You cannot outsource your liberation. Malcom Fabiyi writes:
For the Nigerians who are dreaming big dreams about change based on what the Egyptians, Libyans, Yemeni, and the Tunisians before them have achieved, they should snap out of their dreams and face the reality that there will be no Arab Spring in Nigeria. Those nations did not arrive at change by chance. They did not pray it down from the heavens, they did not wish it into being, they did not tweet democracy into existence, or Facebook it to reality. They fought for their freedoms on the streets and alleyways, on fields and in government torture cells. They were ready to pay the ultimate price for its realization, and some were martyred for the cause.More here
Nigerians love short cuts. Our predilection for the path of least resistance spans the entire gamut from politics to sports and to education. Students pay to pass examinations. We turn up at major global competitions like the World Cup, which the rest of the world has put in years of training for, unprepared, and we seriously expect to win. We have an optimism that sometimes borders on the absurd. And our desire for a sweet, simple, painless, internet driven, SMS text message based struggle for freedom is evidence of the mass delusion we suffer from. .
When we lampoon our leaders for their perennial failures to move our nation forward, we point to nations like South Africa, America, Israel and Egypt and hold them up as models. We conveniently forget that those nations got where they are today not by taking short cuts or making inane compromises.