22/09/2025
Misused Tools of Nation Building
Raphael Kunle Ajayi
All over the world, advanced societies carefully build a reward system and incentives to push the values they intend to build.
Hi**er built the German as a superior race and gave the Volkswagen as the minimum that a German should drive. America built it's society on equality and gave gun rights so everyone can defend himself. Thus, even dangerous freedoms were directed at societal balance not chaos. The United Kingdom built itself as a society where men think to better living standards, and gave awards and recognition for extending the frontiers of life.
But as Nigerians, we always miss the purpose of these valuable things because we built our society on wealth and moneymaking, and it causes us to misuse the reward systems and incentives of the advanced countries.
Thus we misuse cars and those who use our transportation system are viewed as low life. We misuse guns and give them even to law enforcement and selected thugs to oppress ourselves. The natural reason for documenting records is to create an incentive for excellence to be copied. Hence whatever we celebrate spurs replication and determines our new land marks.
But we give N10,000 to academic achievers, and billions to cross dressers, reality tv nudists and near naked idols. By this we tell our youths, loud and clear, what is worth striving for — a certificate of nudity pays more than a certificate of learning.
Our social media successes shows our warped senses of humour. We are bored easily by wit and creativity but spurred organically and hysterically by any prank that includes, rawness, vawulence and violence. Why will someone going around slapping people make us laugh, or an underage boy with a girlfriend his senior amuse? What is funny about foreign returnee pretending to be an invalid the first time he is meeting a remote date? What is good about pursuing people with garri and when they reject it, money falls out of it? These are things that we consume mentally and spiritually. The things reflect our true national nature and we are guinea pigs in an internet reality show with an opportunity to socially re-engineer our society by monetisation..
As Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos and others mint billionaires out of our misaligned content creators, they also compile a living archive of our national psyche — a mirror of what we truly are. We may think we are merely laughing at pranks and scandals, but in reality, we are documenting for the world, and for history, the spiritual poverty of a nation. When the archaeologists of the future dig up our ruins, they will not find pyramids, cathedrals, or libraries. They will find hashtags. And they will know exactly why we fell..
I rise..
