Saturday, March 28, 2015
MARCHING TO OUR FREEDOM, IN DEFENCE OF OUR FREEDOM
Hugo Naijaman
Fellow Nigerians,
Today, we take a very significant step on an all-important trip. We find ourselves today on the modern leg of a very ancient journey; a journey that begun from time immemorial, by people whose travels have taken them through seas, land, air, and space. Many discoveries have been made as our forebears have progressed on this voyage.
We have discovered fire, devised means to harness the power of water and wind for our uses, discovered iron… We have discovered religion; we continue to try to discover God; in that endeavor, we have built – and then shaken off – the dictatorship of superstition, and replaced it with a culture of asking questions. Our questions have revealed to us that our world is round and not actually standing on four pillars. Our questions have revealed to us that the sun does not actually rise in the east, nor does it really set in the west. We have asked why it is that whatever goes up must come down and that is how we discovered gravity. Following that discovery, and following all the advances we have made in better understanding gravity, we have ended up producing materials that can go up…and only come down when we want them to. That is why we can now fly from Abuja to Abu Dhabi, why we may yet fly from Dutse to Dubai, why we may some day lift off from a cosmodrome in Imo and dock at the International Space Station. We have discovered electricity, and today we are so heavily dependent on it that some people in some parts of our planet today almost cannot fathom a world without it – probably because they have never visited our part of the planet. Because our world is so dependent on electricity, because of the immense power with which it is associated, we have named it power, we have gone beyond merely discovering electricity and have gone on to discover different ways electricity may be generated. Now we use water, wind, and even subatomic particles – particles that we cannot even see with our unaided eyes – to generate this all-important resource that we call power. We have discovered the generosity of Nature in her degradation of once living matter into fossil fuels that become useful for still living matter – that gift from Nature that we like to call crude oil is a gift that we so heavily profit from today – although Nature herself, by the consequent environmental pollution, suffers from the untoward effects of her own kind generosity. We have discovered how to keep ourselves alive for longer, and how to protect our health better. We have discovered how to use the power of sound – in frequencies that cannot be heard by the unaided ear – to diagnose ailments within the human body, as well as to get pictures of our babies while they are growing in their happy-go-lucky fluid-filled world that we call the womb. We have learnt that light consists not just of the light we see but also of rays like X-rays gamma-rays, rays that while invisible to our unaided eyes, are being used to do things that are making our world a better world. In short, we have discovered – as we have continued on this ancient journey begun by our ancestors – that the senses with which we are born – of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch – impose on us such severe limitations that, for our world to be a better world, we must break free of those limitations. That is what we have discovered and what we discover every day. And it is a discovery that bodes well for our journey. For this journey that we are on, this journey that has progressed through centuries and millennia, this journey that has seen Homo sapiens truly dominate Earth and begin to attempt a conquest of the universe, this journey that is now ours, this journey in which we today execute an important leg, is our journey to human freedom.
But we have made all this progress because we have asked questions. We have refused to take things for granted. We have asked why; how; what if; and if not; we have not only asked those questions, we have actively worked to get answers, and then we have questioned the answers we have gotten. We have refused to believe that it is well simply because it looks well. We have a better world today because we have always striven to make our today better than our yesterday. We have refused to be content with the strides we have made. We have always looked ahead, always recognized that there are more miles to cover; refused to be held back or bogged down by the contentment of those who would bask in self-adulation over the achievements of years gone by; been steadfast in our belief that we have a duty to consistently change our world for the better, and that in the discharge of this duty, time will not give us a second for an ego massage.
So today, in Nigeria, against the prophecies of the prophets of doom, against those who would set us against each other by trying to enslave us to their doctrines inspired by ethnic insecurities and religious bigotry, against those who would prevent us from voting by whipping up sentiments of intolerance, against all these people we march.
We march in defence of our freedom. We march to our freedom. We march along the road to freedom that our fathers have marched. We break new boundaries and make new additions to the chest of discoveries already made by our forebears, to the advantage of our progeny, for they too will continue on this sacred road, they too will continue this sacred march to freedom.
In insisting that things must be better for our children than they were for our fathers, we continue a tradition that has been handed down to us from generation to generation. In asking questions and in holding those we entrust with governance accountable, we adhere to the same principles of asking questions and questioning the answers we get that have today given us computers, mobile phones, and drones, our ATM cards, and the Internet. In insisting on voting today, we declare that we will never again be so enslaved to any set of ideas as to be unable to think independently for ourselves how we can make our tomorrow a shining light that beckons us from our today.
We will not be dissuaded by those who refuse to vote – for those ones who choose not to vote even though they can have no attribute worth emulating in that respect. At a crucial time in our history, at a turning point in our trying to build a nation from among a gathering of nations, they had no opinion. They had no decision. They chose to be on the losing side of history, on the wrong side of history. History has no patience for those kinds of people, and neither should we. In these elections, the only losers are those people who could have voted, but refused to vote.
In this election, the only winners are the Nigerian people, and by extension, humanity. The only winners are the Nigerian people because by these elections, Nigerians do today what Martin Luther tried to do in Germany in the Middle Ages; what Frenchmen did at the Bastille; what Americans did by declaring their independence from Britain – Nigerians march in pursuit of freedom, in defence of freedom, to freedom. But by Nigerian people, I refer to the man and woman on the street who go out to get accredited and vote in the way and manner in which I have come out and am waiting to get accredited and vote, and who after voting, do not resort to violence because they did not get the results they had hoped for. I do not refer to those who institutionalize corruption, who emphasize the things that divide us for political gain, who allow things go wrong because, in their political calculations, that earns them political capital. Not those, for those ones have, in my opinion, lost their claim to humanity and cannot in good conscience claim to be with us on the march to human freedom.
I would love to continue writing, to continue pouring out to this phone my thoughts as they come, but other things need to be done. The line moves and I need to be accredited. I may be unable to go back to re-read these lines and then tie them all up together in a way that will make my meaning clearer. I may not have the opportunity, and in these circumstances, I certainly cannot boast the patience. I have poured my thoughts as they have come, standing in line, waiting to vote Buhari for president, chatting with someone who intends to vote Jonathan for president, and agreeing with him that we shall have a beer together tonight.
We want our nation free. Free from those who would have it in chains. We may disagree on how to get there, but let us agree on the destination…
…because this destination has been fixed for us already from time immemorial.
Never again shall we be let ourselves be enslaved to the ideology that my brother can do no wrong. Never again shall we bind ourselves or allow others bind us to shackles of hate. Never again shall our decisions of right and wrong be based on whether the players in question are muslim or Christian, catholic or protestant.
For beyond all these divisions, we are human…and we today march in defence of human freedom, to human freedom.
I must stop now…
God bless Nigeria and everywhere else.
