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Libraries and Alcohol

Being liked is not the same thing as being useful.
Take this for-instance.
Two men go to the village for Christmas with N200k. One spends the money buying bottles and calabashes of alcohol for random strangers, and 'dropping' for any and every A'nimo that 'taxes' him... Maybe throws a party here and there.
The next man walks into the community secondary school and donates 200k worth of books to the school Library.
Note:BOTH MEN THINK THEY HAVE DONE SOMETHING FOR THEIR PEOPLE.
Word of the first man's 'philanthropy' reverberates through the village like thunder claps on a wildly stormy August  morning... but each bottle of alcohol he buys is only as useful as a few hours of pseudo-merry, and urine the morning after.
Noone hears of the second man, and those that do probably think "Na book we go chop?" ...but somewhere in that library is a boy who will grow up to be an artist, or doctor, or engineer, or astronaut; a girl who will grow up to be a lawyer, teacher, poet, ANYTHING  - all because hidden in one of those books is a spark that will ignite their curiosity forever.
The library is clearly more important than the alcohol. But why aren't more people building libraries? I guess it's because humans have a - permit me to use the phrase - 'congenital desire' to be liked. That is why we 'tip' the drunkard; why we allow students to cheat during an examination we're supervising; why we turn our faces away whilst injustice is being done. But when we do this, we aren't being useful, just being liked, and probably hurting the people whose affection we need so dearly. Are we more interested in being liked than we are in making real changes? Could this be the reason why our societies have 'potential' and nothing else?
This New Nigeria needs people who will rebel against the norm and refuse to conform, people who will dare to make 'useful' a priority. You don't have to build a library or drill a borehole to make a difference. You could donate a pack of chalk (it's only hundred bucks) to a nearby LEA primary school, or plant a tree, or teach a couple of kids how to play chess (one of them may be Nigeria's Kasparov).
The bottomline this: Nigeria can only become great if we make contributions that will outlive us. It may not give you immediate popularity that comes with being a beer-parlour-philanthropist but it we change the world around us in ways we can't imagine. #MakeADifference #StartNow

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