Mr. Sunny Agboju
In 1821, a ship named Nautilus sailed from Virginia, USA, to Liberia, West Africa. One of the thirty-three “people of colour” aboard the ship was a 19-year-old boy, Hillary Teage. He it was who coined what today has become the motto of the Liberia nation: “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here.”
Life without liberty is like a body without spirit. Clearly and increasingly, the Nigerian nation has been one devoid of opportunities for personal and professional growth, access to quality education and healthcare, and an all-inclusive and just society. In the last 8 years, Nigerians have been alive in their bodies – without their spirits. It’s been an empty life without laughter, without energy, without content, without warmth. It’s been a routine drudgery of meaningless living. It’s been worse than hell.
Without doubt, freedom is the open window through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit and dignity. In Nigeria, that sunlight, together with the human spirit and dignity, have evaporated.
Serially, under the PDP and the APC governments, the living condition in Nigeria has moved from hard to pure slavery! It’s so bad the West doesn’t need to send slave ships. Nigerians themselves now pay heavily to escape to the West to be enslaved. I daresay, if a ship were to berth in Lagos announcing it has come to ship slaves to Europe, thousands of Nigerians will fight to queue up to board. In fact, some will go with their own chains, telling the sailors they came with their own chains just in case the sailors forgot to come with some! It’s become as humiliating as that. And all that is because the slavery at home is by far worse than that abroad.
Having destroyed all sectors, the political class forget that there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, can chain our minds from the freedom it yearns to have. Come February 25, we must take our anger and frustration to the polls and do the needful. It is our responsibility as Nigerians to address the inequalities and injustices that pervade our nation, and we must secure our birthright from these political shenanigans.
Clearly, the suffering has reached a point where citizens are saying it is better to die fighting for freedom than be prisoners all the days of their lives. That’s what makes this election a turning point in the history of our country. That’s what makes February 25 a subscription to freedom.
I am not unaware that there are those willing to give up their essential liberty just to obtain a little stomach infrastructure or positional gains. Such people deserve neither the liberty nor infrastructure they get. They are blinded by economic inducements, ethnic considerations or religious prejudices. Because it’s a democracy, there’s nothing can be done about them because they must have their say.
Be that as it may, may the gods forbid that such little-minded, parochial citizens infect the clear majority with their shortsighted, evil idiosyncrasies. Surely, the biggest ill of democracy is that the ignorant, the uneducated, the gullible, the greedy, the overambitious can, in their human foibles, carelessly team up to defeat the upright, intelligent, patriotic and benevolent members of society. And that is why the question is relevant, whether February 25 will be a subscription to freedom or a renewal of slavery.
The only way February 25 can be a subscription to freedom is for every patriotic citizen, like you my dear reader, to not sit on the fence but rouse and galvanise other citizens to step out and vote, and remain to defend their votes, because, in the final analysis, we can only have as much freedom as we have the intelligence to want and the courage to take. You sure do have a role to play!
Mr Agboju is a Management Consultant & a Public Affairs Analyst)
