Category: Oyinkan Medubi

Oyinkan Medubi

Cultural fusion in this global village is enlarging my food vocabulary, as newspapers try to open my eyes to the merits of different dishes from every part of the world. But, frankly speaking unless a dictionary is published alongside such dishes, there is very little communication between me and those pages.

What am I, for instance, to understand by ‘Scalloped Potatoes’? To me, scalloping is what my tailor does to increase her fees, make my dress look as if the scales of a fish have been stuck on it and make me look like a near-strangulated mermaid in it. ‘Shrimp Scamp’ is what I called my children in their growing years when they perpetually got between people’s legs! And I would be grateful for a few potatoes, but ‘Potato au gratin’? I really don’t know. When I come across ‘Mackerel Quiche’, I want to say, quick, give me a Japanese geisha, tinned or not; ‘Chili Concarne’, I think, sounds like chili pepper wrapped in a few leaves of hemp; and I have no idea what ‘Ratatouille’ could possibly stand for: rat fried in olive oil, do you think? After reading those pages, I have many times thrown my hands up in frustration and wondered aloud: What is wrong with good ol’ Amala?

My children say – and frankly speaking, I don’t believe a word of it – that whenever I sit down to a dish of Amala, I become something else. You know what Amala is, don’t you? It is that dark, sticky substance that looks like moulded black tar but tastes heavenly. When I’m eating it, my children say that my ears automatically close and I can’t hear a word from them again; every pore in my body becomes a spring from which sweat pours like the Niagara Falls; and I eat in deep concentration, all the while quivering while the food lasts.

Now, I ask you, how can anyone positively believe all that? I love Amala, that’s true; I don’t like to be interrupted when I’m eating it, that’s true; Amala does tend to open the pores, making one sweat like mad, that’s also true; besides, I need to keep my eyes on my food because those watching me just might throw it out since it is not salad. But sir, I do not quiver: the cocaine content of Amala is not as high as that of coffee!

I have grown very distrustful of anyone who would prefer a bowl of salad to a bowl of Amala. I think someone should sit such people down and ask them what their problem is. I have done that to my family several times but I have to confess that they leave me baffled. But I am not giving up; the gospel of Amala is too strong to keep under. Just ask Mr. Alaani Aderibigbe, who makes and sells the stuff for a living as reported by New Age a little while back. His story is so heartening for me in my crusade of getting proper respect for Amala that I have dubbed him the brave heart. Anyone who marches where angels do not even tread must have some confidence.

Anyway, even Mr. Alani must grant that Amala does have a superior in Pounded Yam, which appears to have found its own incontestable niche in the people’s consciousness as the Nigerian food. You know what Pounded Yam is, don’t you? It is that white, gooey substance made from yams that have been pounded to death, and to which many sweats and other substances have been added in the process of pounding, but who cares! Many Nigerians swear by it, as their devotion is fast approaching a religion. Someone related how he had been so surprised to find a university professor, who had just returned to the country from abroad, at one of the road-side food centres eating pounded yam. When he asked why he had not gone to a restaurant, the returnee was said to have replied that a restaurant was not the right place to eat pounded yam because he would not enjoy it there. Besides, it is only at a road-side food centre that you can get the original pounded yam, mixed with sweat and a lot of women talking over it to give it the right flavour.

Many food centres or ‘bukaterias’ that offer PY run timetables that keep the food and temper requirements of each patron in mind, for they know that if the food is not ready at a stipulated time, Mama Put will get more queries than the most disobedient civil servant. And when the patrons begin to stream in, many are donning white shirt, tie and jacket; the last two being promptly discarded while the shirt sleeve is rolled up. Don’t be deceived, for at normal times, those patrons parade as academics or managers or workmen of all descriptions. No sooner is everyone served than hands begin to travel up and down from plate to mouth, backs bent uncomfortably over rather low tables, neck ties rolled aside, noses streaming, eyes glazed, throats clearing intermittently, and jaws snapping powerfully. But don’t be alarmed; you’re only watching ‘Jaws 4: The Odyssey of the Poundo’.

We are lucky in this part of the world though; restaurant and ‘bukateria’ menus are in English. In some parts of the English speaking world, it is all you can do to read the menu and you wonder if the kitchen is not manned by people from mars; the menu is often not in any language. This accounts for non-English phrases like ‘scalloped potatoes’, ‘shrimp scamps’, and ‘onion tarts’. Shame on those onions! Our menus here are often recited by waiters from memory as, other than the two powerful Nigerian dishes, no other foods command any mention, because by the time one runs the whole gamut of Nigerian dishes anyway, one comes across a wall of paucity and predictability.

