NIGERIA IN HER 50s: AN ANALYTICAL LOOK AT HER THREE SURVIVING GENERATIONS SO FAR AND THEIR RESPECTIVE ROLES. It really pains – though most quietly – that human beings are so weak and grossly incapacitated at doing ‘all the great’ things they imagined and reasoned. Man, most powerful; man, most intelligent; man, most creative and man, most visionary! Poor him still! He is infinite in his imaginations; infinite in his creative thoughts and abilities, yet, finite in availing himself the powers to live an ‘eternal earthly life’. If many ‘true’ great people who have lived on this earth should be asked to say that which bothered them most , yet, remained uncommunicated – should they be honest enough -- they would confess that it’s their ‘inability’ to live to see the realization of their good dreams for the people they served. However, this assertion may or may not have some selfish and ulterior undertones. This ‘inability’ is simply known as our mortality here on earth. Certainly, we cannot be so powerful to avoid dying. In the Holy Scriptures, the psalmist in psalm 89:48 asked; “what man can live and never see death? Who can deliver his soul from sheol?” Consequently, men implore God or their gods not for eternal earthly life, but for long life, knowing that we can’t last more than hundreds of years – not even in this contemporary age, when man’s lifespan has actually been pegged between 1-80 years of age. People, who live beyond this, are counted luckiest. Death, really, was the only factor that halted Socrates in his teaching mission – and will always be for many like him. And so, senility and death halted the full realization of the dreams of the Nigerian founding fathers. Senility and death watered down their hard works, derided their achievements, and made a mess of the structures they put in place for continual nation-building. Naturally, these were bound to happen, as they do in other climes. But, there was a fault in the ‘generational chain-line of continuation’, and that was the real problem. Let’s take an analytical look on the generational roles, bad or good. For a country that has presently lasted for 99 years since its two protectorates were ‘amalgamated’ in 1914, it should be reasonably safe to look at its generations in the divides of 30 years each, in order to see clearly how they played their roles in each of the 30 years. Hence, I have three generations to deal with in this piece, and they are: “the helpful generation, the helped generation, and the hopelessly helpless generation”. THE HELPFUL GENERATION: This is the generation of those who kept asking and looking for ways to better the plight of Nigerians, but most importantly, to create the strongest foundation upon which their children and the future Nigerians shall thrive and survive without much pains. In fact, they bore the pains – so much pain – that the people after them might find it so easy. And it really came to pass! These people were born between the eve of the 19th century and the beginnings of the 20th century – that is to say, from 1890-1930s. They are hardly accused of treasury looting, corrupt enrichment, mountainous piling up of money for families and friends, or saving of billions and trillions belonging to Nigerians in the banks of other nations. They were as men, with their own faults and guilt, yet, their sacrifices are still felt here and there than ever. They were in the molds of Herbert Macaulay, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Jeremiah Oyeniyi Obafemi Awolowo, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Maj. Adekunle Fajuyi, Dim Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and his dad, Sir Louis Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Dr. Michael Okpara, Chief Mbazulike Amaechi, Dr. K. O Mbadiwe, Madam Margaret Ekpo, Dr. Tai Solarin, Tunji Braithwhaite, Professors Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Kenneth Dike, and Emmanuel Obiechina, Christopher Okigbo, Gani fawhehinmi (SAN/Senior Advocate of the Masses), Kashir Ibrahim, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, and a host of others I can’t recall now, and even the ones that quietly did a lot of good works in their different fields. They were zealous for a new and good Nigeria. In their different fields and in their different parts of the country, they sought to compete healthily with the other. Not minding the relative peaceful co-existence then, which is a lot better than now, a great many of them questioned the foundation of the Nigerian nationhood and tried doing something about it, just that the future might be solidly built. The irony of their stint was that they had little money, little resources, little sophistication, but had very tall dreams, far-sighted visions, larger hearts, and more founded and lasting achievements than their successors. From politics to education, to science, to arts, to business, they loomed large, were dogged, and were ready to outlast Europe in its monopoly of many-sided advancements. They did their best and we are so sure that we have no other option than to give it to them, and we shall always give it to them. Yes, some of them – both alive and dead – are being accused of different charges of misuse of power exhibited in the course of their administrations, but whenever the causes for the mention of their good works well up, we naturally