By George Anyiam-Osigwe
Deriving from years of governance failure, statistics reveal that over 80% of our national population leave on less than $2 per day. As a fallout of this reality, in recent times, unemployed Nigerian youths and collapsed families take the path of criminality in order to be able to survive economically. Specifically, with the high level of graduate unemployment, the Nigerian youths have chosen the part of advance fee fraud (419), banditry, kidnapping, robbery and other forms of criminal indulgence to etch a living. Many of these youths are unable to find justification for the years they spent in school if the aftermath, in their view, is “yahoo Yahoo” and “Yahoo plus”.
Further to this is the collapsed moral fibre of our social order. While managers of our governance institutions massively engage in money laundering to legitimize their corruptive wealth, the youths who are first recipients of the misappropriation of our national wealth have become easy recruits for international terrorist links. This has subjected the Nigerian state to wild manifestation of insecurity of life and property. Operating with a jaundiced ideological rudder, the perspectives of these terrorist groups seriously undermine the corporate existence of the Nigerian state. The activities of these negative intruders threaten our sovereignty as a country.
With a government driven by primitive acquisition, appropriation, exploitation and alienation, investing in the educational sector is secondary and, perhaps, unnecessary. The consequent protestations by the staffers of tertiary institutions in Nigeria has been viewed as meaningless ranting of an inconsequential academic. With sixteen ASUU strikes from 1999 to date the waste of human resources deriving from these strikes is, Perhaps, larger than the trillion of dollars that the country has lost to corruption through this period.
While the country witnesses an appalling dimension of security collapse, it must be noted that the lack of emphasis on the education of the Nigerian child (a situation worse in the North) in juxtaposition with the unemployment and underemployment of the citizenry could not have offered the country better Molotov cocktail. The unfortunate realities of Nigeria’s present condition, especially the orgy of widespread insecurity, is crisis of confidence about the future of our nation. Nigeria’s sovereignty and our corporate existence as a country is currently under severe assault.
In his exposition on the Group Mind Phenomenon, Anyiam-Osigwe avers that these realities are not unique, but characteristic of any society confronted with the breakdown of the Group Mind. Anyiam-Osigwe’s Group Mind construct articulate the legitimate basis for community, citizenship and patriotism. In the Group Mind Principle of Anyiam-Osigwe, the paradigm of community is sustained on a fundamental moral foundation. Also, the Group Mind Principle of Anyiam-Osigwe posits that the interest of the composing individual of a community, nation or state must be preserved in the commonweal of that social order.
Thus, within the Group Mind construct, a government that alters the moral premise of leadership is an albatross and a negation of the existence of that social order. Drawing from the Group Mind matrix, every member of the community has his basic existential interest preserved in the commonweal of the community. Therefore, access to education, housing, health, employment and security are consequential rights that authenticate patriotism and citizenship. A community, state or nation embedded in the Group Mind dictum is foreclosed to corruptive indulgent leadership.
In resolving the current national challenge of our country, we must give concrete attention to developing the educational sector as a mindset regenerating and engineering institution. We must review our budget on education and elevate our tertiary institutions to the levels of research organs. We must go beyond the elementaries of rote memorization to knowledge-based learning. We must understand the symbiotic relationship between education and development.
In addressing the security situation of our country, we must appreciate the crises of poverty and strive to totally eliminate or significantly reduce the anathema of poverty in Nigeria. We must evolve a policy of employment for the working people of our country. We must balance the question of office corruption against the matrix of a leaving wage.
It is within the construct of free and compulsory education that we can address the issues of child labour and the availability of our young children for recruitment by terrorist groups and criminal gangs. The perspective to our national regeneration must give fundamental attention to strengthening the family by essentially enhancing its economic wellbeing. The Nigerian State must take responsibility for childcare and child development at the foundational level. It is this pragmatic perspective that will address the limitations and gaps that engender the evolvement of a perverted mindset for our children.
Thus, our focus on the adoption of the Group Mind matrix in resolving our present national challenges is informed by a sense of principled pragmatism. The awareness of the individual that his interest is effectively guaranteed and preserved in the cumulative whole of the social order is the basic integral for patriotism and citizenship.
Indeed, the issues of insecurity transcend the current administration and it will be wrong to assume that the current crisis will cease once this administration leaves office. In the immediate and subjectively, it is vital that we all take an unequivocal and unified stance against terrorism and banditry in all its forms. This is irrespective of where we stand on ethnic or political divides. This calls for a concerted and coordinated national and state policy actions in response to the security challenges we currently face. It requires a bi-partisan gestures and the pooling of resources and expertise to overcome the crisis. Let us note that the present security challenge is gradually assuming an existential threat to our country and must be situated as such.
Today, we are faced with a sense of despair and uncertainty. But let us find hope in the philosophical nexus of the Group Mind. Let us effectively harness its moral and metaphysical innards. Let us explore its construct in political economy in responding to our national challenge. The challenge for us as a people and the leadership of our country is to harness and accentuate this sense of hope premised on an ideological foundation embedded in the Group Mind phenomenon.
Though a difficult and seemingly impossible task given recent events, we must all strive to converge at an enlightened understanding and stronger level of resolve that will propel and realise a new vision for the country. At the national, state and local levels, we must genuinely strive to transcend the lingering traumas of our troubled circumstances and work to evolve a new vision that materialises in real and effective positive change for Nigerian.
This new vision for our immediate future must, by necessity, include a free and fair 2023 election. We must all work to ensure that the will of the Nigerian people prevails. The political space and its governing constitution must earn the confidence and trust of the Nigerian people. The destiny of our country is precedent on this delivery.
The killing, kidnapping and bombing of innocent Nigerians negates the enabling environment for genuine democratic expression. The attainment of a new vista that delivers faith and commitment to the Nigerian project is of fundamental importance to our present and its future.
For the Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe Foundation, it is hoped that those who are aspiring to be in government consider seriously the need to intuit into the Group Mind consciousness. We affirm that the Group Mind, as an ideological matrix, effectively articulates our collective destiny as Nigerians.
God bless Nigeria.