Category: Olatunji Dare

IT is again that time of year when Nigerians, contemplating their country’s troubling past and uncertain future, engage in an orgy of collective self-flagellation, when an anniversary that should be an occasion for rejoicing  and renewal breeds, instead, recrimination and resentment.”

Those were the opening lines of my column for this newspaper on September 29, 2009, as a preface to the National Day, our independence anniversary,  a day when, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, many Nigerians consider their country’s unflattering profile and wonder why, and many others contemplate what their country could be and ask: why not?

In his National Day Broadcast four days later, the guileless President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, of fond memory, would warn that the anniversary should not be turned into an occasion for “self-flagellation,”  using the very term I had employed in my preface to the milestone.  It is not the kind of term you find in presidential speeches.  Even for the most practised speakers, it is a tongue-twister, and the meaning is unlikely to be immediately apparent to the general audience.

I claim no copyright on the term, to be sure.  Still, I could not but be gratified that, although the speechwriters employed that term as warning against what the day should NOT consist in, and might even have intended a gentle rebuke to this columnist rather than what Oscar Wilde designated the sincerest form of flattery, its invocation by the president was heartening evidence that the column commanded attention in high places.

Even while warning against self-flagellation, Yar’Adua enjoined in the 1,040-word speech that the day should serve as “a forceful reminder of the promise yet to be fulfilled, of the dream deferred for too long, and of the work that is still outstanding.”

Yar’Adua’s warning was right on the mark.  Considering all and kvetching and inveighing pervading the anniversary, it might as well be called National Lamentation Day.  Or National Moaning Day.  Or National Self-loathing Day.  Or National Self-flagellation Day. This anniversary will be no different, I wager.

October 1, I suspect, is also the day policy-makers and political officials dread most on the national calendar.  What can they claim to have achieved since the previous anniversary that they had not claimed the year just past with great eloquence and even greater vehemence, and for the year before that?

I don’t envy those who write the speeches and those who make the speeches for that day.

I am here reminded of the budget writers who plan to buy for the Presidential Villa the kitchen equipment and accessories they had bought the previous year and the year before that, as well as computers and servers and communications hardware they had purchased the previous year and the year before, and to sign a contract they had awarded the previous year and the year before for that geo-strategic bridge that was “nearing completion” at the time of the last appropriation.

In his 2009 Budget speech, Yar’Adua spoke about “positioning” Nigeria, “sustainable development,” providing electricity on a “sustainable basis,” and about “holistic measures” aimed at “ensuring requisite macroeconomic stability.”

That was ten years ago today. Those goals and terms are strewn over practically every National Day Broadcast since then. I will be surprised if they do not perfuse President Muhammadu Bihari’s National Day Broadcast today.

Since then, a thousand conferences have been staged on national development, housing for all, food self-sufficiency, water for all, electricity for all, mass transit for all, and generally on how to move Nigeria forward, to translate its vast potential into actual power.  Yet the image it conjures up is that of a stalled caterpillar, its antennae probing in every direction but its body inert.

They say, following the great writer Chinua Achebe, that the problem is the failure of leadership, by which they mean the political leadership.  Taking a related but different tack, others locate the problem in the accession to power at independence.  The prize, they say, was presented on a “platter of gold” to marginal actors for the most part, not to those who were bloodied and jailed and exiled in the struggle.

If it was the latter that had succeeded to power, they argue, Nigeria’s history would have at the very least mirrored, in terms of development, that of former colonial dependencies in the same league, like India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the so-called Asian Tigers.

Who knows?

Of course, leadership matters.  Leaders dream great dreams, define and articulate goals, enlist public support for the goals, map out strategies for pursuing them and stay steadfast on the long road to actualizing them.  They set the tone for public discourse.  They strive to see that rewards and sanctions are distributed justly.  They lead by example, not by precept or preachment.

They see their position as a summons to service, not as an invitation to “come and eat,” as one former minister memorably phrased it.  They appreciate that public service should not be a path to great personal wealth.  They will not engage in an obscene display of wealth from that provenance and dare the pubic to do its damnedest.

When they call for sacrifice in the national interest, they do so from a moral pedestal, having slashed their own perks and privileges.   You cannot call for sacrifice when you appropriate unto yourself as monthly “wardrobe allowance” twice the monthly minimum wage of N30, 000 you are loath to pay.  You cannot, under the guise of making laws for the good governance of Nigeria, allocate more than one-tenth of the national budget to meet your fancies and fantasies.

