Must read! An open letter to Nigeria's new generation - Funmi Iyanda
Open letter to a new generation, keynote delivered by Funmi 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.
