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As the year 2023 dawns

By Editorial Board
01 January 2023   |   3:55 am
Nigerians join the rest of the world today in marking the onset of a new year, the year Two Thousand and Twenty-Three A.D. (in the Gregorian Calendar).

PHOTO / PARADE

Nigerians join the rest of the world today in marking the onset of a new year, the year Two Thousand and Twenty-Three A.D. (in the Gregorian Calendar). We are at the threshold of a year of critical importance for our country’s political, social, and economic development. The most notable event that would stand the New Year out is the forthcoming national elections, which have the potential of determining not only the future direction of our society, but some would say its very stability and survival as a corporate entity.

In the preceding year, Nigerians were forced to endure the harshest of times socially and economically, under a political leadership that is characterized by incompetence, ineptitude and cluelessness on the critical challenges that face the nation. The government has constantly responded to the worsening economic fortunes of the nation by unrestrained internal and external borrowing to further balloon the heavy national debt burden that Nigerians are enduring. This unconscionable and ill-advised action of government implies that generations yet unborn will grow to struggle with an economy structured only for debt repayment servicing. Thus, the sour grapes of today’s prodigal leadership will give way to the gnashing of teeth by future generations of Nigerians.

Indeed, the leadership has been tested and found wanting on many fronts, including the promise to end insecurity and stamp out corruption, upon which the party rode to power in 2015. Nigeria has been going through the most intense period of insecurity in its peacetime history. Unknown gunmen, kidnappers, bandits, terrorists, and arsonists running riot across the country, killing, raping, maiming and abducting hundreds of helpless victims, and burning down critical infrastructure, with apparent ease, and entrenching brazen criminality as a flourishing and profitable enterprise.

The trauma experienced by victims of violence and insecurity on the one hand and their family members and associates on the other in today’s Nigerian environment, can only be imagined. In these dire circumstances, poor Nigerians ended the past year wringing their hands in agony and near despair.

On another level is the subtle, unobtrusive, silent, but monumental violence dealt on Nigerians by fellow Nigerians. It is the runaway looting of this nation’s commonwealth on a scale that is reckless, mind-boggling and unprecedented. In the last of the eight years of the Buhari administration, corruption became progressively entrenched, ingrained and preponderant. The government has not succeeded in moving the country one notch up the scale of transparency and integrity on any evidential basis. Rather, established high profile cases illustrate the extent to which the apparatus of government apparently helplessly watched, connived, colluded or facilitated the senseless and systematic stealing of the nation’s treasury in hundreds of billions of naira. Should a government that permits such gargantuan heists without triggering effective punitive sanctions not be regarded as complicit?

As the year 2023 dawns, there is widespread anger, distress, discontent, fear, and apprehension in the land – a potentially explosive situation which genuine leaders must take seriously. The Nigerian state is failing and failing very rapidly. The indices are evident everywhere. There are therefore enormous challenges ahead for those who are presenting themselves for leadership positions at all levels. It will surely not be party time for those who would emerge after the 2023 elections. If the worst predictions are to be avoided, the leaders and the generality of the people have work to do. Much critical thinking and much strategic planning is called for, and therefore an overhauling of our leadership recruitment process is a subject of critical importance and an urgent imperative.

If Nigeria is to survive as one corporate entity, Nigerians must quickly abandon the sentiments of narrow ethnicity and religious bigotry which have held this country down for so long, and face squarely the task of building a modern democratic society that is made up of people of diverse ethnic origins and multiple religious persuasions and anchored on certain non-negotiable (fundamental) values and principles. If we are to cross the 2023 threshold safely and begin to lay the foundation of a new Nigeria of our dream, Nigerians must rise as one and cast out the demons of ethnic antipathy and rancor, political acrimony and banditry, religious bigotry, primitive acquisition, nepotism, and cronyism, and all the other negative forces that have held us down for so long and now threaten to consume us.

True national transformation will not happen in an environment of widespread division, social discontent, and strife. The exigencies of the times call for a major paradigm shift at the individual and group level. If as the year 2023 dawns, we abandon our corrupt and destructive political, economic, and social habits, and summon the determination to build a modern democratic society, based on justice and equity, integrity and transparency, concern for the common good, and self-sacrificing leadership, we would have put ourselves on the path of the desired national rejuvenation in the New Year.

On this note The Guardian wishes our readers and indeed all Nigerians a happy New Year.

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