By Ogunjimi James
Taiwo
"I believe that our very survival
depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers." - Margaret J. Wheatley
"We need more people speaking out.
This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It's overrun with
sheep and conformists." - Bill Maher
Today, we read books, copy quotes and
listen to speeches that were written or said a long, long time ago. We chant
heroic songs in honour of heroes dead and gone, write eulogies yearly of their
heroic acts. We celebrate their years of birth and death.
We remember them for what they did when
they were alive. We remember their takes on economic policies, systems of
governance, and governmental policies. We stand at a crossroad in this generation;
a crossroad where we have to ask: Where are our own thinkers? We are at an
ideological juncture; a juncture where must ask ourselves what this generation
will be remembered for.
Ours is a generation of people who have
adapted to the horrible way of life that has been foisted on us by the leaders
we've had. Ours is a generation that wants to maintain the status quo, we want
to just come to the world, live a quiet, uncontroversial life, make babies and
die; we don't want to be part of anything complex, we don't want to venture
outside our comfort zones, we don't want to be part of societal changes or help
in challenging evil regimes. We don't want to be part of thinkers, we want to
be thought for.
If the kind of youths that characterise
this generation are the types they had in early times, what kind of world will
we have? If nobody had thought of making clothes, perhaps we'll still be stuck
wearing leaves. If no one had thought of inventing a different form of money,
perhaps we'll still be using the trade by batter or even be using cowries. The
point is, they thought their way into civilisation, and until we begin to
think, we won't move forward.
Until we wake up and begin to think
differently from what we were thought to think, until we begin to think differently
from how we were brought up to think, until we train our minds to revolt
naturally to a set-in-stone way of thinking; we won't make much progress.
We are at a juncture in the life of our
nation when we have realised that brawls and wars won't solve our problems. We
need thinkers. We need people who will dare to challenge established ideas. We
need people who will seek to overturn foundational policies that have failed
over time to favour us.
We need people who will defy insults and attacks to
challenge religious deceit and extremist ideas. We need people who will chart
ways out of the economic mess that bad rulership in conjunction with the IMF
has put us in. We need people that will think different, and act different. We
have more than enough people who want to blend in; we need people who want to
stand out.
We have reached that juncture in the
life of our nation; we either think our way out or watch our nation degenerate
further into an abyss of irrelevance. We must awake and change our line of thought
from conforming to established ideas to thinking of new ideas relevant to this
generation to replace the old ones. This is an era of ideas, only a generation
of thinkers can survive this era and make progress. We must be those thinkers,
we must effect the change.
God bless Nigerians!
Ogunjimi James Taiwo
Ogun State, Nigeria
September 2013
Follow me on twitter:
@hullerj or email me: hullerj@yahoo.com
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