In all humility, I write to acquaint you, with as much candour as I can muster, the condition of our nation, the Igbo nation, as I languidly wallow in the ranks of senior citizens of Nigeria now unable to do much to change the rather unpleasant degenerative condition you all have inherited from our own generation. Those in the generation before us was a pioneer generation. They failed to orientate our people to our system and how we may use our system to better address the needs of our people. They were carried away by the benefits of power and foreign symbols of development and civilisation, and strayed from positive values in our own root culture and lost for all of us relevance in a fast-changing world.
That generation was extremely vain and the people cast no gaze at their people and their roots, to see how best to preserve our pristine values and move us into civilisation in our own idiom. They provided excuse for the military to step in and almost irreversibly afflict our futures. The military saw to it that your future was short-changed with programmes of a defeated. No blame need lie to the military. It is a tradition for them to regard those they rule as conquered people. Citizens became their captives.
A conqueror calls the shots and does all in his power to ram his rules of conduct down the throats of the conquered. Unfortunately, they did not have enough understanding of leadership to do any better than political leaders before them. That is what we have experienced, the ‘no victor no vanquished’ sing-song notwithstanding. What now matters most is that we have become enemies of our positive heritage, and in consequence we have consigned ourselves to the ranks of the never-do-wells and people incapable of positive evolution. We have lost our pristine cognateness and homogeneity. We have pauperised our spirits with so much concentration on material welfare. The irony is that we have become lip-service Christians in droves, but have less humanity in our hearts.
I confess that my generation failed to provide appropriate leads to all of you to latch on and find your profitable ways through life in Nigeria and the world when it mattered most. We could have established our misdirection by our preceding generation and changed the course of our evolution with little effort. Yes we had obstacles too heavy to ponder.
The military hung on to power too long and left little room for some of us with ideas for change to hit sensitive minds and motivate change. But that will not be offered here as an excuse for failure. A generation must discharge itself creditably in order to deserve the ancestral staff which it ought to pass on to the next generation without stain. We ought to have fought hard and sent the military packing earlier than they did. Materialism floored us too.
Our generation was decimated by the military as we yielded to allurements which the military offered. The ranks of our Igbo elite were fractionated with ‘divide and rule’ tactics. Tokens were offered groups to stray from the common courses we espoused. We belonged to all parties as soon as the military gave room and had no ideology for belonging wherever we found ourselves, save seeking crumbs from the masters’ tables.
Even the academic establishment was subjugated. No one spoke forth until General Sani Abacha rankled us too deep and National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) came to our rescue. We were near slaves in our own land. Only a few of our people like Rear Admiral Ndubuisi Godwin Kanu, could see that the trend was nauseating. We drifted and our leaders crumbled for offers of seeming comfort.
I should once again introduce myself for the third time. I had done so twice before. I had sent a letter to Nigerian youth in 1995 when I wrote ‘The Nigerian Condition’ in 1995, for I was worried sore of the trajectory that had led and is still leading to our sinking, which was traceable to the incapacity of the military to offer appropriate leadership to a gifted nation. I wrote again to the Nigerian youth, before the 2011 elections, on the need to make sound choices. There was little room for the youth to impress their vision on the electorate by regarding the vote as serious business.
You with your majority in the population played to the transient whims of the political overlords who used you for fateful ends and abandoned you shortly after elections. The amount of fraud that has taken place in our nation’s history is now mind-boggling. It should have transformed our population to a productive specie of humanity, had the miscreants been prevented from reaching public office.
We have lost tremendous opportunity to work with the rest of the world in contributing to the advancement of humanity. We are still speaking about food and shelter when other nations are feeding well and establishing systems to ease human drudgery with machines and robotics. We still farm like our grandparents. We still cook with wood and kerosene since we have no power to latch into modern power-based industrial products. Jobs are consequently not available to those who qualify. And few qualify because there is no technology-based education left. Our educational system is screwed up in favour of theory.
Few machines feature in our technological institutions as hi-tech products hit production centres in advanced nations of the world. Machines go quickly out of production and we are caught in a web of tomfoolery from year to year. We had Projects Development Agency (PRODA) in Enugu, Igboland, immediately after the war. It has been allowed to degenerate into nothingness by the Nigerian power elite and our own sons who could not remove their blinkers woven of vanity and myopia and greed.
We are left with craftsmen at Aba, Nnewi and Onitsha who make machines without design and engineering drawing which last only for a few weeks and are scrapped because our creative people have no sound education. Our own engineers are in foreign lands powering foreign systems.
With an event of this nature addressing young people, I now urge you to write it boldly in your hearts that we all have to love one another and assist one another in the task of building and sustaining the evolution of our people to decent human beings. We have to shun shortcuts to wealth and power. They demean a people and hurt them deeply eventually.
Wrong courses do not yield right results. Wrong thoughts and volition cannot elevate our people. Only thoughts, volition and action based on love and social responsibility can result in betterment for all our people.
I urge all of you to write these statements in the tablets of your hearts. Our wholesome future will depend on how sacred you regard this short address.
Igbo Kwenu! Kwenu! Kwezuonu!