Shamsudeen Ilyas

There is a group of Nigerians for whom complaining about Nigeria is no longer a reaction. It is a daily habit, a group identity, and in some cases a personality. Morning, afternoon, and night, the script is the same. Nigeria is finished. Nothing works. Nothing has ever worked. The past was a disaster. The present is a disaster. The future is already written as a disaster. They do not see anything good about the country, and they do not say anything good about it either. If a story is bad, it travels. If it is false but sounds bad enough, it travels faster. If it is good, it is ignored, doubted, or dismissed as propaganda. This is not patriotism. It is not even serious criticism. Serious criticism names a problem and points toward a remedy. What many people now practise is something else: a standing refusal to admit that anything in this country can be useful, improvable, or worth defending. Yes, Nigeria has problems. Governance has failed in too many places. Corruption has cost the country more than it can easily count. Infrastructure is uneven. Insecurity has destroyed lives and livelihoods. Public institutions often underperform. Anyone who pretends otherwise is not being honest. But a country is not only its failures. A country is also its people, its markets, its schools, its farms, its traders, its professionals, its diaspora remittances, its culture, and the millions who wake up every day and still produce something. Rather than ask what can be done, the conversation ends at the curse. Leaders are insulted. Fellow citizens are mocked. Anyone who points to a working business, a skilled young person, a functioning local initiative, or a sector that is growing is treated as naïve or compromised. Fake news is forwarded because it confirms the feeling. Bad news is shared because it keeps the group together. Meanwhile, other people in the same country are getting richer, not because the system suddenly became perfect, but because they stopped waiting for the complaint to become a plan. They learned a skill the market would pay for. They studied past the certificate. They built clientele. They traded. They farmed with better methods. They wrote, coded, taught, repaired, designed, exported, or offered a service people actually needed. They did not deny the difficulty. They priced it in and moved. Opportunity in Nigeria has never been evenly distributed, and it has never been easy. That is not the same thing as saying opportunity does not exist. It exists in trades that are short of competent people. It exists in professions where reputation still beats noise. It exists in agriculture, logistics, education, health, technology, construction, media, and small manufacturing, for those willing to learn the work instead of only learning the grievance. The person who acquires a real skill and uses it well will usually outpace the person who has mastered only the language of national despair. Patriotism, properly understood, is not blindness. It is not singing while the house burns. It is the decision to treat the country as yours enough to improve it, rather than as a stranger you are only permitted to abuse. You can criticise policy and still refuse to traffic in lies. You can demand better leadership and still refuse to curse every neighbour who is trying. Why is there never a sentence about what is working, what can be learned, or what you yourself are building? Why is every conversation a funeral and every forward a curse? Acquire the skill. Get the education that changes your capacity, not just your caption. Add value somewhere a buyer, a client, a student, a patient, or a community can feel it. Make an impact that survives the news cycle. Nigeria will not be saved by a timeline of permanent pessimism. It will be moved, slowly and unevenly, by people who can see the cracks and still lay a brick. Complaining has had its turn. It has not built the road, trained the child, or paid the bills. Something else has to.

Osun Governorship election is less than 24 hours away, and what has dominated the major media outlets are reports of attacks by one political faction on another. In the middle of all the noise, the people of Osun are being deliberately distracted from what truly matters. The constant reports of violence and counter-violence only serve to create fear and confusion, preventing citizens from calmly assessing who has actually delivered for them in the last three and a half years. Beyond the coordinated efforts to downplay the performance and popularity of the incumbent Governor, what exactly have the candidates of the PDP, NDC, AAC, ADC and APC placed before the people of Osun as reasons not to renew his mandate for another four years? Where are the clear alternative programmes? Where are the concrete, measurable plans on education, healthcare, infrastructure, job creation, agriculture, and security that can convince voters to abandon the current administration? Vague promises and recycled slogans cannot replace verifiable results on the ground. With the age of our democracy, our political conversations must finally mature beyond sponsored personality attacks, blackmail, and name-calling. Focus must now shift to issues and policies that will impact the lives of ordinary people positively. The dividends of democracy are not measured by the volume of social media noise or the intensity of propaganda. They are measured by roads that are motorable, schools that function, hospitals that work, and opportunities that exist for the youth. The people of Osun are not children; they can distinguish between propaganda and actual governance. Despite the noise and the attempts to create an atmosphere of crisis, Governor Ademola Adeleke still remains the most favoured candidate to win this election. Many voters who may not shout on social media have quietly made up their minds based on what they have seen and experienced. The people of Osun deserve better than manufactured tension. They deserve a contest of ideas, not a contest of insults. When the polls open, the real decision will not be made by those who generate the loudest noise, but by those who have felt the impact of governance in their daily lives.