I thank God for His little mercies!
When I say God, I don’t necessarily mean the Christian God. That’s because I’m aware of the fact that there are many religions and some people don’t even believe in the existence of any Supreme Being.
Indeed, we are gods!
When I was in school, I traversed various religious sects like the Eckankar, the Grail Message, and various sects of Christianity.
What I noted in those I attended was their belief in humanity, humanism and humaneness.
Way back in secondary school, an Igbo was my best friend. By the way, then, we didn’t classify anyone by their tribe. Even if one could mix, there were no boundaries between the children of the wealthy and the poor.
I can remember some of the unifying things among us were the school song, football, food and maybe, girls.
Even further back in elementary school, there were no tribal barriers. We played and fought the neighbouring Ansar-Ud-Deen Primary School like comrades.
I really don’t know where we imbibed tribal sentiments from.
I can tell you for free that before Nigeria’s needless civil war, we played with people of various tribes. Of course, we fought them when the need arose, but it wasn’t because they came from a particular tribe.
It’s not as if people don’t belong to different tribes or ethnic groups in the advanced world. But they see themselves first as Humans, then as Americans, Indians or Canadians.
It’s not until you get pretty close to them that they’ll tell you for instance that they’re Canadian whose province is Nova Scotia.
But in my country, we see ourselves first as coming from a particular family. We then see ourselves in terms of our village, then our state, ethnic group and so on.
We hardly think of ourselves as humans first not to talk of as Nigerians.
That’s probably a reason why the wealthy ones among us do not think of doing anything for humanity. For instance, how many foundations are there in Nigeria?
Let’s start seeing each other first as humans!
030723
