Hassan Abdi. Mogadishu, Opinion: – How many times do we describe someone’s actions as selfishness, negligent to the common interest and destructive to the nation’s welfare?
Let me give you a concerned person’s answer. In Somalia we see it daily – if not every hour- that there are times when citizens act in certain ways that create a suspicion on whether they care their country or not. Somalis can be seen as people that do actions against their loyalty to their country.
Here is a reality that mostly hurts. When all individuals lack the spirit of patriotism or the level of patriotism is very low, the country is facing a catastrophic disaster of anything from poor governance and corruption and threats from internal and external enemy.
In order to prevent all these weird things to happen we need to have a patriotic citizens that love their country, care their people and sacrifice individual interests to achieve the common interest.
People in other parts of the world as well as those in the neighboring countries respect all values of their countries, which defines their patriotism. The patriotism is the social value, which our community has lost and with effect suffers from negative impact of it.
There are several reasons for why Somali people present poor patriotism.
1.The social structure of our people depends mostly on tribalism where everybody descends from a certain clan and settles in specific location. Our ancestors used to be pastrolists and used to migrate from a place to another in order to look for graze lands for their animals.
This part of our history creates categories of people, who do not have hometowns they belong because they spent most of their lives on travelling for graze.
These types of people do not have or cannot develop a passion for the place he or she lives and after all cannot have a solid patriotism other than the belief of his bloodline connection with his or her clan members.
When it comes fighting for a cause, thse types of people might think the interest of their clans than the national interest. To them, the clan is a prime objective because it is the only social insurence a clan member may have. To get a job one have to secure membership from a powerful clan and political escalation goes through this.
2.Somalia have been in civil war for decades and clanish feuds grew mountains.We faced life challenges and every person tried survival regardless of legitimacy of the acts, or if the individual based interests can be good for the interest of the nation.
This difficult era created unlimited risk and challenges in our lives and brought down the pil-lars of the community and clouded our responsibility towards our country.
3.Individuals learn their values form their family, schools and community. Our families, or at least most of them do not give a try to teach their children the value of their country either they claim that they do not have the time (lame excuse) or they do not think that teaching patriotism worth their effort (ignorance).
Our schools, on the other hand, have exported curriculums, a necessary evil, that does not contribute to develop student’s learning in the values of their countries.
Finally, a majority of the population do not have the chance or the opportunity to go to schools leaving them ignorant and uneducated. These people hit the market daily. They strive to get something to eat and in their jungle nothing is prohibited.
Thus, there is no public institutions that promote the national interest in order to make the citizens love their country. The citizens’ love of their country may create thestability of the country, development and unity.
The opinion is solely to the writer:
Hassan Abdi Hassan is a potential writer living in Mogadishu. He studied Business Administration and Law at Mogadishu University. He is an enthusiastic social activist and interests in writing about the political situation of Somalia.
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