It was not until over a year after her 2008 kidnapping that I began to accept that my brother’s wife was not going to come home. It took some other family members longer. In the early weeks after she was kidnapped, in the heat of the Niger Delta militancy, we had been involved in a lot of frenetic activity to get her out, negotiating, speaking with the police, militants, etc and there was some progress. Her driver and the friend who was with her were released within weeks but not her. Instead the trail went cold.
I learnt from that experience that we are all victims waiting to be picked off as long as we continue to wring our hands and watch on in despair and helplessness. I decided to do whatever I could to ensure that loss and that of several others over time is not wasted. I act now in the hope that we can.
When a friend’s relation was refused emergency medical treatment because he did not have a police permit, thereby running the risk of amputation, I and a group of friends decided to act to correct what we felt was a grave injustice. That process got me in close contact with the top hierarchy of the Nigerian police, executives of the Nigerian Medical Association, legislators, NGOs and many Nigerians who were passionate about changing the situation. While we made significant progress, the situation did not change as we desired.
But again I learnt that there are a lot of Nigerians looking for change in both high and low offices but working against each other in a number of ways rather than pooling resources together to shoot for win-win solutions. I saw that people were willing to talk with me, to work with me and to divulge their challenges and frustrations with pushing for improvement in their various small ways. One said I was the only person who had given him a chance to explain his side of the story. I felt a need to bring that perspective to others, to help us look at our situation differently and see that we are partners on the same side of the table against the problem rather than combatants opposing each other and that we need each other to solve our problems; whether corruption, tribalism, etc.
I started to write newspaper articles; first about gunshot victims, then other topical issues and eventually on corruption. And as I did that, I began to see a pattern that signaled to me that our problems are all inter-related and that we can make significant progress if we can address things from the root. And that we were focusing on symptoms when we could find the root causes and remove them. After a while, I stopped writing and began to research and study Nigerian history and to apply my business analysis skills to my findings and that has resulted in “The Survival Mindset: A Systematic Approach to Combating Corruption.”