forget those evil deeds – be it from their own quarters or from the general Nigerian quarters. And so, they left with some glorious feelings of fulfillment at their achievements. They left with a ‘confidence’ that, their children would then build taller on the vestiges they left. Enter their children, the helped generation, and the most prepared and equipped ‘messiahs’. THE HELPED GENERATION: They were born from 1940 till 1970. This generation received all the help they needed. They do confess they were really taken care of, and that’s not untrue. They were almost spoon-fed with all the edibles they needed as university undergraduates, and the best educational facilities of their time were always procured for them. Remember that many of them went to school free because their parents were mainly poor farmers. They were well-trained both at secondary school levels and university levels. With stricter observation, you’d notice that the ones that passed through polytechnics and colleges of education did cut their teeth at being well-learned, unlike what is obtainable with the present polytechnics and colleges of education graduates. Honestly, these men and women were very intelligent, distinguished, and were capable and undeterred at slugging it out with their foreign counterparts. They are presently between 60sth, 50sth, and 40sth years of age now. They’ve been celebrating the golden jubilees of their births since 1990 till this very moment of 2013. They are the ‘powerful’ fellows presently occupying the influential positions across the country, and have been doing so for the past 20 to 40 years. They SQUANDERED ALL THE HOPES THAT WERE PEGGED ON THEM, AND EVEN THE HOPES THE COUNTRY HAD. They rubbished the help given to them and failed to return any to us. These 60sth, 50sth, and 40sth men and women of ages, are the ones pillaging and pillorying our national till to nihilism. They are the ones – who with great diligence – are fertilizing the most bizarre ‘thieveries’ across the nation and even across the world. Unlike the generation before them, a great many of them in politics never question our nationhood and its future chances of possible survival. They are only eager to nauseate you with such remarks like: “keeping Nigeria one, is a duty that must be done”. Yet, the reason why they want Nigeria ‘one’, is to perpetuate their ‘duties’ of stealing and looting the country naked because that kind of ‘oneness’ makes everything about their ‘businesses’ easier. They never sit to ask themselves: “if their predecessors had looted the way they are looting, would we have had anything left?” They are proudly shameless, bravely cowing, and most blessedly accursed to live their lives without excess vanities. One of their greatest stocks-in-trade is to use my generation to make a mess of election and whatever that’s left of the sanctity of the ballot box. They carefully chose to make Nigeria, “a blood-soaked project” (apologies to Professor Okey Ndibe). They are the people we call our parents – and who told us when we were much younger – that we’d be the ‘future leaders’, yet, their body languages and utterances indicate that of those who’d want to die with and in power, and a people far from allowing others a chance to try out their hands at the places and things they’ve continuously failed. They are presently urging us to be ‘entrepreneurs’ when they have stolen away every naira and kobo meant to be used as capital for the realization of such. Though the good ones amongst them may have meant well, but I describe such efforts as ‘resorting to doing anything at all when you had an opportunity to do much more but never did’; and for the bad eggs amongst them, it is only an ‘escapist way of exonerating themselves from the big mess’ they authored. And they all know it. Their disgraceful list includes most of the past military presidents and governors, the PAST and PRESENT CORRUPT civilian presidents and governors, ministers, ‘legisla-thieves’ who tag themselves legislators, civil servants, permanent secretaries, university vice-chancellors, bank executives, clergymen, commissioners, personal advisers, heads of different parastatals and government agencies, the guava-bellied business demons who call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’, policemen and women who have been in service for the past 20 to 30 years, down to the lowest person of their generation. They are the accused ones we know like the Otedolas, Lawans, IBBs, Iboris, Ohakims, Ettehs, Alamiesiyas, Akingbolas, Cecilia Ibrus, Fabian Osujis, Femi-fani kayodes, Obasanjos, Atikus, Modu Sheriffs, Adenike Granges, Nasir El-rufais, Rev. Kings, Ifeanyi Ubahs and a bagful of their cronies and ilks presently in the government and at other influential positions across the country. Names would go on and on, should I keep spanking my memory. They know they failed and they won’t contest it. Would they? And this reminds me the tears-drawing incident at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, when a respected speaker and admired orator, Mr. Chidiebere Onyia – at the orientation of the fresh students in 2010 – apologized to the freshers, saying, “Our generation has failed you, and before I begin my speech, I want to personally apologize to you on behalf of my generation, for failing you guys”. Chidiebere – of course, isn’t in his 30s – and one may not be wrong to hang his age bracket at late forties. The University of Nigeria, Nsukka where I passed through, honed many men and women of this generation, and truly, they’ve remained grateful to that great University. They’ve always appreciated the late Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and the leaders of the defunct Eastern Nigerian Government for that vision of a great institution that has continued and will continue to ‘restore the dignity of man’. Towards the graduation of its first set in 1964, the late Zik wrote a farewell poem for the first graduands and also for the many graduands to come. He titled it “FAREWELL, OUR GUIDE”. The words of the poem were later fixed to music by Ms. Edna Smith of the Department of Music of the same University of Nigeria. Since then, it has continued to be the ‘parting anthem’ of the graduands each year. Filled with hopes for a new Nigeria; awash with strong emotions; beaming the fiery potentials of the zealous young men and women who are on the mission to change the society; and melodious in its symmetry, the poem elated them and motivated their drives to give in their best to the society they are marching into. In that poem, they saw the hope that their efforts will be rewarded wherever they are. They saw in that poem, places to lay their heads and the nests to lay their eggs, and that gave them the confidence to move into the world and do the deal. Most unfortunately, the poem – as far as I’ve observed – has been inspiring and elating nothing in the people of my generation. If by any means it does, it’s just in the very few who are either very privileged to be sure of a ‘waiting future’ or the persons who are determined not to be discouraged by anything. For you to look into the burden of my tale and understand me better, I’ll have to reproduce that beauty-filled poem/anthem here. See below: FAREWELL, OUR GUIDE Farewell, our guide, our alma mater dear, Our love for you will thrive for evermore. Whate’r the fate, our future holds in store, To you we pledge our loyalty sincere. Farewell, our guide, the time has come to part And we must sadly sing our aurevoir, Now is the time, the dread-leave taking hour, When our life’s journey we your scions must start. Happy the memories of the fleeting past, Happy the moments of our work and play, Now each and everyone must go their way, To play the part that none can now forecast. Soon we must match into life’s battlefield, To carve our niche as heroes in the fight, Bright though the day and dark though be the night, May alma mater be our sword and shield. Farewell our guide as we depart from you, May fortune smile on all your future’s brood, Farewell our guide as in the fold of God, We pray that we may all be born anew. What a beauty with rhyme! But, can you really say that these words still inspire the present younger generation of graduands? Be true with your answer. As for me, it’s absolutely NO! The tragedies of this generation are in two folds – one, the good ones were very good and the bad ones were unbearably bad, thus causing polarizations. Two, the bad eggs outnumbered, suffocated and outdid the good ones. Enter our generation, the children of the former and the helplessly hopeless generation. THE HELPLESSLY HOPELESS: Calm down and don’t yell: “God forbid!”, my peers. Don’t misunderstand me! When I say ‘helplessly hopeless’, I mean two things: one, that we’ve been denied of hopes we’d have ordinarily got; two, that despite that hopeless situation, there are more endangering forces – foreign and local – in our own time than in the times of our parents and grandparents who are the generations before us. Our hopelessness in this context doesn’t mean absence of any hope or ‘total negativism’, it means – for me – “the presence of much hopes and dreams in a system where the ‘needed helps’ are totally non-existent”. My Igbo people call it: “Ọ NỌ NSO, ERU M AKA”. Meaning: “closest of treasures, yet, unreachable or untouchable”. Can you now see my direction? This generation is the generation of Nigerians born from 1980s till 2010. They are youths with their ages spanning from early 30s down to 2 years, and this is my generation. We are the off springs of the latter generation. Coupled with the fact that we are over-looked, ignored and allowed to fend for ourselves, we are still great contributors to our helpless hopelessness. There’s no question that there are so many forces against us, following the times we were born into, yet, our parents – instead of helping us checkmate these forces of negative influences, are engrossed in stock-piling and pillaging of the Nation’s resources for us, thinking that that would save us, while the country bleeds daily to death. Having made a mess of the missionary primary and secondary schools they benefited so much from by leaving it to the government, our parents ferried us to the private primary and secondary schools they established. And by the way, that is – if you are opportune to have those parents who had some money to bankroll the expenses of such undertakings. Having grown in the villages, known the customs of their lands and can speak their native languages so well before receiving the western education which should have struck a balance in their personalities, our parents felt that taking us to Nigerian cities and other world’s cities