-By Austen Akhagbeme:

Nigeria as a nation has come a long way. We have been bedevilled by a seemingly unsolvable contradiction right from our colonial cradle as a people, to our adulthood stage as a state with geographical space.

The mutual suspicion brought about by ethnographic reality has over time morphed into hate and severe psychological conflagration of some sort, such that it is becoming increasingly unimaginable if we can ever overcome the dire consequences of this mismanaged construct.

Every nation has a soul and a conscience. Ours is a conscience in an argument in perpetuity; a constant self-engagement between the rightness of doing right and the bare face justification of doing wrong.

This interplay between two opposing forces has helped in shaping societies into modernity, development and improved human relations on one hand, and the ruination and total annihilation of nations on the other.

No nation grows beyond her state of conscience and consciousness. Our collective conscience as a nation can be worked on to deliver only the good for the generality of the people rather than a few privileged individuals who know what is right but chose to do only what is wrong.

A nation where personal desires must be attained despite the collective desire without regard to morality, humanness and negative consequences to the majority in the course of pursuing such potentially destructive ambition can never attain greatness and respect among the comity of Nations.

It is most unfortunate that it is on this evil trajectory that we sit all the time as a nation, pontificating to no avail, how to move the nation forward. Let us change our style to run not on our feet or emotions but on our conscience as people who call a spade its true name.

Until and unless we go in this direction, our collective expectation for our nation will forever remain a pipe dream.

Austen Akhagbeme s a Columnist with Blank NEWS Online