By TOM CHIAHEMEN, Abuja –
Former Nigerian Ambassador to Mexico, Professor Iyorwuese Hagher, lamented at the weekend that the citizens were crying so much that the tears had obscured their ability to see and build a better future.
“There has been too much bloodshed in the country recently. It is necessary to say and again say a thousand times that there has been too much bloodshed in the country,” he noted at the Celebration of his Literary Oeuvre and life, by his Former Students, Friends and colleagues, in Abuja.
The event, which was chaired by a former Minister of Power & Steel Development, Alhaji Bashir Dalhattu, was attended by former Governors, Senators, diplomats and scholars from within and outside the country.
“We are adversaries to ourselves. We need leaders with strong ideals who are prepared for the pains and suffering needed to foster change,” Hagher declared.
He believed that what was needed most in Nigerian at the moment was “politicians who look inwards in their conscience for approval rather than become outside approval-seeking machines, whose public action is measured only by external praise from their primordial base.”
To restore peace in the land, he said “we must concentrate more on compassion and forgiveness than on brute military might, we must explore all avenues of restorative justice to replace retributive justice. Only by innovation, critical thinking, and conceptualization of our reality can we build lasting peace from the ashes of our security nightmare.”
According to the second republic Senator, politicians must look at the present security challenges as a unique opportunity to rise to the true calling as leaders and to embrace healing.
He said: “A young democracy like ours is bound to be messy. Democracies tend to be messy. This is the time for us to think deeply and far for the future of our children. Our present security
nightmare and descent into dystopia have made responsible people reticent, self-effacing, and opting to hide to avoid being harmed or hurt.
“As political leaders, we must understand that leaders are leaders only when they act as leaders. Leadership is acting responsibly in doing the right things rather than doing selfish wrong things.
“Leading is not seats and positions occupied. It is actions taken in situations that make the followers better. We need a different type of politics and politicians. We must shun the politics of meanness and cruelty that is in vogue for one of empathy and love. We must close the gap between elected officials and the voters.
The voters do not deserve the horsewhips and the gun-toting invasions from the police that are their servants. We must stop acting like conquistadors but be each other’s keepers. We are all held together by our mutuality what affects one affects all. At the end of all governance, the duty of leadership is to make the citizens happier. We believe like Alexander Pope, that “Of forms of government let fools contest, whatever is administered best is best.”
Hagher, who is a professor of theatre for development, playwright and poet, also challenged his colleagues in the theatre arts department to use the special skills they possess to urgently make
peace-building the next arena.
“I advocate a national theatre tradition for peace-building. Our earlier focus on TFD must now move to TFP, Theatre for Peace because without peace there can be no development. I call on all Nigerian writers to muster the power of our writing to roll back violence from our land. We must infuse a new consciousness based on education and rationality rather than attempts to mirror the world of magic, spells, and enchantment which is killing our people, and making them spare human parts for rituals.
“Our rural people in villages and humble slums have been given a permanent inferiority complex. They shuffle and stumble along in this impoverished state bitter, and angry in the conviction that they have been deeply wronged by the political class and are brooding for ways to savagely overthrow us.,” he said.
Describing the writers’ pens as mightier than the AK 47 and other arms, Prof Hagher told his colleagues, “let us use our vocation to build a better Nigeria and rescue our people from wretchedness and despair. We must continue to talk truth to power, hold power accountable, and take command of our presence and future existence through humane policies and actions.”
“I am aware that many writers in the Western world enjoy the luxury of ignoring the political turmoils of their times. They claim that it is not their responsibility to find solutions to the world’s problems. This luxury is unaffordable to the African writer and creative artist. For indeed while it may not be our responsibility to find solutions to Africa’s many problems, we are not free to ignore them, nor free to refuse to attempt to find solutions to them. All creative writing is
political. We are either content with the status quo, or like me, we are dissatisfied with the status quo, of things in Africa. This is why we write, and I personally am not just dissatisfied, I am mad at how things are. I am mad at how we treat our weak and downtrodden, our youth, and our women,” he said.
The former Higher Commissioner to Canada, who said the world was growing a younger population that must be prepared for harnessing the potential of a better world, noted that in
Nigeria, 80 % of the population was under the age of 40 years.
“We need to prepare them with adequate knowledge and experience to live in a better world than those we live in now. We need to prepare these youth with universal access to economic opportunities and social services,” he said.
Speaking at the occasion, Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State, called for soul-searching by Nigerian professors to find out why the quality of students they are producing in recent times continues to be poor and does not meet market expectations, compared to those produced in the days professors like Hagher.
Governor Ortom, who was represented by his Commissioner for Education, Prof Dennis Ityavyar, said it had become necessary to interrogate the issue in order to understand what was responsible for the growing decline in the quality of graduates being churned out by the nation’s universities.
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