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Category: Adebayo Lamikanra

  • Class formation (II)

    Class formation (II)

    I have up till this point restricted myself to talking about England because the authority of William the Conqueror did not extend into Scotland. The separation of these two countries went back thousands of years and their physical separation had been established way back before Roman times when  Hadrian the ruling Roman emperor of the time built his eponymous wall which separated the two countries one from the other. In spite of the wall however, the two countries maintained an adversarial relationship which was always smouldering and catching fire from time to time. Incidentally, all throughout this period, the Scots were always allied to the French who themselves were always politically and then religiously opposed to English interests. This is in spite of the fact that the rulers of England were originally French! That the Scots voted to remain in Europe when their English neighbours voted for Brexit in that famous or perhaps infamous referendum shows that the Scots still have their eyes fixed on alliances across the English Channel.

    The two countries carried on their affairs as separate countries until 1707 when a treaty of Unification was signed and the countries stretched their respective hands across Hadrian’s wall and nominally at least,  became one. The Union has not always been amicable and even now, moves are afoot to achieve what has been described as the independence of Scotland from Britain because England with her large population and stronger economy has been by far,  the dominant partner.

    In the case of Ireland, the relationship has been clearer because England had colonised that country as far back as 1649. This being the case, the Irish had been dominated by England in the same way that Nigeria or Ghana, when it was known as the Gold Coast were dominated when more than two hundred years later, they were colonised by Britain. The point to be made here is that the dominant culture in the British Isles has been overwhelmingly English and so the class relations among the British was recognisably English. That is, an all powerful ruling class for whom the vast majority of the working class toiled for little reward.

    The polity may have been ruled by English mores and customs but things worked out quite well because there was little difference between the modus operandi of the ruling classes in both England and Scotland. It was indeed, almost identical. The Scottish Lairds or tribal chiefs like the English dukes not only owned all the land but also the people who lived on them. It was therefore easy for the Lairds to chase the crofters who lived within their area of jurisdiction away from the land when they needed the land to raise sheep on. This was at a time when sheep wool became a prime commodity. Many of those who were chased off the land had no choice but to migrate to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA which is why today, you have a sizeable Scottish diaspora in those countries. A few of them can even be found in other countries which is why  names like Ruggieri Brown and Alexis Macalister have turned up on the Argentinian football team list in recent years.

    As for the Irish under English occupation, their fate was comparable to that of the serfs in England in the Middle Ages. They had nothing they could call their own outside their Roman Catholic Church adherence in a place where to be Catholic was to be classified at best as being third class. Their extreme vulnerability was shown up in 1845 when the potato crop failed. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, one million Irish men, women and children perished of hunger and another million hot footed it across the Atlantic to America in a bid to avoid certain death. A large number of those refugees settled down in Boston and surrounding areas and today, many of their descendants are policemen but, that is another story.

    A great deal has been written about the Irish famine of that period, but a great deal more remains to be talked about as far as that sorry episode is concerned. For example, many in Nigeria talk about Irish potatoes without knowing that there is nothing Irish about those potatoes which are indeed native to the Americas from where they were first imported. It was found that potatoes grew in great abundance in Irish soil and was a convenient subsistence crop for Irish peasants who needed only a little plot of land and a pig to provide food for their large family all year round. The humans ate potatoes and their pig was fattened on potato peels. The pig was then butchered and eaten in turn by the people who got a replacement piglet which was fattened and consumed in its turn at the appropriate time. In the meantime, the English employed most of the inhabitants of Ireland  to grow wheat on their estates. The hot and steamy conditions which destroyed the potato crop were favourable for the growth of wheat and so, in that terrible year of the Irish famine, the English gathered in a bountiful harvest of wheat which they loaded into heavily guarded railway trucks that took the wheat to the docks from where they were shipped across to England. There, it was consumed by the gentlemen and their ladies who could pay premium prices for fine wheat bread. In the meantime, over in Ireland where the wheat was grown, people were starving to death in their many  thousands everyday.

    The Irish as a group or class  formed an easily identifiable underclass which existed below the general British working class. They swarmed over from Ireland in the period immediately after the Industrial Revolution and came to dig the canals,  build the roads and carried out other muscular but menial and dead end jobs which the English, down trodden as they were, were not minded to do for the wages on offer. Expectedly, the Irish who came over to do those jobs were not just looked down upon but shunned like so much vermin that they were held out to be by their reluctant English hosts.

    On the whole, those of the British working class were in their turn a stratified demographic group with the Irish at the bottom of the pile. This position was reserved for them until after the Second World War when the British, full of the conquering spirit engendered by their victory in the war reached out to their colonies overseas and imported workers from the Indian sub-continent,  the Caribbean and later, to a little extent, East Africa to join the Irish in powering certain sectors of their economy. Things have not however worked out according to plan in this direction as the children and grandchildren of those immigrants are now running those countries, many of them holding top cabinet positions with the British Prime minister being an Indian with roots in Kenya. The Scottish first minister is an ethnic Pakistani whilst the shiny new Welsh first minister has roots in Zambia. Up till very recently, the Irsh Taoiseach or Prime Minister was also of Indian descent. Where are ethnic Britons to be found in leadership positions in the land of their birth? There are also the odd Nigerian and Ghanaian in powerful cabinet positions in the British government. It is apparent that this trend will continue, meaning that somewhere down the line, the British government will be dominated by formerly colonised peoples from all over the world with the occasional ethnic Briton finding themselves holding a cabinet position here and there. The indigenous working class people there, after centuries of breeding to their lowly status will only be relieved to yield ground to those immigrants who have not been brought up to kowtow to the home grown descendants of William the Bastard and company. These are people who have been primarily concerned with dealing with basic existential matters namely the provision of food, shelter and clothing for themselves and their children. The housing situation in Britain for example is the worst in Europe as they still live  mainly in terrace houses from Victorian times which are mostly impossible to be kept warm in winter. It is often said that spoils of Empire flowed into Britain but the members of the working class do not seem to have benefitted much from this largess as everything flowed into the cavernous pockets of their ruling class made up of only a small fraction of the population. Those nobles have been inter marrying for so long that they are now in danger of creeping idiocy which is the ever present danger in maintaining such relationships. In the midst of all these, the working class cannot be much concerned with basic morality so that in Britain,  they now have an amoral ruling class and an immoral working class trying to get on with life as best they could.

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    Sandwiched between these classes is the middle class which can be described as the conscience of the country. Recruitment into this class has been going on for a couple of centuries now and for part of the working class, climbing into the middle class has been a recurrent ambition over a long period of time. A great many have been successful in this endeavour but a middle class classification is not inheritable so that not all who reach this goal can pass it on to their offspring some of whom slide back into the chaos and anonymity of the working class within a single generation. In addition, the moral burden of the country is carried on the shoulders of the members of the middle class seeing that the denizens of the upper class are not burdened by any moral sensitivity or responsibility and those in the working class cannot afford the luxury of bowing to moral principles.

    The backbone of Britain is maintained in its entirety by members of the middle class who are to be found in the liberal professions, the officer class in the armed forces and the government. From this definition it is clear that the recruiting grounds for the middle classes are tertiary institutions where they work towards picking up those qualifications required for people in middle class occupations.  From this point of view,  British universities have been very successful at initiating a lot of Britons into the middle class. It has to be said that these recruiting institutions are restricted to the universities because most of the institutions reserved for members of the working class were once described  by Ralph Miliband, the great socialist intellectual as custodial institutions from which pupils are released after a prescribed period to take up the lowly jobs assigned to them practically at birth by their society. However, the golden era of this recruitment exercise into the middle class appears to be coming to an end as a very significant minority of students in British universities are now foreign students whose school fees are keeping the British university system afloat. With less money coming in from Indian and Nigerian students, the future of a number of British universities can however no longer be taken for granted.

    An interesting aspect of the recruitment of members of the middle class by British universities is that an overwhelming number of the members of the current  British government are Oxbridge graduates. For example, since the end of the Second World War virtually all British prime ministers, irrespective of their antecedents have been graduates of one of either Oxford or Cambridge. Most of them have in fact been graduates of a single hybrid course, Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE). It appears that there is very little room in the British cabinet for those who have not gone through the PPE degree programme in either Oxford or Cambridge. And this is set to continue for long time to come.

    To be continued.

  • Class formation

    Class formation

    Virtually every literate person knows or should know that in the autumn of the year 1066 of the Christian calendar, William better known to the world as William the Conqueror but also as William the Bastard, as he was born out of wedlock, backed by his followers in more than two hundred ships, crossed the English Channel from Normandy in Northern France.

    William and his men did not come on a joy ride nor were they in England on a picnic. They had come to wrest the English crown from Harold who at the time was regarded by many as the legitimate king of England. William the Conqueror had come across the Channel because he disagreed with the consensus concerning the legitimacy of Harold’s hold on the throne of England. According to William, the former king, Edward the Confessor, his uncle who had died without producing a heir had promised him the crown. On this basis, he was convinced that his own claims to the throne were not only legitimate but were superior to those of Harold. A polite request that the status quo be resolved in favour of William was no less politely rejected by Harold leading to the launching of those ships bringing William and his troops to settle matters violently.

