Skip to main content

Democracy 1-0 Intellectualism

Reacting to the result of the most recent referendum in Britain where they have voted to leave the European Union, I'd like to point out a positive lesson that is being ignored in the wake of the development. I am talking about the sheer honesty of democracy, albeit working against apparently superior reasoning. It is yet another example of how democracy takes power from the so called superior minority and places it in the palms of the vast and mostly ignorant majority, to do with it as they will. The people have spoken and history has been made. Whether it will be for better or worse is only a question of time.

This brings me to the issue that is weighing on my mind today. The right to Self determination is one of the core liberties of the individual as well as the society at large. If a person or people have that right taken away from them either blatantly or via proxy, such a person or people are automatically robbed of the imagination and courage required to develop themselves. In Africa, what we have in operation is a hybrid of pseudo as well as outright disenfranchisement. Consider Nigeria, Britain's erstwhile cash cow and the most populous black nation on earth. Here, institutions are no more than mere representations and relics of past and present elements of external control. Where access to quality education and government are strictly the prerogative of the rich who account for less than 5 percent of the population and for whose sole profit resources are distributed, to the mutual benefit of the external powers who dictate the tune at the very highest levels. Further down the spectrum of socio-political inequality we have the majority who mostly live in stark ignorance and fear.

Intellectuals and political critics in the western world like to lament about how the political elite employ all manners of underhanded tactics and ploys to manipulate their public into foregoing some of their rights. I laugh because the situation we have here is that the masses are practically dead to the fact that they posses these rights to begin with. What this does is to foster a truly cut throat,  jungle atmosphere where the strong conquer to rule whereas the weak wither and die, while the soul of equality is reposed in the degree of mass corruption across board.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Help

Whenever I use the public transport system in this town I always get a story. It's because the public transportation allows one to interact with the society and feel it's pulse in a way that is almost impossible from the comfort of a private vehicle. So yesterday I got off a bus at Julius Berger round about at around 5pm, rush hour. Naturally there was a fair amount of traffic, pedestrian and vehicular. I had just arrived in the city from my outpost in Gwagwalada and I was hurrying to get in a cab and out of the blistering sun. That was when I saw something that made me stop. There was a crippled man along the sidewalk. His limbs were shrunk and shriveled and he could only manage to drag his malnourished body along the curb using his forearm while accepting alms from motorists and passersby who threw their loose change in his direction. He looked very exhausted and he had his hands full but every time a  note was thrown out of a moving car or dropped by a pedestrian he would ...
3 comments
Read more

If Your "Insurance Bank" does not support your Business, you need a new Church

Salvation... The cornerstone of all religious establishments. The Human race is so terrified of the doom that is promised to come upon the many who will not be saved and this in turn has led to a great deal of desperation among men to gain this salvation.  In our world today and speaking from a Nigerian perspective, the need for this spiritual "assurance" if I may call it that, has inspired the birth of a multi billion Naira industry - Souls Insurance Banking (SIB) wherein a few clever men have learned to take sacrilegious advantage of this widespread desperation among people and have now debased the sanctity of God's Word to the level of Insurance Banking. In this business, the insurance bankers (pastors) devise different means (some contradicting others) of selling this insurance package, that is the comforting hope of salvation to this Gullible Population. Worse still, people don't mind! It is common place in this country to hear stuff like "I call on the go...
2 comments
Read more

Who I Am

The more things change, the more the stay the same. This is the story of the world we live in today as we seem to be stagnated in a constant flux between the hopeful possibility of a better, more peaceful, healthier future and a cataclysmic devolution into irreversible anarchy. The handwritings are on the walls and pretty much everywhere else you look. Global Warming is ravaging the earth - no thanks to our collective irresponsibility. Global warfare on another note has spiralled out of control, with the institutions of state facing new kinds of enemies - the faceless kinds who are happy enough to just spread the gospel of fear. Global population is on an uncontrollable rise and we all keep saying the same things, attributing our actions and inactions to the will of the almighty. It all has to be part of THE PLAN. We pretend that the world is some kind of fictional place where all our actions have pre determined consequences of which we need not take responsibility and when they turn ...
2 comments
Read more