While I was spending Christmas with some friends in another part of town, a colleague of mine called to say that she wanted to come to my house with a ‘message’. I said she could leave it there in my absence, and I imagined that it was probably some kind of written communication.
On reaching home, I found waiting for me, instead, the biggest frozen chicken I had seen in my life, together with a bottle of wine, a heap of powder milk sachets, and many other goodies. The ‘message’ was a Christmas present from her and her husband.
In his recent PhD thesis or dissertation , my friend Dr Kingsley Ugwuanyi of UNN has shown that younger Nigerians today have generally favourable attitudes to Nigerian English. More recently in Nigeria, however, ‘swallow’ is now also used as a noun, meaning the kind of food that is swallowed in the sense just given. Thus in an eating-place some weeks ago I saw listed in chalk on a blackboard these names of items on offer for consumption that day: ‘Rice Yam pottage Swallow’. If you ask someone what he or she will eat, the answer might be ‘I will take swallow’.
We do not hear it today; and its history shows that Nigerian English can change not only by growing, with some expressions being added over the years, but also by contracting, with some other expressions being lost. My dear young men and women, you must come together and bring about a truly meaningful change in your lives. If you fail, you have no one else to blame. Your present and future are in your hands to make or to mar. The future of Nigeria is in the same manner in your hands and literally so. If for any reason you fail to redeem yourself and your country, you will have lost the opportunity for good and you will have no one to blame but yourselves and posterity will not forgive you.
The vigour, energy, agility, dynamism and outreach that the job of leadership of Nigeria requires at the very top may not be provided as a septuagenarian or older. I know that from personal experience. And it is glaring out of our current experiences. Otherwise, we will be fed with, “The President says” and we will neither see nor hear him directly as we should. Yes, for some, age and physical and mental disposition are not in tandem.
The Scripture says that if God would take account of all our wrongdoings, nobody would be able to stand before Him. While not suffering from amnesia, let us stop still fighting and reacting to the civil war in our hearts, minds, heads and our attitude acrimoniously. Let’s stop living on our different wrongs or mistakes of the past: treasonable felony, Tiv riot and its handling, first military coup and its aftermath, second military coup, Araba, pogrom and the civil war, all in the 1960s.
First, no group is faultless; second, for the greatness of the whole, we need one another as constituents of the whole; third, we cannot be talking and working for Africa’s integration and for Nigeria’s disintegration at the same time. Why for instance should I be stigmatised or despised because of my place of origin, place of birth or where I come from? Where I was born, by whom I was born and when I was born were not choices made by me. They were choices and prerogatives of God.
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