Dipo Olowookere
By Nneka Okumazie
There is a hole that the lack of wisdom presents that makes anything possessed become of low worth. To believe that accusing others of things as something worthy of expression is confusing what progress should mean.
What should be obvious is that those who were evil in slavery years ago were not wise, they may claim to be better than others, but they were not wise. They forgot what it might mean for the future of their place and their people and how long it might take to correct the mistake.
The same lack of wisdom is possible for people who think that blaming others or doing things unconnected to how they can have an edge or become better as a people is what they need.
Success is not a state; though it is common to chase the state of having things or getting things, success is mostly time. Time decides eventual success, not the state of things at one point or another. This success of time should have been the project of a people who want to emerge into lasting progress to ensure that correction of the situation is not by using hate or blaming, but by working towards change.
There is what a community means more than just a people of similar looks, language or origin. In Africa, there are many countries with several tribes, but it is difficult to find lots of tribes with their own specialized healthcare system, their own food program, or their own specialized education program, skill program, etc.
Such that coming from a particular tribe, these are the benefits of just being from there; anyone, regardless of demography, can go and get it with nothing or much, much less. Most of the tribes don’t have it, yet there is often the assumption that they care about each other because of some nepotism, but what it means to really care about themselves as a people isn’t there.
Some tribes in several countries are seeking to secede, which, possibly from the error of colonization, may have brought some together. But nationhood, people-hood or community-hood is not in name or simple identification only, but what they do for themselves collectively, showing the potential of what they can do alone, not assumptions of what might be, for a people of untested deep cooperation that have done little in general, that mostly the privileged among them benefit from things.
African Americans need more than the story of an individual making it, going from poverty to success through some profession, work or talent. That is good for them and those around them, but as a people, it does not do much. It also does not do much to go to a community and do things for a few people as a way to give back when the stretch of progress is not for a few.
Like most people have a phone, how can the people in Africa and elsewhere have things of benefit for all their people towards progress and development in this modern world of heavy competition, where all kinds of people from around the world go to other places to rise?
What is the possibility for change and adjustment that benefits all, with several options to ensure that it does not easily fail across sectors and solutions?
There will always be people who are an embarrassment to their own people but if there is nothing going for them, it could be seen as what they have to say or do, or it could seem there is tacit endorsement because they continue to seek what is responsible for failure when no one is building out of it as a people, for their success of time.
[Ecclesiastes 9:12, For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.]
