VALUE FOR LIFE
The
preparation of this book witness two polls: the 2007 and 2011 political
elections of my country, Nigeria. The latter, just concluded, though with
pockets of flaws in couple of places, revealed much improvement and positive
change to the previous elections remembered and marked in national memory for
their marred gross irregularities. The Independent National Electoral
commission, INEC, the body responsible for conducting elections in Nigeria,
this time, braced up an effort that did seriously minimize those anomalies that
were the norms of previous polls. Nevertheless, the price was expensively paid
in wanton destruction of properties and lost of innocent lives especially of
youths, among who were members of the National Youth Service Corp, NYSC,
engaged by INEC as ad-hoc staff at the polls.The pre and post elections violence
triggered in supports for party’s candidates by party faithful waste no time
and spared no weapon to transmute many harmless citizens and some of those
innocent fresh graduate corpers into corpses. As painful as it was for families
who paid these gory prices in the horrible death of a father, mother, spouse,
brothers, sisters, son or daughter(s), the leaders with no itch wait to clinch
the prize. That is their interest; and they act like no price was too much for
the public to pay for them including having the lives of loved ones snatch off
brutally. What a generation of leaders!
About now this infernal experience is the scenario in some nations of
the world that are caught up in pre and post political election violence.
Lately, ripples of protest have been witness in most nations with many of it
demanding the resignation of the president, prime ministers, or some leaders.
Some of these protests have been seen to quickly degenerate from peaceful and
result in the killings of thousands of protesters, indicating leaders’ reaction
and response to the agitations of the led. How sad!
These leaders shortsightedness could not let them see it coming. They
didn’t realize that eagles, which also constitute the led, when ducked long
enough can have their loyalty depleted and starts to negate the authority of
royalty. Where this happens even in a democratic system, as we now see, the led
are further reduced from being ducked to being dead. They are massacred!
How many
lives of the led should be laid down and what volume of blood of the innocent
should be shed to put the current crop of overstayed national leaders into
power, in power and off power? The answer encapsulates the growing statistics
of ‘change martyrs’ in those nations engross in confrontations and conflicts,
in the bit for change; Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Barren, Libya, Nigeria, you
name them. Carefully and critically x-rayed all of it comes down to
consequences of nations where most of her people’s potentials are being ducked
and living life far less of who they are. A crucial obligation of any responsible government
or administration is to see to it that a larger percent of the populace are
groomed, empowered and licensed to soar in their various individual endeavours.
Therein is their qualitative contribution to national developments and enduring
loyalty.
------------------------ Excerpts from chapter 6: STOP DUCKING THE EAGLES. ------------------------
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