Rebranding Nigeria - The person pursuing or occupying elective office - Leader As an Onus

The Honourable Minister of Information and Communications, the erstwhile NAFDAC strongwoman, Prof. Dora Akunyili launched a project called the rebranding of Nigeria which in a nutshell, despite all the big grammar, basically had to do with changing the way we perceive ourselves and the way foreigners see us. Rebuilding our national image was a thing of pride and urgency in other to emphasize and highlight our good points instead of the bad ones. Good talk, if you ignore the fact that the Honourable Minister lost her phone at the occasion. Welcome to the real Nigeria.

At 52 years, Nigeria has really come to stay. Necessity condemns us to co-existence. The truth is that the geographical entity called Nigeria, never mind that we are yet to attain nationhood and never may, at this rate, has coalesced into one solid structure around and within which several very diverse tribes and world outlooks have tried to carve a niche and compete with each other for the resources available mainly in one geopolitical zone of the country. There has come to be some, well, if not understanding, then mere acknowledgment that we will all carry one international passport and use one currency.

Achieving this has not been easy. In Nigeria's unimaginable odyssey, a brutal civil war was fought and the geographical entity known as Nigeria remained intact. However, nationhood, which ought to be the hallmark of any serious people, has continually eluded Nigeria.

Briefly, in the sixties, Nigeria was one of the newly independent African countries that held out so much promise in Africa. Then it fell to the scourge ravaging Africa at the time, soldiers, who had no training in civilian administration took power promising to fix things and ended up worsening them. In the aftermath of the civil war came the oil boom. Nigeria emerged as a regional economic power thanks to vast reserves of crude oil found in the swamps of the area where the Niger River flows into the Atlantic through numerous tributaries, an area now known as the Niger Delta region, hotbed of militancy in Nigeria. According to a military head of state then, Nigeria's problem was not money but how to spend it. He then proceeded to place orders for cement in quantities that would have satisfied all industrial and commercial requirements for about 22years! Since Nigeria's problem was how to quickly expend her resources regardless of generations unborn, she then decided to pay the salaries of striking workers in a neighbouring African country!

After that came the return of what seemed to be democratic rule, at any rate there was a civilian government. And with it quickly came the austerity measures designed to pull the economy out of the woods where successive military regimes have repeatedly raped it almost to death. But again that civilian experiment did not last because either the civilians got too greedy or the soldiers could not wait any longer for their share in Nigeria. They are stakeholders, too, after all. All through well into the nineties, soldiers occupied Government Houses, determined currency exchange rates, set economic targets and controlled educational policy! Professors, medical doctors, economists and other professionals left the country in droves. The country seemed forlorn, besieged by dark forces (and dark goggled ones, too), deserted by her citizens who fled to exile for their lives, pariahed in international circles she hitherto had commanding influence. Nigeria became a bad, nasty dream until divine intervention came in the form of an apple.

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