On The Blackest Weekend Ever

On the 26^th of May, I posted an article urging Nigerians to wake up and work together for the common good; PROJECT 2025. Barely two weeks after and I have never been so certain of anything I’ve written. That post could have been read yesterday i.e. the Monday after the blackest weekend (in my opinion) in Nigeria’s history and it would have made more sense.

It just seems like PROJECT 2025 is too far off, what we need is PROJECT NOW! Because if any of the occurrences that happened between Friday, 1^st and Sunday, 3^rd should repeat itself a couple more times, the whole country would be in disarray.

First, we had the strikes embarked by the former unilag, now maulag students because of the change in the institution’s name even after their VC just passed on. Friday afternoon, a petrol tanker burst in flames on lagos-ibadan expressway destroying 24 vehicles in the process. 24 vehicles! Where was the response team, did anybody even try making a distress call, do we have a response team in the first place? If we do have one, I’m wondering what they were doing and how long it took them to get to the location before 24 vehicles burnt.

As if that was not enough, a Nigerian cargo plane crashed in Accra, Ghana claiming 15 lives. We witnessed all that, went to church on Sunday morning to pray to God for his intervention and ended service just in time to hear that there was a bomb blast in the living faith church in bauchi. There were claims that it was the members of the church nearby that actually got affected, but seriously, how heartless can you be that you would blow up your fellow Human being in the name of fulfilling religious rites?

I recommend that if you are tired of life, you should see a psychologist and if that doesn’t work, you can try jumping off a cliff or a plane, so you end up hurting yourself alone and not disturbing others. Well, the Boko Haram bomb blast was just a prologue to the Dana plane crash some hours later that day in Lagos. A “supposed prefect, efficient” plane crashed tail first into a two storey building four minutes away from the airport. That when the cankerworm crawled out, the so called plane was a used plane the real owners didn’t trust and one of our most respected airlines in Nigeria opted to purchase it to transport lives. Allegations were even made that the plane had issues some weeks earlier and was supposed to be headed to a maintenance workshop that fateful Sunday, but the Indian owners enforced that it should be put into service, and our own brothers and sisters working in the ministry signed and issued the plane permission to  fly.

How greedy is that? You wanted gain but now you’ve lost the plane alongside lives. Is that what we need as a nation? Useless, ill-maintained planes that would fly us? I reckon if you witnessed the happenings this weekend and you don’t see a need for change, you should see a doctor. It’s high time the masses stopped suffering for decisions made by some “high class” citizens. It’s high time we had a say in the governing of our country, its high time God is brought into this equation.

Nigeria was selected as one of the top ten countries that had the highest possibility of having a stable developed economy. That basically means we have hope, and where there is hope, anything is achievable. So like you read last week, PROJECT 2025 can be a reality, actually, it is a reality, it only needs your input and efforts. There’s no use ignoring all that’s happening around us or minding your business, because that house that the plane crashed in could have been yours. To prevent this, we need to join hands and scrub this country clean of its ever growing dirt. It’s in our hands now.

This is our country, our motherland, it should depict our culture and who we are, not depict some greedy, power-craving people, so let’s fight to make sure it does.

To all the families of the victims of the plane crashes, the fuel tanker accident and the bomb blast, accept my sincere sympathies, may your loss turn to benefits and your joy be replenished in a thousand folds.

What has happened has happened; we just have to make sure it doesn’t repeat itself.

I am a motivational speaker and writer by mandate, PROJECT 2025 is definitely a reality!

Damstylee