Sometimes, I wonder if the food editors who are trying to increase our choices ever try the recipes they bring forward on themselves before attempting to tempt my throat with them. Believe me, I tried one recipe once but the results did not even faintly resemble the perfect picture displayed on the page. It was a kind of bread and I believed I followed the steps to the letter, despite my two left hands in such matters. What came out of the oven felt like a cross between rubber slippers and dried cow’s hide to the taste! However, everyone in the house was compelled to eat it so that when next I declare that I want to repeat the performance, I am sure to be paid not to do it. The only one who wanted to dodge my bread was instantly reproved by the head of the house:  ‘What makes you think you’re so special that you can’t eat this bread? You will suffer through it like the rest of us!’ It’s a little like the boy who told his father that he did not want to go to church anymore because church was boring. His father replied: ‘Yes, that is the reason everyone goes; so you will go to church and be bored like everyone else’.

I came away from my experiment with one or two lessons. Don’t eat what you can’t spell, or translate to good plain Nigerian English. Secondly, if a dish requires too many steps and measurements in its preparation, don’t try it. Trust me; one step is likely to have been skipped over by the writer: and that is, how to make it look as perfect as its picture! Both of these lessons confirm to me why Amala and Pounded Yam remain so attractive for Nigerians: they are already translated (even Amala, honest!), they are easy to spell, they do not require too many steps, and they also taste better than rat fried in olive oil. Happy World Foods Day.

• October 16 is World Foods Day; so I have updated this article, first written in 2006, and republished on 18/10/2015, on the subject.

By Oyinkan Medubi

I’ve always believed that there is nothing wrong with Nigeria that removing its people will not cure. Nigeria will breathe again if someone could just kindly take all the present occupants out of it and place them on planet Saturn, and then fill this country again with others with more serious turns of mind, such as Martians

I love drama and the dramatic, I’m sure you would have found that out by now. That is why I try to put some pizzazz in most things. When the food bins are empty, I don’t just go, ‘we need to restock!’ Oh no, that’s too normal. I prefer to go, ‘What the… the food bins are empty?! Who is the rat that has been gnawing at them? Will someone not show me which one of us has been eating this house dry and will not let my one thousand naira garri last for one month?’ I just love hearing all the ‘it’s not me…’ from mouths full of garri grains.

So, much as I love the dramatic, I believe Nigeria, my beloved country, loves it even more. That is why I worry. I worry that Nigeria has been so used to giving the world all that drama that it might not be able to get out of it. Just look at what I mean by drama. Nigeria is said to be earning this much from petrol, yet with few having access to it; against the backdrop of such desperate poverty in the country that women are dying in childbirth in droves because of lack.

Many who have had access to the nation’s wealth have not built hospitals that they themselves might have been able to benefit from in the future should another virus lock down the world again. They have not built schools that could benefit many children, including their relatives, and lessen the burden of ignorance placed on those one’s heads by the corrupt system. They certainly have not even built cheap and affordable housing units that might have helped many people. No, the dramatic in us just insists on showing the world that we are a ‘fantastically corrupt country’. Now, that is why I worry – all this dramatic show and tell!

Like you, I do remember snippets of my childhood, especially the parts that contained a lot of drama. I do remember a particular episode involving a new sweater I had just been given. I could not have been more than what, three or four years old. I think in my eagerness to show off the sweater, I fell down the staircase. Naturally, that was the end of the beauty of that sweater for me. Sooner or later, as the saying goes, pride falls down the staircase. No? They don’t say that? Who would have guessed?!

Anyways, I’ve always believed that there is nothing wrong with Nigeria that removing its people will not cure. Nigeria will breathe again if someone could just kindly take all the present occupants out of it and place them on planet Saturn, and then fill this country again with others with more serious turns of mind, such as Martians. The reason is that we have spent the better part of the last sixty years dramatising to the world that we do not deserve the space we occupy because we cannot seem to get it right, starting with something as simple as equity.

Seriously, just look at the state of things in the country. Electricity is in such short supply everyone has a budget for generator fuel. Hospitals are in such short supply patients have to wait to get bed space. Schools are in such short supply that children take lessons under trees in some places. Where there are classrooms, they are sometimes better suited for goats and sheep, and that’s being cruel to goats and sheep. Food is in such short supply that many able-bodied have taken to going around begging. Well, there’s something wrong with that anyways, but the point is, they claim they are driven into it by circumstances.

Have you noticed that this year, there are no drums being rolled out for the country on this birthday occasion? It’s as if people have lost their hope. The situation is indeed dire, and the government is not helping matters.

