HAPPY NEW YEAR …Message: By Prince Lasun Bakare


My dear fellow Nigerians, welcome to New Year …. Please allow me as a citizen of our great nation Nigeria to share my personal feeling about my beloved ‘GOD MADE COUNTRY’ (Nigeria).

My gratitude goes to every single activist or any patriotic individual (citizen) who had spoken about the problems facing our beloved Country. This message is my personal opinion (…not that you’ve not heard enough already) as a concern citizen who loves his country and rummaging around for not only justice but freedom. Freedom in many words is no heritage. Preservation of freedom is a fresh challenge and a fresh conquest for each generation. It has always been based on the religion concept of the dignity of man. The discovery that man is free is the greatest discovery of the ages. Even our own children, which is commonly thought to lack coherent, is guided from one utterance to the next by the images of their parents behaviors, both now and in the future.

Let us suppose that the idea of being free can be expanded to embrace the whole range of human experience, including all accumulative knowledge in addition to the beauty and problems of the world. No one wants to call a-spade-a spade. We loved to dance around the truth. But what we failed to realize is that, these problems are bigger than any tribal or ethnic group.

Nobody or anyone let alone any nation will help us solve any of our so called problems; LEADERSHIP…TRIBAL…PREJUDICES…POLITICAL…GREED…CORRUPTIONS…RELIGIOUS…PSYCHOLOGICAL…POLITICAL GODFATHER & SON SYNDROME…to mention but few.

This reminds me of a vital comment that caught my attention in Nigeria Tribune Newspaper interview with Ex-Governor of Anambra State –Chief Chukwuemeka Ezeife: Question: What is the recipe for free and fair election in Nigeria? Answer: “This country is designed by God to be a super power, to be a rallying point for all black people. It is the purpose of God in bringing Nigeria into being and not the Politicians. So God who made Nigeria must have designed and planned how we can achieve our destiny.” Now! It’s all God’s fault. His answer might sound repulsive, but hey! That goes one of our ex-Governors. I guess we have to wait in line to fix our problems…Food for thought. May be someone needs to remind Mr. ex-Governor, that the same God created; America, Britain, Russia, Japan…etc. Thank you, Mr. ex-Governor…

Please don’t get me wrong, the idea or mentality to remove Almighty God from the affairs of any nation or society whether it’s politics, virtue or greed… is a myth and subtle deception of Satan, because God is the source of all power including political according to Rev. C. Kingston Ekeke (PhD), is correct. I wholeheartedly agreed with him, but not when you have to throw your hands in the air and expect a quick fix from God. As they say; Heaven helps those who help themselves.

One thing is for sure, the recipe for perpetual ignorance is that we have to be satisfied with our opinions and content with our knowledge. Mr. ex-Governor…Even though I agreed to disagree with you, but I would defend to death your right to voice your own opinion. My heart goes to the graded, the enslaved, the exploited, the weak and poor, the poorest of the poor in our country.

We cannot do everything, and there is no sense of liberation in realizing that. It enables us to do something small, and to try to do it well. We are always surprised at the progress that comes from doing simple things well, regardless of our status or hierarchy. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for Almighty God to step in and do the rest. That’s when you need God. Even though we may never witness the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

In actuality certain quotes and words, when they are used as often by people; suffer in their meaning as if with cancer or inflation, but not with President John F. Kennedy’s quotes of the twentieth century,…Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for your country…It’s innumerable shades of meaning seem to span all across humanity. Our selected not elected leaders can care less what they can do for common people let alone their country. Their number one priority is their pockets. The sad part is; they don’t even know what to do with the money after all. It’s really sad. Their deception is adamant to what Chinese proverb says; “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Shame doesn’t exist in their lexicon. We seldom find a politician with humility approach in his undertaken. Most of our selected leaders fall prey to fear of either their god father or their sponsors, to ambition and desire to stand for what’s right. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within or around him, and so loses all respect for him and for others.

With all our abundant resources, well educated, hard working people, we still let few selfish, arrogant and ethnic diversity destroyed our country. Our children let alone the future of Nigeria are the lease in the mind of these vicious, egocentric, self-centered and tyranny leaders ruling our country.

