We are not doing badly, says Obasanjo
FORMER President Olusegun Obasanjo yesterday took a retrospective look at the country’s 55th independence anniversary and concluded, “we are not doing badly.”
Obasanjo who spoke in Abeokuta, on other issues, including the just concluded United Nations (UN) General Assembly, in New York said, it was gladden seeing Nigeria back ‘at the table’ with the world leaders.
On the independence anniversary, Obasanjo said: “55 years in the life of a nation is comparatively young and when you look at the life and history of those that you may call settled societies or reasonably matured countries, we are not doing too badly.”
Obasanjo was of the view that the advanced countries would have “had missteps just like we are having missteps, they have made mistakes and most of them have learnt from their mistakes, they have been dynamic in the way they have progressed and I believe that we are doing the same thing.”
To him, “What is important is that certain cardinal pinches, cardinal features of our national live, values, should not be eroded and we should also be willing to learn from out mistakes.”
As part of moving forward as a nation, Obasanjo stated, “we must not play with the issue of education, we must not play with the issue of health for our people, we must not play with the issue of employment for our teeming population particularly for our youths, we must not play with the issue of economy, we must not play with the issue of security and peace, we must not play with the issue of justice, Justice and peace go hand in hand, we can’t have injustice and expect peace to reign supreme.”
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1 Comments
OBJ would never acknowledge that Nigeria has been an abysmal failure so far. Many so called advanced nations to which he is referring were pioneers in various fields of development. We had existing models to follow and, actually started off fairly well. It is not surprising that the General gives the nation a pass mark today despite our backwardness vis-à-vis the position of our contemporaries. The backwardness of the nation is partly due to folks like OBJ who had all the options on how to run the country and chose a retrogressive structure. The sorry aspect of it is that they took over a fiscally federal and forward-looking system. OBJ and his colleagues should hide their faces in shame for the lousy state of the nation today. They took over the management of affairs in 1967, when Nigeria was on the same parallel with Thailand, Singapore, South Korea and even some South European nations. The same military managed and guided some industrial Latin American and Asian nations to democracy, stability and prosperity – nations that don’t have half Nigeria’s human and material potentials. How does Nigeria compare to these nations today? What has OBJ’s generation achieved for Nigeria?
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