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| *Prof. Osundare |
YOU just finished the celebration of the 50th remembrance anniversary of the death of D.O. Fagunwa. You are a product of two generations—the oral and the tech-driven. What in your perception do you think this generation is losing with the incursion of the internet, its gadgets and its various cyber attractions?
It is a conflicted generation, deeply conflicted. I hope not tragically, though. We are looking at this generation from two important perspectives. It is a generation that is cyber- literate. It is also a generation that doesn’t seem to have enough depth, enough perspective. It is a generation that is literate in some areas but illiterate in many, many others. A generation that needs to know more about itself, its environment, its roots.
Unfortunately cyber literacy is robbing our young people of the most basic kind of literary literacy. Most of the young people now spend their time browsing.
Sometimes you wonder at the kind of things they read on internet. Our world has become a cyber world but some control will be necessary here. What often comes to my mind is this. The world of the internet is a miraculous world indeed. It is abstract, Super-fast, Unreal. Most of the time, you communicate with people whose physical presence you have never encountered. Cyber friendships are developing; cyber associations are developing; cyber crimes are also developing. The cyber mentality is also developing. In the past if you wanted to socialise with people, you had to go out and meet them physically; you would rub shoulders with them and trade jokes. Today, you could just remain in your little room and chat with cyberfriends in China, Russia, in the United States and in other faraway places. This has its own advantage because it makes it possible for young people to travel as it were, to fly without wings. But it has reduced human communication into perfunctory chatting and instant messaging.
Cyber technologies also turn human relationships into abstractions. It makes people too self-absorbed. You find a young person sitting on his bed for about six hours just fingering the iPad or the laptop. Nothing else in the world matters to this person. So the abstract, promiscuous world of cyber technology is taking over the physical, tangible and human world of our youths.
How does this affect literature? Cyber journals and magazines are all over the place now. The i-book is there. This is good because you could just handle your gadget and read your book anywhere, anytime. The downside is this. You cannot really adequately quarrel with the author when you read him/her on the gadget. For example, I have a way of reading aggressively and interactively. I read with a pencil in my hand. The margins of the books that I read are full of remarks. By the time I finish reading a book, what we have will be two texts—the text created by the author and the counter-text created by me. I relate to books the way people relate with other human beings. I see the author through the book. I can feel the pulse of the author throbbing and the heart of the author touching my own heart. When I do it on the internet, I don’t have this feeling. The internet is abstract and disembodied. It comes and goes at the snap of the finger – mostly in a furtive, mousy way. There is something very disturbing in all that.
What about the folktale? In those days after supper, we all gathered at the feet of grandmother or an uncle and we told folktales. Our world of imagination was extended. All those weird figures—the tortoise (Alabahun); his wife (Yanibo); the spider and animals of the forest. There were Erin, Efon, Ekun, Amotekun, Okete. They were all characters. In fact, I remember that each time I heard a folktale, as a child I thought the world of the folktale was like our own world too. I would go about looking for an elephant that would behave like a human; I would go around looking for a tortoise that would talk like the trickster tortoise in the folktales. There was a way in which all those stories engaged us and extended our imaginative world. The laptop has taken all that away now. The characters we now relate too are not the ones that we know. They are not the ones that we can really meaningfully and poetically relate to. They are mostly strange figures from the cyber imagination.
How does this relate to Fagunwa? We raised this issue at the Fagunwa Conference, and it constituted the crux of my own presentation. My paper had to do with the debt we owe to Fagunwa’s genius and the last bit of it is Fagunwa’s legacy. My aching worry is this. If you ask a primary school leaver, a secondary school leaver, even a university graduate today from the South West part of this country about the person and works of Fagunwa, out of 10, you would be lucky to get 2 that would get the answer right. Now compare: By the time I was in Primary 5, I had read three of Fagunwa’s books, beginning with Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irumole. You can imagine how rich our world was. There was the world of the folktale and its limitless possibilities. Then there was Fagunwa’s world. These two worlds merged because Fagunwa also owed a lot to the world of the folktale. What made Fagunwa great was his ability to make use of all those stories that he heard when he was young and then build his own imaginative structure upon them.
Can the present world produce another Fagunwa? I doubt very much. To begin with, how many of our young people understand Yoruba? Only very few of them.
