The most powerful thing you can give people is confidence. Self-confidence. But some people, once they have it they turn around and use it against you, who awakened it in them.
Next time, you feel like leaving people wallowing in their pitiful inferiority complex.
But a part of you still goes ahead and keeps on strengthening people who need it everywhere you meet them. What they later do with this strength and self-confidence is their business.
You have done yours.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
The end result of life should be happiness. If you live a long and “fulfilled” life, and yet at the end you are full of sadness and uncertainty – what was the point?
I don’t know what or where Paradise is – but if it’s not a synonym for Happiness, what’s the point in making it the destination of your travels?
As simple as it may sound, the aim of life is to be happy – nothing more. The difficult exercise along the way is finding your happiness without unfairly or willfully impeding the happiness of another.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
It is an illusion that Government can save Nigeria. All government can do is more or less throw its weight behind either the fair redistribution of our national wealth or not.
This thing we call “our wealth” however is our biggest self-deception, because we did not create it and do not truly posess it. We simply take what Nature made and sell it and pocket the money without even giving any part of it back to nature.
We then stash away the bulk of this money and share a small part amongst ourselves and use the little rest for “business”. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is inventing itself AWAY from fossil fuels and a system dependent on it.
Real wealth or poverty lies in the ideas that bubble up in the mind. The only thing that can save Nigeria long term is twofold:
1. To learn to transform by ourselves the bulk of those raw materials stage by stage into the final world-class products that everybody else will need and will queue up to buy.
2. To become a scientifically inventing people and culture who already now think up and excute solutions for the time when oil has finished or become irrelevant. A people who don’t eternally leave the inventing of the future to foreigners. That kind of hardwork and industry awakens new virtues and powers in a people and a culture.
Any government that, in addition to meeting its fundamental security and human rights responsibilities, also supports, engenders and midwives this new path, is a government that truly understands and wants to solve the problem LONG TERM. Any other one is just implementing short-term measures, more or less effectively. But the real danger – eventual contextual Recolonialization – remains.
If the Federal Government cannot or will not do it, either because of ineptitude or corruption or bigotry, then each State Government has to step forward and do what is within its power in the service of modernising its citizens – mentally, morally, materially and technologically.
Even on the level of the Local Government – indeed especially on the level of the LG – can the push towards a transformation of the peoples and their conditions take place.
Going by the level of corruption and desperation and visionlessness on ground now, that might seem just like wishful thinking. But I believe events will make it incredibly obvious that we are marching straight back into subjugation – either at the hands of Islamic Imperialism via a hegemonic section of the Fulani power-holders assisted by their lackeys in the other tribes; or at the hands of White Western Supremacist economic, military and political control; or at the hands of rising Asian globalization of dominance spearheaded by the Chinese.
One way or the other we’re going to get it unless we become truly independent and the governments of the Nigerian peoples get right the two points mentioned above, and find a way to tie it into Panafricanism.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Human society needs a healthy mix of capitalism and socialism. Too much of either one has always proven to be bad.
Human society needs a healthy mix of faith and doubt. Too much of either one has always proven to be bad.
The world needs a healthy balance between “I” and “we”. Too much of either one has always proven to be bad.
We divide ourselves into “left” and “right”; and then we forget that left and right are the two legs on which that which is Human walks, balanced. They are not adversaries of one another; they are complementary to one another. Each must tolerate the other, for the sake of all.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
All power belongs to God, and only to God. If power is given to you, then you are just temporarily a vessel through which power in part will seek to fulfil the Will of God.
If you try to wield power and to bend it to your own will, and use it solely in service of your own ego and volition, then it will turn against you and destroy you, even if this destruction only becomes obvious to you after you have left this earth and it is too late to stop or reverse your self-destruction via power.
This is the worst kind of destruction, the one that becomes visible only after you have left the earth. You will have to come again as a baby and live a new life, to attempt to painfully undo the errors of the former.
Power is a very strange thing. It is not what you think it is. It is not what you see or think that you are seeing. What you see as power, no matter how obvious or subtle it may be, is just a temporary vessel through which power seeks to fulfil the Will of God. For all power belongs to God.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
It’s hard to get excited when you see through everyone and everything.
And also when you’ve seen through your own self to the core, it’s hard to whip up enthusiasm for things you know well are not you or yours. It’s like a kind of boredom.