Not only was the country, along with the rest of the world, hard hit by COVID-19, it is now suffering the double tragedy of the government being more interested in adding to her burdens. First, fuel price increase, and then increase in electricity tariff. These two have added to the big, seemingly intractable problems on ground: insecurity from the antics of bandits, kidnappers and herdsmen and the almighty Corruption. Together, all these problems, piled on together, are right now threatening the tensile strength of the camel’s back. Seriously, can a people be more beleaguered?

Now, the level of angst in the land has reached an epidemic level. As we said, many have taken to solving their problems by begging, many more have remained still, nursing their rising blood pressure and silently crying into their pillows. Me, I work out my angst by counting my remaining grains of rice and garri, as I have been taught by some people I know on social media. You won’t believe how therapeutic that is. By the time you’re through, you’ve not only forgotten your problems, you’ve forgotten why you set out to count them in the first place.

It is all the more painful because Nigeria had so much riches and promise. The riches were frittered away; the promise was buried deep within the earth, and deliberately too. The leadership of the country, from the beginning, never meant to allow that promise to grow, which is sad really, because it would have been to the benefit of all of us. Rather than foster growth, her leaders have preferred instead to foster religious and ethnic divisions, selfishness, greed, and unimaginable waste. The result has been that, instead of our having a country as advanced as any on earth (yes, we could have done it!), we have a country that is a cesspool of veritable poverty. The long and short of all this is that Nigeria at 60 has no narrative worth recounting.

Even right now, the coming generations have become entangled in this cesspool of dirt and corruption. Not only are the children of the privileged being taught that it is alright to enjoy and live like princes on wealth they did not work for, the children of the underprivileged are being taught that it is alright to do anything at all, including killing others, to get some wealth to live on. No society with these kinds of norms lasts any distance. Sooner or later, something gives.

Nigeria’s story can change, because, as the saying goes, it is never too late; all we need is sincerity of purpose. Unfortunately, many of her leaders, since the beginning, have not been able to see past monetary advantages. Many of us have gone quite crazy at the sight and sound and smell of so much money in our positions of authority. This is why I always say that many leaders are really not as fortunate as they think, no matter their gains. The work of social engineering that is demanded of them is more than enough preoccupation.

The crushing weight of sociopolitical engineering upon leaders is more than enough concern. Well, this is one time to carry that weight with panache. So, there really is no need for all the dramatics of anti-people bills; only the dramatics of weight carrying.

I greet this country on this occasion of her birthday with, as usual, the two sides of my mouth. On the one side, I raise my cup of garri grains to her tenacity and tensile strength. On the other, I’m shouting, ‘What the… Sixty already?!’ How time has flown; and with so much drama too!

Oyinkan Medubi

When a country has a population such as Nigeria’s, it is supposed to constitute a formidable workforce that should make and keep the machinery of state at world-top level. Perhaps, the future we saw yesterday will return tomorrow.

You know, when one ponders the matter, it becomes obvious that the reason why we have not quite understood the point in this country is that we have all been talking at cross-purposes. You know what that is, don’t you? It is when two people have their wires crossed in their subject matters, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by a quirky calculation of pure chance. For instance, take the classical case of when a man wants to take a second wife. He begins by noting how hard it is for his wife to cope with the house-work and all, and even suggests getting someone to help her. Naturally, the wife eagerly throws herself into the conversation, nodding her agreement while believing the husband to be talking about the same kind of helper she is thinking of. Can a conversation be more crossed and entangled than when realisation dawns? I always love the point when reality dawns and the fireworks begin to fly.

In Nigeria, national discourse is often so entangled you can’t make out what anybody is saying. For instance, I read the other day that some assembly members, senators, and state governors somewhere in this vast expanse of a country had got their brains jammed and decided to fix a retirement sum for themselves that runs into hundreds of millions of Naira. It is enough to make anyone who is not a governor go and drown. Now, that is coming right after the furor generated by the unfair heftiness of these people’s allowances and emoluments; unfair to the rest of us of course, not to them. Naturally, many of us are so enraged we want to puncture their swelled cheeks with our nails in the hope of reducing them. Sadly, some others don’t see things this right way. You can easily spot them: they have eyes behind their backs. They are the ones wondering why we can’t spare more for them.

