The long silent of believing in a single story was first broke by a famous born Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie in a long eassy in one of the series programs organised by TED.
An average reader believes what he first read or heard from the first source, without getting the other side of the story or view.
In 1561 a London Marchant John Locke, who sailed to west Africa. In his account of his voyage he called African as ” beast who have no houses.” He writes “they are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in thier breast.” Thousand of whites color people died with such an ugly imagination of Africa.
President Bola Ahmed Tunubu was elected and sworn into office a year and two months ago, with a well written document titled” Renewed hope.” and he carefully outlined his government to be policies, and subsidy removal on Premiums Motor Spirit (PMS) is part of it.
We all believed that Subsidy is a scam, and has to go. This is a notion from a fruit seller to a University Professor, as those at a helm of affair before him (Tinubu), concoted a single story, and the common man believe in it, without getting the other side of the story.
As a matter of fact fuel subsidy removal has come to stay, as all the four year government plan, use it as a tool for the days ahead. If we have carefully read or heard the other side of the story, we would have avoid tagging it a scam.
Another negative side of Single Story is the university autonomy. We were briefed that when our varsities become autonomous, learning facilities will be provide, and the conducive atmosphere would be created. And now they are what we want them to be, and our universities recorded very low enrollments. Now we feel the pain of our universities being autonomous, only to be saved by the students loan fund, initiated by the present government.
It is impossible to talk about single story without discussing Bola Tinubu as a Lagos state governor. During his term as a governor he transformed lagos to another California in terms of revenue, provided infrastructures like a mini Dubai. And we elect him to turn Nigeria to what Lagos is. We faild to read the other story of sacrifices Lagosian done to make their state better.
Some segment the Nigerian youths are planing to emberk on hunger strike. The only single story they read is the positive impact of the protest, and they should dusk stories of Libyans, Syrians, Sudanese and now Kenya.
We can only be successful, when we rejected the single story, when we reliaze their is never a single story, and we will be in a promise land.
Auwal Dankano wrote from Kano,
malamdankano@gmail.com
