importance to database system. When you know how many people you are responsible for, then you know how to go about creating job opportunities because what you want is balance. Not demand greater than supply as we presently have or supply greater than demand. The number one reason for such a high crime rate is lack of jobs. And contrary to popular beliefs, this has nothing to do with overpopulation because we are not overpopulated at all. The threshold of the carrying capacity of the land has not been reached yet. Infrastructure might not be able to support population as the case is presently, but that just means more infrastructures has to be built and a maintenance culture cultivated for the already built ones. The number one reason for high crime rate in any country/nation is high unemployment percent. Unemployment and crime work in tandem with each other. When one goes up, the other does the same and vise-versa. I don't need to say much about this because it is common sense and everybody sees and knows this, so I'll move on to my next point. And that is
INFORMATION.
Yes, information is the next big thing. Let me tell you why. The only difference between a progressing and regressing person/society/country or anything else is the amount of information they have access to
AND what they do with it. In this article, I'm going to be swapping the word
EDUCATION for
INFORMATION. This is because, so many people are so narrow minded, when you say education, the first and only thing they think about is School. Yea, schooling is important but not nearly as much as information. Education was gotten from the latin word '
EDUCARE' which means to bring out from within. To educate yourself is to load yourself with information that is relevant. There are so many irrelevant educations out there and most people have no sense of direction, so they just load up on what they think is beneficial. Like I said earlier, about people going to cybercafe to browse the whole night on soccer's latest news without them having the intention of either becoming a professional player or an analyst. What makes some countries more powerful than the other is because they are more informed than the other. Nigerians were so lazy and ignorant at some point that they say,
'what you don't know cannot harm you'. Whereas, the truth is,
'what you don't know will eventually kill you'. Information should be made available to everyone and in a country like Nigeria, people should strive to be informed. The only reason they don't strive to be informed is because they don't believe that knowledge is power. They know it, but don't believe it, but they think they believe it.
It is true that the world economy is suffering at the moment that I'm writing this, but more millionaires are made now than ever before. If you read Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad poor Dad, you will see that he predicted this and said it will happen at about this time. Many people are going to be wiped out, but more millionaires are going to emerge than has ever before been witnessed in the history of mankind.
This is so so true. Thanks to God for giving man the wisdom to create the internet. More information can be shared now, more efficiently than ever before. Here is an illustration of what education does or can do concerning progression and regression. An autocrash claims 30lives in the UK. An investigation will be launched to find out what caused it and how it can be prevented in the future. This will incur money and recources, but they will finally nail it and put measures in place to prevent it. Either by changing the speed limit, or the layout of the road, or if its carelessness on the driver's part, to see if it was a drink and drive, or has he a full driver's license, the car's road worthiness and all these stuff. If it happens in Nigeria as it always does, they say, It is God's will and that is all there is to it. They pray, please God, protect us when we go out and come in, you are the lord of journey mercies, you delivered who and this and that.
Please, how dumb can people be? Are we really that stupid? I guess we are. God is not a fool and we should not think him as one. You are in a public transport, your life is in the hands of a driver who you don't know how much liquor he has had, no road signs, no speed limit, the car has not been fully serviced and you're praying to not get hurt? What are the chances that you won't be involved in an accident.
INFORMATION people, learn learn and continue to learn. The internet has helped so many people turn away from the conventional 9 to 5 jobs. I am an example. I make more money in a month now than I make in 6 months working the traditional 9 to 5. I work way less hours and have the freedom to do what I want. I already spoke about this earlier. All youth in Nigeria have this poor mentality of securing a job after school. You know there are no jobs out there but you still rush and do what everyone else does, only to get choked up in the system. Why can't people take a step back for a second and think?
