By Timawus Mathias
“The greatest glory in living lies, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” “We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right”. -Nelson Mandela
Two great quotes from Madiba Nelson Mandela as I join millions of his lovers in the great wait. Wait for what? For that flashing moment when the news would pierce the air of our violent silence that the symbol of forgiveness by earthly man has joined his ancestors in the great beyond!
How more beautiful can it be? The great man Mandela, lies translating to eternity, and the world waits for the moment! Is it to celebrate the apocalyptic fall of an Iroko tree in the African parlance? Or to mourn the departure of a global patriot and citizen?
“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” Thus should Madiba fall to the home call, it is a rising to glory earlier foreseen and foretold by none other than the man himself. Thus as I wait, I do not await a fall. I await a rising, more triumphant than even the birth that began the legendary life.
“We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right” in all its simplicity, is a falconer’s call to human kind for we save Madiba, fall prey to the devourer - time.
I have never thought of Nelson Mandela without wishing how much Nigeria needs men like him. Was it the circumstance of his boyhood and nativity under apartheid, in which regard, was it a blessing in disguise? I must be Nigerian to think like that. Life is about conviction, belief and choice. When it mattered, the great Madiba raised his voice against injustice and inspired a following that transcended a lifetime of waiting. Jailed for 27 years, Mandela sat on the world’s conscience like a cancerous cyst, painful, sustained, and lingering until the fullness of time. He walked out of Robben Island, a free man, but it was the world that was freed.
As I wait, I ponder over the lessons Nigerian leaders have not learnt. Read my thoughts of an issue that matters today, and see how far we are from the great arrival. In my country Nigeria, the values of decency, nationalism and the liberty of man, that Nelson Mandela epitomized matter little. A storm in a tea cup is causing our country sleepless nights.
As you read this column today, the Nigerian nation is at a loss what would emerge from the wasteful Governors’ power-play in Abuja which has gone unabated over the small matter of Chairmanship of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum. This is in oblivion to the masses are trampled upon by high cost of living and joblessness from Maraba, Mararraba, Karmo, Gwagwa, DeiDei, Dutse-Alhaji, Karu and Nyanya just on the outskirts.
This is not factoring the overall national condition of hunger and squalor under which common folk are shackled helplessly. I guess the Governors share the thought that Nigerians are not eating from dustbins yet.
Not that I think much of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum really. It has no basis or function in the constitution and has to my mind not given itself to engendering among its members a collective action towards genuine patriotism, true democracy, guarantee of freedom and liberty for the ordinary citizen, the issues for which having a governor matter to me most.
I look across the Nigerian landscape and all I see is a great many of our executives granted golden lifetime opportunity to impact on the people meaningfully and positively, and much of what I see is a sea of wasted opportunity and monumental failure, albeit in the midst of which one finds flashes of success stories. This is in spite of our stupendous wealth, and human resource.
I look around the African continent or elsewhere on the globe, particularly the US and I see how elected public officers at the rank of Governor or President are using their offices to be change agents for the good of their communities, and I look here and all I see is embroidery and designer suits that convey more value than the character of man.
The Governor’s Forum has failed to rise up to the fundamental national calamities in health, education, decadent infrastructure, urban decay, and good governance, which to me encapsulates the total task of Governance. Individually, the office of Governor has tended to rob some if not all of them, of their unique simple “selfness”, in the sense that they lose their persona to the office. How many times do you hear friends of men in office lament, that the man is different from who was once known. This is the reason they fail to build institutions that bring them about, institutions such as the democratic process of election through transparent primaries, full access to Local Government Council statutory allocations even with supervision for tacit accountability. All told, given the resources these states receive, many of them have cases to answer as to why people’s fundamental needs are not met.
But all told also, I do not think there is much more than a wasteful jamboree in all that the Nigerian Governor’s Forum stands for.
Sadly I have generalized in my castigation, and my assumption is far from the truth. Not all the Governors are failures. In my thoughts, the bad apples have afflicted the good ones.
The Nigerian Governors’ Forum is important for President Goodluck Jonathan far more so, that the Chairman of the Forum is a friendly commodity. But the fiasco appears to embroil his finest and most accomplished - Jonah David Jang against all odds delivering development to Plateau like a Tsunami, pitched against Rotimi Amaechi who has done exploits in Rivers, and you can say the same for Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom, and Sule Lamido of Jigawa.
I pray Mandela is still alive today. I pray President Jonathan and all his Governors, if they eat sumptuously in that dinner tonight, give a thought to what matter in a life whose story is told by the life of Madiba. Thoughts in his mind in his quiet evening in South Africa are lofty - of freedom, of letting things be as dictated by the wishes of the people, of not mansions on the globe, but of upcoming leaders mentored for generations to come. We need Mandela’s type of leaders.
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