    At that time Harold’s cup was full to overflowing with trouble as he had to take his army to the North East of England to confront a Viking army which had come to  relieve him of his crown. The two armies clashed at what has come to be known as the battle of Stanford Bridge, a battle which Harold won and by doing so, brought the centuries old confrontation with the Vikings who raided the coasts of England from time to time, to an end.

    Before going further with the story of William the Conqueror or the Bastard, it is useful to look at the antecedents of his people, the Normans. Originally, they were Vikings, bands of vicious raiders who arrived on the shores of European settlements in Britain, France and adjoining countries raping, pillaging, and spreading terror all round. Such was the fear they struck all over their hunting grounds that the Roman Catholic Church offered special prayers to God beseeching him to save them from the fury of the Norsemen who blew in from the North sea, not to settle but to pillage and gather hoards of treasure. They found churches particularly attractive targets for their depredation because they were repositories of gold and silver ornaments and being pagans, the Vikings attached no stigma to stealing all those glittering artefacts from unguarded churches. Eventually however after centuries of catching fun at the expense of Christians, they went through the pain of conversion to Christianity themselves and became domesticated. Consequently, they began to settle down in parts of their former stomping grounds which is how a large group of them was able to force the king of France to cede part of his kingdom to them. This is how the duchy of Normandy was created a little over a century before the attention of William was turned on England only a few miles off the coast of Normandy. Thus it was that Harold was assailed at the same time by different groups of Vikings and former Vikings from the north and south of his kingdom respectively. On this occasion, he saw off the invaders from the north and immediately wheeled his army around to face his adversaries closing in on his kingdom from the south. The two armies clashed in what has come to be known as the battle of Hastings, an encounter that proved to be a bridge too far for Harold. Towards evening, as the closely fought battle began to swing in favour of the invaders, an arrow pierced Harold’s eye and killed him instantly. Following his death his army disintegrated around their positions and the battle was lost. England fell to the Normans and William the Conqueror also known as the Bastard , grand father of the reigning king of England twenty six times removed was crowned king of England.

    William’s claim to the throne of England was supported by a band of nobles who came on that adventure with him. It stood to reason that all of them were entitled to fair shares in the booty that was England after their comprehensive victory at Hastings. Consequently, all the land in the kingdom was distributed among these nobles, all of them moving in smartly to take over the lands allotted to them. Everything on those lands and below ground now belonged to them. They went ahead to build formidable castles, stuffed them with soldiers and laid down the law in their respective domains. Their law had jurisdiction within their domain and that of the king dubbed the Common law held sway throughout the kingdom. There were only a few dozen of these nobles and each of them had very sizeable portions of land but none of them had enough power to threaten the power and awesome majesty of the king. However, acting together, they could form a formidable opposition to the king when their collective interest clashed with his. This is why they were able to force the king to sign the Magna Carta, the famous document which curbed some of his power in 1215. Today, the Magna Carta is erroneously hailed as victory by the common man over kingly privilege and tyranny. Nothing could be further from the truth as the concessions squeezed out from the king were restricted to the pleasure of the dukes to the total exclusion of the common people who lived under the suffocating shadow of the nobles. It has to be said however that many years down the line the breath of fresh air which the Magna Carta generated wafted down ever so gently to the oppressed commoners and brought a little relief from their drudgery but, it has to be said that any such relief was minimal. The life of the common man in England continued to be circumscribed by the whims and caprices of their rulers right until recent times.

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    Each of the nobles had a dukedom which was passed down to their respective descendants who today are still deriving a great deal of wealth from their inheritance and together, form the ruling class in England, many of them retaining the French names they brought with them from Normandy. Their enormous wealth is not derived from any form of work but from the rent they collect and have collected over close to one thousand years and will collect for another thousand years. The wealth they have is for them to spend whichever way catches their fancy. More than anything else, their wealth confers on them a level of amorality, the consequences of which is far beyond the comprehension of those who do not belong to their class. They have blue blood in their veins and stand above the common herd in the way that the sky stands above the earth.

    England was not empty when the Normans arrived but for the influence that the former inhabitants exerted on the kingdom thereafter, they might just be regarded as having been absent. They were only useful to the kingdom as tillers of the soil and hewers of wood. The Normans created and maintained an apartheid system every bit as brutal if not more so, as anything the Boers practised in South Africa several centuries later. They were reduced to the status of serfs whose daily life was as circumscribed as that of any slave on a cotton plantation in the Civil War period in Alabama. For five hundred years the language of the English court and nobility was French and today, there are at least two words for anything in the English language, one of them derived from French and the other from an Anglo-Saxon word, not to talk of words borrowed or stolen from Latin, Greek and other languages. And right there you  have an explanation for the word density and beauty of the English language. After all,  every cloud however dark has a silver lining no matter how thin it is.

    On the opposite end of the English social register are members of the working class. These are the direct descendants of the serfs who served the ruling class in the capacity of workers on the manors many hundred years before. Their descendants still carry the names which described their roles on manorial grounds; Fletcher, Thatcher, Cook, Smith, Hunter, Bowyer, Taylor, Baker, Fowler, Cooper, Miller, Milner and of course many more are all examples of roles played by their ancestors who served the nobles ensconced in their castles with enforced diligence over many generations. Passing through successive generations of servitude has bred an endearing docility in the English working class who like their ancestors offer nothing other than the labour of their hands. They had little more than the most elementary possessions to call theirs and even the little they had was at the pleasure of the lord at his ease in his impregnable castle, waited upon hand and foot by a large retinue of servants each of them bred to provide service to their lord.

    Apart from anything else, they were used to taking orders and because of this they made good, obedient soldiers who were used against members of their class who entertained any notion of rebelling against their lord and master. They were also used in many wars abroad, principally against their nearest neighbours, the French. They were therefore used in the service of the ruling class at home and abroad and they performed these tasks faithfully and for little reward.

    ●To be continued.

  • Rain (IV)

    Rain (IV)

    When I left Nigeria in 1973, my employer and sponsor then called the University of Ife was a Western State institution. That the university is now called the Obafemi Awolowo University is one of the unfortunate fall outs of the university being taken over by the Federal government. Through this impulsive takeover,  the university became a pawn in the hands of the clowns in Lagos and as the saying goes, the rest is history.

    The university was founded in 1962, after more than five years of careful deliberation by the government of the Western Region. After four years during which the university was plagued by teething problems caused mostly by the political disturbances which rocked the Western Region, Professor Hezekiah Oluwasanmi was appointed Vice Chancellor. Everything considered, it was he who set the university on the path of greatness from which we got the altogether too few of those golden years which set the university apart and for which she is still remembered. My own personal harvest from the Oluwasanmi years was the sponsorship which took me to Manchester as part of the staff development scheme, which over the years took two hundred or maybe even more of us to various world famous universities to cut our infant teeth in the world of academia. Those were heady days of glorious expectation which in turn registered the University of Ife as a world class institution. Unfortunately that season of euphoria was, by necessity, very short lived as the rain began beating us long before we expected it or prepared ourselves for its coming.

    In 1975, the Federal government,  drunk on its own dollar induced euphoria quite unadvisedly as it is now clear, decided to take over the running of all universities in the land at that time and the descent into mediocrity and chaos, especially at Ife was set in motion.

    Between 1966 and 1975 when he was rail roaded out of the university, the university was built up stone by stone by Oluwasanmi who had embarked on an ambitious programme of infrastructural building which has produced what has been described as the most beautiful university campus in Africa and one which could stand side by side and indeed toe to toe with any other university in the world. All throughout that period, state of the art structures were going up one after the other continuously, rather like it probably was in ancient Rome at the height of its pomp and glory. Even now, fifty years later,  as much as 85% or more of the structures you see around the university campus were built within that glorious period of Oluwasanmi’s stewardship. Such was the quality of work done on those rather weather beaten buildings that all they need now is an honest coat of paint to restore them to their pristine glory. You are never likely to see work approaching such quality in any public university now being built in the new Nigeria of our time. Furthermore, there is virtually nothing to show for the Federal presence on that university campus. The most significant contribution of a Federal government to the university came a little over a decade after the takeover when the name of the university was wilfully and cynically changed in the immediate aftermath of the demise of Chief Awolowo who for several years was the university’s Chancellor. One other consideration was that the university had been conceived and incubated at the time when the Chief was in full charge of everything going on in the Western Region. The university could have been named after him at the time as indeed the university in Zaria had been named after the premier of Northern Nigeria at the time. But the temptation to do so was resisted successfully. Years later, a craven Federal government casting around desperately for political dividends transparently bribed the people of the South west by changing the name of the university to that of a much beloved political leader. I don’t know if that government harvested any dividend from that transparent sleight of hand but only a few years down the line, the greatest opposition to that confused government came from the South west. Since then, virtually all our public universities have been named after politicians most of whom had  expired in many senses long before their demise. That is an issue worth thinking about.

    Going back to 1975, we return to the period of settlement in Nigeria. The government, trying to win the support of the people for the elongation of its devalued tenure, devised a formula for putting money directly into private pockets through the payment of the Udoji bonanza to everyone qualified to receive it. Not satisfied with this, the government, a continuation of the Gowon junta devised all sorts of populist measures and in doing so, quite destroyed the future of Nigeria as surely as the guillotine thousands of lives at the height of the French revolution.

