Our Mindset
There's something Ayo Daniels said in his review on Sunday that has stayed with me. The possibility of a change in Nigeria will only come with a change of our mindset. And it's very true. The dictionary defines a mindset as - A fixed mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person's response to and interpretation of situations.
Sometime last year I was with a group of friends. One of them concluded with certainty that a particular person was going to emerge president in 2007. His only basis was the fact that the person had strong political clout and extremely deep pockets. I was sad by his statements and had to call him to order by saying, "If you, a comfortable engineering professional in your late thirties have lost hope, then where are we going to?" He pondered for a while but couldn't really see.
We will do good to up our expectations and broaden our vision. Our mindset has to change. A people with no hope are going nowhere.
And we do have mentors and models in Nigeria who have proved that we can lay claim to new possibilities. Just to mention a few. What made Prof Charles Soludo persist as a lone voice to raise our banks to international standards; what did Pastor Enoch Adeboye see that made him take a local assembly and make it the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world; John Momoh was not limited by a mindset when he successfully set up a television station dedicated to the news; Okonjo- Iweala set her mind to paying off our national debts and she did.
These were all potential impossibilities, but some Nigerian somewhere did not allow the restriction of a mindset to prevail.
What do you think?