Fagunwa attended St. Andrew’s College, Oyo, where they were well groomed. He was very competent in English. In addition to his novels, he also wrote some articles in English. His command of English was confident and creative. He could have written those novels in English but he decided to write in Yoruba. One, he was comfortably proficient in his mother tongue. Two, he loved the language and he knew the possibilities that the language offered. Three, he was some kind of nationalist too. Fagunwa was/is a national treasure.
Go to a typical Yoruba home today and you would be shocked at the way parents linguistically malform their wards. “Junior, Junior come. Come and say hello to uncle.” They would even boast that “Junior doesn’t speak Yoruba, you know. We don’t allow him to do so but he understands English very well. We’re so proud of him” Why this misbegotten mentality? Because English is the only language that matters; it is the language of power and prestige, the language of the cyber world. Our indigenous languages have been relegated even in their own domain. We are suffering a terrible linguistic, cultural and social schizophrenia. We are split people. This is why things are the way they are. Our rulers talk and talk; they don’t speak in the language that their people understand. The constitution is written in a language that 60 per cent of Nigerians do not understand. My friend and colleague, the intrepid Professor Kola Owolabi, has been trying to address this vital issue at the Yoruba Language centre he presently runs at the University of Ibadan. Ojogbon Akinwumi Isola has never tired of drumming it into our hearing.
Fagunwa! We are trying to bring him back. Can you imagine England saying that it wants to bring back Shakespeare? Or France saying it wants to bring back Racine or Moliere? Or Russia saying it wants to bring back Alexander Pushkin? No! Because they never lost those people; they never allowed their significance to wane. In Nigeria we do not appreciate our gems. I have never encountered any other Yoruba writer that writes like Fagunwa, but where is he in the educational curriculum today?
In December last year, Time magazine did a very interesting cover on “The Me, Me, Me Generation.” In the 70s, people talked about the ‘Me’ generation. A few years later, it became the ‘Me, Me’ generation. Today it is the ‘Me, Me, Me’ generation. There was a very instructive photograph on the cover of that issue. A young lady, while lying down, is holding a phone before her, taking her own picture with that phone. All her gaze, all her attention is focused on that phone. Her background is bare and austere, and she is the only one against that background. On her face, a half-suppressed smile and feeling of satisfaction and amusement. She appears to be so contentedly alone, with her camera-phone as friend, witness, recorder, and image-factory. Do you know how symbolic that is? In the past, if you wanted to take your photograph, you engaged other people. There was the tripod, the veil and the photographer. It was a collaborative effort. You reached out to the photographer; the photographer reached out to you. Now technology has made it possible for us to do it all on our own, all alone! Something here that smacks of technological masturbation. Technology is so good, no doubt, but it has to be handled with care. According to Yoruba reasoning and observation, when something is so, so sweet, you must watch out for its (hidden) bitter sides. Technology is a good servant. We need to prevent it from becoming a bad master. We must make sure that it does not reduce our humanity.
More than years ago, you said you had mixed feelings concerning Professor Attahiru Jega’s acceptance to be the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). With the conduct of the 2011 general election and subsequent ones, don’t you think Jega has kept and maintained his integrity?
To judge Jega fairly and reasonably, we have to look back a little bit. We have to look at his predecessor, and the monumental mess and evil that that predecessor left behind. This is very important. Professor Maurice Iwu, working with the PDP and the Presidency, took us to the abyss of corruption. If Nigeria were a sane country, Iwu is a man that should not be anxious to show his face in any public gathering in this country. When Jega was appointed, I was one of those who saw his appointment as a breath of fresh air. I knew Jega when we were running around for ASUU. He was quiet, intelligent, thorough, fair, and principled. I was afraid for him. Models are very rare in Nigeria. When we see a few that show the traits that we like, we have to protect them. That was the feeling that I had with Jega.
Since he came up as INEC chairman, it has been mixed results. One, Jega has not behaved like Maurice Iwu. That is very important. Jega is not evil. Jega is not reprobate. Has he given us a clean, methodical, reliable electoral system? No. Why hasn’t he done this? Because it would take more than a thousand Jegas to do that. Nigeria is a very difficult country when it comes to the issue of probity. Nigeria is a large country too. How many parts can you see from your official perch in Abuja? What about happenings in the riverine areas? What about what is happening behind the distant flanks of Ekiti hills? What about happenings at the places very close to Lake Chad? It will take a general dose of national sanity for a person like Jega to be able to work. It is so easy to bribe people into doing the wrong thing in this country. You and I know what it takes to rig elections at the grassroots level is not much money. A recruited thug can snatch a ballot box for as little as N500. You can hire him to kill your political opponent for a token N5000. These are things that would not happen in a country that has its head squarely on its neck.