    The university I returned to in 1976 was radically different from the one I left behind only three years before and unfortunately, most of the changes I met on ground were undesirable as far as I could judge. The wind of affluence which was sweeping through the campus approached the status of gale force winds and was sweeping away all forms of orthodoxy. By far the most conspicuous victim of change on the campus was the ousting of the very architect of all the positive changes which had occurred on the campus over a period of nine years. Professor Oluwasanmi, together with a few sturdy lieutenants had built a modern university virtually from scratch and had spared no quarter in doing so. What more, there was a great deal to show for their labour. In spite of this, the great man was unceremoniously booted out of office by men who were half his age and could not boast of a quarter of his experience of selfless public service. Part of one of the many structures going up on campus had collapsed inexplicably in the process of it’s construction killing one of the workers. A committee of enquiry was set up and Oluwasanmi was identified as the fall guy. He had to go, a sacrifice to faux sanctimonious posturing by people who would not have recognised selfless service even if it hit them across the face. By that time, the weather had already changed and we should have been reaching out for a conveniently placed umbrella as the rain fell on us with increasing fury.

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    By 1975 the dollars were rolling in unchecked and the problem of how to spend them wisely became pressing. I know very little about economics but even in my ignorance, I am aware of the butter and guns relationship. Butter is that edible stuff which makes a great contribution to the enjoyment of food whilst guns are well, guns. The money spent on butter is no longer available to be spent on guns and verse versa. The rulers of Nigeria at this time had the choice of spending money on social amenities which could contribute to development but instead decided to divert money into private pockets including, or perhaps especially their own. In 1969, just before the rains began, I spent nine months as a clerk in the Ministry of Finance at that time the most powerful Ministry in the land. The Minister was none other than Chief Obafemi Awolowo, second in command to the military head of state. The permanent secretary was Mr. Abdul Atta and on a few occasions, I had the privilege and thrill of seeing those venerable gentlemen waiting to take the lift in the lobby of Mosaic House, seat of the ministry in Tinubu square. In those days before the coming of the deluge we are still trying to cope with, neither of these gentlemen had an official car! A car, not the same car everyday, was sent to bring the minister to Mosaic House and take him back home again. As for Mr. Atta, he came to work under his own steam in a bottle green Mercedes 190D, a modest vehicle to match the standard of those days. Those were the days of the nation’s genteel poverty when resources had to be stretched to cover vast distances. That the country went through the Civil War without borrowing a penny suggests that the nation was under tolerably good management. With the coming of those dollars, all restraints were removed and there was enough to be thrown at everything rather in the manner of a drunken sailor let loose on an unsuspecting port city. To continue with the butter and guns analogy, the money could have been spent on building developmental infrastructure such as well equipped schools, railway system expansion, durable roads, building industrial capacity including the generation and distribution of electricity and modern  telecommunication systems, building up impressive academic muscle and security, to mention the most pressing. Instead, money was made available to pamper various sections of the great Nigerian public. University education was made free, ostensibly to cater for the children of the poor but the vast majority of those who profited from it were the children of the elites who with their freshly enhanced salaries could very well pay for the education of their children beyond the undergraduate level. Ironically, many of these people seeing the local university stumbling  from one crisis to the other elected to send their pampered children to universities abroad. Thereafter, the country was flooded with official cars so that government had to take over the responsibility of solving the transportation of a large number of civil servants. In the days of the odd and even number system in Lagos, some of these fat cats were provided with two official cars so that they could be brought to work everyday at government expense. This abuse of privilege has only expanded over the years until now when billions of Naira are incinerated from time to time as government functionaries are deemed unable to perform their functions in the absence of bullet proof SUVs. In 1969,the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Finance came to work in his personal car because he had purchased it with a government loan to facilitate his contribution to government business. Such common sense has long been banished from government thinking which is why we are now hard out to keep our ship from floundering in the sea of misgovernment which the rains lashing us have created.

  • Rain (III)

    Rain (III)

    The middle years of the seventies of the last century were pivotal, for good or to be honest, mostly for ill, in deciding the present situation in Nigeria. And this hinges on the so called oil boom which drastically changed all societal features within the country. From the genteel poverty of the sixties to the frenzy of the seventies, our default settings were changed so profoundly that we began to operate on a much shorter and destructive wavelength than we imagined we could ever be at the time the civil war broke out in 1967.

    There is no doubt that the war caused a great deal of  change to Nigeria but even after that monumental upheaval, the country was, by and large still recognisable from what it was before the sounds of artillery began to disturb our peace. In the immediate aftermath of that war, the country can be said to have been busy trying to manage the peace which had brought that bloody but weary episode to a close or at least that is what we thought at that time. All signs pointed to the fact that sooner than later, we were going to try and bring life back to what it was before the war. The situation changed and changed profoundly as soon as we were called upon to manage the influx of petrodollars which started after the Yom Kippur war in October 1973. Within a period of only one year, our trajectory had changed forever and a new country had emerged.

    As long as there was a war on there was no opposition to the military government of the day so that all attention could be paid to winning the war and complete its self-appointed task of keeping Nigeria one and setting up the programme for winning the peace.

    The situation changed shortly after the war as all politicians, old and young began to manoeuvre themselves into positions to take over from the soldiers. The most visible civilian member of the military government and indeed the de facto deputy head of government Chief Obafemi Awolowo who had looked after the financial affairs of the country all throughout the period of the war was the first to step out of the military orbit as soon as the immediate post-war period had been successfully negotiated. According to him, it would be doing great violence to his democratic credentials if he continued to be part of an unelected government once the emergency conditions associated with the war had been removed. This was the signal for all the politicians, most of them without a single democratic bone in their body  to start to agitate for a return to civilian rule or, to put it another way, a return of the military to their barracks.

    After more than five years in the seat of power, the military were (understandably?) reluctant to even entertain any thought of reducing themselves to playing war games or whatever they usually amused themselves with in their barracks. Instead, they began to make noises which suggested that they were in no hurry to vacate the political stage. Indeed, the head of state stated quite categorically in his independence day broadcast in 1974 that it was no longer realistic for the military to hand over to a civilian government by 1976. This was in spite of promises that had been made in 1970, all of four years before that military rule was going to be brought to an end by that time. This meant the military government had given itself six years to wrap up whatever was necessary to be done to prepare a viable transition programme. With only two years to go however, the military admitted brazenly that their transition programme was faulty, was no longer viable and therefore needed to be scrapped. Not only that, no new date was submitted for consideration so that it appeared that the country had to prepare itself for an indefinite period of military rule. Looking back to that period, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the promised return to civilian rule was unilaterally taken off the table at a time when American dollars were flowing into the country at an unprecedented rate. With the benefit of hind sight we can say that as soon as the promise to hand over power to an elected government was retracted whatever bonds that existed between the military rulers and the ruled had been severed and looked irreparably broken from whichever way you looked at the situation. There was therefore an obvious need for some sort of reconciliation and looking back, there is a suggestion of a pro quid quo from a government which was coincidentally sitting on a mountain of dollars and the civilian population which wanted them gone. The government needed support for its determination to hang on to power  and reasoned that it could get this support by putting money, a whole lot of money into as many pockets as possible. What followed was the Udoji Award which put a lot of money into individual pockets and went a long way into winning some sympathy if not love for the government.

    The Udoji Award was the result of the work of the Udoji Commission which was set up  primarily to review the conditions of service of the civil service with a view to creating a public service institution which was both efficient and effective. It was thought that it was only by doing this that a public service capable of administering a modern and progressive economy could be created. It was soon realised that a major, if not the major requirement for any reorganisation of the public service was the monetary compensation which public servants needed to induce them to make the required contribution to societal development. This is why the result of the work of that commission is now remembered mostly for the Udoji Award or bonanza which followed it. Anything else that may have been achieved by Chief Udoji and his team paled into piddling insignificance when placed side by side with the irresistible financial package which came with it. And of course, the award was not and could not be restricted to the public service as everyone in  salaried employment benefitted from the rain of cash which was unleashed by the Udoji Award. Actually, people in the private sector went home with something substantially heavier than their counterparts in the public service. After all, salaries in the private sector were even at that time  significantly larger than what civil servants were being paid. The gulf in salaries between the two sectors has now widened into an unbridgeable chasm but that is not within the scope of this discussion.

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    The Udoji Commission recommended a salary increase across board with new salaries being just about double the old one but it has to be said, the arrears of one year’s salary which were also paid together with the grossly enhanced salaries was the brainchild of a government in bribing mode. The people were too busy spending the loot which had in the manner of manna from heaven just fallen by gravity into their lap to worry about the tenure of the government which had just more or less buried them under the weight of unearned income. The richest thing about this process was that the government could pay out all that money because according to the elated or perhaps, befuddled head of that generous or perhaps more appropriately, profligate government, the problem facing the government was no longer about the availability of money but how to spend it. There was an abundance of cash and there was no point with being stingy especially since the public was amenable to being encouraged like a headless mob to do considerable violence to their own interest. The heirs of the assassinated Julius Caesar had used a similar tactic to sway the fickle Roman plebeians to their side when it was revealed that every Roman had been mentioned in Caesar’s will and stood to receive some money from the great man’s estate. It was sweeter still that the money which changed hands on this occasion came from the now elastic government treasury.

