Narrow and Wide Path the Nigeria Child

The Nigeria child smart and intelligent full of great plans and well talented preparing for what the future holds for them. Living in a nasty environment full of vices and crime, trying to struggle out of it to make a bright future. Listening to promises made by past leaders some decades ago that never materialized. The great rosebud of opportunity opened up again. And we beheld the frail petals of national promise on parade grounds laid out like the final triumph presided over by God Himself. Nigerian children, beautiful, innocent and resplendent in their parade uniforms which spoke well of their designers’ healthy respect for the rainbow, marched with their tiny feet to the music and sound of that promise.

Children’s Day. The young came out in their best, wearing their good manners with a profound sense of achievement, to heart the message for the nth time: the future belongs to them. They are the future captains of Nigeria. The old are only regents waiting dutifully for the kings and queens to grow up. That message has the aged, rusty look of a threadbare cliché. But it is still a good message because it is the promise of the present to the future. Every generation is obliged to keep that torch of promise burning.

One wonders what went on in the little minds as the little pairs of ears listened to the messages from our leaders delivered appropriately in manly voices, a cross between the parade group below and the habitudes of an ill-prepared orator. They heard, like children and youth and adults before them had heard more times than one, that the Bible is always right: the road to self and national destruction was carefully constructed by Old Nick employing Italian road builders.

The road is wide, well-paved and straight as an arrow. They heard that road is not a super highway; it is a cul de sac. At the end of it, death, shame and destruction lie in wait for those with ears but won’t heat. Those who take it end up in the slammer or at that the tortuous, crooked, narrow footpath, barely wide enough to take a bicycle, which cuts through difficult terrains, is the right road. It leads to happiness. Those who take it are wise. Said the president “the road to success and greatness may be hard rugged but its reward is the joy and satisfaction of achievement;”

There is no knowing yet what choice of our kids have made. We will have to wait a few years hence to know which they found more fascinating, the thundering tawdry of the ritual or the tingling tinsel of exhortations. What happened, of course, was that at the end of the parades, the little ones returned to their different homes.

The children of the rich, the powerful and the privileged, returned in their father’s big cars to the splendid mansions where liveried servants minister faithfully to their infantile needs. Their ceremonial divide had ended. What the parade ground joined together was put asunder by the cruelty of the social system.

The children of the poor and the underprivileged returned home on splendid homes- rat holes at the deadened of the great divide, plastered with poverty, paved with lost hope and carpeted with yam and cassava peels and rotten vegetables. There, these little Nigerians who had just heard the well-oiled sermon on the virtues of hard work and uprightness, clutching the little green white-green flags of hope to their little fluttering hearts, will sit to wait for the day that the promise given to them will be fulfilled.

The children on both sides of good life are too young to ask. But it must be confusing to them that even among them, some are privileged and others are not. They must wonder why some children are more equal than others. The children in the well-appointed homes must wonder if their parents got to where they are because they took the narrow and straight path advised by the leaders. These kids will wonder if their parents worked hard and are now reaping the sweet rewards of hard work. At the other end, the underprivileged children will wonder where their parents went wrong. Did they take the wide, Italian-constructed highway to perdition or did they refuse to work hard? Why are they living at the bottom of the ladder? Are they reaping the rich rewards of indolence or what went wrong?

Poor children, they will receive no answers to these and other questions, because society has no answers to them; even adults are confused, because this and every society is terribly strange, It preaches virtue but lives vice, because vice often pays. It preaches hard work but lives indolence, because often indolence has immediate reward; it preaches a narrow path but takes the wider super highway because the narrow path is a long, terrible journey.

Many who take it never arrive. They die, weary, disappointed and sad. This nation does not lack hard working, honest people. But in the daily, ferocious struggles for survival, they get trampled under the feet by the dishonest and the lazy. They don’t sow but they reap; they don’t walk but they arrive; they don’t do but they get. How so?

No one knows. That is why every society puts its hope and ambition in the future. The future is when everything good happens. The future harbors no corruption and other vices. It makes sense, therefore, to paint the beautiful picture of the future because, luckily for us, we won’t be there when it comes. Our children will. And what they make of it will be their business.

We can only hope that by taking the boom out of oil and putting it in the gun, fewer criminals will stand up when the future arrives; we can only hope that by cleaning up our towns and cities, we will hand over to them a banner without stain and streets without rubbish; we can only hope that by refusing to let children whose parents display lack of civic responsibility in paying taxes go to school, traditional farming methods will survive in the future; we can only hope that by doing what the pelicans do, there will be no dynamic chaos when the future arrives; we can only hope that by putting yesterday’s men of power and influence in the slammer, when the future arrives, there will be none with itchy fingers.

No present generation of Nigerians can do more because the future is now.

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