A LITTLE GOES A LONG WAY
“We all know in our hearts that Nigeria is ours for keeps, yet we tackle 50-year problems with four-year plans staffed by two-year personnel working with one-year appropriations. It’s simply not good enough. This will neither yield us the Nigeria of our desire nor the Nigeria of our founding fathers’ dream, the future Nigeria” hence we need to turn the page!
“We all know in our hearts that Nigeria is ours for keeps, yet we tackle 50-year problems with four-year plans staffed by two-year personnel working with one-year appropriations. It’s simply not good enough. This will neither yield us the Nigeria of our desire nor the Nigeria of our founding fathers’ dream, the future Nigeria” hence we need to turn the page!
Moreover, with the clear understanding that, “We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.”
Then following from the Mahatma Gandhi guide in his quote: ‘An ounce of practice is worth more than a ton of lectures’, we started of working.
My working idea is about how to develop a three-tier development
model for my country starting from my immediate community. This
model is youth-centric, as I believe that it is very important to have
the voice of the future inhabitants of the country heard and
streamlined into the development process.
Now, this starts with an individual in a school and scales up to include more schools to form a democratic youth council, (FVGI: Future View Green Initiatives) and from that we invite those we regard as in-house mentors (Chiefs, Emirs, Imams, Pastors, Teachers, Business women/men etc) to be its nominal head, to involve the civic bodies, which is very important. Now, I believe that a nation goes wrong not because of the actions of the corrupt people, which are very few in numbers, but due to the inactions of the good ones. So it is very important to make those good ones work, and to do that, we came up with various initiatives and incentives, not only for the youth, but also for the media, corporates, NGOs, I mean, everyone, to get everyone involved in the project, as a form of networking of all the different players of the society, and try to coordinate all projects together.
I started off small, but now it is such a huge youth movement. Right
now we are working on strategic and effective plans, to ensure stability and self sustenance. All that has made me believe that in life, a little goes a long way.
With the eight MDG as our target, we particularly chose the goals
which we will work towards the attainment, and then we motivate other young people and persons to also form cluster/groups and identify a goal to work towards, all within our immediate communities.
In FVGI, we zoomed off with EDUCATION as one effective way to form a pulley and fulcrum for us to attain the goals.
This is our reason, “Education is a very powerful instrument for
reducing poverty and inequality, improving health and social well being, and laying a basis for sustained economic growth. It is essential for building dynamic democratic societies and globally competitive economies.’’
Even education as our kick off tool, we believe that we so educate
other young people to equally work towards the goal. FVGI directly
works towards the MDGs that are related to our health, environment, education and gender equality.
