Permit me to preface this piece by celebrating two of my friends whose promotions provided the occasion for me to reflect again on an issue that keeps returning to my attention, especially on the Nigerian conundrum of development and progress.
I am indeed (just like very many
in different forms) obsessed with Nigeria, and often frustrated as to
how we could be so blessed and yet so impoverished.
Almost any issue
communicates significance for me on how Nigeria can regain its greatness
and empower its citizens.
And in celebrating one of these two friends
of mine, Prof. Olubunmi Olapade-Olaopa, in Ibadan recently, this whole
generational issue resurfaced again in my remarks at the occasion.
The
issue having been a subject of a prolonged inter-generational
conversation which the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy –
ISGPP, had listed as a flagship, I had invited Prof. Akin Mabogunje to
make a statement, thereto, at the reception.
He had to leave
unfortunately, as we could not gather ourselves together to commence to
time, again, a generational concern which remains an issue with my
generation.
Let me begin by borrowing the words that William Shakespeare committed into the mouth of Bolingbroke, a character in Richard II:
I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends.
I am such a soul today, and it is my delight to advertise my extreme
joy and fulfillment at the promotion of my two friends, Professor Bunmi
Olapade-Olaopa and Professor Sade Ogunsola (nee Mabogunje).
Bunmi has
just been appointed as the Provost of the College of Medicine,
University of Ibadan while Sade now occupies the same position at the
University of Lagos, for a while now.
These two instigate some serious
nostalgia for the moments that define our time together at the
University, Bunmi at UI and Sade at Ife.
Since hindsight is our only
perceptual access into the past, I could say categorically that the
frenetic academic pace we kept back then was the only indication we had
as to how our future individually would turn out.
And in that
recollection, I cannot forget Bunmi and Sade as the very personification
of indignant restlessness, especially when it comes to the duty of
righting what is wrong.
Together with all the others who have survived
the Yorùbá proverbial twenty years, we have all come a long way, and
justifiably scattered across all the human endeavours both in Nigeria
and in the diaspora.
I have no doubt that Professors Olapade-Olapade and
Sade Ogunsola would succeed immensely in their respected positions as
the change agents I have always known them to be.
However, apart from felicitation, I suspect that a greater honour to
the achievements of these two would be to tie their promotion into a
dynamic reflection about the larger concern with institutional
transformation and national greatness.
Their promotion is significant
because they now head colleges whose significance for the recalibration
of our medical education and health institution cannot be
underestimated. Institutions require commitment and foresight to be
transformed into optimal functionality.
But transforming an institution
is not just a function of commitment and foresight; it is a function of
competence with a solid touch of patriotism.
But ask yourself: What
happens if the entire endowment, competences and talents of an entire
generation like mine, specifically highlighted in achievements of my two
friends, were to be patriotically injected into the national
development strategy for Nigeria? I could populate a list of all those
in my generation who have reached the very top of their careers.
I could
outline many more whose competences are transforming their endeavours
in many unique ways. But such an exercise always leads me to one query:
Would posterity judge our generation on our individual achievements or
on what those achievements cumulate into in terms of national
development?
I have been an advocate of a generational understanding of Nigeria’s
predicament and greatness. In other words, we can get critical insights
into where we are and where we can get to on the basis of generational
commitment, or lack of it, to the Nigerian national project.
It is the
trepidation borne out of my remembrance of Wole Soyinka’s judgment of
his generation as a wasted one that stimulates beaming the searchlight
on mine too.
Soyinka’s generation might still be around but, to all
intents and purposes, the generation is technically gone; but mine is
still around and kicking. But what have we done for Nigeria. I ask that
question in the light of John F. Kennedy’s admonition: “Ask not what
your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
There is a philosophy behind this profound statement.
One strand of it
is simple: No one works for his/her endowments; we are all essentially
blessed with them, and some more than others. Second, there must be a
providential reason why some specific individuals with some specific
critical endowments are specifically born as Nigerians within a specific
generational timeline.
