An impassioned article on truth and reconciliation in Nigeria’s River State area, where violence, attributable to social corrosion, is rampant, writer Emmanuel Onwubiko discusses the Justice Kayode Eso-led Truth and Reconciliation Commission in light of philosophies governing our times. Read more at the Leadership Nigeria site below.
Tracing the causes of social corrosion in human society, Goleman gave some examples of what may be responsible for the spate of violence, unleashed on members of the human race by their contemporaries. One of such examples of the emerging creeping disconnection among members of the human society is the scenario that occurred in a German city, where a motorcyclist gets thrown onto the roadway in a collision. He lies on the pavement, unmoving. Pedestrians walk right by and drivers gaze at him while they wait for the light to change. But no one stops to help. Finally, after fifteen long minutes, a passenger in a car that stopped for the light, rolls down a window and asks the motorcyclist if he’s been hurt, offering to call for help on a cell phone. When the incident is telecasted by the station that has staged the accident, there is a sense of scandal because in Germany everyone who has drivers’ license, has been trained in emergency first aid, precisely for moments like this. As a German emergency physician comments, “people just walk away when they see others in danger. They don’t seem to care.”
Philosophers in Africa, have emphatically laid the blame for the increasing spate of organised violence to the erosion of the revered African Cultural values of respect for the sacredness of life and the communal sense of selflessness and fellow feeling.
The urgent need to halt the gradual slide to anarchy and restore the collective trust of the people on the government constitutionally authorised, to bring about good governance and an orderly society, gave rise to the creation of the justice Kayode Eso-led Truth and Reconciliation Commission by the Governor Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi’s -led administration in Rivers State.
Read the entire article here: https://allafrica.com/stories/200807180206.html