We all agreed that ‘Rome was not built in a day’, but where’s the vision? Where’s our constitution? Let alone initiate the process of building the infrastructure. We loved to point fingers. We’re now being upgraded from 419’s…to wiz’s of political godfathers… and kidnapping experts and down graded as Giant of Africa. Not to talk about the latest CNN headline world news as one of our young citizen (a 23-year-old engineer – young and smart but spoiled brat) was caught in an attempt to blow a passenger Airplane in Detroit, Michigan. Whether we believe it or not, agreed or disagreed, it’s all shown on the (world) news. Pictures don’t lie. The reality is that the accused person; is a Nigerian. How do you think this will reflect on good hard working Nigerians (dual citizen) living outside the country?

When are we going to get out of the invisible BOX? The generic invisible box created not by the so called colonial masters but us. Who is going to send us another Moses or Messiah to get us to the promise land? President Abraham Lincoln once said; “You can’t escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

My fellow Nigerians…Let’s wake up and smile the coffee. We don’t have much time. Timing is the chief ingredient in judgment. Nothing is a waste of time if we use the experience wisely. The question is when? When are we going to wake-up?

We all want to be safe; we all want to be secured in our pretty little (space) world, fantasy world if I may, the world of “well established order”, (but nobody wants to call a-spade-a-spade) a disorder in disguise.

We live in a world of our partnership, which we do not want to be disturbed - the protocol “relationship between husband and wife, father and son, mother and daughter or vice visas in which we hold together tight, in which there is misery, distrust, fear, anxiety, in which there is danger, jealousy and domination.

The questions remain, what do we tell our children when we are on that last breath to answer Mother Nature? What? – You know what I mean – Death of cause! As George Eliot puts it; ‘when death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.’

We are selfish and self centered. Our intelligence tells us to be careful; is that what we are afraid of? Have we heard of any human being that lives forever? Obviously, no one can dispute the former because we don’t have the answer. Where is Tafawa Balewa? Where is Obafemi Awolowo? Where is Zik? …There is no compromise at that end. So why is the fuss? Why are we afraid of the truth? In many words, digging for truth has always proved not only more interesting but more profitable than digging for gold or embezzlement. Talking about intelligence; is it the same intelligence that warn us to be careful, that operates when we divide ourselves into nationalities within our own country, East versus West, North versus South and vice versa.

What’s wrong with the so called Religion groups? I mean the fanatics – We make the divisions between you and me, us versus them, them against us, of what we don’t even understand. Is that intelligence?

In order words, we have fragmented ourselves, as in avoiding a precipice. It is one of our peculiar idiosyncrasies that we as a nation or society must integrate ourselves in order to make a point.

I presumed we all agreed that the country (Nigeria) that we lived in is immoral. If so, then we not only rejected social morality which means; greed, envy, corruption dishonesty, ambition, nationality but also adopted the worship of class and the rest.

A tall candle does not suddenly go out when there is only an inch left; it burns on until there is just a little puddle of wax to show where it has been. If the block can be chiseled to fit a wall, as some hypocrites are striving for, it will be used. But if rough edges of arrogance, self-centered and self will make it too difficult to shape it should be ejected. You can run, but we can’t hide.

My dear brothers and sisters! We have a lot of work to do. Don’t let anyone deluded us other wise. Tomorrow might be too late. The clock is ticking. Time is of essence. This is the beginning of another year…2010. We have to or should I say; must have a purpose. Without a purpose, work can be as meaningless, and create as much frustration and despair, as unemployment or enforced inactivity. Even though purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning without it.

Doing whatever needs to be done to solve our problems, putting ourselves together; stop pointing fingers, stop blaming somebody or someone for our fault or whatever comes to our mind to make our society (country) livable is worthwhile.

:”Good” or “bad” our decision is more or less a matter of position in the sequence. It also depends on the union of temperamental bequest with specifics. Every position or decisions we made are keyed, as it were, to the action of a certain range of our temperaments. If we are lucky and stick with the former, not only for our children (future) sake, but also for BLACK RACE, it will not only bring joy and glory but peace and harmony.

My New Year message to our selected leaders is simple, (in a nutshell) pay attention to first warning that comes in form of a little pebble, when you ignore it; you get hit by a brick. Ignore the brick and get wiped out by a boulder… (Food for thought)

Thank you,
Long Live Nigeria! May GOD BLESS NIGERIA!

Peace…Shalom…Salaam………..’Ahimsa’ (advocate)


Prince (Arc.) F.K.O.Bakare
Happy New Year
Chicago, IL USA

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