Rossikki:


Dude, please spare me all this garbage. You can literally list three quarters of countries on this earth and recite the exact same rhetoric against them as above, and it would apply to them, yet their people do not HATE their nation, and go around calling it a ''shithole''.

Like I said earlier, MANY OF YOU NEED TO TRAVEL AROUND. Not to the US and Europe. But to the rest of the world. The world is NOT a paradise. The majority of people on it are struggling for their daily EVERYTHING. You people are spoiled by your constant exposure to the so called 'First World' where only a tiny, TINY minority of people on this earth live.

Look, for all your complaints about Nigeria, progress HAS been made. You are living a MUCH BETTER LIFE than your forbears. In the 1960s, how many people owned a car in Nigeria? Cars were only for the very rich and highly favoured classes, who made up less than two percent of the population. Majority of our grandparents were too poor to even own a BICYCLE. They walked everywhere, often barefoot. Majority of them were stark illiterates, courtesy of colonial neglect of education. THEY had no choice of emigrating to say Europe or America. Or even Ghana or SA. They had no idea what those places were or what they would do there if they got there. Today, courtesy of the mass education policy of the Nigerian govt which ensured that YOU got educated, you can contemplate the idea of travelling to any country on earth to settle and earn a living. Your illiterate great grandparents would have KILLED to have had such an opportunity. Such a capability.

Electricity? Look, up till about the 1970s, most parts of Nigeria were not even connected to the national grid. This is the same Nigeria that has existed in various forms for over a thousand years. Are you saying all those millions of people who lived and died here without seeing a lightbulb, were all ''in a shithole''? Nope. They never had that attitude. The Benin Empire used palm oil to fuel street lights in Benin City as early as the 1400s. They had underground drainage by virtue of city impluviums they constructed. Their houses ''shone like mirrors'' according to one visitor's account, due to their scrubbing their walls with special chemical herbs. By the 1500s Benin City was rated among the top cities in the world.

The Ife kingdom built pavements on their roads using broken potsherds. You can visit Ife today and still see traces of those pavements.

Why can't our local communities be so proactive today? Everybody sitting around depending on western solutions to problems they can solve, simply by studying their own history and by being creative.

Communications? As recently as the 1990s, majority of Nigerians had no means of communicating beyond travel by foot or public transport. Today you can dip your hand in your pocket and speak to a guy thousands of miles away with no sweat. You can start a business based entirely on your phone.

These are strides your forbears could not even dare to dream about.

I MEAN, I REALLY DON'T KNOW WHO YOU PEOPLE THINK YOU ARE. You think you should have the finest and most up-to-date living standards on earth, when you are only less than a generation removed from illiterate, village, peasant populations under colonial brigandage and oppression. You haven't even worked out how to properly govern yourselves. Which is not a surprise, considering you only gained independence half a century ago.

You fail to realise that you MUST go through teething problems involving societal ills - corruption, civil war, mismanagement etc. YOU MUST, or you will never be that successful nation.

Success means overcoming problems.

If there were no problems, there would be no 'success'.

Many Nigerians talk as if they expect the country to have no problems.

They expect success to simply land on their laps.

''Ah there is oil. So the oil money will be shared equitably and all will benefit, and we can all sit down, hold hands and sing Kumbaya'' .

....''Oh wait...That hasn't happened? We are failed. Useless nation. Shithole.''

A highly simplistic approach to issues.

Go and read the history of any sizeable nation moving from underdevelopment to development.

It MUST be replete with teething problems.

What we foolishly see as ''failures''.

Signs that we have ''failed as a nation''.

I shudder at such displays of historical illiteracy.

Go and study Dickensian England. Victorian England. You will be shocked at the level of mass poverty and deprivation right at the same time they were building iconic, expensive landmarks like Wembley, Buckingham Palace, and Trafalgar Square. Child slavery was the norm. People slept 20 to a room in London, Leeds, Manchester etc. Disease was rife. In all this, a tiny aristocracy lived like lords, literally. This went on for over a CENTURY before changes finally began to make an impact.

That is just the UK. We can call examples from China, from Germany, from Russia, where Stalin slaughtered 20 million of his countrymen on the way to creating his communist state. That is like 10 Biafran Wars occurring at the same time in one country. Yet look at these places today. They've come out smiling.

Lesson: We are evolving, and we must be patient with that evolution. Nigeria will most likely not be a developed nation in your lifetime. Accept that fact, and contribute your quota to making it better for this and future generations. That is what God put you here for. Not to grumble and complain and insult the country all day, all night.

Seeing that you had to write a 5000 word reply to the 6 words highlighted, while ignoring every other part is enough to realize you are not worth debating.
And I am sorry I made you remember how miserably YOUR ancestors lived. Goodbye.