Nigeria’s Moral Framework
From the above explanation and for those
who are religiously inclined, I can conclude that it is what religion
propagates most and still propagating. In fact, it is the main religious
purpose of humanity. Nigeria is religious but failed to practice it. If
practicing what was/is been preached in the Mosque or Churches even Shrine for
the traditional worshippers, then we are morally upright. The question is, why
do we have many mosques, and churches and still record a humongous number of
immoralities, criminalities, and corruptions?
Why do we still clamor for justice if morality is been practiced
there won’t be any victim talk less of demanding justice? Nations with no or
little religion we can pinpoint to them like Sweden, Norway, etc. are recorded
with less crime index compared to ours. Why are we morally bankrupt in Nigeria
and still, naïve that we are paying the price of its inherent consequences?
Morality refers to the principles of human
behavior and interaction that generate benefits and harms. It can therefore be
said that our ultimate moral goal is to produce the greatest aggregate benefit
while causing the least amount of unnecessary and avoidable harm. It stands to
reason that all persons have a moral obligation to promote this optimal outcome
by learning how to best contribute to our greater society. And it is the
cornerstone of civilization that its members honor a social contract by adding
value in their own unique ways. We must all leverage our unique talents through
labor in exchange for goods and services, not only for our own survival but in
order for our civilization to thrive. This reciprocal relationship between the
individual and society is the reason our implied social contract carries a
moral component. Not only is each of us morally obligated to learn and grow to
become the best versions of ourselves in order to add optimal value to society, but it is also the moral responsibility of society to provide the conditions that enable
this personal development and growth.
Who drives the society? Who is there to
provide the conditions that will enable personal development and growth?
Who is responsible for showing such a moral standard in the society? No doubt! The
answer is obvious, the leaders of the society. Now, what happens if such a class
of Leaders are morally bankrupt? Then it simply means, that society loses its
norms, values, and morals itself. Come to think of it, a leader who brought
in a foreign investor into a country with the agreement of getting its own
share at the detriment of her people in that country is not only a defalcator
but a society moral rustler. Just recently in Nigeria, the word “palliative” is
a well-known vocabulary that even the non-educated market woman understands. Its
uses stemmed from COVID-19 era, 2020. Three years later, it is back in our
mouths due to the fact that there’s a need to cushion the effect of subsidy
removal on imported fuel. Who among those Leaders did right with the so-called
Palliatives as released by the Federal Government? I can only satisfactorily
figure a few, out of the rest of the Governors. The rest ehn!. Hmmmmm!
Then where is the justice, why should we
have inmates in our correctional facilities because those who are supposed to
fill in there are the ones in the helms of affairs? Where is justice! People are
dying of hunger, families are broken, children's education is reversed, our
health facilities are in shambles and many more atrocities are committed due to a lack of morals from the top down. The "downs" are being taken down, punished for such immoral acts
that the "tops" are at the top of the situation, where immoralities are taken trivia. Where is JUSTICE!
The primary moral goal of civilization is
to achieve its greatest common good, where “good” describes what it means for
its citizens to flourish, not suffer. And because it is the moral obligation of
individuals working together to produce the best of all possible societies,
measures must be taken by the government, acting on behalf of society, to produce
citizens who will deliver their best outcomes. The contract between individual
and civilization includes the understanding that society will invest in its
people in order to maximize human potential— to provide the human
infrastructures designed to give people the resources and freedoms to become
their best selves. Every fabric of society must serve to create the conditions
that enable its citizens to learn, grow, and develop themselves to become
valuable assets that achieve humanity and our planet’s “greatest common good”.
One of the most fundamental human freedoms
is our need to be free from fear of an uncertain future. This is the freedom
achieved when we are confident our basic needs will be met. Without this
freedom, we are not free from the stress and preoccupation that stunts personal
development and growth, and we are therefore not completely free to find
meaning and purpose by contributing our best to society and realizing our full
potential. This is why life-enriching resources such as a living wage,
affordable entry-level housing, quality public education, tuition-free college, and universal healthcare are essential to the well-being of individuals and
society as a whole. Providing these basic resources and services ought to be
our government’s top priority. But they’re not. Why? We live in a
society where our Leaders lack morals with their negligence to societal obligations and sell us out to industries
with vast resources to purchase political favor.
In the Preamble of the United States
Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson states that our Rights to Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness cannot be taken or given away. The
arrangement of these words, as expressed, was not written haphazardly. They
represent our natural human rights in perfect prioritized order. Life comes
before Liberty and Liberty before our Pursuit of Happiness. This deliberate and
thoughtful sequence of words clearly describes that the right to be free from
unnecessary and avoidable harmful exploitation is a higher moral principle than
another’s freedom to exploit for personal gain. When we earnestly strive to
learn what is truly important in life, when we understand the difference
between what is essential to life and what merely makes us happy, our intuition
tells us that personal growth and fulfillment are more essential to a
meaningful life than the addictive and often exploitative pursuit of excessive
wealth and luxury.
We are indoctrinated to believe that
excessive corporate freedoms, which include the freedom to exploit people and the planet for profit, are somehow greater than the freedoms necessary for personal
development and growth. And as their freedom to exploit increases, our
opportunities for learning, growth, and life enrichment diminish. What we have
left is an ungrateful society of entitlement that no longer honors its social
contract. A society that no longer respects human dignity, and a society that
has lost the most essential of all human freedoms—the freedom to discover one’s
true self and to find meaning and purpose in life.
