On Saturday, America celebrated 239 years since
its hard-won independence from Britain. Beyond
the fireworks and parades and lofty tributes, I
think there’s an important lesson for us in
Nigeria: that our diversity and our differences
should not/never stand in the way of our
development.

For all its greatness and the patriotism it
inspires in its citizens and even those who are
not its citizens, America is not just a very
diverse country but also a deeply divided one.

The people are divided over their attitudes to
God, guns, drugs, the government, abortion,
homosexuality, and even the Constitution. At the
best of times, America is a giant riot. And yet
that same America still, to a large extent,
manages to function for its people: it gives them
a highly valuable passport they’re mostly proud
of, offers them viable opportunities for honest
and legitimate self-advancement, encourages
them to take their history seriously; pays serious
attention to their complaints and frustrations.

For 25 years, the Pew Research Center has been
asking Americans to respond – by agreeing or
disagreeing – to this survey statement: “I am
very patriotic.” Not once has the portion of
those agreeing fallen below 85 percent since the
survey started. In other words, Americans are an
immensely patriotic people. And you don’t even
need a survey to spot this; you can see it in the
general sense of pride with which Americans
carry themselves around the world, like they put
this planet together and then summoned the
rest of us to it from a distant galaxy where we’d
always existed as nothing.

We should also note that Belgium and Italy –
and even the United States – are in similar
straits: all historically divided along impossible-
to-ignore north-south lines. Yet these countries
have all managed to ensure that their internal
contradictions and (sometimes bitter) domestic
squabbling do not ever stand in the way of their
development. America did not wait to solve its
huge racial questions before putting men on the
moon

I don’t believe anyone has ever done a similar
survey for Nigeria, but I imagine the results
would be very different. Nigeria is, like the US, a
heterogeneous entity, bringing together hundreds
of very different groups of people and...

CONTINUE HERE : http://www.beriahng.com/2015/07/nigerias-most-important-questions-by.html

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continue here? op, you don spoil the beauty of this thread.

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