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Sixty nine days after 33 miners were trapped in a
Chilean mine, the world watched spellbound as all 33 of them were
rescued. That these men endured more than two months trapped hundreds
of feet below the ground is a testament to the amazing power of the
human spirit to overcome challenges. There are, of course, the obvious
lessons to learn from the Chilean story.

Anyone who has spent time on the internet in
recent days cannot miss the many jokes in which Nigerians have
attempted to imagine what would have happened had the events in Chile
taken place in Nigeria. Those jokes reveal one thing – the lack of
confidence that many Nigerians have in the ability of their government
to respond with concern, urgency and efficiency to disaster. We have
seen too many examples in the recent past – the many images of rescuers
attempting to dig victims out of collapsed buildings with bare hands
and shovels, the cholera epidemics that go on unchallenged by the
authorities for weeks on end.

In 2005, the nation watched a plane-full of
persons, most of them young children, consumed by fire at the Port
Harcourt International Airport. There was also the plane crash that
sent emergency services to a site in Oyo State, hundreds of kilometres
from the actual crash site in Ifo, Ogun State. Events like the Chile
rescue always find a way of bringing the Nigerian question into sharp
relief. There’s the temptation to favourably compare Nigeria and Chile
by lumping them together as developing countries. But such a comparison
begins to sound hollow when you realise that Chile’s per-capita income
is $15,000, way above Nigeria’s. Our concern is not so much on the many
ways in which Nigeria has failed her citizens in the past, but instead
in the uplifting aspects of the Chilean story.

We are very much interested in the way in which
such a triumph of the human spirit can serve to inspire the world.
Chile took advantage of a crisis and impressed the world with its
display of national unity. We salute the Chilean miners, for the
indomitable spirit they displayed. We salute the Chilean people for the
display of love and affection they showed for their trapped countrymen.
We salute the Chilean mining minister for the great calm he displayed
in front of TV cameras, and the entire world. There is no doubt that
his calm handling of the crisis significantly inspired many across the
world, the trapped miners included. We salute the Chilean Navy, which
manufactured the rescue capsule that has earned a place in the history
books. We believe that Nigeria can pleasantly surprise the world; that
we can offer a lot more than news of corruption and violence and
electoral malpractice and advance fee fraud. Every day Nigerians
demonstrate this innate capacity to achieve great things. Our
performance at the recently concluded Commonwealth Games is a testament
to this. One can draw parallels between that mine and the Nigerian
situation; the way that life for many Nigerians often seems to be lived
in a trap, swinging between heights and depths of despair, awaiting a
rescue that may never show up. But we also see hope in the way what
might have been a tragedy played out. Quick as we are to point out
Nigeria’s many failings, and excoriate our leaders in the public and
private sectors, we are also eager to use this opportunity to remind
Nigerians that it is important to draw hope from the story of Chile’s
33 miners. Against the odds, against all hope, they held on; kept one
another’s spirits up, and displayed an sense of organisation that
seemed incongruous with the desperate circumstances in which they found
themselves.

As Nigeria enters its fifty-first year as an independent nation,
those inspiring images from Chile should be allowed to seep into our
national consciousness. It is possible for us to be a country that
takes positive advantage of crises — one that makes the headlines for
our sense of unity and efficiency, just like Chile.