    The point that has to be made about the Nigerian economy then and now is that the vast majority of the actors which operated it, did so outside the formal economy which fell under the jurisdiction of Chief Udoji and other members of his commission. Like an iceberg, most parts of the Nigerian economy is actually lying but not quiescent under water.  Indeed there is a whole lot going on within the more or less invisible informal economy. The market women and men selling all kinds of exotic items in all the markets in the various nooks and corners of this country operate all the mechanisms which govern the massive informal economy were of course not captured by the Udoji report but there was no way that they could be excluded from the government largess. These people waited patiently for their own award, arrears and all by manipulating the prices of every item they sold. Prices of everything immediately went through the roof as it were but this did not deter Nigerians from blowing their winnings in an orgy of spending. They now had money enough for buying whatever caught their fancy; cars, motorcycles, clothes, building materials and of course, frozen chickens from anywhere. The major consideration in making a purchase was no longer if something was needed. It only needed to catch a fancy and it was immediately purchased and flaunted.

    The genteel poverty which we had contrived to navigate for several decades was cast aside like old clothing and we put on expensive new robes which did not cover our nakedness any better than our old clothes but which caressed our pampered bodies as we moved around to our satisfaction.

    Our society was suddenly transformed into one which was characterised by a high level of consumption, one which was however not balanced by any increase in our productive capacity which actually fell drastically. Whatever money was brought into the country in the wake of the oil boom was immediately cancelled out by the cost of imports which were flung in our direction from all parts of the world. There was great rejoicing in the coming of the oil boom which came upon us like a clap of thunder but soon left us shivering in the rain which followed immediately after it. Our rainy season had arrived out of blue cloudless skies.

  • Rain

    Rain

    Rain when used as a metaphor is instantly recognised by any sensate human being, even the very young. A baby may not quite understand what is going on when it rains but in spite of that it responds naturally to the steady beat of rain on the roof top. A few years down the line, the baby, now in childhood may respond to rain by rushing outdoors as soon as it starts and cavorts  under the showers  with  joyous abandon enjoying the feel of raindrops on their young skin. It is not clear at what point rain is seen as something of a nuisance, one which can ruin  freshly coiffured hair or a new suit of clothes. For others, it may be the absence of rain that causes anxiety as a prolonged absence of rain may lead to a drought which in turn leads to widespread and profound catastrophe. More often however being beaten by the rain becomes a metaphor for unmitigated disaster as it engenders a strong feeling of helplessness. The only help for it is to get out of the rain as quickly as possible. When you are caught in the rain far from any shelter you are likely to feel utterly abandoned at which point any shelter however inconvenient would be gratefully exploited. If you really want to look for a victim of the rain however, you need look no further than a chicken. A chicken which has been caught in the rain looks absolutely miserable, with feathers blatantly ruffled and dishevelled. It is never a pretty sight.

    There are some who liken our present predicament in Nigeria to being caught in the rain, a merciless howling gale that leaves no room for any mitigating circumstances. What more, we are in such a miserable state that we have nothing on a chicken in a rain storm. The question on many lips, is, when did we get caught in the rain which is now depriving us of any crumb of comfort? There are some others who are convinced that there can be no end to our extreme and largely collective discomfiture unless and until we go back to identify at what point in time the rain started beating us and begin the process of recovery.

    One thing about rain is that, it hardly ever starts without warning even if the cloud that grows to cover the sky and blot out the sun completely is no bigger than a man’s hand when first sighted on the far horizon. The deluge, the effects of which we have been suffering from, started with that proverbial cloud, smaller than a tiny hand but of course the warning which that tiny, wispy cloud constituted was ignored out of hand and so, we have only ourselves to blame for the wet condition we are stuck in. After all, it is only a wise cripple that hot foots it out of an area that is threatening to become a theatre of war. By the time the mentally challenged cripple sets out on his journey to salvation, it is too late and he gets caught up in the rush to escape from toil, trouble and turmoil, ending up as a casualty of what at the appropriate time was no more than an avoidable  situation.

    When we talk about the patently uncomfortable situation we are in today, there is no shortage of ideas as to how to reach dry ground as quickly as possible. For some, all we have to do is strengthen the Naira without any delay and everything will be well. Even for this simple solution nobody is sure about how it can be engineered. Some others think that what is necessary is to slay the fire snorting dragon of corruption and all dividends of normality and well being will fall into our laps. When we are not talking about corruption, we turn to the issue of leadership, followership, public finance, patriotism and other intangible elements on the backs of which we are to ride to salvation. In the meantime, there is no sign that there is any identifiable path leading us to the promised land in which case, we have many years of wandering through the wilderness in front if us. More than any of these we are still blissfully unaware of when the clouds began to gather in the sky above our befuddled heads.

    It is clear there is a case for identifying the gathering of the clouds as when our soldiers, betraying their oath to protect the country from harm instead decided to rape the country by engaging themselves in activities which plunged the country into what can only be described as a ruinous civil war. There was every chance that the country was going to be torn asunder, the whole structure collapsing under the weight of multiple contradictions. However, that did not happen and the country, like a person who has been brought face to face with a decidedly fatal situation seemed to have  recovered her senses in the nick of time especially since the national economy survived the internecine conflict relatively unscathed.

    I was out of the country between the years 1973 and 1976. In those years without the internet and instant news, I could only look at Nigeria from all that distance through a telescope. The coup which overthrew Gowon floated to my ears through distant airwaves and letters from home. When Murtala Mohammed was slaughtered like a sacrificial lamb on a street in Lagos the news reached across the ocean carrying with it the outrage unleashed by that murderous deed. Were the clouds already gathering menacingly at that point in time or, is it that the first rain drops were already dropping as scattered and inconsequential splashes?

    Whatever are the answers to the above questions, I can say that the country I arrived in in 1976 was clearly another country from the one I left three years earlier even if those I left behind only three years before did not seem to be aware of any changes to the metrological situation of Nigeria, if we are to persist with the metaphor of rain that we started this article with.

    I felt the winds generated by the coming rain at the back of my neck within a couple of hours after I touched down in Ikeja. Earlier in the day, we had a stopover in Kano. On getting into the terminal, I saw a telephone and toyed with the idea of phoning ahead to Lagos to confirm my arrival. The telephone did not have a dialling tone, a capacity it had obviously lost a long time before. I had not encountered that level of impotence associated with a utility service in the three years I had been  away. Welcome to Nigeria!

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    Almost as soon as I got home my mother wanted to know what she could cook as a treat for her son returned to the nest after a long absence. To tell the truth I  had not missed any home cooking as I ate the same things in Manchester as I ate before I left home. I saw the disappointment in her eyes as soon as I refused her offer of a home cooked meal. It was then that I remembered that all the time I was away, no chicken worthy of the name had passed my lips. Anyone who lived in Britain would remember probably with a shudder that what passed for chicken there was worse than what was worthy of being written about with any enthusiasm. My teeth longed for the opportunity of being challenged with chicken bones which did not melt in the soup or fell apart as soon as it encountered any pressure exerted by any reasonably healthy teeth. I immediately brought back the smile to my mother’s face as soon as I  ordered some soup made of a chicken with bones worth cracking with my teeth. I waited a few hours for the chicken to be brought from the market, to hear it’s cackling noise as it was killed in the backyard before being made into soup. I waited in vain for any sign of a chicken being being prepared for the pot. In the end I had to ask about the chicken being prepared to welcome me back home. Not only that, I wondered aloud if the chicken had been bought as I had not seen any chicken being brought into the house.  I was then given the assurance that my chicken soup would soon be ready.

    ‘But you haven’t even bought a chicken’ I replied.   I was then reassured that an uncle’s wife had been immediately despatched to the market to get a chicken as soon as I expressed the wish to be treated to chicken stew.

    ‘But I saw her arrive and she did not have a chicken in her hand’ I insisted.

    ‘Oh, the chicken was in her bag’ I was told. I was confused. Since when did live chickens come in a bag? I was then informed that frozen chickens, imported all the way from New Zealand were now available in Nigerian markets. The Nigerian economy was blooming and doing so with uncommon vigour which was why we were now importing chickens from a place more than half a day’s distance from Nigeria. The explanation was made with more than a touch of pride because as far as those around me on that day were concerned,  Nigeria had arrived in style on the the world stage and could now order chickens all the way from New Zealand and beyond. Since then, we have all but wrecked our economy by importing a whole lot of things which were once provided by the local economy. A lot of the people who were once involved in producing all those things we now import are now unemployed and desperately poor. They are drowning in the deluge of cold rain which has destroyed our collective welfare. The harm done to that economy was immense and after fifty years of that criminal frivolity, the economy has been forced to its knees and the rain hammering on our bowed head with a ferocity which has brought us to our knees.

    I looked around me that day trying to make the point that it was because it was that kind of chicken I had been coping with and that I was sick and tired of eating such garbage but it was clear to me that my point was not well taken. Nigeria then had the capacity to buy frozen, tasteless chickens, beef and mutton from New Zealand and as far as they were concerned that was a clear sign of progress. The point that was made at the time was that the availability of frozen meat on the Nigerian market had forced down the price of that commodity making it possible for more people than before to afford to buy meat. Unconvinced, I was shaking my head as I forced that tasteless chicken stew down my constricted throat. Looking back it is clear that even if the rain had not started at that point in time, the clouds had begun to gather above us. That was some fifty years ago.