Add all these together: If you are endowed and
are a Nigerian, does that not essentially place a certain generational
responsibility on you to be up and standing on behalf of Nigeria—the
specific society that Providence has placed you in? Of course, there is
no sin in translating your talents, competences and endowments into
individual promotion; but then there is a moral issue involved if that
is all one does.
Like all the other generations before mine, this generation
constitutes a critical mass of endowments that could be deployed to the
rethinking, rehabilitation and reinvention of the Nigerian nation-state.
We have public intellectuals, engineers, scholars, medical doctors,
provosts, professors, clergies, architects, business men and women,
civil servants, military personnel, diplomats, managers, and lots more.
All these were equally present in generations past.
We had the
Awolowo-Bello-Azikiwe generation; there was the Soyinka-Gowon-Ojukwu
generation too. There were a lot of other generations before and after.
Given the state of the Nigerian predicament and the enormous endowments
that these preceding generations were blessed with, the conclusion could
only be that there is a saddening proportionality missing in
correlating endowments to national progress.
That successive Nigerian
government had to contend with the tragic and accumulated national
burden of the past is a damning report on what has gone before. But it is so easy to pass judgment on the past.
What happens to the
present? Most people in my generation are in their late 40s, in their
50s and 60s. I am in my mid-50s too. And the clock has not stopped
ticking—Tick tock; tick tock.
Posterity is also getting ready to pass
the same judgment we eloquently passed on the past and its ambivalent
generations of Nigerians who had so much but could deliver so very
little.
Do not get me wrong. Generational analysis of politics and
development involves a complex analysis that cannot be understood in
terms of white and black.
There are a lot of grey areas that one must
thread very softly so as not to sin against history and political
sensibilities.
Take Awolowo, Bello, Azikiwe, Adebo, Akilu, Eni Njoku and
Okigbo on one hand; Soyinka, Achebe, Obasanjo, T.Y. Danjuma, Saro Wiwa,
Bolanle Awe, Ayida, Fawehinmi, and Ahmed Joda on the other. These two
strands combine politics, scholarship, activism and professionalism.
In
Awolowo alone you have politics and professionalism. Awolowo was a
lawyer and a politician. Soyinka was an intellectual and an activist.
Bolanle Awe, Mabogunje, Billy Dudley and Bala Usman were scholars and
public servants, Tejumade Alakija, Francesca Emanuel, Joda, Asiodu were
technocrats and civil servants and Gowon, Obasanjo, T.Y. Danjuma, and
Ojukwu were soldiers and administrators.
What united these people and
their generation is an intricate relationship with the Nigerian state
that begs for a delicate interpretation.
Would anyone dare say that
these ones were not committed to the Nigerian cause?
That seems obvious,
even if you are duly concerned about the ethnic dimension that Awolowo,
Bello and Azikiwe introduced into the Nigerian polity.
Or, the
provincial turn that led some away from an otherwise national concern
about Nigeria’s post-independence evolution. I doubt, for instance, that
Nigeria appreciated Idika Kalu, Aboyade, Alhaji A. Alhaji (Triple A)
and the significance of their national development economics.
Yet, Soyinka considered his generation a wasted one. Wasted in what
regard? It is definitely not in terms of individual talents and
endowments.
In their own right, other individuals were as great as
Soyinka and Achebe in their own personal endeavours.
But then imagine
that the activism of Soyinka has been multiplied several times into a
thread of collective generational reaction against the Nigerian
predicament?
Imagine that the most endowed in these generations have the
boldness of Soyinka and Saro Wiwa to engage Nigeria, the courage of
Achebe to interrogate her, the vision of Aboyade and Mabogunje to
propose alternative economics and spatial dimensions for her? Imagine we
can abandon our self-centered pedestrianism and imbibe a sense of
history and how our collective competences could facilitate social
engineering.
Unfortunately, generational capital is not working for
Nigeria. I quake when I think of what the coming generation will (not)
do? Horace, the Roman poet, already sees ahead.
Back to my friends. Since we are kindred spirit, restless and often
grossly discomfited by disequilibrium, they will immediately grasp the
logic of my discomfiture. I have no doubt how they will perform as
provosts. But where are the others? It is time for my generation to come
alive.
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