Our politicians are horrible. Nigerians have a very ingenuous way of doing the wrong thing. Many of us are imaginative and creative in the wrong way. I will be sympathetic to our friend Jega. If he has not done his best, at least he is not as bad as the other Professor who preceded him in office. The 2011 elections were not perfect, but their 2007 antecedent was hell on earth. A hell which emerged from the brew of the likes of President Obasanjo, Maurice Iwu, political various godfathers and the perverted “Christian conscience” of suborned Electoral Officers. . . But the Big Test is coming in 2015. And the battle lines are already being drawn.
In Kogi State, all the teachers were reported to be on strike. In Edo State, the governor paid an unscheduled visit to one of the state’s education centres and there he asked a teacher to read an affidavit that she wrote herself and she was unable to do so. The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is asking the Federal Government to implement the agreement they both signed some years ago. The Finance Minister, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said that the country was broke and therefore unable to pay the amount demanded by ASUU. What is your take on all these?
I ask the Minister of Finance: “Madam, if you say the country is broke, who broke the country?” That is the question many people are not asking. Nigeria has money. In fact the problem is Nigeria has too much money for her own good. The problem is that the money is not well spent. It is going into the wrong hands.
About a year ago, we were talking about the subsidy scams. I couldn’t believe it when the probes started throwing up all the huge figures of money that were misappropriated and stolen by the subsidy scammers. Many of these scammers are children of very rich and powerful Nigerians. These are young men and women who at 35 are already billionaires because their own parents were or are billionaires. They became rich by riding roughshod on our back. It is as simple as that. The money that should be spent on improving our lives is being stolen, squandered, and mismanaged. Let us talk without prevarication. Let’s talk without using any euphemism. Many of the people who rule us are thieves. Many of them should be in jail.
I used to talk totalistically in the past but what we have seen in the last two years show that some politicians are beginning to show signs of respect for the peoples’ opinions. We are beginning to see things on the ground that our money is being spent on. I just came back from Ekiti and Ondo States. I live here in Oyo State and I have to travel from Lagos to get to this place. The question I ask when I see some of these projects now on the ground is: what about the money the predecessors of the present governors were given in the past? How was the money spent? Why didn’t we have these structures five, 10 or 15 years ago? There is money in this country but it is being stolen, being misspent. This is why the country is broke. If you say Nigeria is broke, who broke Nigeria? Is it the meat seller at Bodija market? Is it the plumber? Is it the poor, dispossessed farmer in Ekiti or Ebonyi State? Is it the fisherman in Kiagbodo? Is it the teacher in the classroom? No! It is the powerful ones who steal with the stroke of the pen and transfer Nigeria’s wealth to different banks in the world. Go to Dubai and see the amount of landed property that Nigerian millionaires have there. Go to Brazil; go to Malaysia. Yes, Nigeria’s powerful thieves have gone South- South! Many of them don’t keep their money in Switzerland, New York or London or Paris anymore because individual citizens in many of those countries are beginning to challenge their governments for being collaborators with Third World thieves. Now, Nigeria’s kleptocrats have gone South! The oil leaves our shores but the money doesn’t return to our hands. The Minister of Finance should know better. This is how the money goes.
If you say education is expensive, try ignorance. That is a common but extremely useful saying. Nigeria doesn’t spend up to 10 per cent of its gross national earning on education. Let’s face it, education has never been our country’s priority. Countries which lead the world today, which produce the goods and services that Nigerians consume shamelessly, have prospered because of their educated citizenry. Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Nissan did not fall from the sky; the Japanese manufactured them. Kia, Samsung, LG did not just happen: the Koreans produced them. What about those Volvos and Mercedes we love so much? They are products of some people’s imagination. And Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Twitter: they have been created by Americans who passed through a good educational system. I have said this time and time again: if you want to gauge the real development of a country, go to its classrooms and laboratories. Nigeria is a very unserious country.
