Letter To The Nigerian Graduate

By

Francis Kizito Obeya

Pennsylvania, USA

fkizito1@yahoo.com

 

 

Brother,

 

Many times I have sat here at my desk, looking for the right words that will convey to you the deep impact of my feelings. Many times I have deleted a rough draft of my discourse for fear that they lack conviction enough, energy enough to reach into the very depth of your soul or the pith of your intellect to set in motion the necessary machinery that will bring about the right thoughts, the right motivations and the right actions. I am writing these words from a place where you see in your dreams; a place you must have termed nirvana, a perfect utopia and the panacea to all your problems; a place where you have been led to believe serves as a permanent solution to all your quests and wanderings. I do not begrudge your thoughts brother for there is indeed such a place but for most time the victory of getting there is itself so pyrrhic that there is almost no joy when you reach the zenith of this quest. I reached this venue because I dared to dream the same dreams as you only difference being that my dream became a reality. As I swept and cleaned the streets in Washington dc the other day, I thought of you and tried to place you in my shoes and wondered how you would have felt if it were you who had traded his degree for a good broom and a pan on this voyage of no retreat and no surrender.

 

Before I delve into my discourse, I beg to deviate a bit to give recognition to your spirit, my brother. Yes, your ever optimistic and unshaken spirit that keeps you holding on, believing that tomorrow will always continue to be better than today even though there are no symptoms in evidence to convince you of that fact. This spirit has kept you persistently knocking on the doors of ministries, corporations, banks ,oil companies and embassies( yes, embassies) in the hope that someday someone will give you a fair deal and hire you based on the quality of your intellect and not who your uncle or your aunt knows in the government. Your resumes - in their millions – fill up the trashcans of offices as employers laugh at your efforts to better yourself, refusing to believe less in yourself, refusing to give up. But to me these resumes are a tribute to your personality, a testimony of your willingness to take a chance and go the distance. I see it rising in judgment on the last day against those who have snickered and sneered at your attempts to better yourself. Have your ranks not filled up every major city in naija seeking opportunities for  a better living, sharing in the joys of a colleague who just got employed ,the sorrows of those who got turned down and hoping in a hopeless situation that it might be your turn next time? Have they not been exploited by every opportunist, promised the world ,made to serve in the futile promise of the chance to someday partake in the share of the cake? Many are your sisters who have given of their carnal self in exchange for an employment and many also are they who have been kicked to the curb as they refused to cave in to such demands and held their honor intact. Brothers and sisters, I salute all your spirits.

 

Even as you continue to hope, brother, you are not  oblivious of what is happening in this great country of ours. You are not ignoring the mountains you have to climb in your quest to get to the top. You are not unaware of those who would do anything to hold you down even to the point of mortgaging your future. I say this because the last time we spoke you told me that you were simply tired of your situation. You were tired of being without a job, tired of being lied to, tired of being passed over, tired of attending kangaroo job interviews where the whole process was just a charade since they have already hired the people they wanted even before the interview was announced. In short, you said that you were tired of life and you have every right to be. Sometimes in the midst of these” luxuries”, I take a retreat and try to put myself in your shoes jus t so that I can feel your pains. In the agonies of your pains, I saw the struggles you went through right from day one at the university. The struggle to get registered for classes, the handouts that made all the differences between a pass and a fail. Together we survived sadistic lecturers who thought we had it as easy as they did in the days of the oil boom when “naija had the money to spend but nothing to spend it on.” The challenge of jostling the cooking pot with our textbooks and brother, many were the Guinness book of records we must have broken in our quests to discover the shortest cooking time for beans (black-eyed peas.) I shall not even say much on the carryovers we shed tears on or the tuition fees we tried to reject. Need I mention the ASUU strikes, the aluta for all kinds of reasons as we fought one oppressive policy after another? It was a battle every step of the way and many were the souls that fell along the way. It was sweet victory as we stepped up to collect our certificates on convocation day and it was a day of hope as we swelled with the belief that we could face whatever life had to offer since we had survived the worst. I think on all these and feel so sad that it is not yet uhuru since we are still in the struggle even if the battlefield is different.

 

The corruption got into everything and we must suffer for the shortsightedness of our elders. Policies that would have ensured a better future for us have been aborted as government changed hands legally and illegally, funds that would have eased our situation are looted and diverted into the bottomless pockets of a selected few. White hairs of our elders became not a symbol of wisdom but a symbol of lack of judgment, of selfishness, of foolishness. Elders boast shamelessly of how it took them less than three decades to cripple one of the greatest nations on earth and scattered her children abroad. Yes brother, brain drained. Those who got the chance left for other lands to seek a better life there. But a lot of them never forgot where they came from and the countries where they ran to made sure they never forgot. We live, we work, we suffer, we smile but we never forgot brothers, sisters, frie nds and colleagues who have to suffer this curse on our land because grey hairs have ceased to represent wisdom?

 

As you read these words of mine from a newspaper that you rent every morning from the vendor due to the high cost of purchasing one, you must be wondering what I demand of you. All I ask of you is to retreat into your head and think. Think of how we found ourselves in this predicament and what can we do to get ourselves out. You have been given the gift of problem solving and this gift has kept you alive to this point. You have neither gold nor silver but what you have is worth more and will someday make a difference in the life of our country. In a decade or two, God would have called to judgment the architects behind the destruction of this great country and would you then be ready to take part in His great rehabilitation plans for Nigeria? The answer lies in you, brother, search within yourself.

 

I would like to conclude that in all the societies ever known to man, change has always been brought about by the youth who are tired of the old ways. Corruption, bribery, nepotism and all sorts of ills have defined us over the years and witchunting has become disguised as tools for fighting these ills. Brother, I hope our generation will witness a genuine effort aimed at turning things around. I hope that the lot for the Nigerian graduate will not be unemployment, discouragement and despair in our time but hope, progress ,industry and innovativeness. I also expect to see a reawakening of the national spirit where we can once again be proud to be Nigerians once again. I hope in future we shall see prosperity not only in cities and their companies and factories but also in the villages and townships and the land to till and farm. All I can say for now, brother is: Nigeria needs you to think for her today in preparation for a better tomorrow.

 

                                                                Francis Kizito Obeya

                                                                Pennsylvania, USA