I love my nation jealously but it hurts when I look at how backward and shallow minded we are. I just took a walk around the community I reside as am in my service year and I can't help but notice poverty screaming aloud, the small poorly built houses is enough to explain my narrative. The people here though they live within the capital have houses and huts much more synonymous with ancient villages but what strikes me the most was these huge cathedral still in its construction stage within these same poverty stricken community. As a Nigerian you know for a fact it's still these same poor people and some very few wealthy neighbours that pull their resources together to erect such a structure to their own delight and to the glory of God.

Some people will consider me blasphemous and disrespectful when I tell them "This is why we will never catch up with the developed world". I've never traveled abroad and I don't think you need to leave the shores of Nigeria to realise how different we think compare to the developed world. Even though we like to blame corruption and bad leadership for our stagnancy and backwardness over the years but the truth is all these and others are consequences of OUR MENTALITY.

To understand my grievance, you have to ask the BIG QUESTION, its so big most won't dare to think of it talk less giving it voice but I ask "what has Religion done for us"? "How has it improve our lifes"? In fact it's a series of questions bothering on our faith in God that troubles me. Nigerians believe so much in God, we think only God can take away corruption and give us good leaders, something that hasn't quite work out for us in the over 50 years of our existence.

As I continue my walk, I scanned this community well and in my opinion, the funds realized from this poor people should have been channeled into something more resourceful like a storage or processing plant that would have been more beneficial to the occupation of these people as farmers instead of a gigantic cathedral.

We like to talk about what the government can do for us and what they ain't doing for us but we fail to discuss what we could do for ourselves and what we ain't doing. Some would argue that religious practices promotes unity and peaceful co-existence within a community but nothing promotes unity and peace like wealth and I believe wealth ought to be generated right from the community level. I can't help but imagine how happy and prosperous our communities will be if they had embraced industrial solutions with the same might they embrace religion.

I recall an article online where some southwest leaders said the recently incarcerated founder of saharareporters; Sowore deserved the accusations leveled against him by the federal government as he disrespected the Yoruba culture by insulting the elders and I laugh. We deceive ourselves if we continue with such lies. The truth is our culture died a long time ago while the religions of Christianity and Islam took its place. The appalling part is that the colonial masters that forced these ways on us have since moved on to embracing civilization and industrial ways of thinking while we are still stuck in the chains of religious bondage and archaic way of thinking.

The building of "cathedrals" is not a Nigeria thing. Britain has one in every parish, and that's like 10 minutes apart in some cities. And they were often built through taxation of the poor, though wealthy people contributed too. And I hear its the same all over Europe - Italy, France, Spain, Netherlands, being four countries I've seen them myself. Some took hundreds of years to build too, so imagine the cost of building temples to a God who never needed them!