Could Dr Goodluck Jonathan have been the President of Nigeria today if his parents didn’t send him to that little school in Otuoke many years ago? Could Obafemi Awolowo have revolutionised the South West if he hadn’t gone to school? There is nothing like education. You can never say that education is too expensive. The rot we are seeing in our educational system now began some two decades ago – first in the elementary schools, then secondary schools, before it started ravaging our colleges and universities. . . . I am not surprised that primary school teachers were asked to do sums that were meant for primary four pupils and they couldn’t do them. It is like the interesting logic of the computer. If you put garbage in, you will get garbage out. Our students are not being taught and they are not being taught well. From the universities right to the elementary schools. I started elementary school in 1953. There was no free education then, but my father (bless his soul!) had a vision for me. My sisters couldn’t go to school because they were girls and people thought when they got old, they would get married and that would be it. In January 1955, Awolowo brought free education. I will never forget that experience. Boys, girls, everybody trooped out in our community. You could have thought that it was a festival. All the kids were on their way to school. When they got there, we were provided with free slates, free chalk, free paper and free lunch. The leaders and administrators (yes, we had leaders then!) at that time knew that many of us were so poor that we couldn’t eat balanced diets in our homes. If you didn’t eat well, your brain would be undernourished and you wouldn’t do well in school. They made sure that the school lunch provided some amount of protein. School was where many of us got a regular supply of protein. That was Sukuru Awolowo (Awolowo’s School) as it came to be known in those days. See why it’s simply impossible to forget the author of that welfarist plan in our part of the country?
So when people say that Yoruba people treat Awolowo as if he was a god, I tell them that Yoruba people are not foolish. They know politicians whose policies have benefitted their lives. Awolowo was a man beyond his time. At the time he was laying out all the social services, there was no oil money. The meagre revenues came from cocoa, palm kernels, palm oil and rubber. But Chief Awolowo told his lieutenants that the money in government coffers was like the blood in the people’s veins. Nobody must waste it. He led by example. Therefore if you deviated, he could correct you without contradicting himself. That is the miracle behind the relative progress that we have in the South-West. Now compare Awolowo with the brands of politicians that we have been getting in the past three, four decades. Many of these politicians do not have our interest at heart. Their eyes are permanently fixed on their stomachs.
Let the Nigerian government listen to ASUU and find a way out of the present problem. ASUU’s struggle is a patriotic one. It is a fight for the future of this country. Illiteracy kills a country. It is at the root of PHCN’s dysfunction. It is responsible for the absence of water in our water taps, for death on our roads and hospitals, for hunger in our stomachs. Progress is no miracle. The miracles are not on the prayer grounds. The miracles are in the classrooms and in the laboratories.
Your country has a forum called the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF). It held an election of 35 people. At the end of the election, two leaders emerged. One was Governor Jonah Jang and the other was Rotimi Amaechi. Who do you recognise?
This ties in very well with the point we were making with Jega and the limits of the lone reformer in a devastatingly corrupt polity. Was the NGF’s election organised by Jega and his team? Certainly not. This is a country that cannot conduct any election honestly and fairly. Nothing could have shown the weaknesses of the Nigerian system more clearly than what happened at that forum. In a way I am happy it happened. These are chief executives of our states.
That is to say that if elections are taking place in their states, the electoral officers will have to report to them; the police commissioners will have to report to them. But look at the way they have behaved. Are you surprised? I think it was good the governors were exposed this way. There is a sad logic to their behaviour. Their act and behaviour is a true reflection of how many of them got into power—through rigged elections. We know it in this country that most of the people who rule us were the ones we never elected. This is one of the things that make Nigeria the laughingstock of the world.
From what we read, Amaechi got 19 votes out of 35. More than half. What did our honourable governors do? They annulled the election. Yes, they annulled it.
Who says the Babangida tradition is dead? No. The Babangida infamy is alive and well in our political system. They annulled it and went behind the back of the other governors to elect the one who lost the election in the first place. And that one is now parading himself as the authentic chairman. What kind of governors are these? What kind of human being is Jang? Does he have a conscience? Can he think? What do they think about of us Nigerians? They have no respect for us.
As far as they are concerned, we are nincompoops because their action is not only illogical, it is so criminal. The NGF affair is so symptomatic and symbolic of the virulent Nigerian malaise.
We just witnessed the coalition of some major opposition political parties into the All Progressives Congress (APC). Do you think such opposition will help sanitise the nation?
What is happening now reminds me very much of the Sopi ‘revolution’ in Senegal many years ago, and what happened in Kenya more recently against the government of Arap Moi. In both instances, a coalition of opposition parties worked hard and ousted the ruling government. A similar phenomenon seems to be rearing to go in Nigeria.
