Ismail Aliu Danesi    London, United Kingdom    March 20, 2008

I can see where you are coming from. I don't think Nigeria will be civilised in our lifetime ( assuming from your article that you must be middle-aged or over). Until we stop pontificating and all this nonsense about "Blood of Jesus etc.", Nigeria will NEVER move forward. The leaders are blinded by their positions, full of themselves, and not visionary!

I grew up in that period but left Nigeria as a youngman. It will take a lot to make me want to come and live in Nigeria because it has been such a let down the way successive leaders have taken the country downhill! Despite all the oil wealth, there is no decent transportation system; you can not move freely because of Okadas, you find boys who should be going to school hawking phone cards from 8.am to 10pm, youngmen who should be in a technical college or secondary school riding Okadas and worse, you have all of them converging to make the roads of Lagos hell to travel on! Then you have the area boys and the robbers, what a state Nigeria is in!

In our days, we used to walk from Kakadu ( Bobby Benson ) to Alagomeji at 2am in the morning without any hassle if we couldn't get a ride back. Can one attempt that trip in Nigeria today? Empire Hotel Yaba, Ambassador Hotel Yaba, Lagos Arcade, Obalende and another club at Alagomeji Yaba were the joints young people went to in those days, coming back home early in the morning the next day. Nigeria was great then and sometimes I wished those years could come back. Those were the years before the Hausas invaded the capital although they were always at Sabo in Yaba and Obalende, Ikoyi Lagos; they were the humble type, with no ambitions to rule the country. It was a time of live and let live!

The colonisers put Nigeria together the way it is today. I am therefore still surprised when people talk about differences when they know it is impossible not to highlight it. We are different peoples put together as one people by the colonialists for easy of governance! Nigeria should embrace the USA system of democracy completely instead of the wishy-washy system it has now. You can not have centralised government and semi-autonomous States, impossible! The States must be given complete AUTONOMY and let the Federal government operate on the same agenda as the USA federal government. You must have Federal Laws and State Laws, which will define our heritages, customs, and traditions. If a State wants Sharia laws, that is fine; and if another wants to be a Socialist State, good also. But our uniqueness and the understanding of our differences will unite the country as one instaed of trying to enforce Oneness on all Nigerians. How could one say the Ibos and the Ijebus are one when they do not speak the same language! Even the Yorubas, Edos, Ibos, Hausas, etc, are not one so why should Nigeria be forced into being a land of One People!

Leave whitemans' democracy alone and let us have what we had before the whitemen and the Arabs came along with their religions and enslaved our peoples. Bring back the traditional rulers because that was how the colonialists were able to rule us; they did it through the traditional rulers! What we need to do is modernise it to fit the present, in a democratic and transparent functional system.

Nigeria needs to devolve power to the States to end this sorry state of affiars where people who live in the oil rich areas do not benefit directly from their God given wealth. Instead, the proceeds are syphooned off to people who live thousnds of miles from the source of the riches. This must stop for Nigeria to move forward as a united country otherwise, there will be many breakaways. It nearly happened many years ago and will happen again if curruption is not arrested immediately.

Next time, it would not be just the Ibos, it would be every State hence it will be very difficult to put down. The signs are already there with the happenings in the Niger Delta, so take note and implement changes as soon as possible without delay. God bless Nigeria.

If the whiteman had all our natural resources, it is a blessing for them but us black people, it is a Curse! We kill each other for the control of the wealth from the resources. Instead of using the proceeds to develop the country, individuals divert the proceeds to their own private account offshore, allowing the whiteman to use it again for their development while the indigenes die of starvation, Aids, and malaria!

When the ministers, parliamentarians, and senators travel abroad, do they see OPEN DRAINS in their travels to the whiteman's countries? Of course not, and that is why they do not die from malaria! Does the world health organisation know about this simple fact? Yes of course, but black lives ain't worth nothing! Brothers and sisters in government, please look to learn, listen to learn and you do not have to be a graduate to be able to observe and compare. One more time, God bless Nigeria!