Leaders are rarely solitary figures.  They work with like-minded persons to define goals and seek solutions; they seek actively to bring others of a different persuasion to the fold. But when necessary, they are prepared to act alone and take responsibility.

In the Nigerian experience, such figures are rare.  Yet they constitute what Nigerians have in mind when they bemoan the failure of leadership.

Others blame the structure of the federation, the obsessive drive for uniformity in the guise of unity, for the failure of the promise of independence.  The answer, as they see it, lies in restructuring the polity to achieve “true federalism.”

Nigeria’s present structure is without question a serious impediment to development, what with too many unviable states, and funds that should have gone into meeting worthier goals being used to maintain a bloated political bureaucracy that serves little purpose.  But that is only a part of the answer.

If leadership in Nigeria has been dysfunctional, what of the followership?

Can leadership be divorced from followership?  The one and the other are but two sides of a single coin.  Thus, the failure of leadership in Nigeria is no less remarkable than the failure of followership.

When the followership behave as subjects rather than citizens, when they continually make excuses for bad leadership, when they embrace policies that are not merely inimical to but are actually subversive of their interests, when they are easily bought off or bribed, they become an integral part of the problem.

When followers do not see it as their duty to help maintain facilities and structures built at great expense for their benefit, no leadership can accomplish much in the area of infrastructure.  To take as an example:  Where today are the guard rails for the bridges and highways built in the 1970s and even more recently?  Why are the drainage systems clogged with solid waste and even disused tyres days after they were decongested?

Nigerians of all classes will kvetch and moan and lament as usual on this independence anniversary, the followership more than the leadership.  But the followership has been an equal-opportunity actor with the leadership in perpetuating the national malaise, and must resolve to be an equal partner in ending it.

IN the end, it was not the glorious event that India’s nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi had gone down to the Mission Control Centre for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), in Bangalore, to witness personally and celebrate. Instead, last week, India’s attempt to become the first country to land a robotic mission at the Moon’s South Pole failed.

Engineers lost contact with the Vikram lander — part of the Chandrayaan-2 probe, just moments before what would have been a successful and historic soft landing.

A miss, as they say, is as good as a mile, and nowhere is this truer than in space travel where pinpoint accuracy is the standard operational procedure.  The closest approximation won’t cut it. That India could embark with such confidence on such  an ambitious mission is nevertheless proof, were any still required, that when it comes to science and technology, India is a world power.

If the mission had succeeded, India would have been only the fourth country in the world, behind the United States, the Soviet Union and China, to make a soft landing         on the lunar surface.  Even so, back in the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had failed in their early attempts to land on the lunar surface.  It is greater consolation that the lander is still in orbit, only incommunicado.

Given the staggering poverty in India’s vast rural countryside and inner cities, there are those who say that such projects are misplaced, and that the resources poured into them are needed more urgently elsewhere.

But scientific pursuits in outer space cannot wait until the earth’s problems have been solved. They often have an enormous multiplier effect, throwing up processes, procedures and products that help in tackling the problems of terrestrial existence.

And the cost is often smaller than is generally supposed.  India’s lunar project, which began some 10 years ago with the launch of the Chandrayaan-1, a satellite that fired a projectile into the moon’s South Pole in search of water, carries a price tag of $150 million.  That is just 10 times what the 9th National Assembly plans to appropriate from the public purse to buy luxury motorcars for its members.

If the Chandrayaan-2 were a Nigerian space vessel, the National Assembly would have gone ballistic since its loss.  The appropriate oversight committee would have staged marathon emergency hearings, to which the top ISRO scientists would have been summoned to testify on oath, most likely wearing their crisply-ironed lab coats.

Then a foreign trip or two would most certainly have followed, estacode and all, to the United States and the Soviet Union, to seek insight into the remote and immediate causes of the mishap, and how future mishaps might be averted.

In India, the whole endeavour is all a matter of national consciousness and pride kindled by its founders and sustained by a generation of leaders.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was a polymath. A brilliant lawyer and gifted writer, he also took a keen interest in planetary science. In one of the dozens of letters he wrote to his young daughter, Indira, from prison, he sought to explain to her in language that she would understand the working of solar system. She learned from an early age the place of science in human life.

To fire the development of India’s vast human capital, Nehru established the Indian Institute of Technology in three strategic locations across the country.  Admission was as competitive as you could find anywhere.  You could not rig it.  You could not buy your way into the system. The syllabus was just as rigorous. Only the very best graduated from the system.

