By Abel Leonard Nzwanke
Peace is expensive, it has a higher price tag where it is elusive. In Nasarawa peace takes a double price for the fragile diversity of our tribes and for the veracity of our polity. All that is lost to the waves of crisis, life and property so far is not the only one we have to pay for the public peace we pursue. The road to peace is still long it is not pessimistic; it is the realistic atmosphere in Nasarawa state.
According to Albert Einstein, “our problems cannot be solved by the same level that created them” He is right but what was missing in his assertion is that indigenous problem demands indigenous approaches to solving them. The problem and the solution to what we see and feel today is in our own hands. We have to give ourselves the peace we need.
To seek peace means to change, to move from one unit to another, it is also a manner of doing things to a better way of doing the same. But change is different because the new is always scary but then change is not expensive what we see is not as expensive compared to the peace we cherish. It does not need a ten-year Nasarawa budget or the salary of our civil servants to execute it.
In this type of “Next Level,” we seek individual transformation and collective understanding. It is time to do this for the common fate we have for our state.
In all that is happening to us and near us, everyone is affected in some ways, we know that the state is not Nasarawa, but it stands on all Nasarawa homes. If it fails today, it will fall on all families, this is the reason we reach out to hold peace.
In history anytime is long but the destination of peace should not be difficult for anyone to determine. We need to redefine our life from the micro abstract look at things to the macro. Shelve out tiny habits in individual life and living and relate them to the shared values that hold all of us together.
We will all agree that the major problem of our dear state is the dislocation of the system which is the result of greed. Greed should be redefined in Nasarawa state as the careless and immodest want and waste of what is needed by the desperate majority. This is a personal flare, corruption involves everyone in every way.
In the words of His excellency Engr. Abdullahi Sule the Executive governor of Nasarawa State who disclosed that “Oftentimes, we blame it on the system (government) to shift responsibility because the system and the people are abstractions referring to no one. We accepted to lean under leaders, we serve as followers. The problem with us is the overriding selfish ulterior motives of the individual in us due to indiscipline or disregards to others with an equal amount, value and needs of life”.
He further said that “Greed and want to blindfold us from thinking, choosing and delivering the just, the fares and the good for everyone. The people of Nasarawa are all involved in the failure. We need to do well for the collective good, however, knowing the right thing to do and doing it is an individual difficulty, not just the system”.
The present government under the able leadership of Eng. AA Sule to perform effectively requires the individual system, not the government system. There is a limit or the elasticity of the human mind coupled with the conditioned Nasarawa indigenes who have the mind of mistaking anything wrong to be good.
The personal and social approval among a people of class religiosity is not just sad, it is a curse. Only in Nasarawa State where Gods order and wish are personalized, reinvented and interpreted through the rhetoric of self-styled preachers who overtake the serious social problems affecting all and dig the deep wounds of division, hatred and disrespect just to gain cheap recognition and power over powerless followers.
National and common issues are trivialized in the roots of Gods own houses with much quantity of information more than before we still stagnate behind the changing fortunes of other states in Nigeria. Part of the problem with us is not understanding between the shift in life and the fix in mind, the dynamism of the society is unachievable, more so in a postmodern world where information is the first commodity on top of the hierarchy of the human needs.
Next level demands that we move away from hitherto frames that misled us, to set ourselves to serve. One way to describe this is its stereotypical mediation of issues in the state. A stereotype is the use of limited information to wrongly generalize collective information for the good of the people. We speak and write too much often without facts and evidence which open wounds and incite further crises in the state.
Similarly, in an information-based society where information should be the human resource for development, it is callous to find information as an antidote to collective fate. In a diverse society of professionals who should know the impact of stereotype and guard the rest against it, We made information purposefully scarce. We limit both intention and effort at getting information about ourselves and others in the state.
Religiosity has an exceptional definition in Nasarawa State. It is the attendance of worship places in mad rush, days and weeks, without commensuration God pleasure for our worship. And we fail for the umpteenth time to see the signs of God’s displeasure in the compose of our life; even by our most godly, most learned, and the wisest.
We have bastardised values of honesty and selfless service and took them away from the honest and the sincere sold them to thieves and the corrupt. We have turned worship places into centers for approving wrongs.
In a religious society like ours, determining right and wrong should not be hard to do. For us, it has been easy to change wrongs into rights and rights into wrongs.
Our religiosity is also misled into the faith that God will have to descend to earth to effect proper changes for us in the state totally debugging the social change process that humans are agents of change and valuable humans can be ‘magic multipliers’ of that capacity for change.
Instead, we left the target of social collapse of our system and is eating everyone. This is why any attempt at rationalizing the current waves of violence by anyone is just hard to believe. In a society like ours too polarized over its collective problems, no one can understand the truth of the problems. It is time to talk about it again.
