By Olatunji Ololade
Fathers earn and sons spend. Moguls acquire and sons deplete. Pacesetters in politics, arts and business hack their way through mortal wilderness to acclaim. They forge their path to identity, amassing fortunes and a name that they bequeath to heirs. The latter, having it all, however, suffer the burden of freedom.
Freedom binds them to the slaughterhouse of choice. Where they make the right choices, they soar into trance and society salts the earth they walk upon. If condemned to wrong choices, freedom chillingly shut their eyes to the truthful and humane, in a deadly game of blindman’s bluff.
In the latter scenario, ignorance becomes Eden and the sanctuary of heirs, where too many sons of famous fathers become spendthrifts, alcoholics, drug addicts, dilettantes. They deplete what their fathers procured.
The son, often heir to fortune on a silver platter, has nothing to measure or be measured against, except the accomplishments of his father – most of which gets squandered.
Fathers build and sons destroy. But not every child depletes what his father built. A generation may forcefully reinvent itself out of the declining fortunes of its forbears.
The current generation of youth, for instance, could recreate the Nigerian dream from its deplorable state as the fantasy of thieves, looters and blinkered murderers into a progressive, realistic and awe-inspiring vista.
To do, so we must rid our souls of moral lesions, conflict and contradictions; we must quit being shameless and grand in disarray.
We could start by substituting the lowliness of our mental skies for the bold flying of progressive mental kites.
We must redefine consciousness and progress to mean a lot more than random irresponsible sex, shortcut to wealth, cutthroat politics, degenerate sexuality, interminable gender wars, and corrupted sociology funded by NGOs and advanced by modern feminism.
To achieve this, we must decisively change the thrust of scholarship and learning in the country, from the primary through the secondary and tertiary school levels.
The consequences of our dysfunctional public education system and the shallow, over-priced private education sector are coming home to roost. We are afflicted by a youth divide comprising individuals whose education was corrupted from an early age by a lethargic system continually playing catch up with the rest of the world.
Ultimately, the Nigerian system teaches scholars to get ahead, and getting ahead means deference to authority. The learner becomes adept, writes Richard Hoggart, at a technique of acquiring facts. He learns how to receive a purely literate education, using only a small part of his personality and challenging only a limited area of his being.
He begins to see life as a ladder, as a permanent examination with some praise and some further exhortation at each stage. He becomes an expert imbiber and doler-out; his competence will vary, but will rarely be accompanied by genuine enthusiasm.
Such a student rarely feels the reality of knowledge, of other men’s thoughts and imaginings, on his own pulses. He has something of the blinkered pony about him; sometimes he is trained by those who have been through the same regimen, who are hardly unblinkered themselves, and who praise him in the degree to which he takes comfortably to their blinders.
This is hardly a fruitful way to proceed in the world we despise, in pursuit of the future of our dreams.
Many yearn for a better tomorrow but we have “today” and fail to make the best of it. The Nigerian tragedy persists because it is a human tragedy and not a quirk interred in some mythical ‘system.’
Some Nigerians are beasts in the closet. Left to their devices, they display unforgivable inhumaneness and lack of character. Nigeria still reels from the shock of the dastardly murder of Favour Daley-Oladele, 22, who was decapitated and had parts of her eaten up by her supposed boyfriend, Owolabi Adeeko and his mum, in fulfillment of a money-making ritual. Of course, the Adeekos and their spiritual father, Pastor Segun Phillip, are ‘ordinary people.’ You could hardly ascribe such grotesqueness to them, close up, or from a distance.
Of course, Owolabi is hardly the poster image of the Nigerian youth but he projects the burgeoning mentality driving hordes of Nigerian terrorists, kidnappers, advance fee fraudsters (Yahoo Boys), call girls, armed robbers and political thugs in their youth.
We were wrong to think it a matter of years and decades that we would improve in humaneness and insight. We pride ourselves on our education but fail to understand that true knowledge essentially translates to being an emissary of kindness, truth, hope, superior culture, humaneness and progress to every segment of the human race: the rich and poor, old and young, male and female, weak and strong, literate and unschooled,
We forget too that the true essence of learning, that is, both intellectual and vocational learning, is never simply to teach breadwinning, furnish teachers for the public schools or be an epitome of polite society. It should above all be the appendage of that fine adjustment between reality and the growing knowledge of life. An adjustment which discovers the secret of civilization and the solution to its seemingly intractable problems.
Du Bois writes that the final product of learning must be neither a medical doctor nor journalist but a man. A full man to be precise.
To make such men, our learning process must be borne of ideals and inspiring ends of living. Not desperate, sordid, money-grabbing sound bites. The end product of our educational process must have learnt to work for the glory of his calling, not simply for pecuniary gains. The intellectual must think for truth and progress, not for fame or the applause of the gallery.
Its about time we evolved useful knowledge and a culture beneficial to all. Until we attain a broad, busy abundance of such understanding, not all the finest flavours of the proverbial national cake – be they oven-baked or sand-baked – can save us from our lusts and the affliction by the predatory ruling class.
Currently, we suffer the lack of honest and broadly cultured men. Patience, humility, good breeding and taste. Comprehensive high schools and kindergartens, universities and polytechnics, industrial and technical colleges, teacher training colleges, literature, tolerance and tact – all these spring from proper learning and culture.
We cannot achieve these overnight, however. If we must elect the fine women and men, borne of catholicity of will and conduct, we should begin the process by which they would emerge right now.
It’s about time we engaged in pursuit and dissemination of knowledge devoid of loose and careless logic, like the type that produced and still produce a good number of the Nigerian electorate and ruling class.
The Kingsley Moghalus, Omoyele Sowores and the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT) collective must rise from the ashes of their dormant platforms to re-engage with the citizenry. Beyond their hastily convened townhall meetings, corny platitudes and revolutionary chants at election time, the status quo offers them wonderful opportunities to reconnect with the youth, academia, pensioners and market women of the sidewalk, among other broad segments of the electorate in realistic terms.
Its 2020 and about time they stopped trumpeting off the failings of the incumbent ruling class and get actively involved in addressing our social crisis, outside lethargic perimeters of thought.
The following are suggestions by which they could engage with the rest of us…
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