Sit-at-home: We need healing, not additional burden -By Usama Abdullah

I may not be in the right position to reconcile us, but I hope my words would. In difficult time like this, unnecessary noise making is meaningless and don’t matter, at all. Implementation of half-baked policy like the sit-at-home order, yields nothing but add to the already sorry condition of the country. My problem with those agitating for self-government is, they don’t usually stay in touch with the past occurrences.

If only they could remember what has happened some decades ago, we’re more likely to live peacefully with one another. Right from schools, people are either not or inadequately fed with history of the country. This is true having seen the alarming rate of historically uninformed or misinformed persons across the country. One of the greatest mistake Nigeria made was scrapping history from its curriculum in secondary schools.

I am not studying history as a course nor  natural at it, but I can tell exactly how significant it is to the well-being of the society. History ought to be among the compulsory subjects in primary and secondary schools because it will help the students to be historically informed so as to avoid being totally clueless about the history of their past heroes and the country itself.

By revisiting past experiences, we can be able to chart the way forward to healing those previous wounds and have a glorious future ahead. Otherwise, we will continue living in denial as if in a zoo, hopelessly. Of course, the IPOB are not more Biafran than late Odumegwu Ojukwu and other so-called Biafran warriors.

Yet, they can’t even nearly fight the war the erswhile biafran warriors fought. After endless suffering, hunger and lost of tens of thousands lives of innocent people, late Ojukwu and co realised that we are better off together. So, they gave up that idea of secession and embraced unity. I had always wished that IPOB could learn from the past. Meanwhile, division is not the answer to our everyday problems. And never could it be.

Nigeria has been in this mess for about sixty-one years now. We have had several interventions from two different regimes, the military and civilian rule, yet we still suffer the same fate. What keeps tempting our minds to adjust for better is our inability to learn from yesterday’s hardships.This is the reason why I have emphasised in the first place that we should often revisit our history so as to acknowledge, admit and heal those damages.

Our strength as a people lies in helping one another and toward the development of our society, as well. But the moment we channel that strength into doing something else, we have, however, abused that strength. The civil war is a huge reminder. 1967 is a year unworthy of remembrance, unless if we would love it to repeat itself.

This recent thoughtless actions carried out by IPOB is such a heavy miscalculations. Indeed, no sane person will fail to condemn this. No thanks to Nnamdi Kanu for initiating this small terrorist group. Boko Haram is enough a great affliction on the country. We must not justify this or refuse to expose the people involved in this act of violence. If we tend to do so, we are digging our graves ourselves. Truth, they say, is bitter. Agreed. But we must say it, regardless.

Setting ablaze cars conveying goods and other  vehicles is very wrong. And terrorising people won’t help either. This shall not only affect the economy of the states involved, rather that of  the country at large. The earlier we realise this, the better.

Usama Abdullah is a Public Affairs Analyst from Jos, Plateau.