Dear child, I write you this letter because of how much I love you. You are young and full of life, restless and in need of some action but watch it. Watch it, I tell you, for you are about to destroy all I lived and died for, you are about to sacrifice your life on the alter that no longer exits, you are about to be cut short in the prime of your life, you are about to leave your kids orphaned, your wives widows and your parents childless for a concluded cause.
You take this too far, and that is because you didn’t see the war! If you did, you would do everything to stop any further reoccurrence. I fought and do you know that I lost some of my loved ones? I and my colleagues had reason to mourn over sons, daughters, fathers, mothers and siblings before we finally joined them. I felt raw pain. It wasn’t funny; sometimes we had to take up our alms and fight even on hungry stomachs, we often had to lie in muddy pits and trenches crawling with warms and all manner of rodents, we had to see our friends fall in battle and I tell you, if we could do anything to stop it or turn back the hands of time, we would have. But alas! It was too late. So we fought on till we had to stop and when we did? We couldn’t rejoice that the war was over because of the devastation. We could only hope that our children and future generations would have a more peaceful existence as they build in unity. We took solace in the fact that we had cleared the way for you.
So now, tell me; are you trying to make our sacrifice of no effect? Are you trying to reopen old wounds that we struggled so hard to burry? What are you trying to do? With your strength and intellect, modern facilities and all manner of technologies available to you, you can chat a different cause; one that is indeed noble, one born out of love for your fellow brothers regardless of what names they bear or tribes they represent. Not a cause born out of hate, un-forgiveness or the feeling of deprivation and oppression. Look at it, everyone member of this great country suffers one challenge or the other, isn’t it unfair to think that you suffer the most and become insensitive to the sufferings of others? But imagine if we were all to rise and fight to overcome our challenges rather than fighting ourselves; no matter how diverse, our unity will grow from strength to strength as we harness all our resources to make one great nation. We only need to be one people with one cause and with God on our side; rising is a sure thing for us. What would happen to the strength and solace that we found in the company of each other when we choose to see our differences as a plague rather than a blessing? Remember that the brothers that have misunderstandings more often are usually the ones that end up being the closest. Why not give your immaturities, faults and misunderstandings time to be worked out till your friendship gets to the place called ‘closest ’. He is different from you because he is not you, and even if you had a twin brother, he would never be you. Our differences are the very things that make us eligible to be called humans and live with each other. You want to be comfortable and safe? I won’t stop you but think it through again, there is always the right way to go about things.
What you have now, may not be the best, but it sure is better than what you’ll get if you fight the way I believe you intend. However, if you would endure and build with your brothers, you will definitely have something better than you imagined. Let your name go down into history as one that made a positive contribution to your land, as one who stood for peace even when it wasn’t trendy, as one who lived and let others live.
Indeed, there is no war without peace, but there are better ways to fight a war than with harsh words and ammunitions, especially when I and my comrades have finished the war and laid the foundation for peace. Now, it’s time to build. Build with everything you’ve got, for that is the reason God made you a Nigerian. He put in you just the right amount and quality of muscles that Nigeria needs to whether these storms, so arise above ethnicity and individual differences for we have only one cause- to serve our father land with love, strength and faith. We are a nation under God and in His strength we rise and we build!
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