Though a shared moral authority based on
our current 21st-century knowledge of human and planetary flourishing would be
highly worthwhile, the concept of “morality” has been manipulated, twisted, and
trivialized to a point where it has lost its meaning and serves little useful
purpose in our society. Even the simple notion of "moral conduct" has
been perverted to mean whatever is expedient and can be rationalized. Our emphasis
on individual human rights has come with a double-edged sword, largely because
it has caused the value of an individual to override the welfare of society as
a whole. When we advance individual rights in a vacuum without regard for
social welfare, we lose our moral compass and our desire to promote the
universal good.
Our society in this country, Nigeria, is
supposed to be founded on values, I think it was, going by the reign of the
likes of Sir Ahmadu Bellos, the Abubakar T. Balewas, the Awos, and the recent past
of Pa Lateeph Jakandes in the Lagos State. History reveals a lot of their efforts
made on societal growth through Quality Education, for example, is something to
emulate but today many of the values with sound Legacies have not only destroyed
but eliminated rather, the values that
encourage negligent opportunism— the self-serving exploitation of others.
Unless we take deliberate measures to create societies that value positive
prosocial outcomes, social systems will organically devolve to honor this
highly predatory and socially harmful ideology and practice. As Thomas Hobbes
warned in his landmark book "Leviathan", life without a strong
governing body devoted to serving the public good is “solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short”. In such a world concerned only for the “self” without
regard for anyone or anything else, life is marked by ongoing fear. It is a
life where every man is at war against every other man.
Since the neoliberal, the so-called
progressive movement, and the conservative began in this fourth Republic, the
freedom to exploit has become the dominant value that has shaped conventional
wisdom and drives our society in Nigeria. A value system that favors an
unregulated free-market capitalist economy that limits government intervention
and minimizes safety nets for marginalized people who have been exploited by
the predatory capitalist system. It is the reason the quality of life has eroded for average
Nigerians since 1999. It is the reason we must fight one another in order to
survive. And now, compared to other developing nations throughout the world,
life in Nigeria for many has become increasingly “solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short”. As it turns out, the conditions created by both progressive
and conservative “trickle-down” economics and its predatory form of capitalism
are precisely what I'm warning about.
We talk about the legacies we wish to leave
behind for future generations; and though we complain about the major problems
in our world, we rarely do anything about them. Either we expect someone else
to come along to fix the problems we've identified for the millionth time, or
we say the issues are too big, nothing can be done to fix them, or there are no
lasting solutions. But these are merely excuses to make us feel better about
our own lack of effort, our laziness, and our unwillingness to reimagine and
improve our world. We are good at identifying problems, but not so good at
taking the necessary steps to produce positive and lasting change. The truth
is, we can fix our problems if we care enough to try, and any effort that
drives toward improvement is better than none at all.
Mine is all I'm doing now...
Albert Einstein told us, “No problem can be
solved at the same level of consciousness that created it.” It is also said
(not by Einstein), "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of
the problem". Who among our current
Leaders is not part of the problem, except a few. That's the consciousness we are
talking about, that's the reason no single change is made in how we approach
our problems. It’s not about being a pessimist but having the same result is not far-fetched.
We cannot deny or escape these realities. And if knowing this doesn't change
our behavior, then I am curious to understand, why not?
How sincere is our desire to design and
engineer a better world and leave a positive lasting legacy for future
generations? The issues we face in Nigeria today may seem insurmountable, but
in order to achieve sustainable solutions, we must shed our complacency and
address our problems together. Every time we point a critical finger at a
problem without offering a feasible and actionable solution, we're causing more
social harm than good. We tell the world not only do we condone inaction, but we
encourage it, even when we know our social woes will persist. It says we can
all feel better about ourselves as we continue to expect Miracle, to perpetuate
our lack of mindfulness and effort together, thereby condoning, reinforcing,
legitimizing, and perpetuating a culture of negligent opportunism and the
predatory form of capitalism that currently dominates our economic, political
and social structures.
I was once asked, “Is it better to be right
or maintain a relationship”? Though I didn’t have a suitable answer at the
time, I have since learned that being right is far better than maintaining a
relationship if “right” serves to end harm and suffering. Calling out negligent
behavior may make the agents of harm uncomfortable, but we should never
compromise our principles by allowing them to perpetuate harm in their willful
ignorance. Those who stand for social justice on all fronts must come together
in solidarity to define and share a common moral authority based on what it
means for humans to flourish and suffer. And it doesn’t matter where we think
the source of this authority comes from, whether it be from the Laws of Nature
or a Divine Creator. What matters is that we draft objective and rational moral
arguments in clear, concise, and compelling language in a manner that
deconstructs and invalidates the self-serving narratives that have dominated
our politics and social values over the past 24 years.
To rise above our current circumstances
takes tremendous conviction and courage. It’s not easy confronting injustice
when far too many are crushed under its weight. Yet, all worthwhile human
progress begins with the seeds of ideas that grow to become mighty visions. And
transformative change will occur only when we embrace these bold promises of a
brighter future and have the resolve to honor their visions.
It begins with an idea that becomes a
vision, and it can happen if we honor the vision.
Babatunde
M. Kolawole (08038193742)
#trustyourinstinct
https://www.linkedin.com/in/babatunde-kolawole-8120001a/
https://web.facebook.com/babsozone
https://babatunde1010.blogspot.com
https://artemisconsult.blogspot.com
https://web.facebook.com/artemisconsultingltd
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