By Jonathan Ugbal
The current economic challenges facing Cross River is contrary to what the ancestors of the state dreamt about says a one time Attorney General of the Federation, Mr. Kanu Agabi.
The Senior Advocate of Nigeria said this during a lecture at the third Anniversary Lecture of CrossRiverWatch where he was the Guest Lecturer.
According to Agabi “Our ancestors dreamt of a self-reliant state – a state whose patience, whose resilience, whose intelligence would feed the nation – not a state, such as it is now, totally dependent on non-indigenes for her economic survival”.
The cause, Agabi says lies in the fact that “In those days it was merit that counted. Today nothing counts” and went ahead to describe his dream Cross Riverian as “that man or woman who will make a success of his or her life not just in the state but also elsewhere in the nation and indeed the world”.
He also portrayed the Cross River State of his dreams as “that in which the talents of the southern senatorial district will be the common property of the north and the central and vice versa”.
The Bekwarra born legal luminary argues that the present generation fails to see what the ancestors saw saying “Our ancestors realized, as we fail to do, that a society founded on patronage cannot last. The emphasis then was not what governments can do for the people but what the people could do for themselves and for the nation”.
Explaining this he further added that “The reason why the men and women of those days rose to eminence and enjoyed the respect that they did was because they believed that they could advance by methods of their own.
They did not suffer from a complex and they did not believe that the methods of other people were final. While admitting that we had a lot to learn from the rest of the nation, they made it clear that, on our part, we had much to teach the nation. Their generation did not suffer from the complex under which we now labor- a complex sometimes of inferiority and sometimes of superiority”.
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