Tag: Nigeria Airways

I must confess that I was surprised by the number of readers who wrote to me about the parable of the man who fell from a skyscraper with which I concluded the piece that I wrote in this column last week. More precisely, I was surprised about the number of people who felt that it was too gloomy, indeed too dispiriting. Of course, there were a few people who felt, correctly in my opinion, that it was a cautionary parable, that even though it narrated the tale of a man who seemed doomed to a messy end at the end of his freefall, in essence the story was using what is known as graveyard humour to teach very important lessons about life in general and life in Nigeria at this moment in time. More on this reaction to the tale later in this piece. Meanwhile, I wish to first explore the reaction of the readers who felt that the tale was a “doomsday parable” that a columnist like me that claims to be working for change from the present dire state of affairs in our country should keep at an arm’s length, if not indeed stay away from completely.

I agree: a doomsday parable or metaphor like the one with which I ended the column last week, gives great emphasis to possibility or closeness of the destruction of life or existence itself, or life and existence in life or existence as we know it and find peace, happiness and hope in it. On this basis, the motto that one might encounter when one confronts a doomsday metaphor is the old, grim one from antiquity: abandon hope all who enter herein! If that is the case, why should a messenger, a “herald’ of change and hope deal with or recycle doomsday parables and metaphors? Is such a herald, such a columnist not giving in to despair and despondency? Or does the columnist feel or sense that things are so bad, so hopeless in the world and in our country that the most appropriate tales and parables to tell are the ones speaking out of and to the terrible times in which we live?

The answer to these questions is not as difficult or unclear as it may seem to be. And what is this answer? It is this: there are many, many Nigerians out there who feel that things are very bad, very frightening and if doomsday parables become common or even dominant among the stories that Nigerians feel and tell about themselves, so be it! But on the other hand, there also millions upon millions of Nigerians who do not think that things are as bad as that, that doomsday tales speak to or for them. It is also the case that there are an untold number of Nigerians who swing from one to the other: tales and parables of doom or despair side by side with parables and jokes about getting rich and making it in life against the odds posed by even the most deprived and seemingly hopeless of life circumstances. Indeed, deep down, most Nigerians, in my view, belong in this category of in-betweenness: great despair mixed with unalloyed optimism. This is why, again in my opinion, Pentecostal evangelism is such a phenomenal social and spiritual phenomenon in Nigeria at the present time since it is compounded of, on the one hand, a tragic sense of life and an acute sense of the power of evil and, on the other hand, a triumphant and epiphanic joy in the possibility of restitution in this world and salvation in the Hereafter.

This leads to our consideration of the readers who saw a cautionary tale that I intended in the parable of the man who fell from the skyscraper hurtling to what appears to be his inevitable destruction. The first thing to acknowledge here is the nature and purpose of both parables in general and cautionary tales in particular. The most commonplace definition of parables speaks of it as a tale that speaks of one thing, one order of existence in terms of another thing or order of existence. In the most typical of such tales, animals think, speak and act like humans. And in another type of the parable, human beings think, speak and act like animals. In yet another form or mode of the parable, human beings think, speak or act like human beings but in situations that defy literal or factual logic. This is the order of parables to which the tale of the man who fell from the skyscraper belongs: in real life, in literal terms, a man who falls from a skyscraper  would never have enough time to answer a single question as he is hurtling through  space, let alone answer a question each at floors 100, 80 and 60 as he zooms downward. We accept that he can answer the same question three times because we accept that in a parable, you do not, you must not apply the test of literal or factual logic to what happens or does not happen in the tale.

I was particularly pleased and gratified by one reader’s reading of the implications of my tale of this falling man precisely by projecting beyond what happens in the tale as told by me to things that do not happen, that even cannot happen in the tale. Here’s what he wrote, presented as a summary: going by my narration of the same question and answer every 20 floors, the man can only have a maximum of five times to respond to the question; by the time that the sixth question is put to him, he would be so close to ground zero that no time would be left for him to answer the question as he had done on the previous five times. On the basis of this reading of the parable, we confront one of its many sobering insights into life in general and the Nigeria of the present moment in time: you can only be terribly, terribly complacent in the face of looming disaster up to a limit beyond which your complacency cannot and will not take you.

