http://www.dasofte.com

I believe the best thing is to try and strike a balance in the pendulum. You don’t have to give in completely! Respect should be the keyword.

There is a crisis of values in Nigeria amongst the young, one symptom of which is a crass materialism. It is partly a nouveau riche mentality (old money doesn’t flash itself) and partly a lack of guardianship from an older generation that utterly failed to provide ethical leadership.

But I think the deeper point is about alienation from indigenous spiritual traditions. When a supercharged materialistic christian evangelism is fused onto a social body that has lost sense of itself (its history, its culture), the end result is not going to be pretty.

So the question is: how is Nigerian society to become an ethical society again, where people give respect for words and deeds, not for what you own or what you show? I can’t see any other way forward but to retrieve what was good about the forgotten ways of doings things. Each of the three main cultures have vast riches of spiritual and ethical practice to draw upon that are increasingly ignored. Without making this move backwards-to-go-forwards, Nigerians will remain a little lost inside themselves, with no unique set of values and outlook to offer up to the world.. In which case, those with money will continue to parrot Western ways of doing things (Gucci and all the trimmings), with nothing distinctive, nothing of substance, beneath the surface.

The point is not to despair about these people. Forget about them, and pursue your own path, and embroider it with all the meaning you can find from the world. There are many who are wise, and there are many paths that offer other kinds of riches along the way.

And so endeth the sermon!