If any race qualifies to be the world’s master race it is us the black race. Our continent Africa is the cradle of mankind. It is here too that the very first civilization was recorded. Genetically our genes are found in all the races of humankind. Our gene is the foundational block of all the other races in the world. This is even proven in chemical experimentation and analysis. If you put all the colours in one jar the result you will get is a black colour. Our culture and forms of its expressions are the bedrock of global popular culture. Black people are the most naturally connected and earthy race among the races of the world.
We are also the strongest, most resilient of all races. Blacks had endured the most horrendous treatment ever subjected to any race of humans long before the Holocaust. The western civilization was built on our resources and on our sweat and blood. Think about scores of African slaves packed like sardines or arranged like yams bound in chains hand and foot in the hold of a crude ship with little air, for a journey of months to the Americas. Also think about African slaves bound in one long file accompanied by whip holding Arab slave dealers being marched across the Sahara desert to slave markets in the Middle East.
Yet we survived all these and are still standing. For us to have outlasted all attempts to exterminate us where other races had gone extinct with far less inhuman treatment means that God has a special reason for keeping us alive. We are the true nemesis of all human races. Going by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest we are truly the inheritors of the earth.
That is the essence of Nigeria. Nigeria is like the first born child of a very prominent chief who had died and whose legacies must be advanced. That Africans and indeed black people the world over are still being subjected to inhuman treatment is principally because there is no Black Country ready to take up and advance the interest of the black race in the comity of nations. No other country in the world is well positioned by way of resources, culture, diversity, history and location to take up this challenge than Nigeria.
It is not a role that Nigeria can avoid or continue to shy away from. Indeed in its abiding quest for transformational development, Nigeria will sooner or later be confronted with this reality which it must find ways to fulfil. It is an imperative embedded in Nigeria’s DNA. The question then is how does Nigeria meet this challenge?
The first in the order of priority is for our elites and leaders to raise their consciousness, obligation and responsibility to Nigeria, to a level at par with the leadership of world leaders. Very often one hears our elites and leaders say “We cannot compare ourselves with so and so countries. We have to be realistic”. The statement may be correct to a certain extent, but when closely examined it is actually a cover for opportunistic inaction and deliberate abdication of leadership responsibility. There can be no other reason to explain why a country of 200 million people with such a surfeit of resources and other second to none endowments and advantages should continue to embrace and wallow in mediocrity and underachievement. When a leadership develops the kind of consciousness necessary to make its mark, it will surely find the means to do so the odds notwithstanding.
Some comparative historical lessons are instructive here.
In 1776 when American colonists in the original thirteen states developed the consciousness to seek independence and establish the American nation, they were able to find the corresponding strength and resolve to confront and defeat Britain their oppressor which was at the time the most powerful country in the world. Similarly when the Jews having suffered continuous oppression for centuries in Europe culminating in the Holocaust resolved to return and set up the nation of Israel, they were able to surmount all odds to achieve their goal in 1948. Today no Jew anywhere in the world can be oppressed without incurring the wrath of Israel whether he or she is an Israeli citizen or not. Britain an island nation with little natural resources has faced down and defeated repeated attempts at invading and conquering it from the 1588 Spanish armada Hitler’s blitzkrieg. China which is on the verge of becoming the preeminent power in the world today took the path to its present position in 1949 led by a conscious leadership after centuries of foreign subjugation.
In the current circumstances of our world, Africa faces two major immediate issues to which it must find answers; the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath, and the fierce strategic competition between China on the one hand and the western countries led by the United States of America on another. These issues have been joined by the existing ones of institutional racism, economic and political subjugation of Africa and black people all over the world.
Nigeria as the leading African and Black Country in the world must square up to these challenges. It must cut itself loose from the self-abnegating consciousness that denies it the right to achieve what it must achieve. All the feeling of apprehension that our leaders often entertain about possible sanctions or punitive actions if Nigeria moves to assert its real self in the global arena in pursuit of its manifest destiny is unnecessary. Why fear people who in their minds fear us for what we are? No country however powerful can afford to ignore Nigeria or take action against Nigeria without an injurious blowback to itself. By its very essence, Nigeria has a built-in insulation against any intended or actual attempts that will be mounted by any foreign power acting either singly or in concert with others to prevent it from taking its place in the world.
What remains now is for our elite and leaders to throw off the abiding yoke of fear and uncertainty that has characterised our engagement with the world. It is time for Nigeria to confidently lead the renaissance of African and black peoples and for the world to accept and reckon with that. In that is our salvation as a nation.
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