Our current state has come to be because, in the mad dash for cash, in the adrenaline rush of the igbotic huzzle, we have forgotten – We have forgotten that the policies of yesterday will pave the roads to our future.

Nigeria is a jungle. And we have grown accustomed to thinking like jungle residents – like wild animals, and like men not much distinguishable from beast. Nature has never been redder in tooth and claw as it is in our country. Only the strongest survive -the toughest, the most cunning, the meanest, and the most duplicitous. The jungle has become so wild that not even its denizens can survive within it. And so, in mass migration, we carry our feral nature to other jungles – to Ghana, to London, or to New York, the concrete Jungle where one at least has hope of fulfilling their dreams.

The inherent fight or flight reflex of human beings has never been as taxed as it has been in our great nation. We are the prey, constantly under threat, either from predators within the system, or from the system itself. We are under threat – from the LASTMA official at the street corner looking for that little bribe, from armed robbers and scammers, from dishonest household staff. We are under threat – from the scarcity of clean drinking water, from the floods which carry away children when the rains arrive in full force, from the dilapidated roads with gullies that swallow up lives every week. At every turn we are faced with an experience more jarring than the last. Our Central nervous systems are so overworked that we no longer have time to pause and think. Instead, we learn to quickly forget. We pay no attention to the mistakes of yesterday. We just want to move on, and get through the next series of events, almost as if the happenings of yesterday never happened and the slate had been wiped clean.

We are the ‘now’ generation – We don’t want to know why yesterday’s policy implementations have inflated the prices of goods and services to the point at which they are now. We just want to make enough money to afford the new prices. We don’t want to know about how bank rates have skyrocketed to an almost criminal 25%. We just want to amass enough assets to use as collateral and do our business. We do not care for why local manufacturing and agricultural industries are non existent. We just want to be able to buy all the fancy imported thing amajigs brought into our borders every day.

It is a twisted, perverted evolution we have undergone in Nigeria. But what can we do? we either adapt or we die. Humanity, having evolved from the stone ages where everyone fended for themselves, is meant to have developed to a point where we know what is good, and what is bad, and established societies with legal systems to enforce the good and punish evil. Once, slavery was seen as normal to some people, but now it is globally condemned. Racism still exists, but acts of it are punishable by law. We are supposed to have evolved into a society that cares for as many people as possible, upholding their rights.  In the west, they have healthcare policies and unemployment benefits which, while sometimes abused, provide opportunities for even those who have nothing to make something out of their lives. In Nigeria, we are alone. It’s us against the world.

For some reason, we did not see it fit to adapt the policies of the West as swiftly as we import their products. As a result, our society has evolved to the stage at which we are faced with increasing adversity every day and have no choice but to fend only for ourselves and almost no one else. We have jetissoned the needs of the ‘masses’, and focused on the advancement of the privileged. The rich amass more wealth while the poor continue to languish. “…whoever has something,
will have more given to him. But whoever has nothing, even what he has will be taken away.” I believe Nigeria took Jesus’ words a bit too seriously there.

Our current state has come to be because, in the mad dash for cash, in the adrenaline rush of the igbotic huzzle, we have forgotten – We have forgotten that the policies of yesterday will pave the roads to our future. We have forgotten that while we chase our daily Lagos loaf, the area boy from Okrika doing dobale and hailing our governors will be the next local government chairman because he has washed his ogas copiously. We have forgotten that when this generation of ‘ancients’
leave government – and by leave I mean pass away, because that’s the only way they seem to disappear – the only people left to actively manage this country will be those same area boys. But perhaps some of us didn’t forget. Perhaps, because of the foreign education often given to the children of the “upper-middle class”, most of us never even learned in the first place. There was nothing to forget. That is not an excuse though – we cant tag this one on our parents and blame them for not instructing us on nation building. It’s a course of study we must learn, with or without their help. So we’d better pick up our books and start learning fast, because our future is already here, and it isn’t looking so bright.

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30 Days 30 Voices series is an opportunity for young Nigerians to share their stories and experiences with other young Nigerians, within our borders and beyond, to inspire and motivate them.

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.