You want change, start with yourself, Buhari tells Nigerians

For Nigeria to move forward, and achieve the needed change, there is a need for a change of attitude and mind-set in everyday life of the citizenry.

This according to President Muhammadu Buhari will go a long way in restoring a credible value system and spirit of patriotism among other values in the country.

Buhari stated this on Thursday when he launched the national re-orientation campaign at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, which he said, is geared towards engendering a holistic attitudinal change in Nigerians.

The slogan of the re-orientation campaign is “Change Begins With Me”.

According to him, the change the citizens expect to see begins with them. If you have not seen the change in you, you cannot see it in others or even the larger society. In other words, before you ask ‘where is the change they promised us’, you must first ask how far have I changed my ways ‘what have I done to be part of the change for the greater good of society’.

The president stated that “It is safe to say today that honesty, hard work, Godliness have given way to all kinds of manifestations of lawlessness and degeneration in our national life. This is why we have among our cardinal objectives ‘change’, which implies the need for a change of attitude and mind-set in our everyday life.”

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He lamented, that “Nigeria today is passing through a challenging moment where hardly anything works in a normal manner. Many have attributed this phenomenon to the total breakdown of our core values over the years”.

He added: “The campaign we are about to launch today is all about the need for us to see change not merely in terms of our economic, social progress but in terms of our personal behaviour on how we conduct ourselves, engage our neigbhours, friends and generally how we relate with the larger society in a positive and definitive way and manner that promotes our common good and common destiny, change at home, change in the work place, change at traffic junction, change at traffic lights etc.

He said that the campaign is part of the determination of his party, the APC, to seek to carry all Nigerians along on the journey to a better and greater society that all Nigerians can be proud of.

“There is no doubt that our value system has been badly eroded over the years. The long-cherished and time honoured, time-tested virtues of honesty, integrity, hard work, punctuality, good neighbourliness, abhorrence of corruption and patriotism, have given way in the main to dishonesty, indolence, unbridled corruption and widespread impunity.

“The resultant effect of this derailment in our value system is being felt in the social, political and economic sphere. It is the reason that some youths will take to cultism and brigandage instead of studying hard or engaging in decent living; it is the reason that some elements will break pipelines and other oil facilities, thus robbing the nation of much-needed resources; it is the reason that money belonging to our commonwealth will be brazenly stolen by the same public officials to whom they were entrusted; it is the reason why motorist drive through red traffic lights, it is the reason that many will engage in thuggery and vote-stealing during elections; it is part of what has driven our economy into deep problem out of which we are now working hard to extricate ourselves.

“Every one of us must have a change from our old ways of doing things, we cannot fold our arms and allow things to continue the old way,” he said.

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