Independence: We Look Sixteen at Sixty

Sixty years in the life of a man is enough time to confer all round maturity, not only in stature but also in character and reasoning. The signs will be clear that the man is sixty. Physically, the hair will become grey and the face will begin to get wrinkled. But that is not all, the oil of wisdom will become fresher and abundant and like the aging wine, his disposition gets better and sweeter to the doxology of youngsters.

While physical maturity is inevitable as it is a function of time, maturity of thought and action is deliberate. It is a function of personal investment in faculty, network and virtures.

Whether Nigeria has grown to reflect her age of wisdom today or she is a paradox of one that has grown but has not matured is the crux of the matter. Have we shown maturity in our attitude to governance, to communal living, to conflict resolution, to brotherhood, to citizenship, and to the management and security of our common wealth?

Are we not behaving like sixteen year old juveniles who lack sound faculty for critical reasoning, self independence and governance? Have we truly brought to bare the maturity and experience of a sixty year old sage in our quest to communal living and management of our diversity as a nation? Have we not discarded the rich lessons of our 60yrs of existence into waste bins and clung on to divisive and sectional mentors who want to make a caricature of our age of wisdom?

Have we not, like the 16year old juvenile, been all over the place exhibiting delinquent attitudes of selfishness, clanishness, cronyism and hypocrisy? Have the young and the old not collapsed into one basket of irresponsible juvenility of fraud, rape and hooliganism with no one left in the elders corner to sound a note of caution, restraint and discipline?

Perhaps the age-long paradoxical statement of an elder of sixteen and a child of sixty has found expression in Nigeria as a country. Sixteen, not because we are bubbling with life but because we lack sense of direction and self independence even when we claim we have had it for sixty years and counting.

As we reflect on the past sixty years of our nationhood today, it is up to us to decide to act in the wisdom of a sixty year old sage or swim in the irrationality of a sixteen year old deliquent.