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A former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara has said Nigerians seem to have accepted mass killings in the country as the new normal.
Dogara, in a key note address titled, “Peace and Development in Nigeria: The Pragmatic Approach,” delivered at a summit organised by the Sultan Maccido Institute for Peace and Development Studies, University of Abuja, lamented that such killings no longer made headlines, adding that the situation had created a feeling that “nothing matters anymore.”
He said: “Today, Nigeria is faced with unprecedented crisis, so much so that nothing in our history prepares us for such a time as this. We seem to have accepted killings and mass murder as our new normal and so many cold-blooded murders of our brothers and sisters no longer make the headlines in the media.
“As students, lecturers and political leaders, some of us are complicit, while the few who have dared to speak up are already outraged, fatigued and have surrendered to fatalism- a feeling that nothing matters anymore. It is like Nigeria seems to be suffering from some kind of God-ordained ineluctable fate.
“What we have done before doesn’t matter; all that matters is our present station. As long as we are not actively engaged in seeking solutions to these intractable issues, we are actually, wittingly or unwittingly, actively promoting it.”
The former Speaker said Nigeria runs the risk of not surviving if people merely tolerated each other, adding, “Our happiness cannot be the other groups’ unhappiness; our strength is not and will never be in our numbers but in our unity.”
ThisDay
