By Tony Okoroji
I verily believe that the biggest problem we have in our nation is that we have too many takers and very few givers. Poverty and hopelessness bestride our fatherland because we give nothing and take everything.
Give a Nigerian the nation’s pension fund to manage and he takes all the money and leaves the pensioners hungry on the streets. Give a Nigerian Army General money to buy arms to fight the terrorist traumatizing our people, the General will take all the money and bury it in a soak-away pit and send innocent soldiers without weapons to go and die in Sambisa Forest. Across the country, everyone is in a mad scramble to take. Very few are willing to give. Pastors are on the take, civil servants are on the take, some judges are on the take and policemen are on the take. And we want to build a nation? How?
Give a Nigerian governor money to run his state and he grabs all the land across the state and builds mansions for himself, his wife, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and generations unimagined. Meanwhile, he leaves the roads without maintenance, hospitals without drugs, government workers without pay and the citizens without hope.
In my service in different organizations in the creative industry I have witnessed a number of people fight tooth and nail to join the different Boards or Working Committees, not because they want to provide service but because they want to “chop”. Once they find out that the board or committee is about work and not “chop”, they get frustrated and head for the exit with so much noise and nuisance!
Because some people have become so engrossed in taking, they don’t believe that anyone can honestly give. In December, at the COSON AGM, we announced the distribution of millions of Naira to thousands of musicians across Nigeria as palliatives, at a time of economic distress. Many of the beneficiaries, I have never met. I know that there are people who still don’t believe that the distribution is real. They think that it is a Nigerian scam. Do you know that scammers believe that everybody is a scammer?
Some people once wrote to the police, protesting that the COSON COVID 19 royalty distribution during the Covid era was a smokescreen. Thank God, COSON House keeps excellent records. I took the huge print out of paper containing the records of the payments with the names of the thousands of recipients, their bank account details, their telephone numbers and handed it over to the police to investigate. Nobody ever called me back to say that they found one person who did not receive money that was said to have been paid to him.
I know that there are people who wonder why we will not appropriate the millions we distribute, when we have our own pressing personal needs and problems. At the COSON AGM, in December, I addressed members of COSON and said: “in my time, I have been to many funerals and witnessed many great men and women buried. I have not been to any funeral where a big house was put into the casket or the grave. I have also not been to a funeral where a big car was put into the casket or the grave.
“My experience tells me that our true legacy is the love we share, the service we render and the sacrifice we make on behalf of others. In the fulness of time we will all fly away”.
How can we grow when it should be clear that there is no nation, no state, no organization and no family that can make progress when everybody is taking, and nobody is giving?
Giving is what builds nations and institutions and families. It is the giving by many of their intellect, time, love, hard work and sometimes, their lives that have created those countries that we admire and whose visas we are desperate to acquire.
Just look at the New York subway and imagine the giving that went into building that incredible network of rail lines under the dizzying skyscrapers of Manhattan. The marvelous road network in Germany, the Autobahn, is the product of giving.
Across the world, you see nations with structures and systems that work so very efficiently. Why? It is because these nations have people who are happy to give of themselves.
The International Red Cross, Caritas, Doctors without Borders, and many such organizations, set up to save people in need and in strife, are staffed by people who take unimaginable personal risks and deprivations to serve people they don’t even know.
There is nothing wrong in making money if the objective is to try to bring happiness to the greatest number. Believe me, the Almighty does not reward you for what you take but for what you give.
Considering that we come with nothing and go with nothing, is it not curious that we spend so much time acquiring, grabbing, taking and taking things much of which we do not need?
Think about it, Nelson Mandela did not become great by being a taker. Martin Luther King did not become great by being a taker. Mother Theresa certainly did not become great by being a taker. The just departed Jimmy Carter who died at 100 years, did not become great by being a taker.
My mind is clear that in 2025, I do not want to be a taker. Please join me in praying that the good Lord gives me the where-with-all to be a giver of hope, love, warmth and happiness to as many in the world as I can.
