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"As an individual, say, a parent, the success of your offspring should be one of your major concerns, and therefore you will responsibly carry out your parental obligations towards them. That is to say that you will go to every length to provide your child(ren) with their every need.
Once you have adequately resourced them financially and prepared them for a dignified social life by guiding them through the paths of ethical and moral rectitude, you will give them their head, especially when they have attained the age you hope, trust and expect that they will begin to work sedulously to harness and channel those resources towards securing great career opportunities.
Additionally, you will expect them to develop positive social skills like commitment, partnership, team spirit, sincerity, loyalty, and solidarity…, which they can avail themselves of once they have confidently made their transition into working life.
Now, what you should not, or cannot do —beyond your duties as a parent or provider— is compel your children to be at your beck and call and do your bidding. Neither can you prevail upon them to alter their decisions in matters regarding their choice of career or relationships. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink.
This means that It is enough for you to provide financial and social support for your children, (and you should be content they have accepted to be resourced) but you cannot oblige them to turn the opportunities into good account only because you made them possible!
In the same vein practically, as citizens (civil servants, freelancers, self-employed, etc.,) of a nation, when we put in the hard graft in our various workplaces to earn our crust and perform our civic duty to comply with our tax obligations and service to our communities, we do so in a bid to resource the nation.
We have a big stake in doing our bit through our contributions, and we can only expect to see that those contributions are fully leveraged. How? -—through the government undertaking viable economic projects for the greater good.
However, if the government reneges on its socio-economic commitments, the rest of the citizens have the right, unlike the case of (a) parent(s) versus their offspring, to hold the government to account. In other words, governments, unlike our wards, owe a duty of accountability and fairness to the people.
However, the closest we can come to openly obliging governments to do the needful is via a relatively few but supposedly valiant representatives of the society coming forward to embark on demonstrations.
In these scenarios, they employ their voices —sometimes amidst order and propriety, other times amidst chaos triggered by a cacophony of chants— to accompany the placards bearing the grievances condensed into short unequivocal political and socio-economic statements.
In other words, should the governing body break its social contract with us citizens by becoming insensitive to our needs, yet, and not even on our blind side, which means openly satisfying their private selfish interests, we can only feel frustratingly helpless and defenceless against them.
Unfortunately, in certain quarters, the government is backed to the hilt by armed-to-the-teeth so-called indestructible forces executing orders to send fear waves lashing against our sovereign rights to peaceful demonstrations.
But then again, as citizens who 'lead the horses to water', if we cannot 'make them drink' through sit-ins and public demonstrations, we can, in a last-ditch effort, unleash our God-given weapon —our Head, or if you will, our Brain, which endorses our formidable parliamentarian — Honourable Mr. Thumb Print, through 'whom' we CAN, at the next polls, register our dissatisfaction with the government and show them the exit.
We will do so in the hope that the next bellwether of the flock called the 'economic management team' will steer the sheep called 'country' from arid fields to graze on lush green pastures!
The only element that militates against this hope while we wait is fear, the fear that, before we even get to the point where the people will get the opportunity to be given, as it were, a new lease of life, unfettered ill-administration fuelled by untrammelled freedom to borrow will in all likelihood lead to the arid fields turning well and truly into deserts!
