Ace
TV personality and talk show host, Funmi Iyanda writes an open letter to
Nigeria’s new generation.
The
thing about age is, it is catching. It’s like a hysterical jester lying in wait
for the fool.
I
want to tell you about Mrs Okoro. Before l turned nine, school was a vaguely
irritating distraction from the pursuit of happiness in play and adventure.
Every school day, I’d wear my red checked dress and burgundy beret uniform and
passively submitto school. l was not a rebellious child. I was a bored child
who daydreamed through classes until lunch when the school served asaro and
chicken with bananas and ground nuts as snacks. That was until l got to Mrs
Okoro’s class.
Mrs
Okoro made letters become words, words which became stories, stories which
became my life. I loved her dearly, perhaps it was transference as l’d recently
lost my mother but at nine, l started going to school because she was there.
One day walking out the gates after school, l saw Mrs Okoro getting into a bus
ahead of me so l ran across the road to get into the same bus. I didn’t bother
checking for traffic. The next thing l rememberis thinking heavenlooked rather
like Akoka road. I had been hit by a car and was staring up at the concerned
faces of Mrs Okoro and others. The driver was distraught; he was a student at
Unilag and in the moment before pain cut through my adrenalin, l remember being
happy l had been hit by a grand university student not some infernal danfo bus
driver.
He
took me to the university health centre where the nurses gave me a large cone
of ice cream to comfort me before treating me and putting me in the big
university bus home. My heart was swollen with pride as the shiny big bus drove
down our dirt street in Bariga. Not a dime was exchanged, no one called my
father at work, there were no mobile phones and we had no phone at home. There
was no need; the system took care of me.
It was Nigeria 1980.
Recently
on my way out of Nigeria, the Murtala Mohammed airport was thrown into chaos,
people were sweating and swearing, passengers stranded as all electronic
equipment had stopped working. The place
stank because there was no water to clean the toilets. I watched the white airline crew walk by with
barely contained derision as they gingerly sidestepped the mess. The problem
wasn’t that there was no electricity at the airport, that’s normal; it was that
someone had not supplied the diesel to run one of the generators.
I
sat in a corner, observing people; those who fascinated me most were the band
of men, mid-thirties to late forties, Nigeria’s emerging business and political
elite. I recognised them by their Louis Vuitton luggage, logo jacket and velvet
slippers, disguising their social anxiety with an unabated desire for the
pointless. Seemingly oblivious to their environment, they strutted about
backslapping and rolling their r's, being cocky, rude and dismissive to
everyone.
What
struck me most about these preening peacocks though, was their total lack of
shame at the state of things. They are the band of new-Africa-rising, proudly
Nigerian jingoists, living in a glass bubble as far removed from the Nigerian
reality as you can get. For them patriotism is not a recognition of failure and
a determination to redress it, but a slogan to be worn, tweeted or liked.
Later
on, crammed into a rather unsanitary first class lounge, I watched them posturing
for furtive young female travelling companions, clearly under instructions to
pretend not to know them. The odd thing is that these are no corn farmers made
good from my native Ida ogun, these lounge dwellers are very well educated and
uncommonly well travelled Nigerians. A defective fraction of the immense amount
of brainpower and knowledge Nigeria has produced. They help prevent their peers
fulfilling their potential and a pool of brilliant thinkers, explorers,
scientists, innovators and artists is lost, squandered by a nation that
strangulates its best.
I
often hear foreigners perplexedly comment that Nigerians are some of the best
educated, urbane and confident black people they have ever met, so how come the
country is so, well, Shit?
One
reason staring them in the face is that, the best-educated, urbane and
confident elite they delight in meeting has failed us.
The
question therefore should be, what is it about the country that makes it
impossible for its bright, hardworking, resource rich population to organise
itself into collective prosperity? What is it that turns some of Nigeria's
brightest technocrats into hand wringing, head-scratching incompetents when
they achieve power?
You
see, Nigeria was founded as an economic proposition to collect and remit
resources to the empire, with the British government entrenching a feudal,
centralized, western-education-phobic elite in the North and a westernized,
Judeo-Christian, anglicised elite in the south.
On
departure, these elites with their distinct cultural differences but common
goal of avarice became the new imperialists. Imbued with a servitude
underpinned by self-loathing and a voracious appetite to mimic their former
bosses, they confused westernisation for civilisation and like all
counterfeiters concentrated on the surface of things. Thus, to their thinking,
the more resources of the land they could coral, the more trappings of the west
they could possess and the more civilised they could become.
