This minute, Nigeria unfurls to a viral disease. It’s a psychological and social pandemic. And it afflicts both young and old, male and female, engendering disaster of vastly different stripes.
The young, however, are more vulnerable to its scourge thus their enthrallment as spectators and tools for the proliferation of our social prejudicial complex.
Societal foundries of thought including the academia, religious institutions, and the economic and political intelligentsia, are burdened by the yoke of prejudice fostered by political and religious demagogues, confused liberals, and partisan social institutions – all thriving by the participation of a fierce and furious youth mob.
The ruckus of selective outrage and anti-Nigeria sentimentality championed by the young have become worrisome. But if these youths seem incorrigible and hopeless, it’s because they are consequences of bad parenting, casualties of the complete collapse of the family as a social unit.
An older friend of mine argued that it’s her generation, the Baby Boomers, that started the malaise. “Our parents raised us well and disciplined us appropriately. But our generation decided to spoil our children. We condoned too much misconduct,” she said.
Her generation, she argued, suffered the boomerang effect; because many of them thought that their parents were too strict, they compensated by becoming “too accommodating” and “less stern” with their own children.
The Baby Boomers, however, aren’t solely to blame. Subsequent generations of parents courted impotence by skirting around the contentious issue of discipline in raising a child. Tomes have been written about modern parenthood; modern sociologists, marriage counsellors, and child psychologists have promoted weird and tame techniques of parenthood, urging parents to experiment with ideas from the so-called developed but debauched societies of the “First World.”
What they advocate in their books and podcasts, however, is hardly child nurturing. It’s akin to animal grooming; that is, rearing a child, like livestock or an expensive pet.
The lack of child discipline is a consequence of parents’ obsession with ego, among other social malaise. Damaged parents raise damaged children. Thus self-centred parents imagine that their kids are the centre of the world and incapable of wrongdoing; that was the general Baby Boomer attitude toward their own kids. And subsequent generations, like the Millennials, internalised and perpetuated this defective culture of parentage.
This is not to dismiss the efforts of those parents who painstakingly nurtured and disciplined their wards, imparting in them highly sought moral values.
As a child, my parents never harassed my teachers for disciplining me when I did something wrong. No sensible parent would do that except in rare circumstances of extreme abuse. Cut to contemporary society and life gets turned on its head. Parents jostle to enrol their wards in schools where they are taught to feign a foreign accent at the expense of cultured grooming and discipline. Thus the preponderance of schools coaching minors to speak in British and American accents while our native language is dismissed as backward vernacular. On the flip side, indigent families haul their wards to school to learn skills required to function as systems managers in our highly dysfunctional and corrupted social system.
Lest we forget those parents who force their children – even when they evidently lack the interest or capacities – into medical or nursing school, in preparation for future job hunting in the United Kingdom, the United States or Canada. Everybody wants their kids to be doctors or nurses abroad.
Some, however, encourage their children to settle for less endearing jobs as public toilet attendants, janitors, street sweepers, sewage cleaners, mall attendants and so on.
A disdain for their homeland fosters the burgeoning brain drain afflicting the country. Thus whatever the class of their degrees and professional competence, an increasing number of Nigerians are raising their children to romanticise life as menial workers abroad as their passport to the good life.
This mentality of parenting has so far produced in the country, a generation of citizenry afflicted with toxic personae; their lives are complicated and fraught with low self-esteem and an abiding disdain for their homeland. They care only about themselves and think that the world revolves around them.
They despise their country because they have been taught to do so by their parents, their schools and worship houses.
Thus the increasing number of youths – including the professional working class and unemployed – mounting the pulpit in the various worship houses, to celebrate their visas to travel or relocate abroad at “testimony” time.
A Nigerian medical doctor who has been doing menial jobs in Canada disclosed, recently, that he had a fantastic practice back home in Nigeria. He said he had a thriving hospital, four cars; a personal driver, and two wings of duplex – one served as his family home while he leased out the other wing.
Yet he “relocated to the UK for the sake of the children.” Things got tough in the UK as his “wife and children weren’t feeling the country.” So, he moved them all to Canada. “I did it for the sake of the children,” he said.
No one should begrudge him for doing what he considers best for his family. But he has been doing menial jobs for about five years now, two years as an ambulance driver in London and three years now as a store attendant in Ontario because the Canadian medical authorities have refused to validate his credentials.
Already, he has burned through his savings from the sale of his property before his relocation abroad. Occasionally, he mulls relocating back to Nigeria, but he lacks the courage to come back and start from scratch.
According to him, he was a “giver” and a “very successful doctor” who consulted for government hospitals before he migrated abroad. He dreads returning to the country to restart as an underling or underpaid consultant to doctors who once looked up to him.
He hasn’t practised for over five years and this may be used to devalue his competence and suitability for employment back home in Nigeria, he said. That is actually the least of his worries. In time, his children will outgrow his paternal authority and challenge it. They will grow disaffected with his sacrifice and would most likely tell him, “Nobody asked you to do all that, Daddy.” If he gets lucky, he won’t get kicked out of his own home.
Back home in Nigeria, he deemed each day rewarding because of the volume and quality of patient traffic in his private clinic. More patients and consultancies translate to a lucrative practice. These days, success subsists in getting through each day without losing his spot to a younger and more agile immigrant. Forget the challenges at work, his greatest challenge subsists in surviving domestication by his wife even as he struggles as a beast of burden to his entire family.
Again, no one should begrudge him for seeking a better life for his children; even if his family of seven must squeeze into a two-bedroom apartment ridiculously tinier and inferior to his luxurious mansion back home. He only took his best decision towards the attainment of the best living conditions and opportunities for his children
Let’s hope his children aren’t blind to his sacrifice. They know the certainties and luxuries he had to forgo in order to relocate them abroad. They see his reduction from a medical doctor and a high-value man into a menial worker and just another immigrant scum hustling in the structured societal jail cells of Canada.