without making us come home often, would make us wonderful. Lo, we are wobbling in our identities, and they are scared to death, coming to terms with the reality that the customs and native languages they inherited, and which they should have passed swiftly to us, is fast going with them to their graves. We grew up with the warped and unenlightened mindset that we are “Lagos, Enugu, Jos, Bini, Warri, Port-Harcourt, Kaduna, Abuja, London, American, even Ghana overseas boys and girls who have no business with our villages and our native languages”. I just spat now in disgust and shame! What about you? As a thorough-bred Igbo kid, I’ve seen in many instances where people old enough to be my parents, yell at their kids not to communicate in Igbo, instead in English ( especially the queen’s) with ‘good phonetics’. I saw it while growing up and I still see a little of it till now. Same applies to some other tribes, but it’s evidently more in my own Igbo tribe. This generation is very good and a lot of us are ‘whiz-kids’ at computer, ICT, social media, etc. But hardly do we use them for properly channeled growth, which would help us in being better leaders of tomorrow. In a bid to mop up some dirty sides of the past, the younger ones in this our generation are presently deprived of learning anything at all about our past. I’m meaning to say – as I recently learned from a female Yoruba Vice-principal, who is a History graduate with many years of experience in teaching History in secondary schools that – History, as a subject, is no longer offered in secondary schools as was obtained in our own time. I’ve written about this in SUN newspaper late last year. Having developed hostility towards reading voluminous works and even reading at all, and having known little or nothing of the beginnings of this country, my generation stands the greatest danger of being clueless when we shall occupy the leadership positions. How can we derive our ideologies upon which solid achievements would be built, when we don’t know enough of our past and were misguided and misshapen in the dreams of our future? Your answer can definitely not be an assuring one, I guess. We grew up with the impression that certificates are much more powerful than whatever might be the stuff we are filled with upstairs. Thus, many of us are ready to be in the high institutions – not for the acquisition of the knowledge that will change our society – but to present ‘purchased certificates’ to our parents who would gracefully ‘fix’ us into those government offices where they themselves entered into without any form of ‘fixtures’ but just with their worth. Oh, how are we broken! We went to school when schools started becoming huge jokes, without meaningful facilities at our disposal, and then we learnt little or nothing, and even lost interest in knowing or hearing anything quality or intensive about education. As if that wasn’t enough, we graduated as we could manage to, but came out to find no jobs or ‘places’ to lay our empty heads. Of course, necessity has been and will always be the mother of invention; so, we happened to invent one. It was the ‘art of kidnapping’, since our own parents created their own ‘art of thievery’. It became a classic case of: “they thief us, we kidnap them”. We waste the lives of our fellow youths on very trivial issues, like we had in the cases of Cynthia Osokogu and the UNIPORT/ALUU 4 in 2012. Similar incidents go on in our different campuses in the name of cultism, whether of the males or the females – thus, preparing ourselves for a jungle life at the bigger circles, where we shall eventually choke and suffocate ourselves. All we now know is to make any hook and crook money via many absurd means. Service, integrity, values and good reputation are all old wives’ tales to us, and we dare lynch anyone who would bore us with such gospels. This is the state of the mindsets of many of us and hell knows how cancerously metastasized it would be in the next 10 to 20 years when we shall have taken these ‘batons’ we weren’t duly prepared for. I shudder each time I sit to imagine the picture of the impending doom staring us all in the face. The tragedy of this my generation is that you don’t even know where to start the repairs, and that you seem to be so out-dated and primitive when you discuss History and enlightening issues that will benefit our future. I pray that such a jungle-life moment – when we shall be leading with this way we are going – would never come at all in the history of the existence of this ‘mere geographical expression’ called Nigeria (apologies to Awolowo). Of a truth, I am strongly of the opinion that the only way out is majorly by DIVINE DESIGN, which can meet us automatically and directly; they call it ‘miracle’. Or, on the other hand, this same DIVINE DESIGN can come in the form of a “very” radical HUMAN MACHINATION. You can explain that better, can’t you? Nigeria had better become a quashed and forgotten entity than to have that bloodiest period meet us at all. By: CHIJIOKE NGOBILI This piece was first written and published on October 1, 2012. But it’s re-published again with a few adjustments this day, Oct 1, 2013 as Nigeria celebrates her 53rd Independence anniversary.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 22:24:18 +0000
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