Uniting for Progress: Rejecting Hate and Embracing Difficult Conversations
By Amb. Lady Zakari, LDM
We must reject unwarranted, uneducated, and hateful labels. We also need to have difficult conversations in order to find common ground.” This is highly applicable not only in the global world but also in Nigeria and Africa.
What do we want as a collective? Is the arrangement and the setting we have in our countries capable of giving solutions to our problems? If our current setting is good enough to make the positive changes we all desire, then we need to make better plans and implementation strategies. If our current setting will not give us and lead us towards development, peace, and progress, then we need to rethink our current setting and come up with what will work for us as people, as collectives.
Hate speeches and venomous writings. Hateful rhetoric, looking down at one another, feeling ourselves, and imagining we are better than the next person. Spewing rubbish and showing disdain
will not yield anything positive but create more discord, unnecessary tension, and misunderstanding. Hatred and negativity have never yielded anything positive and progressive.
The hallmark of intellectualism is to use it and give a gift of love, peace, and progressive ideas to the world.
Having a library of multitudes of writings, articles, and messages full of arrogance, divisiveness, venom, and disdain only shows the states of our mind. The unhappiness and dissatisfaction we have with who we are make us feel the need to bring down a person or a group of people and point a finger of accusation at them.
In our mental sickness, we believe that will make us feel better about ourselves. We forget that when we point a finger, four fingers point back at us.
Please, dear comrades, we need to grow up and learn to fight for positive and worthy causes. Eschew sentimental bitterness, disdain, and tribal or religious jingoism. Negativity alienates the object of our disdain further away from us and makes us look idiotic and foolish, and that is definitely not a worthy goal.
What we need are simple, realistic, and applicable realities that are in sync with our reality as a collective and in harmony with our plans for the collective. We don’t need far-fetched stories that will only serve the interests of the very few.
We must eschew selfishness and self-centeredness not only because these are bad values but also because it is only when the majority is better off that actual development will materialise.
Very best wishes to Nigeria, to Africa, and to humanity as we once again gear up towards a better and more positive reset.