I am not always sanguine about coalitions of this kind. It is a mongrel collection of all kinds of contending forces. I am afraid of the incubus of opportunism in Nigeria. Many of the people I see on the barricade now shouting “progressive” were running dogs for Generals Babangida and late Sani Abacha just a couple of years ago. Some of them were in the PDP before now. Perhaps, they were not getting enough to ‘chop’ from PDP. Perhaps, they felt slighted by PDP. They went to bed conservative and reactionary one night and they woke up “progressives” and “revolutionary” the following morning. We the people of Nigeria can only trust such political changelings and opportunists at our own risk.
It is a very large group. Well at least it is good that PDP is getting some organised opposition. When Wole Soyinka, in his usual prescient way, described PDP as a nest of murderers, I think he knew what he was talking about. The PDP has no plan for Nigeria; so you cannot hold them down for not following any plan.
Nigeria is broke because that is where PDP wants it to go. That we have a group of men and women trying to put their energies together and do something about this, should be something to cheer about. Just as there are opportunists in APC, there are also men and women who feel genuinely concerned about the future of this country. Some of them also know what to do with power. One is not going to be too pessimistic about this. But we have to tell them to watch it. It is important. Nigerians are not as foolish as many of our rulers’ think they are. You cannot hold PDP to any accountability. They didn’t promise us anything, so we cannot blame them for producing nothing. On the other hand the APC is promising us something and we should all get our diaries ready and jot these things down so that we can at least remind them later. In our present circumstances, any group that can get out the PDP will be welcome. But we must hold the feet of the ‘reformers’ to the fire and refuse to be taken for granted.
The chairman of the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P), Dr Christopher Kolade, said that 40 million Nigerians are jobless. How does the fight taken up by the Federal Government against crime, terrorism and kidnapping appear with such revelation?
Armed robbery, kidnapping and terrorism are siblings of the same parents. Most of these crimes are committed by young people whose hands are idle. Nigeria doesn’t take care of its educational system and Nigeria has not provided jobs for those who have passed through that system. This is another instance of our tragic contradiction. This is happening at a time when the number of universities in Nigeria is increasing at an alarming rate.
Our rulers are like those proverbial thoughtless people who merely watch the cutting edge of the axe when it is trying to fell a tree. Visionary leaders look out for where the tree is likely to fall. Before you start establishing universities all over the place, you have to have a plan because those you are putting in the universities will need to have jobs when they finish, not just to satisfy themselves but to build society. But how can you contribute to the building of your society if you have no job? An unemployed graduate is worse than an uneducated person. You put somebody through the rigours of college only for them to be idle and ‘useless’ after graduation. At the end you begin to preach to them that “you have to be good citizens. Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country”, and suchlike vapid, hypocritical effusions. How can I do something for my country when my country has not empowered me to do something for it?
It is a tragically untenable logic that the best way to cure unemployment is to create more unemployment. As I said in an old poem of mine, “The IMF is a doctor/ Who heals the patient/ By killing him first”. Remember the Awolowo legacies—the housing corporations, the industrial estates, the village farms which engaged youths and people all over the place. All those things have closed down. What does Nigeria produce today? Nothing. All the things we need either come from India, China, Europe or America. How I wish oil had not been discovered in this country! Oil money comes too easy, too suffocatingly plenty. It gushes too indulgently, too indolently in the Niger Delta. Oil money has ruined this country, corrupted our values, and valorised the mentality of Ise kekere/ Owo nla nla (Little work; big big money), and that is why we are the way we are. I don’t know which will collapse first—the political system or the economic system.
Our mouths have been opened wide, our appetites rendered insatiable by the gushing insanity of oil wealth. Look at the satanic wages, salaries and emoluments that our rulers are earning. Consider the proliferation of universities in the country. All this is fuelled on easy oil money. When oil is kicked into second or third place by alternative energy sources, what is Nigeria going to do? A time is coming when the world is going to tell Nigeria “soak garri in your sweet crude and drink it.” Our rulers don’t have any sense or vision. They don’t foresee that oil will not always ride the waves. The oil-rich Arab countries know this which is why Saudi Arabia, Dubai, the Arab Emirate and so on are setting up structures with their oil money. We don’t even have our own oil refineries. Many of the graduates we produce are unemployable. Those that are employable do not have anybody to employ them. Again, I ask: What will Nigeria do when oil has passed out of favour? What shall we hold up as lasting gains from many decades of oil wealth?
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