By Kayode Emola
If we imagine what people go through when they loss a loved one to the cold hands of death, the pain and emotions that come with it, and a lifetime without that person. I’m sure we will all agree that as much as death is inevitable and agonising, it is far better than losing a loved one without any trace. The most painful thing is that as much as no loss is bearable, losing someone or something important without closure is even extremely hurtful.
I was watching a fictional movie last week where a mother lost her teenage son to an alien invasion and within seven months after being lost, the child has aged over 40 years in his alien life. The mother was very hopeful that one day, her son would return, and she continually nursed the optimism of reuniting with her beloved child. When she eventually met her son in his alien form, rapidly aged and unwanted, the knowledge caused her even more pain and as much as she was happy to see him, she couldn’t bear to see her son in that amount of agony. She would rather live in the hope that her son was still out there than the knowledge that her child would never return home in his human form due to his alien transformation.
Seeing what the poor mother went through, I was quite taken aback that she would rather live-in hope that her son will one day return than the knowledge that her son has become a beast of some sort. However, when I looked critically, I noticed that a lot of us are just like the poor woman, in the sense that we sometimes try to persuade ourselves that for some reasons hope is better than knowledge. This phenomenon has led a lot of Nigerians into abject poverty and continues to drown the resources that could have been available to build the good people of this great nation.
For all intents and purposes, we would have thought that as nearly three-quarters of the world’s population are religious, this would translate into some sort of peace and prosperity for many. Alas, quite a lot of people continue to live in ignorance which is the main driving factor of all violence and poverty we witness in our world today. For instance, quite a lot of people in Nigeria believe that if they go to church, pray hard and hope for the best, then maybe one day fortune will smile on them. This belief and the hope mindset, permeates every fabric of our society, destroying everything in its pact to the detriment of my people.
When I first travelled to the UK nearly a decade ago, I saw the main reasons why we as Nigerians and Africans, in general, are being held down as a people. We have been brainwashed with the false ideology of ‘Hope’. We’ve been made to believe that if things are not working well for us, it is because we do not have a strong belief in the first place that it would work, but this is not supposed to be the case. Why I do not dismiss that sometimes and in most times, it is good to hope for a better outcome in a situation, much of the results we get in life, dwells in our ability to factor a solution for the many challenges that we face as a people rather than hope in nothing.
I do not also want people to take this in the wrong way, as I am not implying that we cannot hope for God to do the unimaginable. I am against the widely idolised false hope that has been sold to our people that somehow, if you hope for the best, then it will surely happen in that manner.
If we take the recent case of the covid-19 pandemic that has been rampaging the globe since 2019. Immediately it became a global pandemic, Europe, America, and Asia started racing against time to find solutions. Many countries were looking for national solutions and other organisations collaborated to get a global result in tackling the pandemic. On the other hand, African leaders were waiting and hoping for the white man to come up with the vaccine needed before they will raise a finger.
Whilst many African leaders always depended on foreign aid donations to serve their populace, as we see in the case of the covid-19 vaccine, we must realise that these aids we have been receiving are not the drivers of a competitive economy. This explains why many African countries and especially Nigeria is not developed and consistently retrogressing. We hope for one day when all of our problems from bad governance, bad roads, bad education, etc will be solved by a messiah. The truth is, we must all as Africans take responsibility for failing to put efforts into actions that bring results rather than hoping that bad roads or infrastructures will automatically fix themself.
Nigeria is in a worst state today, because a lot of us are living under the illusion that things will get better one day like the woman expecting that her son will one day come home. Perhaps if only we seek knowledge to better understand that Nigeria was not designed to work, then we will begin to change our mentality. Take, for instance, the British that gave us an institution such as the police did not explain properly the role of the police in a civil society. It is supposed to be a welfare organisation to assist people in the society that find themselves in one form of difficulty or the other. Rather, the police in Nigeria, especially the ones built under the colonial masters and inherited by their successor was created to be abusers of the people they were supposed to serve.
If only people will begin to seek knowledge about why things are not working properly in Nigeria rather than hope for the better, then we will begin to make headway as a society. For those of us advocating for our own independent Yoruba Nation outside of the contraption called Nigeria, a greater knowledge of how this can be achieved will help advance our cause rather than mere hope. We must remember that it is only practical actions that will give us our desired result rather than merely relying on hope. Let us move away from the illusion of false hope to a place of understanding as knowledge rather than hope is what will take us to our desired destination.
