Iyanda at the ThinkOyo 30under30 awards recently. Read
below…
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 stuck 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, hard working, 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 one's 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.
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