CHANGE BEGINS WITH ME...

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking. ”…Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Theoretical Physicist

Change! 

Perhaps unknowingly, we all are advocates of change, yet we fight it. Just like hypocrisy, we preach it, yet we violate it. Also ignorantly, we witness it, yet we pretend like it’s not imperative, like we are bewildered by the truth, and due to our consequential circumstances, we, like feigning faith, wishing to be miraculously elevated beyond our sorry state, create our own very lucid world of ridiculous fantasy, all in the bid to evade the mysterious and age long necessity, change.

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future”…John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) 35^th President of the USA

What is Change?

Trust me or not, just like love evades us, no one has actually come up with an impressive meaning of change. 
The dictionary tells us that change means to make or become different, which of course can be through an act or process.

How evasive can that be in this very modern world that we have made so much complicated than necessary? 
A world where we literally get ahead of ourselves due to our egos, insecurities, ignorance, greed, selfishness and insatiable want of power and lust for presumable virtual wealth, which is all vanity that ultimately leaves us in the blistering cold after we have been used to dissipate the actual necessities out of our lives.

“To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often”…Winston Churchill (1874-1965) Former British Prime Minister

The Most Constant Thing

Like it or not, change is not only important, it is pretty damn inevitable, more like a forceful phenomenon. 
Look at it this way, a couple fall in love, passion brews, heats transfer, copulation happens, the female gets pregnant, which of course comes with a level of pain and inconvenience for a period of time, a baby is born, then growth happens, and the baby becomes you. 
You look back and realize you have passed through series of real life situations, the experiences make you unique. 

See? We cannot escape change; we just have to pay attention in order to realize that even nature is not in a hurry.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”…James Baldwin (1924-1987) African American Writer

The Real Issue

 

Nigeria is the most populous nation of the African dark skinned people with a whopping 170 million humans. 
She is on the top 10 highest producers of the proverbial black gold, crude oil, and was once popular for oil palm, groundnuts, cocoa and even kola nuts.

Nigeria is also known to have fantastic weather and massive deposits of highly valuable natural resources such as coal, clay, tin, bauxite, columbite and the list goes on and on.

Impressed yet? Then wait for the unpleasant one, Nigeria unfortunately also has a worldwide reputation for corruption, Money laundering, fraud, Illegal drugs, fake drugs, and surprisingly also human trafficking and consequently prostitution.

The implications of corruption cannot be over-emphasized, parts of its effects have been poor infrastructural developments such as bad roads, abysmal educational and health sectors etc. that have frustrated and pushed the citizens to look for alternatives of welfare even in dark places as the government looks irresponsible.

This has made Nigeria (ns) seek to rebrand herself over the past years with initiatives such as ‘Good people, Great nation’ and recently ‘Change begins with me’. Really? This is more like a cosmetic approach of a sort. Just like putting a bandage on a deep wound just for the purpose of concealing it.

“Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive, easy to govern, but impossible to enslave”…Henry Peter Brougham (1778-1868) 1^st Baron Brougham and Vaux

Enlightenment…and truth

This is exactly why I am a huge fan of ‘systems’ where you analyze multiple causes and effect before you take decisions.

See, Nigeria and or in proportion to the entire world has a fundamental problem that has to be viewed holistically. 
This is why education is more than important, in order to help build the self-esteem of people, make them aware of their environment and ultimately themselves, people have to believe that they are a part of this world, and that yes they do matter.

A school of thought teaches us that education can be compared to a key, which sets us free from the prison of the mind.

We keep mentioning change without really talking about it. Change is an action word; at least it makes an impact when it is actually done. Change comes with pain, which of course can make us smarter, and pain is usually attributed to love, we then may be safe to say change has a link with emotional intelligence.

And when change is on the spot, perhaps we can use history to explain it in numbers. Change is present in the evolution of man, change turned around the fortunes of Kodak upon the worldwide acceptance of digital camera technology, change helps us send information with the speed of light across Continents and even planets miles and light-years apart respectively.

Want more numbers? We say Nigeria is the ‘Giant of Africa’ but we fail to complement our export with massive inflow of imports we either don’t entirely necessarily need or that we can produce locally with the required political will.

Do the math, for every car, truck, TV, computer, phone, DVD, fridge, washing machine, industrial machine, Air Conditioner, luxury apparel, furniture, decoration, building material, all the way down to toothpicks and even the petroleum product that we can produce locally but we didn’t, instead we opt to import for whatever reasons from laziness to lame excuses to incompetence to corruption and selfishness, consequently blind to the economic implications of our actions and in-actions, and in addition to the monies some of us steal and take abroad.

Calculate all that it costs in Naira, and then deduct it from the economy, by principle, we are meant to be at war with ourselves for want of a cup of garri (cassava by-product), and then die shamefully of penury in a land of plenty, all due our greed and self-inflicted blindness to the love initiative that can sustain us.

Our mysterious survival compels me to further aggressively believe in the school of thought of the presence of the Most High Power, God.

This is the only logical explanation of the existence of a people where the rich oppress the poor that they stole from, and still waste the monies of unbelievably ridiculous material things that just eventually filter away especially after they are gone as the acquisitions are of no value to their offspring, yet they never learn from vanity and apparent greed and wickedness.

You want to talk change? Think again, just as I said earlier about us being advocates of change but we are unaware and also hypocritical about it, yes it does have a correlation to love, we cannot totally define love, but when it comes for us, it does conquer all, but we can only survive change when we adapt to it, like necessity being the mother of invention, we need to re-invent ourselves, and loving ourselves more especially with action being an integral part of it all.

Thanks for reading.

Akin Abimbola. (akinzogee@yahoo.com, akinzogee@gmail.com)

           Twitter: @akinzogee

           Facebook: Critical Lyric by Akin Abimbola

Did we make your day? Spread the word. Tell them it happened here.

Become a fan, follow and share.                  

You can be a critical lyricist!

Talk to us.

What did we miss?

What do you think?

Be grateful for being alive and let your content flow…

Sources: Google, Good reads, Wikipedia, Brainy Quote, Proverbia, OPEC, RICS, Webster's Dictionary

This article is an original piece, reasonably researched and contains considerable opinion and a unique style of the author.

The names in actual stories are not real and the stories in this write-up are usually fictional, consequently, people’s names appearing are purely co-incidental, except for quotes and news that are typically referenced.