Over the years, an institute patterned along the same line was established in every Indian state, with nary a lowering in the rigours of admission or instruction. In an interview on the CBS television programme, 60 Minutes, several years ago, a professor in one of the institutes, spoke of how his son, who could not secure admission there, nevertheless was accepted at Cornell on a full scholarship.

These institutes, based on an education system that privileged science and mathematics, helped propel India to the status of global techno power.  Today, India has the largest pool of English-speaking scientists, engineers and doctors in the world.

Recognising the potential of space technology in promoting telecommunications, distance education and rural development, Gandhi also set up the space research organisation, ISRO.

In India on assignment for The Guardian in 1986, Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi and I were given a special pass by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, to visit ISRO, in Bangalore, the southern India city that has since emerged as the Silicon Valley of the subcontinent.

We were guided through their research labs and manufacturing floor and conference rooms by alert, confident young men and women, scientists and technicians, all in their off-white tops and grey pants, explaining the functions of various component, large and small, and how they were fabricated or acquired.

“This one?” a guide would ask, pointing to some huge component. “We made it.  We built it here,” he would say with that familiar Indian nod.

“How about that one?”

“That one?  We had a manufacturer build it for us,” he would explain.  We thought it would be cheaper that way. Even so, we designed it here.”

Their pride was restrained, but palpable all the same.

I had never felt so deflated, and I am sure I can say the same for Yemi Ogunbiyi.  Here we were, denizens of the Giant of African being shown the greatness of India already in the making, whereas the vision and thinking and the commitment that produced it were nowhere evident in our homeland.

The Chandrayaan-2 failed its mission, to be sure. But the Indian space authorities are not in the least discomfited. “We came very close, but we will need to cover more ground in the times to come. Every Indian is filled with a spirit of pride as well as confidence,” Prime Minister Modi told the nation. ‘’We are proud of our space programme and scientists; their hard work and determination.”

“. . . Resilience and tenacity are central to India’s ethos. In our glorious history of thousands of years, we have faced moments that may have slowed us, but they have never crushed our spirit. We have bounced back again, and gone on to do spectacular things.

“. . . We are full of confidence that when it comes to our space programme, the best is yet to come.”

Surely, Modi can be permitted a little nationalist chest-beating.

Meanwhile, they are looking forward with confidence to manned missions scheduled for next year, for which ISRO has fabricated and unveiled most of the hardware.

Here, we are still mired in our petty schemes and intrigues.

WITH the recent sale by public auction of its archives of more than four million black-and-white photographs, some of them prize-winning and some never published before, the monthly lifestyle magazine EBONY which defined and captured the black experience in America like no other for two generations has finally gone out of business.

Priced at $46 million, the archives were sold for $30 million.  The proceeds will be used to offset part of the debts of the Johnson Publishing Company, owners of the magazine.  The company filed for bankruptcy liquidation, some three years ago, unable to arrange financing or a sale.

Fears were rife that EBONY’s iconic pictures would fall into the hands of a private-equity firm that may choose to dispose of them as it pleases.  In the event, they were purchased by a consortium of four leading private foundations, which will donate them to the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution and the Getty Research Institute.

This arrangement guarantees the archives will be preserved for posterity and made accessible to the public

EBONY was launched in 1945, in Chicago, by John H. Johnson, a visionary entrepreneur concerned “to show the Negroes (as African Americans were then called) but also white people that Negroes also got married, held beauty contests, gave parties, ran successful businesses, and did all the other normal things of life.”

Johnson’s daughter, who succeeded him as publisher, said the mission was to make EBONY the “curator of the African-American experience, past, present, and future.”  It fulfilled the first two parts of its mission admirably. But its future now lies behind it, sadly, after a run of 71 years.

Within a few years of its debut, EBONY became a habit.  There was hardly any black home in the United States where you would not find a copy.  It was read and passed along, to be read and passed along until every member of the household had savoured its contents.  Those who could not read were rewarded with its white-and-black pictures that captured arrestingly all aspects of black culture, from the ghetto to the executive suite, and the Boardroom, and ultimately to the Presidency.

It was a lifestyle magazine with a difference.  It depicted African American entertainers, athletes and movie actors and performing artistes all right.  But it also showcased black scientists, lawyers, diplomats, legislators, community leaders, inventors, engineers, astronauts, corporate executives, commanding officers in the armed services and, generally, achievers in every sphere of American life.

Its tone was optimistic, upbeat.  But you could never accuse EBONY of puffery, for the stories were substantive, well researched, and very well written. The photo-essay it published from time to time was a model of story conception and execution.

