DIRECTIONLESS- TO SURVIVE AND SUCCEED
Feature Story
The choice to survive and succeed is mine.
Can life get any worse? With several assignments to submit, a couple of seminars to prepare for, there goes my practicals! I have got to carry out so many long unending procedures. Like asking Usain Bolt to go for a marathon. Yeah, I guess the result is obvious. My case was worst cause I'm not even Mr bolt. I'm just a Nigerian student pursuing a dream that's now forming out of the mirage. I was drowning, it was just too much for me to bear, so I guess you know how much that ASUU's two weeks warning strike meant to me. Like setting a domestic bird free from its cage, I was going to flap my wings and scratch the floor happily before returning to chirping in my cage. Will there be any returning though? At least not yet.
I was ignorantly going to start preparing for my seminars, I was confident the break was for two weeks after which everything will be normal again. Sincerely, I heard about Covid a few days before. I don't know why I wasn't too bothered. Like this is a virus in China it won't even come to Nigeria talk more of a state without an international airport. Yes, I really didn't care. Not until the mortality began to rise and boom it was a pandemic and of course, schools were shut down.
It was all still hazy for me as I traveled back home. Somehow I still had assurance everything will be normal again, well not until ASUU's strike metastasized to a full-blown case. I lost interest in reading, what's the point to read without exams. I'm a typical Nigerian student jare.
From nowhere motivation came to study poetry for the first time in my life, it was there I discovered that everybody has their Calling. Like a defeated hyena I withdrew back to my niche.
I practically tried everything within my powers to fight boredom and get my life going again. I learned how to sew, (what most people will call fashion and design even if it's just a part of it). But the economy was crippled who wants a new senator when he can't go out. It felt like my life depended on school.
I grew up with the popular rationale, go to school, read well graduate tops, get a good job then raise a family. And I have lived my life based on this precept. But this period I discovered that school isn't all there is to living your life as a young person, for the first time I was forced to look for avenues to engage myself meaningfully all in search of finding fulfillment and that inner peace but Nigeria is quite a place.
Where leaders enjoy robbing the masses of their resources which unfortunately isn't outside human nature. I mean humans are greedy, never contented, and always seeking fame at all cost. But the inhumanity of our leaders was perfectly showcased when innocent Nigerians were massacred for speaking up, standing against oppression, for being the light in a highly dark nation( May their souls rest in peace). Yes, this took my mind away from the strike, the pandemic to another serious issue. Like we want ASUU to call off the strike so we graduate and work where? Live where? raise our kids where?. A place where the government can't provide life's basic requirements talk more of a conducive environment for our dreams and ambitions to thrive. A place where you're murdered for exercising your fundamental right. Yes boredom left and the new movement was and is still soro soke and we move.
What a year, the shocking 2020. But amidst all, we young Nigerians, we know better. The strike and pandemic have given us, though undesired, the time to reflect and see the mismanagement of social engineering by our so-called leaders. And like the cedar of Lebanon covered with clay the revolution has begun, soon its heights will be enough to birth the Nigeria of our dreams.
The decision of ASUU and FG notwithstanding, our destinies are in our hands. We decide what we become by our every decision and actions backed with great resilience and tenacity. It's correct that our environment influences us a great deal, but we can choose to succumb or rise above these influences. I have chosen to survive and succeed so I move.
Contributor: DiniceSC (Unical)
Edited and Published by Directionless