So many promising national discourses have nosedived into the ground and have not yielded any fruit because of these crossed wires. For instance, some among us insist on defending what cannot possibly be of any good for the health of the nation, such as someone charged with helping him/herself to billions of Naira using any argument on earth and in heaven? Yet, many of them regularly manage to be freed by the law courts and the people’s court, particularly when the people share the same ethnic background. The other day, I heard someone say that a bank chief accused of pocketing tens of billions of his bank’s money was only a victim of someone in the apex bank; in actual fact, he was innocent. I said, WOW! Now, I have heard everything. Next, they will tell us that the certain someone accused of pocketing funds from a pensions fund was actually the target of a functionary’s anger. What now, are we living in tents across the land where everyone runs to when they are accused of indecent behaviour?

The thing about discourses is that they have ways of bringing out the best, worst or dregs in the innermost recesses of our brains. The pity is that we all appear to be clothed in human skin, yet we are hosting so many incapacitating germs in our brains. This proves, according to a fable, what one animal said to another: there are many walking on two legs who should be using four. Many among us are really animals in animal skin, and many more are in human skin. When you consider that the world just celebrated the world population day this July, you want to pause a bit and reflect on these two important questions: what really makes up the Nigerian population; and what is the good in building up a population if you can’t use it to build the nation?

Honestly, I cannot begin to think of telling you the answer to the first question, lest I be hanged in effigy by many a reader. The unfortunate thing is that nearly all, if not all of us, have brought some degree of impropriety into the sanctity of Nigeria’s population. We all really deserve to hang our heads downwards like brooding chickens, pluck at our chests like penitents and intone after me: we are sinners and are not very proud of it. We are not worthy to be counted as members of the population of this country.

If you think you are not affected just because you have never ‘swallowed’ millions or billions raise your hand and I’ll show you an untruth-sayer. Please note, I have not called you a liar, just an untruth-sayer. Have you or have you never stopped in the middle of the road to greet your friend while traffic builds up behind you? Well, have you not? Can you say, in any given day, that you do not regularly break any traffic, building, contracting, policing, soldering, doctoring, nursing, teaching, civil-servicing, studenting, or anything-you-do rule? And the most important question of all, can you say that you regularly or even averagely work for the pay you get?

Nigeria has a population of people dwelling within her walls and occupying her space. Sadly, though, she has no builders, only sackers of treasuries, spoilers of lands and plunders of the nation. Everyone is so busy trying to get his/her itching hand on the ‘national cake’ it’s a wonder that there is still any left. Nigeria’s population right now is engrossed in ravaging the land like locusts, taking, taking, taking and giving little or nothing back. For them, there’s no such thing as ‘ask not what your country can do for you …’ and all that. For this population, it is what we can get from the country that counts. Yet normally, when a country has a population such as Nigeria’s, it is supposed to constitute a formidable workforce that should make and keep the machinery of state at world-top level. Perhaps, the future we saw yesterday will return tomorrow.

However, here we are today, the about one hundred and sixty-million of us, a population bred as a nation that cannot even keep its own laws. How then can we build a nation? Oh yes, failure to keep the law is failure to build the nation. Someone once said she was afraid to train her child to be obedient, law abiding, humble and all that because she was certain that many parents are allowing their children to grow up as wild, lawless beings, thus making her good children greatly disadvantaged. For answer, I did not answer.

I guess World Population Day is the day we are supposed to gather round a table as a nation and talk about how to control it downwards or upwards, considering that the food resources are at the moment presently not at par with the users. So, we are supposed to discuss how best to match population with resources for the maximum development potential of every individual. However, I chose the road not normally trodden today for a good reason: that many of us do not sufficiently appreciate the connection between respecting the country and gaining access to the just and equitable utilization of her resources. It is this connection which prevents humanity from being a useless population to a useful one. For what indeed, does it profit a country to gain so much population figures and lose its very essence? Let us make Nigeria’s population count in a way that matters.

• This article was first published on 13/7/2014.

Oyinkan Medubi

Going by the state of things, all the educated folks in this country are owing the schools that nurtured them an explanation. They have not given a good account of themselves. Luckily, my education is not yet complete

SO, reader, as we were saying, the Nigerian’s multi-split personality, which makes him at once a psychopath and a scheming, conniving devil, continues to be the subject of our discourse. I must warn you though that this discourse is not for the squeamish. Tackling an Aro patient is never easy. No Pele or Ronaldo is deft enough for the job.

Did I tell you how much I admire art? It is that medium that speaks directly to the soul of the observer. That is why no one ever understands it. No one can with any clarity say exactly what a piece of art means, sadly, not even the creator. Most artists that I know will acknowledge that they stand humbled and befuddled before their creation, wondering what the sculpture is saying. The Almighty is doing that right now about Nigerians.