  • Let the doctors go

    Let the doctors go

    In the late eighties when the Nigerian economy began to show signs of terminal decline just as it is doing at this time, Nigerian doctors began leaving Nigeria in droves. At that time their sanctuaries were in Middle Eastern countries, principally in Saudi Arabia from where they acquired those American dollars which had suddenly become pure gold in Nigeria. Nigerian universities were hardest hit by the exodus of doctors as professors in all medical specialities cashed in on the strength of their stethoscopes and ran away for their economic lives. They took special leaves of absence and went off into an Arabian exile where some of them struck their tent and did not look back. They did not think it was in their interest or that of their university to come back home to fulfil the terms of their leave of absence. They simply paid off whatever financial  obligations they had to the university from their store of dollars and waltzed into the sunset, never to be seen anymore. They had in the meantime built a house in which to spend a comfortable retirement after their labours in the desert. They were therefore lost forever to the university system which was too poor to appreciate their expertise.

    The Saudi gold mine did not remain open indefinitely as the Saudis turned to training their own citizens to become doctors and other medical specialists to take over from Nigerians and other foreigners. The recruiting agencies which sprang up quite suddenly to facilitate the flight of our doctors from Nigeria just as suddenly went back underground and all became quiet on the Eastern front. Somehow, the home universities survived the Saudi blitz and moved on to train the next generation of doctors who this time have their eyes fixed on destinations in the West; notably those in the USA, Britain and Canada. The emigrants this time included a sizeable number of pharmacists and I remember writing a number of references especially for those of them who were going away for the expressed purpose of acquiring further degrees. I cheerfully gave those references thinking that the recipients were going to come back to strengthen our faculty but the last time I checked, not one of them has given their home university a backward glance. They are all ageing gracefully in comfortable exile. The only exception to the general rule has been a professor who went out there with a Ph.D from Ife to fortify herself with knowledge in Molecular biology and is now back in Ibadan complete with a state of the art laboratory in which her students are acquiring skills which would have been beyond their reach had the good professor decided to remain in her place of exile in the USA. It is rather sad that no one else to my knowledge has thought it fit to replicate her method and give back something substantial to her society.

    My generation of scholars received their postgraduate training in universities abroad but except for the odd deviant, we all returned home to build up our various academic departments which is why it was possible for those coming behind us to receive the level of education which made it possible for them to be accepted in their turn by universities abroad for their own postgraduate training. A few years ago, an ill-advised or perhaps,  just an incompetent government,  in a fit of political grandstanding awarded dozens of scholarships to, admittedly outstanding graduates in many disciplines. The recipients  of these scholarships happily went away to the best universities abroad, did very good work there and carved out a niche for themselves far away from the hostile shores of their homeland. Whoever thought they were going to come back home after their exposure to the facilities abroad  must have had a screw or even a raft of screws loose in their head. A poor country like Nigeria has,  in this case  done nothing more than subsidise the development of universities abroad. The money spent on this mad act of misplaced charity could have been spent in the development of a few centres in our first generation universities and perhaps a few others where the next generation of Nigerian academics could have been trained. In the meantime, my own generation of academics have retired from our universities, their expertise now irretrievably lost to the system. In any case, they are now exhausted from battling the uncaring Nigerian educational establishment which seems hell-bent on destroying the Nigerian university system which is growing uncontrollably like a cancer careering towards a terminal condition. Over the last fifty years, nearly three hundred so called universities have been created and the population of Nigerian undergraduates is now in the millions. Where are the competent lecturers to run these establishments which for want of an appropriate name we call universities? It is nowhere now enough to call a collection of buildings however elegant a university, if there is not a full compliment of adequately trained and well equipped staff to teach students that have the ability to appreciate whatever it is they are being taught. From this point of view, I wonder just how many universities worthy of the name are now operating in Nigeria.

    When doctors were rushing off to the Middle East in the eighties, it was thought that all they wanted was more money in their lean pockets. The government of the day, goaded by the Minister of Health decided to throw money at this problem. A new salary scale which upended what was available in the health sector was hastily put together and suddenly the doctors were earning a whole lot of money, much more than other cadres in the hospitals. But because of a sense of self imposed exceptionalism, they want even more money and when like Oliver Twist, they could not get it, they have jumped on their bikes and are riding off to new climes just as their fathers did in the eighties. But now, other members of the healthcare team have joined the match.

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    Like the educational system, our healthcare system appears to be in terminal decay and it may not be long before the little trust we have in our hospitals will be completely shredded. Indeed, with our pampered elite group opting for overseas treatment for all but the most trivial ailments and our health budget devoted to the payment of personal emoluments, do we really have any health system left? The jury must be left to deliberate on that but I have a feeling that the honest answer must be in the negative.

    Over the last few years, especially in the last two, we have been regaled with takes of the flight of our healthcare personnel. We are told that whole departments have disappeared en masse having secured visas to countries beyond the seas. Some of the emigrants have burnt all their boats and bridges giving the unmistakeable signs of their determination never to return. Homes, vehicles, landed properties and even home utensils have been disposed of as the money required for travel papers had to be gathered somehow. The first group of émigrés in the eighties was made up of doctors going out to bag a fistful of dollars at the top end of the Saudi Arabian health system. This time we have a motley collection of healthcare workers some of who will have to slot into something only a little better than minimum wage level, within a British National Health System battling with existential problems in a country battling both economic and political challenges. They are not likely to come back home to build mansions in low population density areas as their predecessors who went to the Middle East had done. This new cohort have no plans to come back because they are probably committed to slotting into the underclass in their new homes. They are gone and gone forever.

    Perhaps the most prominent members of the immigrant group are doctors and nurses who are deserting our healthcare system in droves. So many of them have left that we should be worried about what is likely to happen to those of us who have the misfortune of having to take shelter under the wings of our healthcare delivery system. So far, the rickety system seems to be holding up but in the absence of reliable figures we cannot come to any meaningful conclusion about the status of our healthcare delivery apparatus

    The last time that we had the problem of the exodus of doctors, we threw a lot of money at the problem making it possible for doctors to corner a considerable proportion of the healthcare budget into their cavernous pockets. So many years down the line, we find that doctors need even more money in order to give them some satisfaction.  Unlike university lecturers who are the designated orphans of the nation, the doctors have the Nigerian authorities on the hop and people are putting forward all kinds of strategies to deal with the situation of large scale desertion of Nigerian hospitals by doctors and to some extent, nurses. One authoritative suggestion from Lagos State is for the state government to train 1,500 doctors annually. An extension of this strategy is for the country to double the intake of medical students across all medical schools. These strategies will make it possible to produce even more doctors, to at least take the place of those who follow their professional fortunes abroad. Such ad hoc responses are unfortunately, nothing short of laughable except that the governor is quite capable of trying to carry out his own suggestion and of course, doubling the number of places available in our medical schools can be made possible by fiat and in doing so, create other problems.

    With doctors pouring out of our medical schools, we will soon have a great many more doctors moaning about how little they are paid and once grumbling starts, they will start skulking around foreign embassies as they plot their exit so that more doctors can be produced to take the place of doctors who have escaped from the toxic Nigerian environment.  At this time, what the doctors are saying is that there is not enough money in Nigeria to compensate them for whatever services they are capable of rendering. That is something that is worth thinking about.

    When doctors’ salaries went through the roof, it was also suggested that the most effective way to fight disease is to prevent them. Rather than produce more doctors and loading them down with money any available money should be spent on building the capacity to prevent the spread of infections. For example should most Nigerians have access to potable water, their dependency on doctors would be reduced. Should our standard of living improve to such an extent that we can eat at least two, but ideally, three nutritious meals a day and live in standard, well ventilated and mosquito proofed homes, our reliance on doctors will be reduced considerably, at least enough to reduce their self induced exceptionalism. In the meantime, all those doctors, nurses and others who do not feel appreciated should simply sell off and ship out. We will survive somehow, just as we have always done.

  • A game of numbers (II)

    A game of numbers (II)

    A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how the human race grew over a short period of time to cover the earth, in spite of the numerous problems posed by pathogenic microorganisms. For most of human history we remained ignorant of the existence of these microscopic organisms and were not aware of the danger they posed to our continued existence both at the level of the individual as well as the collective.

