By Wordshot Amaechi Ugwele
Protests, uprisings or a revolution is indeed long overdue in Nigeria. It’s not like, as Nigerians have continued to show all these while, that anybody actually wanted these. However, the ruling elite, for long, in not making possible a peaceful change in the sorry situation they have plunged the people, have inevitably ignited the fuse that is burning to set off the conflagration everybody but themselves saw coming.
The people of Nigeria have endured what chattels in a slave camp cannot take. Nigeria has deliberately been reduced to a colony of bonded people, where no economic nor social prospects ever exists for the inmates, as they have all been reduced.
While leaders use their political ruse and exclusive party platforms to recycle themselves into positions and recirculate their perks and privileges, the fall-out is a continued reticulation of hunger, joblessness and more misery for the rest of the people.
The youths have been forced, in the midst of abundant resources the leaders have been plundering and mismanaging, to resort to extreme measures in the absence of any viable options towards a meaningful handle at life.
As a result, they are either desperately fleeing the country in droves, sometimes imperiled in the process as they perish in the desert and at sea, or they stay here to engage in cyber crimes, ritual murders for money, prostitution, and baby factory animal husbandry.
The prospects have never been any bleaker, and those in authority more wicked. The provocations have never been more naked and insulting, with all the taunting lifestyles that make more harrowing the sorrow and the abjectness of the living conditions of the people.
The weight and burdens of Nigeria and her leaders on the neck of the masses have reached the point where either their necks snapped or the yoke is broken. Something must give. The old must give way to the new values in governance the young people seek in their End Bad Governance Protest. The way things are done in Nigeria must change.
We cannot continue to allow criminals run the country, to steal everything for themselves. Everywhere, political crooks and state captors have taken over and are spreading more their tentacles and digging in deeper. These people can only keep things as they are, as they only came to pillage and plunder. They will never allow true elections to hold, for the people to elect who leads them. They will never encourage merit, fairness and equity, for these are not in their creed. Their cronyism, religious and ethnic bigotry have turned the people against themselves, leading to their being sidelined at the brink where they are perpetually condemned in dereliction, and consuming themselves while their unpatriotic rulers consume what the country has.
The youths, after waiting for near eternity for the tomorrow that supposedly belonged to them, may have decided to reach out on their own to pull it closer. After all, they heard it clearly when they said the goodies you want are not served ala carte. So, about their future which has been deferred for too long, they want to “grab it, snatch it and run with it,” for their own good and all Nigerians!
No amount of propaganda, blackmail, ethno-religious profiling, etc, will undermine the justness of their position, including all of their demands to the government, and how they are going about it. Indeed, Nigerians have been patient for too long. And it is not surprising how in the well provided insularity of our captors they have not realised that.
