Promises! Promises!!

Suffering and smiling, the struggle for survival continues but we are very much alone. Everyman here is an island that is not the way that it is supposed to be.  Our leaders fail on past promises, whilst always happy to make new ones. Promises, promises jam today but no jam tomorrow!

 

More than a century ago, Robert Baden-Powell, established the Boy Scouts instituted on a promise that has become a cliché: “On my honour I promise that I will do my best...to do my duty to God and the King...to help other people at all times...to obey the Scout Law.” This is where the catch phrase “On my Boy Scout honour...” comes from.  A promise is a debt it is a contract based on honour. Failing to fulfil that commitment is akin to committing a sin against humanity.

 

We let ourselves down and lose the respect of our kith and kin when we fail to honour our promises. Honour is built on trust and trust on acting on our utterances. If you have doubt as to how sacred keeping a promise is, turn to the scripture, where the Lord says Himself that He honours His Word more than His name. That is a powerful statement. A parent who promises a child a gift just to get the child out of the way, only to return home empty-handed, has breached a solemn agreement. A child starts out loving unconditionally, lose that respect and trust and you will never regain it, apart from the damage done to the child’s psyche. These are lessons that are inadvertently taught to children so we should beware of our actions and the consequences.They watch us.

 

A promise is unconditional; it is neither granted “under duress” nor a “defence mechanism”. It isn’t a promise when we are compelled or coerced into making it.It is not an instrument of trade that we make in anticipation of a favour. Once a promise is made, fulfilment should be non-negotiable. One of our great human traits is unpredictability; a promise made should be the closest a man can be to predictability. Hannah Arendt said in “Civil Disobedience” that “Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that is humanly possible.” Our reliability is eternally judged by the promises we fulfil, not those that we make.

 

Like sins, there are no small or big promises. A man/woman who cannot redeem a “small” promise in the home will not fulfil an election campaign promise. It is the reality of our era that our government ranks high in making promises they have no intention of redeeming. The craft of government is to replace “Vision A” with “Vision B” when it becomes apparent that the former will not be met. We talk of eradicating infant mortality by 2015 (according to the MDGs) yet children are dying before us of lead poisoning, hunger and deplorable sanitation. Since 1999 billions of dollars have been sunk into power generation with the promise that Nigerians will have uninterrupted electricity. Every year, government make fresh power generating projections in megawatts, while Nigerians measure their megawatts of darkness in pollution-induced power generators.

 

The oaths our leaders take clearly means nothing to them, and the National Pledge is only recited as an open to public functions. They forget that a mother who fails to wean her child will be stripped of the joy of motherhood when the child becomes a burden to society. A man, who has taken an oath to love and protect his wife but fails, cannot complain when she leaves him and seeks love and protection elsewhere and vice versa.

Nigeria is a country of many broken promises; we carry the burdens of shattered dreams.  We live therefore in a turbulent present and a future far from assured. We need to keep our promises.