(Voice of Paul) – On August 23, 2023, at 18:31 hrs Indian Standard Time when the Chandrayaan-3 landed on the South Pole of the Moon, the whole nation jubilated and leaped for joy, making India the only fourth country after the United States, China, and Russia to have landed on the Moon.
The significance of the country’s landing on the Southern Pole of the Moon is a lot heavier than just a technological achievement – it was a testament that people, irrespective of race, religion, language, food, clothes, or societal ideology are independently capable of achieving prosperity on their own, in their way, in their own culture while embracing themselves without necessarily embracing outsider’s ideology of society.
Today, Hindu is the country’s official language. Many Indians practice Hindu as their religion and they eat their food with the likes of Parata, Roti, Biryani, Puri, just to name a few. Additionally, they love and embrace their cloths Sari, Choli, Dupataa and Lehanga and still, the country is on the path to economic buoyancy and power. As an evidence of a growing economy and a society that has embraced its identity, the Indian President recently commissioned an Hindu temple in Abu Dhabi, the capital of United Arab Emirates.
The lesson here is that it does not matter if the official language of a country is Swahili, Hausa, Ibibio, or Zulu; if they only wear Agbada and Buba or Isiagu, if they worshiped their ancestors or practiced Buddhism, they can still have an excellent quality of life, a robust economy and a powerful army ready to defend the country against intrusion or invasion.
It is high time that African leaders embraced everything that represents us – our language, our food, our spirituality and infused it into modern society governance strategy, embracing ourselves and our identity, growing, thriv,ing and competing economically in our originality.