    It is interesting that even before the connection between disease and microorganisms was made, mankind had quite instinctively begun to take precautions against them. A man who was martyred for his belief in hygienic practices was Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor of German descent who practiced in the Vienna General hospital in Austria in the middle of the nineteenth century. Coincidentally, there were two labour wards in his hospital, one was managed by midwives and the other by doctors who also conducted routine post mortem examinations on their freshly dead former patients. Surprisingly, the number of fatalities among women who were admitted to the doctors’ ward was more than double what was recorded in the other ward. The good doctor reasoned that the disparity in the fatality figures in the two wards was caused by doctors who also carried out post mortems. They all came to attend to women in labour straight from the mortuary without bothering to even wash their cadaver contaminated hands before bringing them in contact with the living tissues of women striving to bring new life into the world. In the process of doing this, they transferred some infectious agent to their gravid patients, many of who succumbed to the virulent effects of what they had picked up from the doctors. Semmelweis insisted that the doctors under his supervision washed their hand with chlorinated lime before attending to their female patients who thereafter and consequently, stopped  dying in child birth. Unfortunately, this went against the grain of his ignorant professional colleagues who argued that women were ordained by their God to suffer and even die in child birth and so, reducing their suffering during child birth was to thwart the will of God. Semmelweis was vilified for his work to such an extent that he was railroaded into an asylum where he died very soon after. A few years later, his work was vindicated when it was discovered that the puerperal fever responsible for killing the women after childbirth was caused by microorganisms which could be killed by the simple expedience of  doctors attending to them washing their hands in chlorinated lime before attending to their pregnant patients as prescribed by Semmelweis. It is not difficult to imagine that by saving the lives of women in child bearing age has contributed immensely to boosting global population as has happened over the last one hundred years or so. Just as important as the work of Semmelweis was to saving lives on a truly large scale was the contribution of John Snow to advancing the course of public health. Snow was an English doctor whose primary area of interest was in anaesthetics. But, whatever work he did in this field pales into piddling insignificance by what he did in the field of epidemiology. He is indeed known today as the founder of this branch of scientific study. He won his spurs in this area of study through his work on the origin and cause of a cholera epidemic. Cholera outbreaks were quite common in Europe at this time but on this occasion, Snow was determined to track the outbreak to its origins. In this instance, the pestilence broke out in London in August 1854 and as cholera epidemics are wont to do,  killed hundreds of people in next to no time. This was at a time when  even the most learned people were completely unaware of the existence of disease causing microorganisms. Not really knowing what he was up against,  Snow painstakingly followed the progress of this epidemic and found that the vast majority of those who died took their water supply from a particular pump on Broad Street. He brought the epidemic to an abrupt end by simply removing the handle to this pump so that people no longer had access to the contaminated water it dispensed to a multitude of people every blessed day. This opened the eyes of the world to the importance of making pure drinking water available to people and led to the building of water purification plants in cities all over Europe. This measure also made a substantial contribution to the health of people  and over the coming years, boosted global population figures tremendously. Today, there is virtually no European who does not have ready access to municipally purified water which is a guarantee of freedom from water borne diseases. The Europeans took this practice to towns and cities in their overseas colonies which is how come the inhabitants of Lagos  were supplied with pipe borne water which came all the way from Iju as long ago as 1915.

    As soon as Pasteur demonstrated the pathogenic quality of microorganisms, it was immediately clear that what was needed to remove the scourge of microbial infection was to find ways and means of killing pathogenic organisms within their unwilling and endangered hosts. This was however easier said than done as there were no available substances which could eradicate microorganisms from the human body without using grievous harm to their hosts. Nevertheless, the search was on to find what was described as the silver bullets which could kill bacteria whilst sparing human cells. It was however clear from the onset that, as advised by Semmelweis taking hygienic measures was vastly beneficial to those who took the trouble to exclude microorganisms from their body.

    Long before the silver bullets which could kill microorganisms were discovered however, perhaps the greatest single most effective public health measure in human history had been introduced into medical practice. Louis Pasteur, who else, had given vaccination to the world and by doing so guaranteed the rapid increase we have seen in world population over the last hundred years. Because of the practice of vaccination, children everywhere have been given more than an even chance of not just surviving childhood but of living long enough to have children of their own hence the dramatic increase in global population which has made it possible for eight and a half billion people to be alive today. Our recent experience with the Covid pandemic clearly shows the importance of vaccination to the world. This pandemic killed close to eight million people within two years and goodness knows how many more millions would have died had no effective vaccines not been made available at the time that they were. In a malaria endemic area such as we live in, the recent availability of not one but, two effective malaria vaccines suggests that the goal of malaria eradication has been brought more than a step closer to blissful reality.

    Another reason why there are so many human inhabitants in the world today is that we now have an effective chemotherapeutic agent for virtually every bacterial infection including tuberculosis that agent of lingering death which took years to kill its victims but always did so in the end. Today, there are many tuberculostatic drugs which are effective in curing this utterly dreadful infection.

    Man was launched into the world of antimicrobial chemotherapy by the serendipitous discovery of penicillin by Sir Alexander Fleming, a Scottish doctor working in London in 1929. Every literate person should acquaint himself with this story so, google it. Antibiotics, more than any other group of drugs have revolutionised the practice of medicine and changed the business of saving live profoundly. Life before antibiotics was rife with sudden death, pain and suffering which turned survival to something of a lottery. Since antibiotics became available, bacteria were knocked off their pedestal as determinants of human fate and longevity so much so that it has been calculated that antibiotics have added another ten years at least to our collective life expectancy. So far, man has not yet been able to solve the problems caused by viral infections but even so, HIV/AIDS,  an infection which was invariably fatal only some years ago has now been degraded to the status of a chronic infection which can be managed successfully over the span of a lifetime by the judicious use of retroviral drugs. It is difficult to come to terms with the fact that the basketball legend, Magic Johnson has been living robustly with HIV for more than thirty years now and appears to have many more years left in his tank. Such is the power of modern medicines.

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    Drugs have also been very useful in the treatment of non-communicable diseases. In 1921, Canadians, Banting and Best isolated insulin from dogs and used it to treat diabetes in other dogs who had been  made diabetic. Within two years, insulin isolated from cows was being used to treat diabetes in humans and since then, millions of humans have been kept alive and able to lead a more or less normal life even though  they are diabetic.

    Over the last hundred years, man has learnt a great deal about the myriad diseases which plague them that many of the conditions which for many millennia made life a misery have now been  eradicated. They have used the knowledge acquired to create a world in which most of us have access to a level of healthcare which was the stuff of dreams two hundred years ago. There are still some dark spots but continued research is beaming a great deal of light in those areas and our health status will continue to improve in the foreseeable future. A few days ago, I saw the video of a so-called pastor supposedly ‘sucking’ cancer from a woman’s breast.  I felt doubly sorry for the poor woman because she is never going to get better and because she has just been publicly humiliated. Sucking a woman’s breast is an overtly sexual act and to do so publicly is to violate the human code that sexual acts were restricted to private quarters. Man is the only animal species that respects this code and to violate it is to reduce man to the level of other animals. It is a frank denial of the human status. Our current control of disease has not been achieved by pastors, diviners, soothsayers and supposedly powerful men who have some control over spirits, principalities and powers. This control has been chiselled out step by step by men and women toiling day and night in scientific laboratories. We can only honour them and enhance our health status by putting some trust in the result of the tremendous work they have carried out on our behalf.

  • The lost art of letter writing (II)

    The lost art of letter writing (II)

    Although each individual post office was  just a building, it’s tentacles reached far and wide and touched virtually every building in the land.  The letters posted in each post office was moved through one of several agencies associated with the office. Perhaps the most important agency was human, as the letters had to be sorted out by people who had been appropriately trained for the job. In other parts of the world, places where they have to deal with a very large volume of mail, machines are used to deal with sorting mail. This is especially true during the Christmas period when the post office has to employ an army of casual workers to shift out letters and other items of mail which had to be delivered before Christmas. Many Nigerians who were students in Britain in days gone by retain happy memories of the stipends which came their way at Christmas, courtesy of the Royal Mail which briefly opened her doors to them in those hectic days leading up to Christmas.

    As soon as letters were appropriately sorted, they were sent on to their respective destinations in all sorts of vehicles many times travelling through the night to deliver letters to destinations all over the country. Night travellers were likely to meet mail vans as well as those notoriously quick pickups ferrying newspapers across the country, delivering news to all nooks and corners of a country in the grip of satisfying sleep that came after honest labour.  Apart from these all important mail vans, letters were also distributed by contracted transporters like the famous Armels Transport with the guarantee of faithful delivery whilst even the trains which roared their way through the countryside carried mail. The roads over which mail was carried may have been narrow and winding; they may have been untarred and the bridges encountered all along the way may have been designed to carry only one vehicle at a time but they were adequately  maintained by the men of the Public Works Department (PWD) whose work camps were a prominent presence and like that of the Police, could be taken for granted all over the land. The delivery of that letter casually dropped into a mail box on the Marina in Lagos and received by a friend or relative in Afikpo a couple of days later would, if it could talk, have a story of adventure to tell of its journey through the Nigerian postal system as it was put into the hands of the recipient by the familiar postman who arrived at the point of delivery on a government issued bicycle.

    The P&T was an institution with a vast and necessary reach and as with all institutions had her own rules of engagement and discharged her duties with due diligence. It had an unwritten but powerful social contract with her numerous and diversified customers, big and small all over the country. Countries all over the world, at least those of them that have a reputation for success, are governed by these contracts whilst on the other side of the coin are the broken countries in which the social contract is casually violated, almost as a matter of principle. In Nigeria, the will and the drive to deliver letters on time began to unravel, first imperceptibly and then quite overtly at some point in time until the postal service which became the butt of sick jokes, sickened in its turn and died. It took longer and longer for posts to be delivered until the guarantee of delivery died a natural death. Hitherto reliable postmen no longer saw or respected the need to make any delivery and dumped mail in some convenient spot but not before extracting anything of value contained in the post under their care. Such chicanery could only have been possible in an institution which had lost its way in a country which had lost all forms of social cohesion and degenerated into an incoherent mass, rather like a terminally diseased heart going into atrial fibrillation at the point of shutting down forever.

