The problem with Nigeria is also masked as a blessing. Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness and our trail to utter destruction.
Our diversity. It's a plague. It's shadowing the dark fangs of war and is coated with the soft furry balls of a thousand colours flying in the sky. We're blessed with a curse and we don't even know it.
In everything we do, tribalism reeks. If you want to get a job, your are asked of where you are from. If you want to enter Unilag, they crosscheck your local government of origin. If you are an igbo man, you're seen as a sly fox. Heck, the rest of the nation has summed you up before even knowing the colour of your teeth. If you're Hausa, people call you an abokį. Not because you are actually their friend but they say this in mockery. They believe that you are of no good and they chuckle when you speak. The way you replace the F's with T's and vice versa. They expect you to rear cattles and hang a long stick across your shoulders and wear soggy and muddy worn-out Wellingtons with a cloth that you haven't washed for two decades. They don't expect you to pick up a book—they expect you to pick up guns instead and terrorize they whole country.
Just like your counterparts.
If you're Yoruba, you're blessed. They needn't be worried about you. For you are lily-livered in nature and don't have the balls to pull a heist. You're a source of mockery for the whole lot. Your strength lies in your mental fortitude. Amongst the poets, writers, artists, and academicians.
If you're from the South, the Deltans and the Edos, forget it. You're of no good. Your destiny lies in the motor parks hoarding twenty nairas off of bus drivers and pickpocketing, defrauding foreigners of their hard earned money and making people laugh on stages. They laugh at your jokes and in the deepest parts of their hearts, they laugh at your tribe.
They muse within: they are all the same. Comedians, Hooligans, and touts! That's all they can be!
It's where they come from, it's who they were destined and designed to be.
I wouldn't write an epistle of problem-solving algorithms on how we should alter these thoughts that pop-up in every Nigerian's mind concerning each tribe, for it has been instilled in them, right from the day they started to talk. They were told of these significant characteristics of each tribe, they were nurtured as tribalists at very young ages without even knowing it! Hence, their hostility towards the different ethnic groups.
The women, treated like crap! The men, caught in traps! And even with the advancement of technology and the vastness of information concerning each ethnicity, people still remain hostile towards each individual uniqueness. They still nurture these stereotypical beliefs and still thrusts it into the media, for their children to see, and still feed off these nonsensical deductions.
Our diversity is our blessing and it still is our weakness for if we continue this way, mindlessly categorizing and summing people up by the drawl on their tongue, the odour on their skin, their love for exotic and distinct sounds, colours, and delicacies, we might embark on another war. A war far more greater than that of the Igbos against the rest of the nation. This time, man would be against man, woman against woman, and child against child. We'd commit mass genocide, by ourselves, destroying everything we have suffered to build just because this man speaks a different language from mine.
It's high time we start talking and reasoning like the people of higher intelligence that we are! Please, don't let the rest of the world perceive us as primitive beings. Let us act civilized. Shun every particle of tribalism and ethnic hostility all around us and accept every man, woman, and child, for who they are and not where they come from.
