1 week Ago By Rapheal
Our country in the past 64 years has been trying to build up our space, to have a true nation-state which the citizens can embrace and call theirs with every sense of pride. For that long, the ultimate goal has remained elusive. As observed, failure has nothing to do with want of trying and hard work; if anything, we have given all and expended very huge resources, yet the indices have continued to hover around the corner of the negative.
The leadership class and everyone else have been left transfixed and perplexed. Nearly every citizen finds it very difficult to place a hand on what the obstacles are or have been, we all agree that our efforts all these years have given us a result far from the intended. The aim of this discourse is to identify what is wrong.
The first is that the people must first have a country before any meaningful work can commence. A country is established by consensus agreement. A country that is imposed or arrived at by conquest would keep boiling, over and over.
What we see across the world confirms this postulation. We saw how Soviet Union disintegrated and disappeared from history despite great advances in science, technology and production and its attendant prosperity. We are familiar with the story of Yugoslavia and the internecine conflicts that took a very fatalistic turn before the country was torn apart.
Yugoslavia was a very competitive country before the predictable explosion. Their case wasn’t about prosperity or lack of it. Neither was it about size, it wasn’t a highly populated country yet staying together could not hold; they hadn’t a country in the first place.
They were products or outcomes of enforcements. The truth is that wherever we have enforcements they remain very shaky entities. Great Britain isn’t out of the woods despite huge concessions in terms of extensive autonomy to component parts.
Europe has appreciable degree of cohesion and harmony because after the dark ages and the conquest mentality that attended the assaults that were widespread during the era, commonsense prevailed later with the drawing of national boundaries according to near homogeneity patterns. Most European countries are not only small with manageable populations, but most have in the main people of same cultural stock. Modern day prosperity only became an enhancer.
People found in America before independence negotiated the future country, the shape, structure, benefits and pathways to nation building. That country’s Constitution is tiny but contains straight to the point matters. Liberty and then production drive development there.
France came from the ashes of about five failed republics before everyone saw the need to reach agreement on the future France. Americans don’t behave like people found in their parent countries in Europe. The French isn’t same as the English or the Germans same as the Swedish.
It is no happenstance. It is the outcome of deliberate effort and rigour, which are very vital factors in the making of any country. History shows us the Italians left the world with the secret when in a parliamentary session they told themselves: “We have found a country the next task is to develop the Italian.
” A country that will work is “sought after.” After this rigorous process, the founding group has added responsibility to “create the citizens” that would suit the ideals of the envisioned country. The average American is very patriotic, and tied to high development of the country and the benefits it offers the citizens.
That position may hold some facts but definitely not the truth. Leave the externals for a moment, the bad side of that country’s history which had to do with the very inhumane trade on human beings, precisely Black people, everything else bordered on patriotism even before the country attained very high economic status. Part of the reason for independence was to entrench liberty and achieve economic independence.
Embedded in this would be the truth that sacrificing for national good was planted in their subconscious even before economic boom came to be. In Israel every security personnel trusts every word given them by another of their citizens and when we tried to ascertain why, we found out, you are never a Zionist until one has gone through some form of formal mentorship on what it takes to be a true Jewish person. Requirements include very little things such as proficiency in speaking and writing the Hebrew language.
In Germany, we couldn’t communicate because nearly every one of the citizens claimed they couldn’t speak English. We learnt many could but won’t try it because of national pride and placing. Shopkeepers told us they didn’t have Japanese cameras and had no need to keep.
They told us: “If we sell Japanese products in our country what happens to our companies who produce same goods?” Now the question would be who taught ordinary traders in shops on the streets such sophisticated economic theories? Who is making them keep to it when in a supposed free economy, private initiative as they brand it, anyone can run on the dictates of “globalization” and rush to another country, get cheaper goods to sell in home country and make very huge profits. We build a country and “create” citizens. The citizens the colonialists trained were far better than what we have made by ourselves.
Isn’t this the plain truth?.