It is perhaps necessary for me to add two other readings or interpretations of the tale before coming to some concluding remarks that I will weave around yet (another) doomsday parable. One: if it seems so shocking, so unbelievable that a man that is hurtling to certain death can be so cheerful in this moment and drama of existential proportions, all we have to do is think carefully and imaginatively about life and circumstances that we have either known ourselves or heard or read about how people, the great as well as the ordinary, can be so joyously carefree and irresponsible in the face of ongoing or looming disasters about which others cannot stop talking. This was the historic condition that inspired Charles Dickens to write one of the most celebrated opening sentences in the history of the novel: It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…”

Two: In the general scheme of things, in the context of the combined lives of past, present and future generations of humanity in general and a national community in particular, a whole lifetime is but a very brief instant that we wrongly perceive as seventy years, two centuries or even a millennium. That is why a man hurtling to his end which, logically or temporally, would take only one minute, thinks, speaks and acts as if he has time on his side, that as far as things are “so far, so good”, he can be cheerful, perhaps even hopeful, even if, unknown to him, that cheerfulness or hope is an illusion. And indeed, illusory cheerfulness and hope are things that virtually all our rulers, all our ruling class political parties exploit cynically and shamelessly. Buhari and the APC come in a long line of this moral and political exploitation of the illusions of hope and cheerfulness off most Nigerians in otherwise terribly dispiriting circumstances. Basing myself on a deflation of this tradition, here is another doomsday parable with which I will conclude this piece. I give it the title, “Which turbulence?” I have used it once before in this column, but since that was about ten years ago when this column was written under a slightly different name for The Guardian, I would like to retell it for my current media context and readership.

A man making a first visit to one country that shall remain nameless chose to make his flight to the country in the national airline of the country. Unhappily for the man, his flight was so marred by air turbulence for the whole duration of the flight that his enthusiasm, his excitement were soon completely overcome by the fear and terror generated by the violent and unceasing turbulence and disturbance. What made things worse was the man’s observation that among all the passengers on the flight, he alone was the only one who seemed to notice let alone worry about the air disturbance and the erratic flight of the plane. This was doubly disconcerting because all the other passengers with the sole exception of this man were nationals of the airline carrier which owned and operated the flight. At one point, the man became so concerned about the indifference of these nationals that he asked one of them: Why are you people so indifferent to the air turbulence, to the erratic flight of the plane? To this, the man got the answer that gave us the title of the tale: Which turbulence?

Going by the rules, the conventions of construction and reception that govern the telling an the consumption of parables, we must discountenance the implausibility of any passengers on international air travel that would be completely indifferent to violent air turbulences, let alone those which last for the entirety of a transcontinental flight. We must also discountenance the implausibility of any national group of passengers on an international flight that knows nothing of the existence of air turbulence: anyone who travels constantly will sooner rather than later encounter one of them. But then, here comes the problem with discountenancing all these crucial aspects of the tale: we have more or less “killed” the parable. To revive it, we must not only restore these crucial aspects of the tale, we must expand on it. We must say that the frightened foreigner was so scared, so terrified that he fainted three times. And we must add that each time that he fainted, the other passengers were totally baffled as to why he fainted, that in place of pity, they were full of derision for the man. Finally, we must add that the country shall not be nameless, that it is our own dear native land, Nigeria.

About two decades ago, only foreigners in our midst saw Nigeria in the semblance of the flight of the plane in our parable. And these foreigners would ask themselves or sometimes ask some of us: can you people not see that a terrible crash, a terrible shipwreck is coming? These days, Nigerians too are asking such questions of themselves and their fellow countrywomen and men. And remember, compatriots, Nigerian Airways went bust, it “crashed”. May what happened to the national airline never happen to the nation itself. We need these doomsday parables, compatriots. After all, I write one only once in a while.

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu