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“To love a country is to protect its people, defend their dignity, and take responsibility for the future they share.”Prof. Amina Mohamed
There is a kind of love that has no body. You cannot hold it, photograph it, or hand it to someone and say, “Here, this is what I feel.” Yet it is there when you wake and when you try to sleep. It is the love of a country.
It is one of the most difficult loves a person can carry because it asks everything of you and often gives you no way to act. You can love a person and cook for them, sit beside them, or hold their hand.
When you love a country, you love millions of people you will never meet, streets you may never walk again, and a future that is not yours alone to build. The love is enormous. Your reach is small.
Ask most people what a country is, and they will point to a flag, a border, a government, or a name on a map. These things matter, but they are only the surface.
A flag does not feel hunger. A border does not bury its children. A government can change in a day, while a country is what remains when the ministers have gone home.
A country is a mother walking for hours to reach a clinic. It is a student studying by candlelight because he believes tomorrow can be different. It is the shopkeeper who opens his doors after the worst week of his life because the neighborhood still needs bread.
A country is its people, their safety, their dignity, and their hope. To love a country is to love them, and to love them is to feel responsible for them.
The hardest part is not the helplessness. It is the loneliness. When you love your country deeply, you notice what others walk past: the policy that will hurt the vulnerable, the silence that protects the powerful, the small decision that, repeated a thousand times, becomes a wound.
You try to explain, and too often you meet people who do not understand what a country means. For them, it is a place to take from, a platform to stand on, or a prize to win. They speak of the nation while measuring their own gain.
Then you are left holding a love that others treat as a slogan. I want to say plainly: you are not wrong to feel this pain. It is not weakness. It is evidence that you see clearly.
A love that turns to contempt is no longer love. It is grief wearing armor.
The person who loves a country but feels unable to help it faces two temptations.
The first is to withdraw: to say the country does not deserve you and that it is wiser to protect only your own family. Exhaustion is real, and nobody should be shamed for needing rest or safety.
The second is to harden: to let love become bitterness and to despise the very people you wanted to protect.
The harder road is to remain compassionate and keep working.
“I cannot do anything” is almost never completely true. One person cannot fix a country, but a country is not repaired all at once. It is built, every day, by many people doing the right thing in their own place.
If we are serious about saving our country, these are the foundations.
1. Put People Before Position
Every decision should answer one question: does this protect the people, or only me?
Leadership is a duty of service, not a prize. When those who hold power are held to that standard, trust begins to return.
2. Choose Unity Over Division
A country divided against itself cannot protect anyone. Reconciliation is not weakness. It means sitting at the same table, forgiving what can be forgiven, and agreeing that the safety of the people matters more than any group, clan, or party.
3. Build Institutions, Not Personalities
Leaders come and go. Strong institutions endure: courts that are fair, a health system that works, regulators who cannot be bought, and a civil service chosen on merit.
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A country that depends on one person falls when that person falls.
4. Invest in Health and Education First
Nothing rebuilds a nation more effectively than healthy mothers, safe births, educated children, and trained professionals.
Every clinic, school, and teaching hospital is a quiet act of national defense.
5. Make Honesty and Accountability Normal
Corruption steals from the weakest first. Transparent budgets, open records, and consequences for the abuse of public trust are not luxuries.
They are what allow people to believe in their country again.
6. Protect Security Under the Rule of Law
People cannot rebuild where they live in fear.
Security must serve the citizen, and the law must apply equally to the powerful and the poor. Safety without justice does not last.
7. Bring in Women, Youth, and the Diaspora
A country that sidelines half its people, its young, or its skilled sons and daughters abroad is choosing to remain weak.
Open the door to their knowledge, their investment, and their energy.
8. Begin Where You Stand
Do your own work with integrity, even when integrity is not rewarded. Teach one young person what service means. Tell the truth in the room where it is unpopular.
Refuse to let your corner of the nation become corrupt, even if you cannot cleanse the whole.
Nations recover because enough people refuse to give up.
Love of country cannot be touched, but it can be felt, and what is felt can be passed on.
It is felt when someone speaks the truth at a personal cost. It is felt in a hospital corridor when a patient is treated with dignity, whoever she is. It is felt by a young person who watches an adult choose service over comfort and thinks, quietly, “I want to be like that.”
That is how an untouchable love survives. It does not live in monuments or speeches. It lives in the people who carry it and pass it on.
So, to those who love a country and feel they can do nothing: your love is not wasted. It is working, even now, in ways you may never see.
Keep carrying it. Protect the people in front of you. Tell the truth. Build what you can.
And to those who do not yet understand what a country means: it is not too late.
It begins with a single question.
Who are we here to protect?
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About the Author
Professor Amina Mohamed is a Health Regulatory Affairs Specialist, and the president of the Dr. Hawa Abdi Foundation.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Dawan Africa.