Nigerians, and love for the dramatic
“The time the fool has learned the game, the players have dispersed, and you can beat a fool half to death but you can’t beat the foolishness out of him”, African Proverb.
I have said it countless times that Nigerians suffer low attention span, we suffer focus delinquency, like a one-year-old baby, so easily excitable, we pick on every matter and like a toy, after a while we drop it and move to the next one.
We just love the dramatics– I will remind us a few. There was a certain Aluu 4, we even had a memorial song, signed petitions, so what happened, and then last year a boy was killed by the mob in Lagos, first we debated his true age, and followed-up on whether he stole garri or a mobile phone.
Remember that drama like a tsunami over the Central Bank Chief (now) Emir Sanusi and Islamic banking–what became of all the foolish arguments especially against…or that Sanusi donated money to Kano? Today CAN, the umbrella organ of Christians says that it will kill the current Central Bank Chief who is a Christian for heading one Islamic banking body.
Who remembers Ombatse anymore and all that DSS officers that died, like an auction market–it came with all the drama, and finally it went.
All part of the entertainment called Nigeria. We only grumble a bit but soon we forget.
Today the epicenter is in Southern Kaduna, before it was Plateau, Jos and environs, I recall Dogo Nawa, and more recently we have confine “Pray for Agatu” to the dirt bin of dramas that were exciting. Follow me let me refresh our minds to the theatre production of Christians were poisoning crayfish and palm oil, sending same to the North and Muslims poisoning suya and injecting oranges and apples to kill Christians…in the words of Miriam Toews “Depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.” Why do we love foolishness with a succinct staying power…?
I am guilty, you are, we all guilty. We are only victims of a contagion that spreads fast and as it is, for now the cure seems far from us. So we are outdoing ourselves on the peanuts that Dieziani stole…ordinary $158million, it’s all drama; we soon will forget the script.
For me our debates are dramatic as a people and largely expose our poor cerebral quality regarding nationalism and high amount of hooligan quotient in us.
Of all that I have read, know and what informed sources say, at best, we engage in crude fight for power, on the other hand, it is a fight with no moral, no agenda, a fight of ego and on a final count–there is no fight at all, it is all diversionary, nothing will come out of all our fights, we won’t even learn from it, just some drama for the moment.
What saddens me is that Nigerians have refused to learn. We are either fighting ourselves or fighting for those that are misgoverning or looting us blind.
I will end with this small gist; its author is unknown–There once was a farmer who discovered that he had lost his watch in the barn. It was no ordinary watch because it had sentimental value for him.
After searching high and low among the hay for a long while; he gave up and enlisted the help of a group of children playing outside the barn.
He promised them that the person who found it would be rewarded.
Hearing this, the children hurried inside the barn, went through and around the entire stack of hay but still could not find the watch. Just when the farmer was about to give up looking for his watch, a little boy went up to him and asked to be given another chance.
The farmer looked at him and thought, “Why not? After all, this kid looks sincere enough.”
So the farmer sent the little boy back in the barn. After a while the little boy came out with the watch in his hand! The farmer was both happy and surprised and so he asked the boy how he succeeded where the rest had failed.
The boy replied, “I did nothing but sit on the ground and listen. In the silence, I heard the ticking of the watch and just looked for it in that direction.”
You can educate a fool, but you cannot make him think, a whole lot of us as Nigerians have refused to sit on the ground and listen, we are all talking at the same time, are we really engaging in any critical-problem solving manner, we just do not want to think, or maybe we are not—Only time will tell
