The Way We Must Think

Dec 17th, 2009 | By admin | Category: FEATURE

Home Truth With Goke Butika

When the world was thinking straight, people were progressively progressing; a situation that would compel man to think about his name and integrity first and those who failed the aforementioned virtues were regarded as psychopath and in some circumstances; had been ostracized from the society.

But now, our thinking faculty seems to have been filled with psychopathic ornaments to the extent that majority of our people in all spheres of life are no longer thinking straight and this has affected our society in so many negative ways.

Listen to the music from our musicians, what you get is either explaining the hidden beauty of a woman or extolling a stinking rich fellow with ill-gotten wealth. The era of country music with proverbs and celestial message is gone; the era of using music as a corrective measure for social disorder is gone; we are now slaves of gutter genre. Funny enough, the level of ‘shit’ garbaged into music now speaks the kind of an award a musician would rake-in

One thing I notice now is that only very few children are thinking about reading to the peak of any chosen field; very few are thinking of becoming professors or bagging Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) certificates, as majority of them are thinking now of becoming politicians, not because politicians of this country are cerebral or motivating, but because elected politicians with no traces of entrepreneurial skill would be entrusted with our collective resources in public offices and before we know it, the good-for-nothing politician that bulldozes his way to the top would suddenly become emergency millionaires under our very noses and heaven would not fall; rather he would become a shinning star in the society and we will start seeing him as our leader.

Even in the political circle, the thinking is changing very fast now. Gone were the days when a politician would mount a podium and without telling his crowd to maintain decorum, he would delve into issues with philosophies and trade tackles with his opponents with his track of achievements and challenge the incumbent with facts behind the figures and his loyalists and party faithful would go home with good points to campaign with. Today, all a politician needs to win election from the councillorship seat to the presidency in Nigeria is state power powered by armed political thugs.

The other time the President of United States of America, Barack Obama was moving from one state to the other in the course of his electioneering campaign, even, non-Americans knew that the man was the best in the fold and that translated to electoral victory, as the best candidate finally emerged, but opposite was the case here in this part of the world. Of all presidential candidates in 2007 presidential election, we all knew that Professor Pat Utomi was the best candidate with an unblemished record coupled with intimidating profile and oratorical power, but the sick man was stage-managed on us and here we are. Our President spends more time in the hospital than at his duty-post. Eventually, we are infected indirectly.

It is only possible in a world on a cliffhanger that one thug parading himself as a Local Government Council Chairman would move in a convoy of armed-to-the-teeth hoodlums and criminals to a filling station with a view to disrupting the queue and scare anyone in sight to safety, just because he wanted to display raw power of executive lawlessness.

Yours sincerely, one young opportunist called Ibukun Fadipe in Ilesa West Local Government Council Area of Osun State was the rough-neck I am talking about. A politician is expected to be civil in his approach, but this good-for-nothing thug called Council boss just drove in convoy of his thugs to a filling stations in Ilesa and declared free for all; some members of the family of the DHL founder, Chief Ade Komolafe, who dared the lunatic called Council boss, as a matter of their right were telling the story on the hospital beds and the bastard is getting away with it.

Up till the time of writing this column, Fadipe is still carrying on as if we have no law enforcement agents that could at least obtain justice for the victims. Imagine, if a creative man like Komolafe, 71, with profile of establishing a world standard courier business like DHL, could be that manhandled, what would now be the fate of the people of Ilesa West in the hands of a madman called Council chairman?

In the state, a House of Assembly member who carries the appellation of honourable was reported to have beaten one of his kinsmen to a pulp right inside the bedroom of a traditional ruler, who had called the duo for a discussion, and the silly politician is getting away with it. Let one Femi Farounbi, the majority leader explains himself to the world why his kinsman was pounced-upon like a cat would pounce on a rat, right inside the bedroom of Oloogi, a community traditional ruler in Osun State .

In the same state, a Federal High Court was reported to have handed down an injunction to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) with a task that the umpire must not even make an effort to prepare for any election without updating or revising its voters’ registers and make such available to all parties concerned, but because the ruling party felt that it had expended so much on the electioneering campaigns, the election must hold whether the court likes it or not and the INEC leadership kept mute, but secretly playing along. What a contempt of court, but the ruling party and the undisciplined INEC would get away with it.

Let us think through, in the good old days, children would not go beyond the shadow of their parents and each time any matter would be conflicting with integrity and the name of the family, their parents would be warning them against transgression of any kind; today, what to eat and what to become have taken-over from the norm and the children have gone with the social disorder and that is why, the only music on the lips of children now is hip-hop. They go along, even if they do not understand the genre.

Gone were the days when pupils and students would be clutching around with books. Then, the volume of the book a young man or woman was holding would inform us whether he or she was a student of the institution of higher learning or post primary school; nowadays, the DVD and VCD plates have replaced those books.

In our higher schools, teachers are more interested in more money, because they want to compete with thieving politicians out there, but nobody is talking about the degeneration of education in the country.

If a bad pupil is patched to the university or any of our institutions of higher learning, we need not ask that the product would be half baked in the future and that has started haunting this nation already.

The thinking in our heads in this nation is unique and strange, but may be I am the only person who is observing the trend, nevertheless, let us discuss it: we are talking about electoral reform as if the law is our problem, while we left the attitudinal reform of the politicians to fester.

The problem with us in this country is not about the law, it is about the people. In some political parties, they are in short supply of creative people and they want to win election at all cost, so politicians resorted to raw violence to prosecute agenda.

The only solution to this is to make political offices less attractive, because if money is not a deciding factor, those who want to make quick money would look elsewhere and the turf would be left for the people of ideas and creativity, who only want to serve because of integrity.

Our economy is in shambles, because the people managing it are clueless, the only viable solution to this is to tap from the resources within and make use of the local expertise. Imagine how the challenges at the petroleum downstream sector would have disappeared into the thin air should the people are at the helms of affairs make it mandatory for themselves to fix our ailing refineries.

In Yoruba parlance: “The first year a hunter kills an elephant; the second year he kills a buffalo and the following year he kills a rodent, the hunter deserves to change his name to (Olanrehin), a man who contends with demotion.

Things are not improving in this country, rather is getting worse and the way we think, speaks volume.

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