As Chief Fola Solanke said in her piece, it is disgraceful that our children know very little about our history and collective wisdom of the past. It is a truism that a people who do not know where they are coming from cannot know where they are going. Perhaps in the whirling of time, our federal government would realize the folly of cutting off our young ones from their roots and restore the teaching of history in our schools. If I were to send a copy of this present book with all its distressing details of failure to my son and his young impressionable daughter, that would be ensuring that they would not come visiting to Nigeria again. Not even as tourists.
The Late Chief Obafemi Awolowo said in 1979 that if he became president he would scrap the ministry of tourism. He argued that no sane person would come to Nigeria as a tourist. He said unless the person wants to know what hell would look like. Chief Awolowo had an uncanny sense about development or lack of it in our country.
All the 11 distinguished writers of this book perhaps with the exception Chief Folake Solanke, Professor Peter Okebukola, and Engineer V.I Maduka, end their chapters on notes of pessimism about current and future development of Nigeria.
Each person, using different imageries, end up painting the same picture of missed opportunities, missed steps and following the wide road that will eventually lead to perdition. But within their sad and clinical analysis, one can find preferred solutions if we changed course. One of the most telling aspects of this book for me is to see two of my former teachers who have now joined the saints triumphant, Professor Emeritus J.F. Ade Ajayi and Professor Emeritus T.N Tamuno virtually giving up on Nigeria in their evening years. Professor Ajayi, the quiet and deep thinker that he was, ends his chapter on a radical note that only the payment of reparations to Africa can balance the sheet of the debt owed to Africa by the West through the Slave Trade and Colonialism imposed on us because of our weakness. How the reparation is to be gotten did not seem to bother him too much. He apparently believed that the injustice done to Africa is self-evident and that the West will give in to our demand without a fight. Unfortunately it is not likely the West would surrender their position of privilege and power without a fight. Do we have the wherewithal to compel the West to accede to our request? The answer is no. Professor Tamuno is more pessimistic. He described Nigeria as “Lying in State” and that increasingly Nigeria, former giant of Africa before the civil war of 1967-70 “…Now resembles an ant or rat on global platforms of rectitude, justice, stability, security and peace”.
He also accused our rulers of preferring “State security” over “National Security” and he said, government at all levels in Marxist terminology constitutes the state and the governments guzzles all the resources in order to secure themselves with little or no care and regard for the people who make up the nation. In the case of Nigeria of 400 or so nationalities brought together without consultation by the British, Tamuno argues that the only thing binding us together is the oil and even at that we continue to behave in the manner of “quarrelsome crabs in confined space”. Both Professors Sagay and Agbaje agreed with Tamuno that we deceive ourselves if we say we are operating a Federal System of Government. Rather Agbaje and Sagay say we live in deceit and that our so-called federalism is decentralized unitary system of government. In a normal federal system, the states create the centre and not the other way round of the centre creating states. The federal government should normally be co-equal with the states in all federations. It is the states that have land, the people and the resources. The state by agreement should be funding the centre which since the military seizure of power has become a Frankenstein monster, some kind of Leviathan breathing down everybody’s neck. Both Agbaje and Sagay advocate a functioning federal system, some kind of cooperative federation similar to that of Switzerland and Canada which incidentally are not without their own problems. In the same vein Prof Mabogunje goes over the unreasonable structure of our country in which the federal government not only creates states but local governments that are not rooted in the historical loyalty of our people. He suggests that instead of lumping together disparate settlements and breaking down large cities in order to conform to some mathematical demography, we should in fact have a new paradigm of local government that is not static but changes with demographic development of our rural and urban settlements. This is the only way the much required grassroots development will be meaningful.
Professor Emeritus O.O Akinkugbe writes with tremendous lucidity, hilarity, and facility but poignancy. The municipal problems of inadequate water supply, shortage of electricity, insecurity, and poor medical facilities attract his attention. These municipal inadequacies are actually militating against our performance at optimal level in all our vocations. Imagine operations being performed using lanterns or the insomnia-inducing loud noise of generators.
Professor Akinkugbe opined that to have a decent and functional life, each person has to assume the role of a local government, providing one’s own electricity, policing, water, and even roads not minding contributing to the general pollution of noise and carbon emission in the provision of electricity as a result of the absence or failure of the national grid.
Prof. Akinkugbe wonders why Africa is poorly represented in the pantheon of scientific heroes. His implied answer is that mental ability is enhanced by a web of factors which are sadly absent in Africa whose total contributions to world economy is less than two percent. Perhaps Africa’s time has come and gone with the achievement of ancient and Pharaonic Egypt’s primacy in world civilization. After all Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal claims that ancient Egypt was an African civilization or may be the time of African’s dominance will be in the future if one were to believe Professor Ludwig Dehio’s Theory of civilization coming in cycles.
