By John Ogunlela:
A young man came to me and said he had this money he wanted to put away. “I want to save it in dollars so it will appreciate and I’ll sell later”.
He asked what I thought.
“Don’t do it”, I answered. “You can’t take a position against your own country”.
I explained to him how that using a foreign currency to hedge against the naira is not a business. It is taking a stand against his own land, people and future.
Of course if most people believe the naira will keep sliding against the dollar, it will keep sliding against the dollar. Business is about moods, feelings and faith on a large scale.
He went to keep his money in naira.
A few weeks later naira had dropped, from N700 to maybe 750, I think. So he came to me with some sort of I-told-you-so words.
“Well, money is not everything. You did the right thing by supporting your country. You did your duty and money can’t pay for that. Doing your duty has cost implications some of the times”. He saw that clearly and agreed with me and left his money in his savings account.
But he had asked me about all the people who are doing it and even people in authority who are doing it. I told him we have to stand for what we know to be right always even if we have to stand alone. You cannot un-know what you know and you cannot just go ahead and actually do what you know to be hurtful to your future and to the lives of others. You have to be true to yourself and not crush your conscience for money. It is almost foolish thing to tell an average Nigerian today but it doesn’t take an atom from its soundness.
See, we are responsible for Nigeria and our highest wisdom is to protect and defend her if we want it to be well with us in the long term.
I see a lot of people who think the best take these days is to take their families to the West while they stay back here to make money. (It always gives me pains when I meet people who talk about living abroad with a romantic and superiority air. They don’t understand the morass they frolic in! They don’t understand the powerful historical ramifications of their actions and beliefs. But let’s wish them well really. Let’s wish them well and may they be a blessing to the countries they are living in). These buy forex regularly to send to them there. I have a friend who seems to be living in airplanes and airports right now because of that phenomenon. I wonder how he is enjoying it (as you know, nothing is more boring than being in an aircraft flying for hours. You hearing gets impaired and your taste buds malfunction. It is why they add more spices to the food you eat in the air because altitude mess up our sense of taste).
Some have practically lost their families because of this havoc. The kids have gone out of control in a foreign land and the parents are now polygamous and polyandrous. Some of the kids are doing drugs already. The wealth has turned to a curse. We cannot curse our land and be blessed ourselves. Living in the motherland is not a virtue as living abroad is not a vice, don’t misunderstand me, but destroying your country to put your faith in nations other people have suffered to build is nothing commendable either.
I just think the time has come to drive this thing home at a personal level. In the past two weeks, I have put our two posts here that have given me a lot to think about. In one, I talked about my struggle to understand why it is the people that suffer for the misdeeds of their leaders. In the other – yesterday – I reposted a statistics that put Nigeria in 171 position in the ranking of the IQs of nations, below Kenya and Ethiopia. In fact, there are 171 countries on the list, so our dear naija sits pretty at the bottom. My friends are mostly disputing it and I understand how natural that is. It took me a lot of thinking to post that thing. I sent time wondering about the appropriateness of it and how it can affect the reader. I even wondered about the motivation of the people who did the research and so on and so forth. In the end, I concluded it is something worth sharing and worth our honest round table.
Where is the IQ of a people who edge against their own country? Look at P&ID for example. Nigerians did that thing. They gave the keys to the enemy. The former president Buhari (you know I first supported him and later fell back as I saw that he wasn’t a good and knowledgeable leader. He was ruinous, in fact) made a statement three days ago about P&ID after the favourable court verdict. He said something that made me appreciate him.
He said many people came mounting pressure on him to settle out of court and pick a tab of $5 billion against Nigeria. One of them was a British MP, along with his Nigerian insiders.
He refused and asked the Attorney General to raise a legal team. Later, he found that all the strategy discussions of the Nigerian legal team, along with documents found their way straight to P&ID though insiders in that tight legal team! Pray, tell me, how is that country not an abysmally low IQ country? People who denominate and are ready to sell anything for money at all times, how are they even human beings! And what about if, having identified those saboteurs, we allow them to continue to live in honour among us, we give them a cover of secrecy and they carry on among us as even decision makers. How are we not a nation of mere fools who arrogantly ascribe wisdom to our reeking low IQ? There are no softer ways to put these things.
These are issues we the citizens have to ruminate and take honest positions with ourselves. No good government can succeed with a bad people a d good people will always find a way to dislodge a bad government. Always.
Ogunlela is a Public Commentator