Only your small simple little things satisfy your life now and you tend to just want to stick to them, whether the world says they’re right or wrong. They’re yours.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Every shift in form takes a bit of attention away from content as the consciousness or subconscious seeks through a reappraisal of form, and an attempted understanding of the reason for the shift, to glimpse a hint at the current nature of content. So, the understanding of content – on its way from itself to itself – takes a detour via attention to and understanding of form.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Why is it that many White people, when they go to Africa, one of the points on their checklist is to go to an orphanage or a Hospital or a village school and take pictures of themselves carrying little Black children and surrounded by little African children?
If I were to come to Europe and go to an orphanage or a hospital or a village school and take and post on social media pictures of myself carrying and surrounded by little White children to whom I have no close personal connection and whose parents or guardians don‘t even know me, I would be accused of many things.
Please, White people, stop instrumentalising Black African children for the purpose of your hypocritical self-staging as supposedly benevolent world saviours. Robbing them of their privacy and dignity, objectifying them, and using them as moral ornaments with which to decorate your souls on social media. They are human beings, they are minors, and they are somebody’s children and wards.
Even if you want to donate to an orphanage or help the under-privileged, you have no right to use it as an opportunity for a foto op and PR session. I’m sure some of you also donate anonymously to orphanages in Europe and America, but you don’t afterwards troop there to pose for pictures with the children to whose welfare you are contributing. You sense, and quite rightly so, that it would be undignifying towards those children. And undignifying towards you yourselves too. Well, the same applies to Black and African children too! And the same applies with regards to them.
Please stop using them as background deco and surround sound for the accolade-seeking self-images you wish to bring back with you from Africa as your holiday trophies.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
The present always becomes the distant past. When Martin Luther put up the 95 theses, that was for him in the present. For us today it is the distant past. When Judas betrayed Jesus, for him that was the present; for us today it is in the distant past. When the artisans at Igbo-Ukwu or in Nok made their bronzes, that was for them the present, the most modern moment they knew. They could have never guessed what the future would be. But for us today, their present is the distant distant past.
Even such is time.
Today will one day be the past, the distant past, and be forgotten. Another day will be the present. Everyday another day. Only the present matters. The present is the only thing that Really IS.
Live in the present, from day to day.
Move with the present, from day today.
BE the present, every day.
Be present in every moment.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
For those people (and leaders) who like to blame the masses and exonerate the leaders who, as they say, afterall emerged from those same masses and from those same people… well, as logical as your argument is, I would nevertheless like to say this:
This is the magic and importance of leadership -:
If you aspire to leadership and campaign for it or willingly accept an appointment to it, you thereby indicate your willingness to be better than the masses, to be an example for the masses and to pull, inspire, chaperone and lead the masses out of the wrong towards the right. You indicate your certainty that you KNOW and UNDERSTAND the masses, from out of whom you also arose. Your campaign is an assurance that you know their weaknesses and strengths, their qualities, history and idiosyncrasies, their needs and problems. And that you know how to pull them together and bring out the Better Them. The best in them.
No one expects you to be perfect, but they expect you to strive towards perfection. If they experience you doing so, they will be ready to forgive you your shortcomings.
Blaming the masses is not the solution. The masses are yearning and looking for a leader – a GOOD leader. And that’s why they voted for you. They believed in your rhetoric and put their faith in you. Now YOU have to lead them towards what is better – instead of turning around and blaming them.
Especially in a young country whose institutions are still weak and forming, where there is mass under-education and massively one-sided congregation of wealth, we need powerful circles and groups of leadership personalities to break into the driving seat on all levels and power the birth of the best of the good in us. One day we will hit that critical mass that tips the scale. Good people really need to stick together and work together – because evil people always do. Irrespective of colour, class, cut-out, conviction and creed – on both sides.
The leader should first give his best, his honest and noble best; and then leave posterity to be the judge. Don’t blame the masses, don’t blame the people. Blame the leaders. If you are not ready or able to lead, do not step forward in the first place to ask for or accept the staff of office. If you do that, then you represent the worst of what you condemn in the masses.
From now on, we want leaders who represent and reflect The Best of what is in the masses of the peoples. This is what Nigeria needs now. This is what Africa needs now. Afterall, there is a reason why leadership is called “public service”.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 