We Need to be Proactive!

I do not discount the importance of History in the discourse and discussions on nationhood, but, if all we ever do in this country is to spend our time and energy trying to distort facts and historical incidents at the expense of dwelling on ways to achieve Social Development, then we’re going to spend a lot of time waiting to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

History serves a purpose; it reminds us of the past and points the way forward in avoiding pitfalls, but that is all there is to it.

History as a discipline of recall and memorization should receive relatively less attention in our developmental discourse whilst we spend more time developing policies and structures to facilitate Social Development.

Development of Social and Public Policies, of course, require debates on facts steeped in history to succeed but we need to adopt a forward-looking approach to issues.

In his famous work, “Hierarchy of the Sciences”, August Comte arranged the sciences in order of increasing complexity and decreasing generality where the most simple phenomena is the most general.

Each category is grounded on the principal laws of the preceding category and serves as a basis for the next ensuing category.

In the hierarchy, Comte places Sociology on the highest rung and Mathematics on the lowest.

At this point in our development trajectory, we require a lot of contributions from Social Scientists such as Sociologists, Development Planners and Social Policy analysts…

We need well thought out thesis and antithesis that lead to usable synthesis.

We have a nation to develop! We have social maladies of poverty, hunger, lack of education, lack of shelter and health facilities to address. So, politicians should give us a break. We need a break from their jaundiced and distorted views about the past. We have a nation’s future to design.