I had two great meetings yesterday, one was the Future Movement’s steering committee meeting, and the other one was a  New Nigeria Club Online Conference. I’m so thrilled at the key issues we were able to trash out in both meetings yesterday. I’m particularly impressed with how much we are achieving with the online conferences, technology is sure making things easier.

There was an interesting eye opener during the NNC online conference though, and I think it’s an idea I should quickly bring back on board and re-communicate. With so many great heads brainstorming together, we were able to obtain a good variation of personalizing our issues with our leaders’ name concept. I was thrilled with the additions and have decided to capture it as Rebranding Nigeria, Reloaded! Rather than sound abusive or use words that might ultimately lead us nowhere, we have decided to add an interesting positive tweak to the personifications. Here are the thoughts.

1. Rather than make careless and unguarded statements, we have decided to end every comment with a prayer for the personified issue. Here are a few examples.

For Electricity which has been christened Yaradua.

Yaradua has not be constant in my area, May God help Yaradua.

May these issues with Yaradua in Nigeria come to a permanent end.

The absence of Yaradua is creating troubles for Nigerian business community, May God help Yaradua and help us.

We figured that it might be pointless to just keep on stating the facts without making any comments that can help us change. It seems a good idea then, to identify the problem, and still put our leaders in prayers to God, that they will get help and make use of it. This way as well, we get to have many people praying for our leaders, and many people eager to have change.

2. Rather than allow everybody to say anything in the name of personification, and to avoid lack of consistency.

We have also decided to craft a Wordbank. This will identify who to personify as what issue, and ensure a consistency. It will also define the parameters for using any statement. One of the key parameters for adopting a word for example is that it should be capable of showing negative when bad, and positive when good. 

For example, if we say Yaradua = Electric Light from NEPA grids, then when there is no light, the comments will sound negative, and once it starts getting fixed, the comments become positive. We cannot afford to use a word, that will still connote negative even when things are changing for the better. If someone is personified with scam for example, when scams become a thing of the past, will we say that the person has been eradicated? Hence the good term to personify will be anti-scam and in most cases the good term to personify will be the positive things. The things that if fixed has the capacity to immortalize the person. 

Since Nigeria’s number one PR problem is scam, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to Christen our minister of information anti-scam. So that for example, people can embark on a Dora campaign, we can complain about how ineffective the Dora campaign has been, and how people are making Dora’s work painful. It can also help us pray for Dora, that she’ll be able to put an end to this plague. So that when things begging to progress, we can say that Dora is winning at last. Up Dora, Nigeria is a great country again!

I think the key word here is, let’s only personalize the positive. Any thoughts or word samples you can give in this area are welcome.

3. Online Scam is a Real Menace.

It’s a real menace every Nigerian must be passionately against and passionately reveal. I also feel the law enforcement agents need to be educated, cos there are also legitimate people who do business online, and they need to know the difference. We must not take half measures as this is currently the external perception of our nation. Kayode, brought it to my understanding that 99% of the time the word Nigeria is used on twitter, it’s connected to scam! I recommend that we move a motion to the senate, on way forward and strong consequencies for scamming.  I also think New Nigeria Club can pick up some of Kayode’s recommendations (he’s one of us) and pull it together. We need to chase those crazy bad eggs out of town!

Rather than make positive comments alone, I’ll really appreciate if we can use this post as a dumping ground for our thoughts and ideas on the wordbank, and sample statements we can make that won’t make us appear rude, rebellious or less passionate about the future of our country than we are. If it has to be, it’s up to us.