Are our problems self-inflicted?

Our nation is in a terrible state, on this we can all agree. How did things deteriorate so? Well, look at it this way. If the harvest is poor, who gets the blame, the crop or the farmer? The farmer of course, the one who is supposed to work the land and tend the crops. There's no masking it. Like Chinua Achebe said, our problem is LEADERSHIP. A failure of leadership at all levels including the clergy. Despite the sorry state of things, an outside observer will think we are totally content in our squalor because we haven't done much to change things.
We bicker and moan, there has been a few feeble attempts at protest but how has any of this helped? We continue to recycle the same crop of leaders, sing their praises and pay them fat salaries and allowances many times the minimum wage.

It's like we suffer from a national Stockholm syndrome wherein we have fallen in love with those who have held our destinies ransom and stymied our potentials. Most baffling of all is how we continue to worship at the altar of a clergy that can't stand up to the oppression and greed of authority and speak truth to power.

The priests who should be the nation's conscience and moral compass seem to have gotten into an unholy alliance with those who pull the purse strings and we are all worse off for it. It appears both man and God have failed us.

We have become a pie in the sky people, hopeful that one day all the gracious goodness we desire will fall out of the heavens. According to silicon valley entrepreneur and PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, this is a dangerous state he calls indefinite optimism, a situation where we just hope that things will get better but we don't have a plan and strategy therefore we don't know WHEN things will begin to look up.

We like to believe the sun will rise in the morning but how many of us will survive the long, interminable night? They say we are the leaders of tomorrow but how old will you be when tomorrow finally comes around? If we had a national motto it will be 'e go beta'. This three word expression is the epitaph scrawled on the tombstones of many unrealised dreams.

We have only one life to live, when are we going to demand more from those to whom we have entrusted our welfare before we go six feet under?