Love yourself, your neighbour is fine, By Odi Ikpeazu

The hatred of one’s self is a strange mental disease since the human emotion is from all indications, wired towards self love and self preservation. As a result, the apparent masochism which afflicts the Nigerian mind should be the subject of international psychiatric study or at least demand investigation by neutral expert mass psychologists.

The eagerness and glee with which we deride and demean ourselves in almost every field is obvious not only to me, I am sure. Even a recent joyful event such as Tobi Amusan breaking two world records in one night in the hurdles incredibly became contorted in twisted minds and somehow turned into a disparagement to Nigeria despite the athlete herself giving credit to the government of her home state for the encouragement they gave her along the way. Her touching tears on the medals podium were spitefully interpreted by the cynical majority as not of joy but contempt for her country.

When terrorists ambush and kill our soldiers, it is wildly celebrated as yet another monumental failure of our system, whereas if the reverse be the case, it is received with deliberate disbelief and a palpable implicit wish in fact that it should not be true. If a cell of urban guerrillas living in plain sight in the South East is wiped out, the reflexive scornful question is “why have all the bandits in the uncharted forests of Sambisa and the difficult terrain of the North East not been equally obliterated?”

Young soldiers give their lives everyday in the battle against asymmetrical terrorists under unorthodox circumstances but are not just unsung and unheralded but discredited and desecrated as if they were mere soldier ants crawling out of some termites mounds in obscure countryside. Ironicaĺly, while we debase these young men who volunteer the truncation of their lives, the ubiquitous critics and sadists, which include septuagenerians and even octagenerians, attend mosques on Fridays and churches on Sundays begging Allah and Jesus for long life! Our military is berated for not annihilating the extremists in one fell swoop as if it did not take mighty America a coalition of 80 countries and a budget of $9million daily for over multiple years to degrade Islamic State and basically succeed only in channeling their extremism down the Western Sahel into Nigeria and other countries of Northern Western Africa.

The United States announced on Monday that it had killed Ayman al-Zawahri in a drone strike in Afghanistan, ­ending a 21-year manhunt for the terrorist leader, who was instrumental in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Well, good for them. But it is not in our nature merely to acknowledge the story, follow it or enjoy it if possible. No. We have to attempt by some convolution of the distorted mind, to berate our country and compare ourselves unfavourably to America for not achieving similar assassinations. Well, are you kidding me? Like we are not aware how long 250-year old, $22 trillion-dollar-GNP America has been conducting and perfecting the art of diminishing, overthrowing or assasinating foreign leaders who they deem not favourable to their interests? Your brother Patrice Lumumba was killed like a dog in the forests of Katanga the same year $400 billion-dollar-GNP Nigeria became independent and Eisenhower sanctioned it!

Between 1965 in Vietnam and 2022 in Afghanistan, America has disclosed at least sixty successful assassinations of perceived enemies. Multiple assasination attempts were made against Moammar Ghadafi until Obama and Sarkozy finally nailed him in 2012 notably with the help of Libyans who were every bit as self-hating as Nigerians. And see where they have left Libya today, a country which was once a shing light of Africa and one of the world’s leaders in terms of social security for its citizens. Fidel Castro incredibly managed to die naturally only by the skin of his teeth, surviving numerous planned executions as did men like Rafael Trujillo, Ngo Dinh Diem, René Schneider and a host of others.

Talking about the dollar, with each drop of the Naira against it, the news is received by us with a deafening moan of displeasure, which actually camouflages a curious pleasure at our own discomfiture, a classic case of sado-masochism if I ever saw one. It is truly bewildering how a people whose passion is consumption and their aversion is production, even imagines that they could achieve favourable competition against the currency of an imperial nation, whose weapon is exportation and their objective is world domination. Worse is that when the government even attempts to begin to mitigate this collosal anomaly by such devices as protectionism in favour of local production and prohibitive tariffs against foreign importation, the uproar can be heard from Lagos to Washington and without the aid of electronic sound amplification.

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