OPINION: Attahiru’s Funeral: Where Was Everybody? |The Source

By Bashir I. Bashir

In a serious country, where sacrifice and devotion to duty matter, The President, the Vice President, majority of State Governors, Senators and Representatives will all be around for the burial of the most senior Military Officer of The Army.

What message are we sending to our young men and women who are aspiring to serve our great country in different ways possible?

But this is Nigeria. A country of different species, where service, honor and dedication to duty are a rare commodity to be appreciated.

Per chance, if the late Chief of Army Staff were alive, and today happens to be the wedding day of his son or daughter, everyone will be struggling to ‘show face’ to be noticed. Gifts worth millions of Naira would have exchanged hands. Full page Advertorials would have been placed in prominent National dailies.

We have completely and disgracefully lost our core values as Muslims, as Christians, as Africans and as human beings. We are a nation without conscience.

The leaders and the led have lost all sense of personal responsibility to ourselves and to our country.

We have allowed ourselves to be sucked into the devilish vortex of materialism and ego trip. We are busy, achieving nothing, and struggling daily without positive results. We are enmeshed in the complex web of religious and ethnic  self inflicted conflicts!

Today, every Nigerian is walking in a labyrinth that we surely know will lead nowhere except the black hole that swallows potentially great Nations who behaved as we are behaving now.

May the remaining good Men and women amongst us rise to the occasion  and apply brakes to this driverless vehicle called Nigeria, and may these good people seek truth, follow the truth, and may they be true to themselves, to our people, and to our Country.

May the Almighty inspire these good men and women with wisdom, courage, vison and the competence to navigate us through this murky terrain smeared by killings, kidnappings, corruption, self hatred for each other and selfishness on individual basis.

May these good men and women aspire to various political offices come 2023, and may the Almighty open the eyes and ears of the millions of impoverished Nigerians who, hitherto were only concerned with their next meals to stand firm and elect those who will guarantee not only their next meal, but the security, the meals, the quality education, the health care, the economic prosperity of their generation and the next , and the next, and the next!

Amin.