It is one thing for one to know what an artwork is; it is another to know what it says. I mean, most people recognise the sculpture, Venus de Milo, but they are still scratching their heads over what she is saying, especially by those missing arms. So people are going, is she saying that it is ok not to have arms, or to have incomplete arms or that beauty does not need arms to rule the world?

I am equally befuddled by the value of the Nigerian’s education. I lay awake at nights, wondering just what value to place on it, and also perhaps because I am hungry and don’t want to get up. Never mind that. The point is that going by most people’s actions, ideologies, and utterances, I am hard put to it to ascribe a particular value. Most of the time, what I am getting is a value of someone who fails to apprehend the totality of the opportunities given him/her to shape the destiny of their country and become a hero.

I once had a teacher, a foreigner, who tried unsuccessfully to teach me how to measure value, mathematically. He would ask the class what the value of x was if y was this and z was that. Honestly, for most of us in the art class (I was not alone, thank God), that man might have been talking Greek. I think he was talking Greek for not only did we fail to understand, we failed the exams.

A long time ago, I learnt to measure the exact value of my stew by the way the children ate it. If the plate came back half-full, it meant the stew was passable. If the plate came back clean, it meant it was edible. If the plate came back broken, it meant someone attempted to eat it with the stew. That meant an excellent score; my stew was very educated.

Of course, I couldn’t apply the dish measurement to everything, especially to things like knowing the sum of our education. How can, when there are close to two hundred million Nigerians, many of them with tongues saltier than Lot’s wife, sourer than lemon, or just plain twisted? No sir, the voice of my education has told me to avoid things like pelted tomatoes, rotten eggs and other unprintable measurements of displeasure.

There is an unfortunate fact, and that is that the level of progress in a country is directly tangential to the progressive inclinations of the leaders. It’s a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ situation. This means that the country’s progress can be no greater than the ideas (or lack of it) of the least educated of its leaders. We can therefore surmise that the amount of progress (or lack of it) we are witnessing in the Nigerian nation is directly proportional to the amount of educated ideas displayed by the Nigerian in leadership. I don’t know if you follow that logic, because I don’t.

Anyway, education, says Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, ‘…is that which discloses to the wise, and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.’ Sorry, I searched for a shorter definition… But wait, there’s Thomas Haliburton who said that ‘a college education shows a man how little other people know.’ No, that doesn’t do it for me; it does not show how little he himself knows. I will, however, not give you my own definition yet; I’ll just let these people continue to beat about the bush.

Seriously, nothing has shown us the value of our collective education in this country than the current COVID pandemic. As we have said here, and many others as well, Nigerians know what to do, but their personal failure to grasp the value of their own education has prevented them, and it has remained that, their personal failures (PF). It is often said to be indexical to character. Take the matter of distributing relief packages, for instance. It was so bad it was alleged that even the children that were already in their parents’ homes were still being fed by the government, on paper.

Oscar Wilde said that ‘society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.’ Since we take it that most of our leaders have been produced by this society, we cannot complain that we have us our own locally produced err… ‘leaders’. Indeed, education has also made them very clever ‘leaders’ indeed. So then, it seems that our education is working in Nigeria. We have nothing to complain about. Or don’t we?

Listen, when I read what Theodore Roosevelt said, that ‘a man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad,’ I thought, maybe, we really don’t have anything to complain about. So far, our news reports have told us how our freight cars are being robbed blind and blotto, but at least we still have the railroad, right? Some, though, have looked at this statement, and then looked at our debt profile, looked at the other indices of progress, and have burst into tears, again like the Almighty was said to have done once over Nigeria.

The reason for the tears? The COVID came to expose to them the sad fact that we have had no governmental presence since independence due to the absence of any solid social structure. Imagine, when the lockdown came and we were asked to stay at home, some people had to stay under the bridge the entire period. Now, howzat for progress?

I read a report last week on the value placed on online studying by some people who had participated in a study. I found it rather instructive that the study confirmed some of the notions already mentioned on this column and others that the method of instruction leaves a lot of gaps in the students’ educational journey. Among other reasons was the absence of structural support systems such as affordability in its entirety for the average student.

I find it saddening that when the Nigerian gets into a position of authority, his/her principal preoccupation is not how to contribute to making life better for the citizens so that affordability can be ensured for most if not all in any venture of progress. Rather, the character of the Nigerian, no matter the level of their education, seems to propel him/her to make life more unaffordable for other Nigerians. We have taken psychopathic behaviour to a magnificent level.

Our thesis? The sum of our education is not being brought to bear on our national life. Going by the state of things, all the educated folks in this country are owing the schools that nurtured them an explanation. They have not given a good account of themselves. Luckily, my education is not yet complete.