7 Deadly Sins

Mahatma Gandhi said that seven things will destroy us:

*wealth without work
*pleasure without conscience 
*knowledge without character
*commerce without morality (I want to rephrase this one - business without ethics)
*science without humanity
*worship without sacrifice (or religion without sacrifice)
*politics without principles 

I don't know about anybody else o, but when I read this a while back, it just screamed NIGERIA NIGERIA NIGERIA!!!!!! All the 7 deadly sins are upon us!

Wealth without work. The last decade has been marked with people rising from  odogbolu (may be a fictional place, I dunno) to lekki phase one, the decade of climbing into range rovers, the decade of kids that don't know what the air in business class smells like, as all they know is first class, the decade of the G6. where this money came from we dont know but all we know is that they have ARRIVED! And we will join them to enjoy, we go collect our own awoof. Me too i go collect Range Rover 2011 Evoque if somebody fit dash me!

Pleasure without conscience. Every Nigerian has a PhD in Gbedu Sciences. We do what we want, when we want, because we can, and because we can afford it, whatever the consequences. In the words of my man Kanye "I was drinking earlier, now I'm driving", foolish, foolish behaviour

Knowledge without character. Knowledge without wisdom. Most of us can boast of having the best educations that money can buy, Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford you name it, a ti de be, we get their paper, certificate, but we lack the wisdom to apply the knowledge we have accrued.

Business without Ethics. If you are running, or working in an organisation with good ethics, then congratulations to you, you are prob the only one. Bribery, corruption, perception management, sexual harassment, corner corner, zero integrity, everything is rife in our society.

Science without humanity. Ok this not so much. But we're getting there. Our hospitals are so degraded, I have heard countless stories about people bleeding to death after shoddy child births, being rushed from hospital to hospital only to meet strikes, and an untimely death.

Worship without sacrifice. Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Catholic, Babalawo, Nigerians expect something for nothing. In the days of Abraham, and all the bible folk, they sacrificed sheep and goat, but all God asks in the 21st century is a sacrifice of righteousness in return for the mansion in banana, the bentley, the gucci, fendi and prada that we badger him about in prayer. But for us its want want want want, and we don't have anything to give!

Politics without principles. I don't want them to send anybody to my house. I will leave this one to your imaginations! let me fuel it small sha, missing ballot boxes, closed schools for a month for elections, copious deaths from road accidents, taxes spent on God alone knows what, state fund allocations going missing, rows of PJ's parked at MMA, no infrastructure....

My point being that we are fast heading to destruction, like a car travelling a hundred miles per hour and a tyre suddenly bursts, sending the car spinning out of control, with no direction. Such is the state of every facet of our society, education, healthcare, infrastructure, family, religion, local government, commerce, security, everything spinning out of control without direction, we have no visionaries, our ship has no destined port.

I won't blame this on our government, I blame it on us, you, me... As Joseph Marie de Maistre said, "Every nation has the government it deserves". We deserve the government we have now, we deserve the government we will inherit after the 2011 elections, if we do nothing about it. What we need is radical change, and we as Nigerians have to take it by FORCE. I'm not saying that we should go onto the streets and protest, begin dey throw bottles for ground, but we need to protest, and take Nigeria back from the clutches of destruction. If not for yourselves, so that your children (whenever u have them) will not curse their parents' generation for leaving them a charade for a country.

Xoxo