TEDx: THE POWER OF SHARED CONVICTIONS

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As we dipped hands into a big plate like children of the same father to celebrate the successful outing of Sokoto TEDxArkilla 2018’s Festival of Ideas, it rightly dawned on me that the future of a multi-cultural and highly-sensitive society like ours depends on shared convictions and intelligent conversations that positively shape our perspectives about the prejudices and biases we have against people of different religion and tribe.
 
Despite our tribal, religious, sexual and even professional differences, TEDxArkilla 2018 afforded me and the 23 people on the volunteers’ team the once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity to brainstorm, network, synergize and work with diverse people: a Muslim from the north teaming up with a Christian from the south, an Igbo with an Hausa, a banker with a student, a youth corps member with an engineer, a Master’s student with an artisan just to put Sokoto State on the map of global relevance!

It is sheer buffoonery to use the index of minority to assert or affirm the majority. As a person, I’m often very excited with the unusual degree of intelligence and genius in many of the Northern youths I work and relate with on a daily basis. We cannot be so engrossed in our own tribe, culture and religion that we fail to tolerate, accommodate and understand with those whose faith and tribe differs from ours.

To a country that is already divided over hyper-sensitive fault-lines of faith and tribe, to ignore this reality is not to ask for trouble; it is to guarantee trouble.

"For in the end, a nation cannot rise above the generality of the mentality of its citizens."

Inferiority complex and superiority complex are both diseases of the soul, but I’d always said that superiority complex is the killer disease. Superiority complex makes you believe your tribe, culture, religion and opinion is superior to that of others and therefore you are the only person that is right. There is nothing like superiority of religion or tribe. We are simply different! Some things are issues of personal convictions, and thus we must not allow it interfere with our social interactions. Until we settle this, we will continue to be victims of social tensions, ethnic agitations and religious violence.

Ask yourself: What side of the struggle to build Nigeria are you? Are you fighting on the side of ignorance and prejudice and bias and blind adherence to tradition or are you fighting on the side of knowledge, of reason, of enlightenment of the mind?

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