In 1976, a veritable bomb of a book, ‘Black Man’s Dilemma’ written by the journalist, columnist, administrator and one time editor of the then best selling Daily times, imploded on Nigeria’s literary and intellectual scene with dramatic and controversial impact. Frontally tackling leading authorities in African academia who had researched and written extensively on what they described as the glories and accomplishments of the great cultures, civilizations and empires of pre-colonial Africa, Oyebola described such submissions as wholly false, mythical and misleading. Relying on extensive library research as well as notes from his wide travels, interviews and careful observations throughout the black world, including the blacks in America, Oyebola contended that the black man had in fact not made any original or sufficiently impactful contribution to the attainments accomplishments and feats of human civilization.
Oyebola’s polemical masterpiece generated furious and fiery debates both within academia and in the Nigerian media. He interrogated and seriously disputed, on the basis of historical and archaeological research, claims that the ancient empires of Egypt or Ethiopia, among others, were black civilizations as claimed by some authorities. The great educationist and social critic, Dr Tai Solarin, who was in prison under the Gowon military dictatorship, read the book in prison and promised that on his release, he would aggressively promote the work to be read in Nigeria’s higher institutions. Solarin kept his pledge distributing thousands of copies to students in the course of his frequent lecture tours across Nigerian universities.
Exactly forty years after the publication of the first edition, Chief Areoye Oyebola, now an octogenarian and traditional title holder in Ibadan, published a revised and updated edition of his book, specifically in 2016. He provided evidence that four decades after the publication of his phenomenal study, nothing had happened in black Africa to necessitate any fundamental change in his original thesis. Despite not being genetically or mentally inferior to any other race, Oyebola lamented that the black man, after six decades of formal political independence, had still not bestirred himself to make any original contribution to knowledge, build any country into a global economic or military super power or make any path-breaking invention particularly in the spheres of science and technology.
Oyebola’s revised and updated book was received with hardly a whimper in 2016. There were, of course, a few newspaper reviews but no healthy and vigorous intellectual disputations on the issues he raised as relevant as they continued to be. The country’s academia, literary and media elite had become distracted and laid prostrate by the country’s protracted crises of ever deepening poverty and underdevelopment.
The same inexplicable silence, indifference and inertia has been the fate so far of an explosive new book, ‘The University-Media Complex As Nigeria’s Foremost Amusement Chain’ written by Jimanze Ego-Alowes and published by The Stone Press, Lagos, which was released into the market last year. By now, this book ought to have taken the nation’s literary scene by storm and its author, a polyvalent public intellectual, whose expositions reveal considerable multi-disciplinary grounding in areas as diverse as economics, literature and the arts, classical music, philosophy, mathematics and physics, rigorously engaged on his bold, robust, original but many times highly combustible and provocative submissions on Nigeria’s current socio-economic and condition.
Running into 292 pages, sub-divided into three interwoven sub-sections or books comprising 31 chapters in all, the book frontally challenges long held conventional wisdoms on the fundamental cause(s) of Nigeria’s protracted socio-economic and political debilities with the author proffering alternative paths, mostly reflective of ‘out of the box’ thinking, to the actualization of the country’s trapped potentials. It says something about the author’s sharp witticism and irreverence that the first section of the book is sub-titled, ‘Eze Goes to School and Comes Home a Moron’! This offers us a glimpse into the author’s take on the content and structure of Nigeria’s educational system.
Jimenze fiercely challenges the idea popularized by the great novelist, Chinua Achebe, in his slim 1983 classic, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’, that th country’s socio-economic and political failures stem substantially from leadership deficiency and inadequacy. Nothing, Achebe averred, is wrong with the Nigerian water, or climate or character while everything is wrong with the leadership. Jimanze Ago-Alowes demurs and vigorously too. He contends that Homo sapiens as specie, including the leadership class, only have a superficial, shallow and insufficient insight into the fundamental nature of the material reality, the physical realm that can be cognized by the senses.
In the author’s view, the leader lacks the capacity and cognitive gifts to “diligently utilize his intellect to fill in the gaps left by our senses” in the attempt to perceive and apprehend reality and so this cannot be his duty. Rather, he explains, it is the men of the mind, the intellectuals and poets, who have the mental endowment and philosophical depth to use their intellects diligently to create “deep awareness and true understanding” of society’s reality and such insight is a fundamental condition for the production of leaders that can, in turn, nurture flourishing societies.
Thus, as the author avers, ‘In other words, the failure of Nigeria as a “work in progress”is squarely a failure of her intellectualisms, and not leaderships, but that is not all the story. The fuller story is that Nigerian intellectuals are having fun failing and being paid for it. How? They have cleverly turned intellectualisms to circuses, and the nation is entertained to her ruins, even if absentmindedly. Alas”! Expounding further on this argument,with brutal bluntness, Jimanze explains that “this book is about the failures of the Nigerian intellectuals especially in their self-a-musement roles and overriding aim. This what earns the Nigerian University-Media Complex, the entire network of Nigeria’s intellectuals, the vulture’s feather as the Nation’s Foremost Amusement Chain. They have amused the nation to her dearth and runny disasters”.
The bulk of those who canvass the mantra of leadership failure in Nigeria most, Jimanaze contends, are the scholars and the educated classes in general, which he defines broadly as “just about any Nigerian with a B.Sc/BA diploma degree. Emphasizing that it is the Nigerian scholar who has failed the country the most, Jimanze wonders if the Nigerian educated class by its own standards and accomplishments is not itself a dismal failure when assessed in global comparative terms. For the author, the parameter for accurately evaluating the quality of a country’s educated elite is the capacity of its scholars “to produce new culture and new knowledge; it is not to consume extant knowledge, no matter how brilliantly”.