Pay attention, then applaud!

You may answer that many or some, or worse, a few remember them now. Of course many of those who conceived them are now sadly deceased and have entered the pantheon as part of our nation’s heritage, while their surviving contemporaries are aging, but respectable members of our society. These national principles are innocuous, straightforward, and lucid terms than the rhetoric that sustained the then ideological duel between capitalism and socialism. Who, notwithstanding their ideological bent, would take issue with them or even seek to forget the desire of all nations immortalised in unity, self – reliance, development and democracy? In my view, the more they are forgotten, ignored or added to, the more they become constant and relevant as may have been intended by our nation’s forbearers. In any event, in a nation of fugitives (from memory), the one who returns home (to remembrance) always seems to be running away! To avoid this as a nation, we must surrender, almost despite ourselves, to the act of remembering.

I want to believe that this nation’s founders conceptualised these four national principles with collective seriousness and laid bare their innermost wishes for the fledgling republic.