Nigeria: a Mistaken Identity

It’s no news that the entirety of the Nigerian system is in shamble and absolute chaos that it defies all forms of remedy. Every year, a lot of students in Nigerian universities in a bid to address this perplexing state, write their long essays with the enthusiasm that it would make an impact. Students see it as an avenue to propound solutions and theories from past political thinkers and philosophers as well as what is obtainable presently to them as a way of showing their great concern for the nation. But how many of this get to receive the attention it deserves? Yes, the youths have the right to be heard and when that is not happening, we tend to be aggressive while others tend to lose hope seeing it as impossible yet claiming otherwise. And now what do we have? I see myself in a society where my colleagues, friends and even supposed leaders of this country dream and aspire to be like their founding fathers or better still, call it ancestors. A society were youths and future leaders see change as a thing that cannot be attainable, because they are leaders of procedures and will allow themselves to be mentally enslaved. And this can be traceable to what the “colonial interlopers” did before the independence of Nigeria in 1960. To enslave us mentally and to make us believe that nothing good can ever come from Africa. And that change cannot be associated with our future leaders for change has become an illusion. Just as Heraclitus of the ancient period of philosophy in Greece rightly said “change is an illusion of the senses” for it is unattainable. Nature they say have fashioned us to be the way we are. To be greedy, selfish, self-centered, power driven and most of corrupt, but does this mean that nature cannot be altered? That man is destined by nature to be corrupt does not necessarily entail that man as not been created to be the measure of all things. For Protagoras of Abera, he said and I quote “Man is the measure of all things, of things that is, that it is