THE RENEWED MIND BY AKANO ADEWALE
adewaleakano1@gmail.com

“I want it to be a page of hope and renewed trust”. Those were the words of a man. He went
further to say he heard “the rage, anxiety and doubt that a lot of you have expressed”, and he
vowed to spend his presidency “fighting the forces of division that undermine France”. To his
supporters he said “tonight you won, France won. Everyone told us it was impossible, but they
don‟t know France. Those were the words of Mr. Macron, the 39 year old man that ended
decades dominance of the two traditional main left-wing and right-wing parties with 66.0%
votes. That was an incredible win, wasn‟t it? After sweeping the votes, he never hid away from
the fact that the country is facing enormous challenges like unemployment, terrorism, and others,
but he stood still and said “we have the strength, the energy and the will, and we will not give in
to fear”. In the words of the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, “Macron offers five more years of
failure and encouraging Ms. Le Pen to stick in there”. Macron said to France that he would do all
he could to ensure in future, there would be no reason to vote for extremism. He came out to
form a movement called En Marche after he left the Socialist government of President Hollande,
and that was hell of a courage he had in this 21st century against the ruling class.
According to George Bernard Shaw, “life isn‟t about finding yourself. Life is about creating
yourself‟. The lives of majority of us Nigerians ever since the inception of the independent state
has been about finding out what the country has in store for us through the political office
holders. To the youths in Nigeria, the way the status quo is cannot be blamed on us because we
met it like that, but it will be our fault if we still remain to dwell in the same status quo where no
tangible developments are achieved. The wave of change has been blown and only few of us has
truly come to the realization that change in the Nigerian context have different definitions.
Turning on the searchlight of my memories, I got hold of one of my favourite quotes that got me
going in the university, „when men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them‟. With
the past gone and irrecoverable, the thoughts of today and the future bothers man because of his
insatiable wants and his incapacity to satisfy them.
Our wants as Nigerians are insatiable because when they are indeed satisfied, Nigeria will cease
to exist, but as the landscape of the world is changing, we need to summon the courage to renew
our thoughts so as to create the kind of Nigeria that we want, a Nigeria with vision. Considering
how events in the international system are fast changing, it is evident that nothing is impossible.
Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, Brexit, even Donald Trump showed us that nothing is impossible
to a willing heart. Looking at my Nigeria, the truth is we the younger generations are tired of the
status-quo where nothing is changing at the top, but are we intellectually ready if we get hold of
the mantle? Emmanuel Macron, Obama, Trump and others did not just wake up to say they
wanted to impact, the process of their renewed mind started after they believed in themselves.
We the future of this country are fond of arguing , but when you give ears to the solutions they have to offer, they are just like the palliative measures the old brains in our country have always
offered us and not the real solutions. We the youths prefers dreaming to seeing and actualizing
visions. Our fathers have deceived us by calling us the future and not explaining that any day that
is not yesterday and is not today is called the future. They painted the future for us in a time