Its stablemate Jet, published in a much smaller format, debuted in 1951 as “the weekly Negro news magazine.”  Together, EBONY and Jet captured the essence of black life in America like no other journals. Their challenge was to define or redefine for America black Americans, who were for the most part presented with mutilated images of themselves by the dominant media.

The field was not entirely bereft of black journals.  There were, for example, the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American and Amsterdam News based in Harlem, New York.  These were important voices and vehicles in their communities, but their circulation and impact were modest.

At the launch of EBONY, many newspapers in the American South, did not publish pictures of blacks   as a matter of policy.  Large sections of the print media did not report the stirrings that culminated in the civil rights movement, the sit-ins and protests that challenged Jim Crow laws and caused them to be abolished.  It was only in the late 1990s that a newspaper in Jackson, Miss, sought to atone for this denial by omission and published supplements chronicling important news stories of the civil rights it had not reported.

Television was just as complicit.

EBONY changed all that.  Black people, many of them for the first time, could see black people like themselves as leading achievers and key public figures, in positions they did not know black people could hold and performing roles they never thought black people could play; they saw Africans in their colourful native attires on the world stage as kings and presidents and prime ministers and statesmen.

It fostered black pride. It promoted Black role models and fired black aspirations.  Its yearly issue profiling the 100 Most Influential Blacks in America was a parade of excellent role models for aspiring African Americans. And if you wanted to reach the attentive black audience EBONY was the medium that gave you the best value for your advertisement budget.

The coming of the Internet opened the era of free content.  Television generally, and cable television in particular, offered round-the-clock programming that gravely undermined newspaper and magazine readership.  Advertisers shifted to digital platforms and television even as newspaper production costs soared, forcing such venerable publications like TIME and NEWSWEEK to abandon the business model that had served them so profitably for decades.

EBONY’s fortunes contracted in this altered environment. Debts mounted.  Operations became unsustainable.  Unable to arrange financing or find a buyer, it filed for bankruptcy liquidation three years ago.  The sale last month of its photography assets closed what will go down as one of the most eventful chapters in the history of American journalism and black culture.

Unfortunately, generations of Nigerians will probably remember EBONY in an entirely different context

Despite its iconic status in the African American experience, the magazine had no market presence in Nigeria or anywhere outside the United States.  Many Nigerians were acquainted with it only by its reputation.  Some had read pass-along copies at infrequent intervals, courtesy of Nigerians living in or returning from the United States.   You certainly could not pick up a copy at the newsstand as you could TIME and Newsweek.

Still, in 1990, EBONY magazine figured in Nigerian politics the way few foreign journals had done before or since. In the process, it bequeathed the term Ebonygate to the nation’s vocabulary of sleaze.

Military president Ibrahim Babangida’s benighted Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) had sapped the economy, turning basic needs into luxuries and eviscerating the middle class. Hunger stalked the countryside, and many Nigerians were reduced to rummaging through dustbins for food scraps.

Anti-SAP demonstrations, which turned violent in many cities, broke out across the country, fuelled by rumours that Babangida had stashed away some $3 billion from the national treasury in foreign banks, and that he and his wife owned, among other properties, a diamond watch factory in France.

The organizers cited EBONY magazine as their source.

Conspicuous among the teeming protesters in Lagos was the respected educator and founder of Mayflower School, Ikenne, Dr Tai Solarin, in his trademark floppy hat, khaki shirt and shorts.  In an interview he had made some reference to Babangida’s rumoured offshore wealth – a key grievance of the demonstrators.

The claim that the story came out of EBONY was implausible through and through.   It was not EBONY’s fare.  But no matter.

State security officials seized Solarin and subjected him to a brutal inquisition on live national television, conducted by Col. Kunle Togun, who had been living under a cloud of suspicion of complicity in the 1985 parcel-bomb murder of the crusading journalist, Dele Giwa

What was Solarin’s source?  Did he verify it?  As an educator and an influential citizen, was he unaware that he had an obligation to verify the information so as not to lend his authority to subversive rumours?

Official desperation did not end there.  The authorities dispatched a team to Chicago to urge EBONY publisher Johnson to state categorically, for the public record, that at no time had the magazine carried the story attributed to it. Johnson refused the strange demand.

And to this day in Nigeria, Ebonygate carries the resonance of rumour, gossip, or falsehood, a slur on the reputation of the foremost journal of the African American experience that was.