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| *Prof. Osundare |
Niyi Osundare is Professor of English at University of New Orleans,
United States of America. A celebrated poet, essayist and columnist,
Osundare is every interviewer’s delight. In this interaction with WOLE
EFUNNUGA and KEHINDE OYETIMI, Professor Osundare delves into issues of
national and transnational concerns. Excerpts:
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?