That
unwelcome process continues today.
For
this elite, the rest of their kith and kin fill them with unease and even
disgust and they condemn them to poverty and a passive consumption of other
people’s science, innovations, religions, art and technology as though such
achievements are beyond us. They also condemn their own children to future
poverty not just material but emotional and cultural. Notably the stolen wealth
hardly outlives the first generation.
Each
time the elite is replaced, it is by a new generation similarly afflicted and
culturally insecure with the same desire to fraudulently acquire a large share
of the common wealth themselves.
This
is self-loathing in action. It is a terminal disease.
Our
common humanity and civilisation should be guaranteed by carefully protected,
ever evolving structures, systems and processes, which reflect all our highest
values and aspirations. Kajola ni Yoruba nwi.
The
system designed by the British was to serve the big empire. It was not designed
to work for us and never will.
We
all know this and every so often the government of the day will propose a state
sponsored jamboree to endlessly chew the curd of that vexatious issue of
reform, only to artfully spit it out when the people are sufficiently
distracted by the increasingly circus-like, mad-max dystopia we are living
through.
The
dysfunction at Nigeria’s heart remains because it serves the interests of
whichever big man muscles or cheats his way into power. (Note; I said man, the
system will never allow for a woman, at least not a woman who won’t do the
needful.)
But
what about the people? What about the youth?
The
subtext of Obasanjo’s recent letter to Jonathan is what they used to call two
fighting boy and boy in the streets of Shomolu. The people can sense this it is
not their fight; they are as disconnected from the elite as the elite are from
them.
They
know their place is to submit and dream. They want to be the next big cat. They
have no real distaste for those who have stolen their future; often they just
want to replace them. The grudging admiration seeping through their envy
fuelled whimpers of protest reveals fragile egos easily stroked by association
with those who have raped them, then thrown them a bit of Vaseline and warm
towels.
They
desire to be the ones at the airport with the designer bags and unplaceable
accent. The ones who are gearing up to follow the path of those before them. To
flaunt luxuries but live in situations so far removed from the vision of life
those luxuries where designed for. When Karl Lagerfeld designs each Chanel bag
he cannot possibly envisage it may end up in a place where the carrier can be
dragged out of a car and raped in daylight with witnesses and no repercussions.
Yes that happened. The baubles do not make us civilised, a country built on a
political structure that allows the creativity, innovation, and talent of all
to thrive does.
Nigeria
in 1980 was by no means a perfect place but would my counterpart in Shomolu
today have a Mrs Okoro or such access to public health care?
Let
us sound a warning to our "betters," as they push and pull the
country one way and another in their hustle; it is untenable, there will be a
snapping, one, which no one can predict.
So
what shall we do? What will the young intellectual elite of today do
differently?
A
youth cultural revolution of ideology and values perhaps? Jettison the hypocrisy,
the pseudo religious, anti women, anti children, anti poor patriarchy. Turn
away from the bigotry, the megalomania, and the cultural bravado. Free
yourselves and your future. Speak the truth to power and each other, not just
on twitter, to face. Refuse to participate in the racket, the hustle, and the
lie. Be better than that which is on offer.
Thatcher,
a deeply polarising figure, but outstanding leader once said;
“Watch
your thoughts for they become words.
Watch
your words for they become actions.
Watch
your actions for they become habits.
Watch
your habits for they become your character.
And
watch your character for it becomes your destiny.
What
we think, we become. "
Start now before you become the company CEO,
the minister, the commissioner, the senator. Lead from within and without.
Abraham
Lincoln once said of citizens desiring change; make me. Make your elders and
leaders take you seriously. Help the few good men and women in power by showing
there is a generation who can and will stand with them. Insist on the
structural and constitutional changes that which will free our collective
creativity, innovation, science, ideas and culture.
Civilisation
is neither westernisation nor exclusive to other climes. It is building a
society on values and institutions designed to protect not the strongest but
the weakest as we are only as strong, as honourable, as respected and valued as
the sum of our weakest parts.
Now
what? My job is to tell stories with context, sometimes l don’t know the end.
Write your own ending. Shape history.
This
is an open letter with a difference. Everyone word of it depicts truth. Well
done!