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Imagine how good comes naturally to you. How you can't fathom killing people or contributing to their deaths. Imagine how instinctively you work hard and believe in intellect. Now replace everything with its antithesis. That's how evil people are. It's natural to them too.
The reason you can't understand the average Nigerian in power, is because you wonder how they can live with themselves. You can't conceptualise how they could willingly allow Nigeria to be this way.
Once you realise that evil people have no moral conflicts and that they sleep well at night, you'll understand why Nigeria will never change unless those who feel pain do something.
When you read Ursula Le Guin's Those Who Walk Away From Omelas, you'll understand why people are migrating to Canada instead of rescuing the "little child".
There is nothing, absolutely nothing that will make Nigeria's oppressors change their ways. There is no consequence. We either need a clear and present danger which will invariably hurt the innocent or a demonstration of power, which often hurts the innocent too.
Just look around you. What is the consequence when a Nigerian official decides not to do their job? The wheels of justice grind so slowly and selectively that only those that are out of political favour get caught.
And if you blink, those who are caught, get away with it. Those who replace them soon start behaving badly because there is no institutionalisation of systems and structures. People are tired and weary. They have little emotional energy to insist on justice.
Those who remain in Nigeria who still subscribe to values simply form tribes where things work on a small scale and where they can do some good.
The rest keep praying for a saviour with the emotional strength to lead a movement. They pray for miracles which lead to power vacuums. The evil take advantage of those vacuums and the cycle begins again.
I may not be able to change Nigeria but maybe I can spark the mind of the person who will. Maybe I can save some lives in the meantime. Maybe I can contribute my resources to a solid plan for the future.
I stopped believing in the "miraculous" approach to changing Nigeria, when Abacha's death didn't do so and when the removal of an incumbent president didn't do so.
This change ehn...we will work for it. It will be strategic. It will be gruelling. It will be long and hard. It will be deep and systemic. It won't be miraculous. A few people may spark the movement but it will still require many moving parts.
Add 20 years to your age. That's how old you will be before the first products of a good educational system are produced, even if we start fixing the system now. Nothing miraculous about that.
Without a deep skills set, we will build infrastructure few know how to run or maintain. We will import expatriate talent without the rigorous policies and regulators that are required to manage them.
Doctors will keep leaving, hospitals will keep killing people, the masses will keep being poor because those who know better will keep stealing from them. Those who should dispense justice will keep being exhausted.
Population explosion will lead to scarcity of resources. Enter epidemics & the fight for resources. Emergence of new technologies & our opaque governance will reduce the price & attractiveness of our natural resources. Rogue agents will simply steal them through illegal mining
Congo and Sierra Leone have taught us that even a failed state can still keep supplying natural resources to the world. Opportunists who know how, will become the middlemen who facilitate supply.
By this time our government officials who have stolen billions will relocate their families using the 2nd passports they bought via investing in other countries. They will access their Swiss bank accounts and live very well.
The masses will die in droves until other countries who can't imagine 200 million plus refugees on their doorstep will grudgingly make noises about "doing something". But we all know how that goes, don't we.
The point is, the people in power will NOT change Nigeria for you. There is no incentive to.
