Emeka, a close friend of mine, who once attended a foreign training where participants from different countries also attended. During the cause of the programme, as they were having lunch one particular day, a co-participant from India called Rajev, knowing Emeka is a Nigerian, asked him if he had noticed that the loudest in the class are Nigerians. "They ask more questions, comment the most on issues, but obiously understand very little about the subject under discussion because they spend most of their time talking, and during test, they make the lowest grades," Rajev said.
Haven't you ever thought of why we are so loud and noisy, and always in a hurry, rushing to nowhere? We are always looking for short cuts and like cutting corners. We always aspire to be the one that gets that job opportunity by all means, even when we are the least qualified for the job, and always wanting to be on top, but never taking the pain to go through the mills to achieve excellence. We want to win every contest even if we have to cheat to do so. That is the reason why we often field over-aged players in our youths tournaments yet we never perform well. Parents often rush their children through school, skipping classes and changing school just to be ahead and graduate early enough to move on to higher education.
Despite all the rush and hurry, we always find ourselve performing disappointingly in almost every aspect of our lives. Take our traffic situation for instance. You find car driving recklessly and driving on walk ways, taking one way, climbing culvets, break all speed limits just to beat the traffic and at the end, they end up crashing their cars or get arrested by the traffic offices, therefore loosing even more time and encurring cost of repairs both of their own vehicles and the other car, and even paying fines for traffic offences.
We need to stop this mad rush to nowhere. We have to retrace our steps because, we are getting everything wrong. Our educational system is wrong, our health care system is terrible, the security agencies are under-performing and the political structures are in shamble. The trader in the market is not left out of this embarrasing social degeneration. Traders often stock fake and substandard products and sell for the price of geniune ones.
Our artisans and apprenticeship training structure which used to be reliable and strong in the past, has degenerated. Half baked drop-outs are all over the place. From hairstylist, vulcernizers, mechanics to tailors can hardly provide quality services to the public. These quacks are now the ones training our young apprentices, thereby passing half-baked knowledge to these set of young Nigerians. Things are so bad that, many employers of labour look outside Nigeria to recruit technicians and labour workers.
Our own people, apart from lacking the pre-requisite skills, also are not trust-worthy. As they have been found to be involved in un-wholesome practices in the workplace.
I am still wondering why we like to shunt, yet always getting late. There is something fundamentally wrong that we need to address. We are all looking up to the government for this social re-engineering. But the sad thing is that the government too is neck-deep in this quicksand of shame and are themselves also struggling to remain relevant in the national polity. How could a government engrossed with so much problems and confussion have the time to notice these social vices grinding the nation into a halt, while other countries are making rapid growth and are progressing.
