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Interesting. My question is this, about eight million voted for Tinubu, six million for Atiku and six million for Obi. Added up it is about twenty three million votes. Nigeria is supposed to be 200 million people. Eighty nine million registered to vote. That is about one in every four registered voters voted. Why such a low turnout to vote? Have Nigerians already given up on democracy? They are always complaining about their looting leaders, why not come out and vote them out? I see, they want God to give them good government. Obviously, they don’t fight or vote for good government so they must be stuck for bad government. Nigerians deserve Tinubu or Atiku or Obi, bad leaders, if they don’t like them let seventy million of them next time come out and elect a competent leader, or they should shut up and endure their incompetent leaders because that is what they deserve.
Professor Ozodi Osuji.
Ozodi Osuji : Your observation is hundred percent correct. What we have in Nigeria is faith without works. It is a dead faith as defined in the Bible.
We all cannot live in sins and yet expect the grace of God to increase or abound in a country where every store front is a Church which is truly a business franchise, like a mom and pop business virtually owned by the Pastor and the wife and where their children who ultimately will inherit the Business after the parents are dead and gone.
Rather than investing money in creating wealth and industries which provide employment and stimulate the economy, all we are doing is building more Churches and pretending to be more Roman Catholic than the Pope and telling the whole world including the tiny State of Israel that we love Jesus more than she does.
Christianity was brought to our shores by the British Missionaries. But today we cherish Christianity more than the British who brought it to us.
You go to Nigerian Churches in America or the UK or Canada you instinctively know we have gotten most of our priorities wrong. We go there to dance for God because our pastors tell us and we believe it that God loves our praises and will answer our prayers if we just praise him like we do to a baby to get his attention.
You hear shouts of Hossana” and “Iye” and you hear people speaking in tongues which is neither English nor French nor Spanish nor Arabic nor Swahili, “Ari Ba Ba Ba. Slobe Ye” Akuna Ma ta ta, Mimo”
We worship the same God with the white races but with totally different mindset and value system.
Our countries are going from bad to worse because God is not mocked or flattered by our prayers and praises. He looks at our hearts and He finds that most of our prayers and dancing are more of eye service just to impress him but He is going to do what He has to do as God, but most of us hardly know that or pretend not to know much to our own peril.
If you want to know how much we have got our priorities wrong, you just go to some of the Nigerian Parties in the UK, in America and Canada and you see the way we waste food and money.
It would make you wonder if we really work hard for the money we make.
The few whites or black American and other nationalities who come to those parties cannot believe the squander mania they see on the Dancing Floor. We spray money like Hell.
We are all guilty, myself included. I am trying to wean myself out of it, but I still do it, because I don’t want a stigma placed on me for not joining the band wagon. But I caution my self not to take it as a competition or overdo it.
We deceive ourselves too much In Nigeria. Our country is in abject poverty today because of it.
“Sadaka Sabo Da Allah” the language of begging for money which was the exclusive preserve of our fellow northerners, brothers and sisters before, has now spread to everywhere in Nigeria.
The Igbos and the Yorubas and the Kanuris and Efiks and the Ibibios, Edos, Itsekiris and Urhobos and all Nigerians now beg for money and they have developed more sophisticated ways to beg and to solicit for money including scams and computer theft all over the place.
Our Census figure is grossly inflated . Less than 23 percent of our wrongly projected population had voted in the last election because our registered voters are also inflated.
How for goodness sake can a candidate who only wins less than 9 million votes in a country with a population of 200 million people be declared President, and we still claim we are a full-fledged Democracy. What we have right now is a Minority Government in Nigeria.
Something is wrong somewhere like you rightly observed. Our leaders are even afraid to conduct a realistic Census and they are afraid to seek help from foreigners to help us do it because we don’t want the truth about our true population to ever come out because we would be embarrassed to High Heavens because we are not as many as we claim. That much I know.
In 1973, I was a returning officer for the Census at Kabba Ijumu Local Government of the then Kwara State.
I knew the figures I sent to the central collation center at Ilorin after we completed the exercise in Kabba.
Two more zeros were simply added to the figures I sent to the Collation Center just to inflate the figures for the Local Government and for Kwara State at the time. Come on, Give me a break. Nigerians lie too much. The great Obafemi Awolowo under whom I served had told me, he disputed the accuracy of the 1973 Census and he killed that Census with his 1974 Convocation Address in my Alma Mater the University that was later named after him. He told me he could not in good conscience live the figures projected for that Census. He too agreed with you and me that Nigerians live in a world of make- believe.
The population of Kano is grossly inflated to give the North and the 19 states of the North more political advantages than the 17 states of the South just to give the North an edge.
By the same token the population of Lagos was reduced so as not to give more local Governments to the Yoruba Southwest.
After 2 or 3 states were carved out of Kano, the population of Kano was still higher than that of Lagos.
It is a big lie that our leaders in the Southwest like Obasanjo could not even challenge because the man just wanted to go along to get along with the Northerners who put him in office twice because he is the only southerner they could trust to not rock the boat of their fraudulent political supremacy in Nigeria.
IBB was mainly responsible for the discrepancy in our population projections when he surreptitiously created 19 States in the North only to give 17 States to the South and nobody called his bluff.
The same IBB had clandestinely fasttracked the building and the movement of the Federal Capital to Abuja to give the North a huge advantage and a slight edge to states like his own Niger State, Nassarawa. Kogi and Kaduna all of which now benefit immensely from their nearness to the Federal Capital Territory.
I am not suggesting that it is only the North that inflated their population census. The Southern States do it too, but arguably to a lesser degree.
A nation built on falsehood like Nigeria cannot but experience the kind of problems we are having now.
That is the blunt truth. Any leader that may seek to correct the problem has to be willing to sacrifice his own life.
A Confederal System like exists in Canada whereby each of the provinces will be self- governing would have been better for Nigeria.
But it will take a lot of courage for any of our current leaders to suggest that and implement it.
The advantage for Tinubu is because he is one of them. He knows where the problems are, and who have been killed by the System and where their bodies are buried.
But it still remains to be seen if Tinubu has the moral courage land the capacity to do what is needed to mend or to heal the country and whether or not the power brokers of the North who benefit from the stench and disequilibrium would let him.
Thank you for having the courage to point out what is wrong with Nigeria.
Dr. Wumi Akintide
