The president, Historical Society of Nigeria (HSN), Prof. Samuel O. Aghalino has said for Nigeria to overcome hunger and other issues currently facing it, the country must retrace its steps to the past.
Aghalino stated this while presenting a Life Membership Certificate of the Historical Society of Nigeria to Frank Tietie, the Executive Director of Citizens Advocacy for Social Economic Rights (CASER).
He said if leaders are conscious of history, some of the decisions they make in private and public life will be guided accordingly for national integration and harmony.
“Our problem is that we refused to utlise our past to better our present. We refuse to go back to history as a means of development. We must go back to history if we must move forward.
“We refused to build on our colonial and pre-colonial economy as a result of that we are in trouble today. We are interested in consuming without production and without production our economy is in trouble. We should look back to history to guide us on how every region developed at their own pace,” he said.
He further said Tietie deserved the life membership certificate for demonstrating an uncommon capacity to confront the national question with patriotic zeal.
“I concluded that Tietie must not be speaking from the perspective of stomach infrastructure, he has been speaking from the fact that this nation is great and we must make it great and we must work in unison to make it great. And each time he speaks, I pick out his snippets of historiography and see nuggets of historical wisdom.”
On his part, Tietie said that the current food crisis in Nigeria is as a result of political leaders repeating mistakes that grounded the country at different seasons in the past, saying that leaders appear to be ignorant of the country’s history.
According to him, with the “insane level of low politics” that is practiced in Nigeria, only leaders who have a sense of history could effectively navigate the future from lessons of the past.
He said 2024 was not the first time Nigeria experienced hunger but it was expected of current leaders to understand the mistakes of the past otherwise they would keep taking actions that are detrimental to the citizens.
“Until we understand certain actions and make changes, we will continue to make the same mistakes in the expectations of different results. That is why we have all these frustrations. Nothing is new under the sun.
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