    It has become very easy these days to point accusing fingers at certain people for the mess we are now battling with but the sad reality is that more than anything, what is wrong with us is the serial collapse of virtually all our institutions especially as in this case, the Post & Telegraph service. It has to be pointed out however that we will only be using the P&T as a convenient scape goat were we to neglect to point out the culpability of other public institutions in what has now become the failure of the whole. The point is, nobody is interested in looking out for public over the private which is why you will need to look into private pockets for money which should properly be going into the government treasury to serve common purposes such as the provision of social infrastructure; good roads, bridges, railroads, sporting facilities, educational institutions and so on and so forth. We now have individuals who are richer than the country and spend ‘their’ money to scratch their back, never mind that the general populace no longer have any back to scratch. The situation has degenerated to such a point that people, those who have a great deal of money in their pockets are well advised to prepare a detailed written explanation for how it came about that they have cornered such a large amount of money. This is in the unlikely but necessary event that the Nigerian situation may change to such an extent that pointed questions are asked about how come they are thriving furiously in the middle of a desert, far away from any oasis.

    The postal service was designed to serve everyone and in doing so, make it possible for societal purposes to be achieved. However, it’s continued usefulness needed to be guaranteed by individuals who had been trained, some of them at public expense to administer what in effect was a public utility company. The P&T was not expected to run up stupendous profit in the manner of Amazon but it was given the wherewithal to ensure that letters were delivered to their respective destinations within a reasonable period of time. It has to be said that this limited objective was once achieved even with time to spare. But that was in those days when we could rely on responsible authorities to be alive to their responsibilities. In the case of the P&T, one can imagine that it’s managers, eager to put up a show for their friends and family began to think that it was in the interest of their job if staff cars were purchased from the public purse for their own personal use rather than delivery vans which actually carried the mails which the company or,  in the jargon of the day, the parastatal had been paid through stamp sales and fat government subvention. In time, the management came to the irresponsible conclusion that the postal services existed for the sole purpose of their own personal aggrandisement.  After that, it became impossible for the general public to be served and letters became an irrelevance, if not an actual nuisance and like many other things, the art of letter writing was lost among us and lost forever. Now, we are all condemned to communicating with each other electronically by email and suddenly the thrill of actually sitting down to compose a letter was exchanged for the rather impersonal exercise of typing out a letter on some compliant keyboard and despatching it with a single click of a button or a mouse attached to a computer. Instant delivery is assured, blocking out the thrill of actually having to pick up a physical entity from a pigeon hole in an office or your own box at the post office or even from a postman with whom you may have developed some form of relationship over the years. In any case, a letter was more than the message it contained but was the manifestation of a way of life. In many cases, it had a life of its own and was like an impossibly elastic umbilical chord which bound, in its most basic form, two people together in their own personal form of a social contract.  When I was away from home for any extended period of time, one of the highlights of my day was receiving a letter with a Nigerian stamp on it even if it was the flimsy airmail which did not allow for many words as it’s forte was in its quick delivery. I felt like celebrating the arrival of a letter, usually in a blue envelope, covered with stamps, the value of which compensated for the weight of the letter and the effort which went into writing it and when it came from a special person the ecstasy of the expectation of the sweetness enclosed in that rectangular cover was enough to make my day and at least reduced the pain of separation over a substantial period of time. In short, every letter had a romantic appeal of its own as it sometimes relieved anxieties which had built up over a period of waiting for that delivery. For those who have probably never received a proper letter delivered in an envelope decorated with a stamp, that feeling of holding a personal letter in your hand is indescribable.

    For many years, I listened every Sunday evening to a BBC programme called Letter from America delivered by Alistair Cooke, a Briton who from 1946 to 2004 wrote a letter to the world from his perch in America. Throughout that period, he regaled the world with letters on a wide  range of topics on his observation of life in America. Listening to it was like receiving a personal letter from a friend, a special friend or if you like a pen pal who lived in America and did not expect you to take the trouble of making a reply. Alistair Cooke was blessed with long life and one interesting thing about his life was that he died within a month of having to give up the writing of his weekly Letter from America. That may have been an example of an incomparable attachment to letter writing but call me an incurable romantic but even at that risk, I consider that the bond which Alistair Cooke had developed with those letters kept him going long after his contemporaries had shrugged off their mortal coil. The email or WhatsApp message is unbeatable for speed but what about the passion?

  • The lost art of letter writing

    The lost art of letter writing

    I am old enough to remember when in many towns and even villages, the post office, irrespective of its size or finish was something of a centre piece. Indeed, they were usually the building which was familiar to everyone in town and featured in any exercise which required describing a route to any public fixture in any town or village. Like the police station, they were a focal point, but devoid of the grimness associated with policemen and their connection with all sorts of unpleasantness.

    The post offices in those days were not only conspicuous, they were often a hive of activity because of the broad spectrum of the transactions going on inside them and not all of them had something to do with their primary duties of delivering letters throughout the length and breadth of Nigeria. The post office was an institution all by itself, with tentacles which stretched all the way to everywhere. And come to think of it, how could any other aspect of government activity survive longer than a couple of uncomfortable days without the contribution of the post office or postal agency as the case maybe. With these little one room agencies in place, those small settlements which could not generate enough business for a fully fledged post office would have been excluded from participating in any form of government business.

    The first thing that comes to mind when the post office is mentioned is the posting of letters and parcels on the one hand and their delivery in any part of the country and far beyond on the other. But the post office represented more than that. For example, any time I drive along Station Road in Osogbo today, I am reminded of the fact that at the age of seven, my mother took me into the hallowed precincts of the post office on that long lived  road to open a savings account. That close to seventy years later, I have no savings in any account speaks loudly to diminished opportunities within a society which has successfully conspired against the continued existence of government controlled postal services among many other things.

    There was a time in this country when letters had a mystique all of their own. It was said and very widely believed that tampering with mail was a criminal offence punishable by long terms of imprisonment and so the safe and even speedy delivery of mail could be taken for granted and the postal authorities of the day worked assiduously towards ensuring that letters were faithfully delivered as promised.

    Post offices were at the heart of postal delivery but more than that, you could send money all over the country without any fear of disappointment through the failure to deliver. The instrument for this purpose was the postal order which was as good, if not better than handing over raw cash to someone standing next to you. You purchased your postal order at the post office, addressed it appropriately and went home confident that the addressee would be able to cash the postal order within the specified time of delivery. It was that simple and efficient.

    Members of my generation would no doubt have retained memories of the buff envelopes in which something called a telegram was delivered. Telegrams were delivered to the designated receiver anywhere in Nigeria within twenty-four hours but usually within a few hours. At the height of its relevance, a house to which a telegram was delivered was thrown into instant turmoil because the telegram was frequently the bearer of news of capable of changing the course of lives for better or worse. Whatever the nature of the news contained in that flimsy envelope, opening it was a step into the unknown as news of births, deaths, promotion, admissions, urgent summons or examination results were all speedily conveyed in the fewest words possible. Out of necessity, telegrams were terse since the cost of the telegram was weighted on the number of words in which it was composed. This being the case, the tight composition of telegrams was sometimes a challenge all by itself. Throughout my childhood, I received a brief ‘Happy birthday Bayo’ in a telegram sent by my uncle who worked for the P&T (Post and Telegraph). The telegram was usually delivered in the morning so that I could bask in it’s warmth throughout the day. Such a frivolous use of the telegram stopped, at least as far as I was concerned when my uncle left the employment of the P&T. Talking of birthdays, the post office once conspired with my brother and I to deliver an unforgettable birthday experience to our younger sister. She had just left home in Lagos for Queen’s School all the way in Ede, a place which would have been  absent from our consciousness but for the fact that we had spent a couple of years in the nearby town of Osogbo several years earlier. Still, we were of the opinion that she needed a lot of cheering up. One Saturday a few days before her birthday that year, my brother and I met up by appointment at Kingsway on the Marina from our respective schools in Lagos and after a great deal of deliberation and looking into our pockets found out that we could afford to send a box of chocolates to our sister to celebrate her birthday. After purchase, we took the precious box of chocolates to the in-house post office in Kingsway and confidently sent our purchase to Ede with instruction that it be delivered on our sister’s birthday. Much to our satisfaction, our wish was respected as the parcel was delivered on the target date.  Eat your heart out Amazon! The postal service in Nigeria at that time was that reliable and expectedly so too.

    The most important duty of the post office was of course to deliver letters and parcels to people all over the country. It was an indispensable support to the beautiful art of letter writing, an art that was assiduously cultivated by all genuinely educated people in an age when the number of people who could be so called was quite thin on the ground. However, this is not to say that letters were passed around only within the narrow circle of those who could boast of some acquaintance with formal education. Ensconced somewhere on the premises of virtually every post office of the day was a professional letter writer who for a small fee, took down the dictation of those who could not write but had something to say to someone living quite a long way off. There was of course someone at the other end of this transaction who was able to read the letter into the careful hearing of the recipient.  This way, communications were maintained by people separated both in time, literacy and distance. That was an age when letter writing was considered to be so important that it was taught in schools at both the primary and secondary levels of the educational system and was actively encouraged in an age when the written word had considerable power to determine the trajectory of a lot of careers. It is no coincidence that at that time, penmanship was also on the curriculum, at least in the primary school. People brought up in that age usually cultivated the art of writing legibly and in most cases, decoratively because the impression created on the recipient started from the quality of the shape of the letters forming the address on the envelope. Unfortunately, by the time I became a lecturer, penmanship had died and the atrocious writing of many of my students drove me beyond despair into desperation. I had been brought up to associate good writing with a tidiness of the mind and having to untangle letters and tease out the sense in a badly written script fairly sent me round the bend. Seeing me today many years after the event, many of my former students remind me, as if I could ever forget that above every question paper they confronted was my warning that ‘illegible handwriting and poor use of the English language would be penalised’ as I was set on edge by those inadequacies! They were, as far as I was concerned, evidence of poor scholastic upbringing which deserved punishment. Should any of them be reading this, they are to note that I never actually went through with the threat and all those of them who failed any of my courses did so in spite of my threat rather than because of it. The pain inflicted on me by their limitation is however neither forgotten nor forgiven.

