The Republic of Ghana is a thriving democracy under its current young President, Dr. John Dramani Mahama who is an intellectual in his own right. What I find extremely interesting about modern Ghana is that the country is run by the young people who are mostly in their 30s, 40s and 50s; the kind of people who will be pushed aside in Nigeria. The simplicity of the Ghanaian leadership is overwhelming. In my recent visit to Ghana, one of the Senior Protocol Officers in the Presidency who was in charge was a young lady in her 30s who was simply dressed in Ankara fabric sewn into a gown and I immediately imagined what a senior protocol lady in Nigeria would have been wearing. The minister of state for tertiary education was a young member of parliament most likely in his late 30s or early 40s. The Ghanaian constitution enjoins on the President to appoint substantial members of his cabinet from parliament. This is something those reviewing our constitution should look into. I personally like the South African model where the President is also the leader of his party in parliament so that he can channel his policies towards enactment into Acts of Parliament. There is so much to learn from Ghana that probably writing a book about it is what would be required. For example, there is no dichotomy between the cities and the rural areas. City houses are not vastly different from what you find in the rural areas and electricity is available everywhere. Hence, rural-urban migration is severely mitigated.
The most glaring disparity between Nigeria and Ghana is the whole question of monuments and legacies. There are no monuments in Nigeria of the past; the houses of our past leaders are treated as ordinary abodes rather than national monuments. The Premier’s lodge in Ibadan I believe has been sold to an individual or turned into a high court. The Premier’s lodge in Kaduna, the so-called Arewa House is some kind of archive whilst the Prime Minister’s lodge in Lagos is now an army officer’s mess. The federal parliament and the original federal secretariat and its successor in Lagos have been abandoned, burglarised and vandalised and are now inhabited by rodents. We have not even been able to build the mausoleum for Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe in spite of millions set aside for it and the graves of our leaders are taken care of by their families. But when you go to Accra, Nkrumah’s graveyard and that of his wife are tourists’ attractions. There is a museum for his books, his clothing and even the bed he used in Lincoln University as a student. If it is not too late, may I suggest that there is a need to build in Abuja monuments to our heroes as well as a country home somewhere in the woods or hills of Abuja for our President to escape to for reflection so that he does not spend eternity in Aso Rock totally isolated from reality? Nigeria is much richer than Ghana in resources and wealth but much poorer in management and vision. I am passionate about the two countries, Nigeria is my home, my daughter is married to a Ghanaian hence, Ghana is my daughter’s home.
There is little sense of nationalism in Nigeria and our flag does not attract the kind of attention and sense of patriotism that the Ghanaian flag enjoys. Yet you cannot build a nation without symbols and monuments. We just do not have rallying points and heroes around which we can build the sense of pride which a developing country needs. When I visited New Delhi, I was taken to Jawaharlal Nehru’s home and showed his house and his bed on his last days on earth and the simplicity was simply overwhelming. In Accra at the Nkrumah Gardens, the Cadillac car he used as President is preserved compared to the vandalization of Murtala Muhammad’s car deposited for ‘safe’ keeping in the National Museum in Lagos.
Whenever I pass by Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s personal house in Ibadan and see crates of Coca-Cola in front of it, I feel a sense of loss about how the place could be turned into a tourist attraction. There is so much that is missing in our lives and it is not really a question of money or budgetary allocation. What seems to be the problem with us is that we simply have no sense of vision and mission and our sense of who we are is befuddled by our current problems many of which are self-imposed.
Perhaps the problem of Nigeria is the official lack of the sense of history. I use the word ‘official’ advisedly because the ordinary man on the street has a sense of history and he can easily connect with the past. This is why the caliphate for example is still a strong force that connects the past with the present among the Hausa-Fulani. The institutions of the Ooni and the Alaafin are potent rallying points in Yoruba land and any politician who denigrates these institutions, does so it at his own peril. Even among acephalous societies of the Igbo, the Ibibio and other Nigerians who until recently did not have centralised institutions of monarchies, their sense of history is no less important and individuals can relate to this sense of history. But at the official level where for reasons best known to government, history has been yanked out of primary and secondary school syllabi apparently on the advice of Americans who came here in the seventies and advised our government to introduce what they call “social studies” in place of history. This is something they do not do in their own country where American history with its theme of their manifest destiny is drummed into the ears of young people so that they could feel they are a special people and almost a chosen generation. But we who need this sense of nationalism because our nation is in a state of ebullition were wrongly advised and probably deliberately made to operate in an historical and cultural void. Unlike Ghana, which has a sense of purpose under Nkrumah and would brook no interference in the educational system of their people, we have been made to go through a system of disconnect between the present and the past; the consequence of which is the total absence of the sense of history in our national life. After 53 years, we have no monuments to point to for the coming generation and to take tourists to while visiting our country. There are no national symbols of our sovereignty, of our history, of our unity. We think the numbers of cars and trucks on our roads and the variety of foreign restaurants and eateries and the innumerable generators and other manifestation of our dependency on Western culture are signs of modernity. We leave the exhibition of our 2000 year old civilisation in Nok, Ife, Benin, and Igbo Ukwu in the hands of oil companies in various metropolitan centres of the world happily without any condescension on their part. This should have been the duty of our government to showcase our past to the rest of the world but our leaders are more interested in feathering their own nest and looting the treasury and building mansions which their children will not be able to maintain and which would have to be turned to museums in the future. Perhaps it is not too late to make amends and I sincerely hope that when our leaders visit other parts of the world including Ghana, they would learn the lesson of building monuments for the future. Life is not about material well-being alone, there are things that appeal to the spirit. A nation could be developed physically but be spiritually poor. A city like Abuja for example may be beautiful but it has no soul and it is incumbent on planners to try and infuse soul into such a city. This is why Abuja is deserted at weekends and people flee to places like Lagos, Kano in spite of the fact that they are not as developed as Abuja. As a nation, we need to be thinking of the future and of our children and grand children and the legacies we would leave behind. This is why civilised countries spend huge amount of money on museums, art galleries, libraries, national monuments which are what will endure and not whatever money we have in bank vaults.
