DO THE PRESCRIPTION FIT THE SICKNESS?

Do the prescriptions fit the sickness?

In solving our personal, family, society and national inherited or imminent problems the only thing I wanted to say, the question I wanted to ask is whether the prescription fits the sickness. Do we have an answer to the problem we want to solve or we have an answer but which is not suited to the problem?

To get a problem fix or to cure an ailment it all begin with diagnosis and the result of this determine the prescription the expert or the physician will prescribe.

Diagnosis – analysis, judgment, finding, verdict, opinion, conclusion and identification.

• The art or act of identifying a disease from its signs and symptoms
• A concise technical description of a taxon
• Investigation or analysis of the cause or nature of a condition, situation, or problem ‹~ of engine trouble
• A statement or conclusion from such an analysis
• The act of discovering or identifying the exact cause of an illness or a problem.

Prescription – Instruction, recommendation, direction, medicine, treatment, drug, preparation, remedy.

• Establishment of a claim
• Act of writing at the beginning, order, limitation of subject matter
• The establishment of a claim of title to something under common law usu. by use and enjoyment for a period fixed by statute
• The right or title acquired under common law by such possession
• The process of making claim to something by long use and enjoyment
• The action of laying down authoritative rules or directions
• A written direction for a therapeutic or corrective agent ; specif: one for the preparation and use of a medicine
• A prescribed medicine
• Something (as a recommendation) resembling a doctor's prescription ‹~s for economic recovery›
• Something prescribed as a rule
• A plan or a suggestion for making something happen or for improving it.

If the diagnosis is wrong the prescription will be wrong and if the prescription is wrong the patient suffers and I think history has taught us as we’ve gone through this procedure over and over something is fundamentally wrong with our assumption (supposition, statement, postulation, hypothesis, guess, best guess, theory, conjecture) as to what are the issues to address in our personal life, family, society and in this country and if we don’t go fundamentally to clarify what is needed to be done we would have all these nice documents presented with all the acronyms and they will be totally meaningless to our self existence and expression and survival as a people so I think that we need to do more fundamental things than what we are doing now. I think we have taken off an assumption and its one government after the other picking up from the previous government’s program on and on and on. What if the primary assumption was wrong and we’ve just been developing on it.

We wouldn’t be able to answer the real issues so I leave it to the individual like you so that in the process of thinking through and in the dialogue we would be more fundamental than we are doing now.

Some of the problem we had as a people is with monitoring and accountability as related to the institutions for monitoring which most of which are not well suited to us and I think we need to go ahead and to talk about domesticating some of the institutions.

I want us to explore that a little bit further but there is no space for that probably I may have to look at it at another time.

And the counter question I had is whether we needed to domesticate the systems and institutions to suit us or we needed to change to accommodate new system.

Its two ways of looking at it because if we keep trying to domesticate things to suite us we may in the end have a mutation (alteration, transformation, transmutation, change, metamorphosis)  of a system which doesn’t serve as and doesn’t serve its original purpose also so we probably may have to be doing some changes at our level. But all together I want us to engage discussion and fruitful dialogue so as to get the right prescription.

These are problems that started from 1914 and we need to be a little bit more committed and more focused to solve them. The political abnormalities we have in the country started before the evolution of the nation called Nigeria. The colonial master did not consider the subsequent generation that will come as a result of their amalgamation 1914, they focus on the present, what they will gain and how they will continue to control and influence our polity. The diagnosis carried out by the previous leaders and government of Nigeria concerning our national problems was wrong and therefore the prescriptions also was wrong and as long as  the prescription was wrong the patient (Nigerians) suffers.

The sage ‘Chief Obafemi Awolowo’ has a clue to most of our national problems but no one seems to listen or pay attention to some of his hypothesis. In a speech made by Chief Obafemi Awolowo at the first Press conference he held at Ikenne on 4^th August, 1966, after his release from prison. According to him he said and I quote “During the past two years I have devoted my full time in gaol to an earnest search for solutions to Nigeria’s multitudinous and tantalizing problems. One of my books, entitled ‘Thoughts On Nigeria Constitution’, which devoted to a consideration of our constitutional problems will be published by the Oxford University Press during the first week of October. In approaching our constitutional problems, I had taken pains to study and analyze the constitutional evolution of every country in the world. I made bold to say - and this will be substantiated by the contents of the book when published – that I did embark on my research with complete scientific objectivity. At the end of it, I was surprise – though pleasantly because of my previous stand in the matter – to be faced with the rationally and scientifically unassailable conclusion that only a truly federal constitution can unite Nigeria and generate harmony among its diverse racial and linguistic groups.

Unfortunately, it is not, recognized by the bulk of our people, including the intelligentsia and even some intellectuals, that the making of a constitution is applied political science. At this adolescent stage in the evolution of homosapiens, it is no longer necessary for political scientists or enlightened constitutional lawyers to grope in the dark in the search of a constitutional formula suitable for our country – or any country for that matter, or apply the rule of thumb to the making of a constitution.

My own study and analysis have led me to the enunciation of certain laws or principles which must be observed in drawing up the constitution of any given country. I express the laws in the following terms:

1.   If a country is unilingual and uni-national, the constitution must be unitary.

2.   If a country is unilingual or bilingual or multilingual, and also consists of communicates which, over a period of years, have developed divergent nationalities, the constitution must be federal and the constituents states must be organized on the dual basis of language and nationality.

3.   If a country is bilingual or multilingual, the constitution must be federal and the constitution states must be organized on linguistic basis.

4.   Any experiment with unitary constitution in a bilingual or multilingual or multinational country must fail, in the long run.

The man went ahead to put the argument better “I readily conceded that the former constitution had many defects. But federalism is certainly not one of them. It follows, therefore, that a step in the right direction is first of all to recognize the exact ailments of our nation. Once this is done, it should not be too difficult for us to devise appropriate remedies for them. But we must realize above all things else that in approaching our problems, at this juncture in our history, we must eschew any kind of partisanship – be it political or ethnical, and allow our thinking and reasoning to be guided by complete objectivity and rationality. Our heart must be ruled by unconquerable goodwill and irrepressible earnestness for Nigeria’s continued ones. And our aspirations must unflinchingly direct towards normative social objectives which are scientifically oriented.”

Coming back to individual, to finally proffer a permanent solution to our imminent problems we must start the diagnosis now, analyze and identify the real problems and after that prescription can now follow, I think every one of us need direction. But in the process of diagnosis if we are not sincere enough or we fail to find out the real problem everything will still lead to exercise in futility.