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    Letter writing was indeed an art, one which was assiduously cultivated and used to create an image. It was also encouraged in many schools. In my time at Igbobi College in the sixties, Sunday evening prep was devoted to letter writing or Bible reading both of which were keenly supervised by Prefects on duty in each class. I saw most of the important people in my life at that time regularly enough so I did not have to write letters home as we were expected to do and having sat through two church services earlier in the day saw no reason to bury my head in the Bible for another round of religious observance. At considerable risk of punishment, I turned to non-Biblical literature and against the spirit of enforced Sunday piety, enjoyed myself immoderately in the company of my favourite secular authors of the day. I am sure that my youthful indiscretions of those days have all been written off  through divine intervention. Those were the golden years of the post office and the art of letter writing.

    As things have turned out to be, those golden years were a brief interval between the complete absence of letter writing and the end of an era in which the art of letter writing withered and died as the much vaunted leaf on a tree.  All over Nigeria at this time, post offices, those sturdy buildings of colonial design stand empty as in most cases of have been taken over by people carrying out their legitimate trade in illegitimate premises. All the paraphernalia of letter distribution have now disappeared, never to be redirected by any force known to man and a couple of generations of Nigerians are blithely carrying on with their restricted lives never having been accosted at any time by a diligent postman delivering mail even in the remoteness of an insignificant settlement situated far away from any beaten track.

  • A game of numbers

    A game of numbers

    Figures released by the UN claim that the number of human beings alive on our planet at any one time crossed the magical figure of one billion in 1804. It has to be said however that this is no mean feat as there was time, albeit a very long time ago when the global population was hovering around one million. All the same, it is also worthy of note that we had to wait for another one hundred and twenty-three years before the global population added another billion people even if that meant a doubling of the population. Today, ninety-seven years later there are close to eight and a half billions of us swarming all over this planet which has expanded, at least figuratively to accommodate all of us, each one according to his or her station. Comfortingly however, there is yet a great deal of space to accommodate many more of us. World population increase has been nothing if not revolutionary over the last one hundred years. Without all the senseless global wars, low grade but frighteningly murderous conflicts in the way of Boko Haram and a couple of pandemics in the last hundred years, there certainly would have been many more of us. But that is another story all together.

    Looking at human population figures a little more closely, the figure of 40% leaps out with considerable force because this is the figure of human beings who were born since the dawn of human occupation of the earth but could not live long enough to see their first birthday. This shows just how inhospitable our natural environment is, as surviving long enough to propagate the species is one huge obstacle course, the survival of which cannot be taken for granted. This is why it is only in the last two generations that all over the world, humans have become more relaxed about the survival of their children. This is also perhaps why we are now much more indulgent with our offspring than ever before in human history. A couple can now limit the number of their children to two or three, secure in the knowledge that but for wildly unforeseen circumstances, all of them would live long enough not only to have their own children but to be present at the respective funerals of their parents. It is thus reasonable and psychologically rewarding to invest a great deal of emotional and other forms of expenses on each child. In the days when only two or three of ten children were likely to survive childhood, it would have been foolish to lavish a great deal of care and attention or any particular care on some child who under normal circumstances was just passing through and was not likely to be around long enough for any lasting bonds to be formed. Better to regard them as transient tenants who were likely to simply drop out of the nest one day, never to return. This is why all over the world, children were the recipient of truly horrifying treatment at the hands of their own parents. In both Britain and the United States, in the closing years of the nineteenth century children needed the protection of special laws from the wanton cruelties, some of them quite extreme, from both their parents and unscrupulous industrialists who put children to work with dangerous machinery at an age when they should have been handling nothing more lethal than stuffed toys. It has to be said however that it was not only children who died long before their time. Many of their parents were only a little less vulnerable so that there were a large number of orphans for which nobody, not even the state was responsible. The adventures of Oliver Twist or Little Dorrit as narrated by Charles Dickens suggest that life was far from being a bed of roses for children who had the misfortune of having been born two centuries ago. Across the pond in the USA, Jack London in his book The Jungle, tells the story of a child immigrant who worked in the stockyards of Chicago. His main job was to fetch beer for his older co-workers throughout the day as they butchered an unending succession of cows, sheep or pigs. To pep himself up, or perhaps to assuage the many difficulties of his young life, the poor boy took little sips from each cup of beer he delivered. At the end of one fateful and very hot working day, with the smell of blood and guts swirling around his brain the boy had succumbed to the soporific effects of the alcohol he had ingested throughout the day and fell asleep in one corner of the work place. He was eaten up by ravenous giant rats overnight. No child deserves to be exposed to such danger in the name of earning a few pennies to augment the meagre wages of his parents who were only marginally less exploited than he was. It is sad that all over the economically challenged parts of the world including Nigeria stories like this have not yet been consigned to the dustbin of history. As one of my waggish friends who is now quite out of it all, would have said, we are still at the mouth of it.

    From the point of view of child survival, we entered a brand new world about one hundred years ago when childhood mortality fell dramatically and in doing so changed the world fundamentally and forever, first in the rich nations and then slowly but surely practically all over the world even in places in the back of beyond like some of the barely accessible parts of Nigeria and other such countries where poverty rules. The one difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich took note of changing conditions and set a limit to their child bearing whereas the poor have continued to produce children in the imitation of a magician effortlessly pulling fluffy rabbits out of a top hat. This is why the population of Nigeria is increasing in the manner of a fully laden lorry running out of control, a towering danger to all and sundry. The population of Nigeria in 1918 was put at eighteen million of which no less than half a million died in the influenza pandemic of 1918/19. Today, there are an estimated two hundred and fifteen million of us, to quote one of the fewest numbers attributed to it. Thus, the population of Nigeria has been multiplied by twelve in a hundred years or just over three generations. The problem of dying children has now been replaced by that of swarms of children with a dodgy future.

    Before the pioneering work of Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany, mankind had no clue as to what was responsible for the illnesses which unchecked, claimed human lives apparently with careless abandon. Children with their immature immune system were especially vulnerable to microbial infections, an inordinate number of which were around to terminate the earthly existence of large numbers of children, cutting them down like ripe wheat in a field during harvest. Polio, chicken pox, small pox, diphtheria, whooping cough, diarrhoea, malaria and many other swift killers competed among themselves as to which of them could do the most damage within any environment that could be mentioned. Given the terribly poor nutritional status of most people, it is a wonder that any of them survived long enough to have children.

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    One thing that is clear from human history is that until recently, in the last hundred years of the 300,000 year existence of the human race has man been able to stand up the zillions of microbes with which we share this planet. The irony of this situation is that without the activities of these microbes billions of which live within our body, the earth as we know it will collapse and die in next to no time. Actually, of all the many million species of these organisms whose primary function is to regenerate the earth, only a few of them have the intention or the capacity to harm their human neighbours and hosts. But the few which have the potential to harm us can kill us within a few days. Two of such organisms were responsible for small pox and tuberculosis which killed at will over the last twelve centuries or so. For most of that time, mankind had no answer to their infestation. For example, small pox is reputed to have killed 400 million people in the last century even though the disease was eradicated twenty years before the end of that century. As for tuberculosis, there was no cure for it until the early fifties when it was found that the newly discovered streptomycin had excellent activity against the organism responsible for this infection. D. H. Lawrence died of it and although George Orwell was treated with streptomycin, he reacted so violently to the drug that it had to be withdrawn from treatment with it and so, the man died, another artistic victim of what the Europeans called the white death. Until the fifties therefore, a diagnosis of tuberculosis was a death sentence waiting to be executed. Today, tuberculosis is still killing in excess of a million people every year but we now have many effective drugs with which we can force a stay of the execution of the death sentence which tuberculosis was only sixty years ago.

    Man has battled against sickness and death ever since he acquired the power of critical thinking and acute observation. He was even able to assemble an impressive armamentum of drugs, most of them plant derived. In spite of these herbal drugs however, man continued to be knocked over by illness like pins in a bowling alley. Shamans, sangomas, babalawos, spiritual healers as well as  con men of every description have  stepped up to the plate to work their magic against illness and death of the sudden variety but when we look at available figures, we can only come to the conclusion that unfortunately, they were all uniformly unsuccessful. Man continued to die sometimes at an alarming rate throughout the period of recorded history. It was not until scientists, those hard headed men and women began to tackle microorganisms with keen and tested scientific methods that we began to make any headway against the diseases which shortened the life expectancy of human beings. Within the last hundred and twenty years global life expectancy has more than doubled from thirty-two years to seventy-one and in some parts of the world it is significantly in excess of eighty years. How this has been achieved is worthy of comment.