This week, I would like to highlight these searing points made by the Governor of Abia State, Dr. Okezie Ikpeazu. In a recent interview, he applauded the leadership of the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame. He highlighted the need for Nigeria to identify and adopt a national narrative – a mainframe that will spur growth and development:
“Some people admire the growth and advancement in Rwanda, I was in an African Leadership Summit that Tony Elumelu organised; the Foreign Affairs Minister of Rwanda came in and she spoke for quite some time and concluded her comments by saying, ‘gentlemen and ladies, I flew in with Air Rwanda’. I was sitting there with Obasanjo and Elumelu, we looked at ourselves. I decided to go and see Rwanda. I went to Kigali on a Digital Africa Conference. It was there to promote this our tele-health initiative. I got to Kigali, I couldn’t pick a sachet of pure water in the gutter, not to talk of the streets. The students when they are going to school, they file towards the school bus and swipe a card on the body of the bus and the bus opens. I said, ‘what is this?’ I ran to the Genocide Museum. It was there that I understood the secret behind it, ‘Never Again’. They wrote everything. They spoke the truth. They changed their official language. They abolished state of origin and religion from their identity card. You are a Rwandan, you are not Hutu or Tutsi or whatever. They took steps to roll back all the rubbish that held them down. Even some newspapers houses that wrote things that fueled that crisis, they sent them away. They created national heroes and villains. I can tell my child, ‘do you want to behave like this person?’ Don’t do that! They had a national mainframe set up that you don’t deviate from.”
