It was meant as high praise but it rubbed rather raw on Ripples.
Lai Muraino Oso, the birthday commemorative lecturer enthused, was a “highly detribalised Nigerian”.
It was October 9 in Ikeja, Lagos. Prof. Oso, Mass Communication teacher and scholar at the Lagos State University School of Communication, was 60; and the drone of small talks, at times causing an intrusive buzz that earned the lecturer’s sharp rebuke, was proof of a packed hall.
Prof. Umaru A. Pate, Kaigamma Adamawa, and professor of Mass Communication at Bayero University, Kano, was at the lectern. The lecture title: “Issues in Media and National Integration in Nigeria.”
An expert in communication, to be sure. Still, Ripples thought Prof. Pate fell prey to one of those great Nigerian clichés, even if his praise of the celebrator was well earned; and, given the diamond boy’s impressive bona fide, truly genuine.
But detribalised Nigerian?
“What does that mean?” Ripples turned to a co-guest and table mate.
“Someone,” the other volunteered, “unburdened by tribal and ethnic baggage or bigotry; and is nationalistic in his thinking. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo,” he enthused, “is the most detribalised of all Nigeria’s past leaders.”
“I see,” Ripples grunted. “But how is someone ‘detribalised’ — cease being Yoruba, as in Obasanjo’s case, so you could be Nigerian?”
That would appear contemporary Nigeria’s conventional wisdom. That appears to have shaped Prof. Pate’s high praise.
Still, must “tribe” be a bad thing? Hardly. “Tribe” is only an ethnic classification. Just as in Britain, the English, Scot, Welsh, and Irish are tribes; in Nigeria, the Igbo, Hausa, Tiv and Yoruba are.
Indeed, Chief Anthony Enahoro (God bless his soul), in his political memoirs, Fugitive Defender, recalled a virtual “tribal war” among the British expatriate teachers of the King’s College, Lagos, of his day — the English with his assumed superiority complex; and the Scot vigorously rejecting his perceived inferiority complex.
Yet, the British overlords, beyond these cold wars, never hinted these tribes were sinister or subversive of the British national interest. They couldn’t have been: for without the English, the Scot and the Welsh, there certainly would not have been the Brits.
But the rules would appear reversed, with the Nigerian equivalent. Nigerian “tribes” were sinister and subversive of Nigeria; though just like British tribes, they endure, among themselves, some tension. Still, those British tribes are supportive of British integration as Nigerian tribes are subversive of Nigeria’s!
It’s the same mindset of language politics that refers to English as English, but African languages as “vernacular”, suggestive of some phantom inferiority!
But strictly, the Brits were a colonising power. So, they would plot any stratagem to cement their imperialism.
But Nigerians must see through it all; and avoid passing the negative prejudices down the ages, under the romance of “national unity and integration”, as Prof. Pate, with all due respect to his scholastic rigour, would appear to have done, all through his commemorative lecture.
Pray, how can you integrate Nigeria, when you start from the premise that the “tribes” making up a federal Nigeria, as far as the integrative process goes, are evil and subversive?
And how can Nigeria be, without the intrinsic qualities of the Yoruba, Hausa, Itsekiri, Ijaw, Fulani, Tiv, Idoma and others that make up that geographical territory?
So long for “detribalisation”!
To be sure, making a patriotic fetish of “unity and integration” is an age-old Nigerian pastime. But that pastime has also shown the futility of dreaming “unity” without rigorously working through the basic challenges: accepting that the 396 Nigerian ethnics (by the professor’s own statistics) are basically different peoples, in a federal Nigeria.
These differences cannot be wished away. But we can accept them and work through them to find common fronts. Any other way is sweet but barren patriotic preachment.
Take the media. To insist on a Nigerian “national” media is sweet emptiness. This is because as Nigeria is a federal state, its media would differ from one end of the country to another, depending on different attitudes, bents and cultures — without prejudice, of course, to common humanity, without which even a federal state, of differing peoples, cannot survive.
That much was proved all through Nigeria’s media history. Iwe Irohin (Nigeria’s first newspaper, founded 1859) was a missionary medium hinged on Egba and Yoruba cultural plank. It couldn’t have survived otherwise. The Anglo-African, Lagos’ first newspaper, wilted and died because of its cultural barrenness.
The most successful early newspapers, Lagos Weekly Record, Lagos Standard and perhaps Times of Nigeria were published by Anglo-Africans, who had little affinity with the native Eko community. Indeed, the Saro (freed former slaves from Sierra-Leone), the natives openly mocked as dual “parasites” — who feasted on the Eko natives “for trade”; and on the British colonisers “for culture”.
But both LWR and LS cut a niche as bastions of African nationalism, which often even fired the imagination and awe of the Eko aborigines, especially when newspapers like Herbert Macaulay’s Lagos Daily News, the town’s first daily newspaper, fought community crusades, over land and water issues, against the British, to roaring cheer from the appreciative community.
The long-and-short of all that is that the media have symbiotic relationship with their communities. If therefore the Nigerian media now tend to stress local differences more than “national unity”, it is simply because too many issues are yet unsettled — most of these issues bordering on basic justice, fairness and equity.
So, what media worth their name would leave those fundamental issues, and start parroting a hoped-for “unity” and “integration” that are, at best, some future Utopia — very sweet to covet, but hardly at hand?
Ironically, by his very examples, Prof. Pate projected his own different outlook, even from fellow academics, from other parts of Nigeria.
He dismissed 1st Republic federalism as “unitary regional structure”, what his counterpart from South West Nigeria would glorify as “true and regional federalism”, on which plank Nigeria should be “restructured”.
On the other hand, he romanticises territorial fissures that Gen. Yakubu Gowon started, as a “process of national integration and cohesion”, which nevertheless folks elsewhere would lampoon as military era “unitary federalism”, which Gowon started with 12 states but which, at the last count, was 36. That has progressively atomised the states, and made the centre too powerful and irresponsible, having great socio-economic implications in mass poverty and citizen alienation.
Still, neither Prof. Pate nor the opposite school is wrong. They are simply right from their own perspectives. Yet, all are Nigerians claiming the best for their country! That is Nigeria’s complexity at a simple glance. You won’t achieve “unity”, if you didn’t appreciate and factor in that diversity.
But Prof. Pate, clearly a Nigeria unity-centric, did well to beam light on these issues. But equal-opportunity rigour demands Nigeria unity-sceptics too clinically cut-and-thrust with him, without risking the toga of being branded “sectional” in their thinking.
It is even more meet that it’s all happening in commemoration of Prof. Oso at 60, that pan-Nigerian academic and scholar, one of the few braves that haven’t given up on the troubled Nigerian university system.
But the good scholar need not be “detribalised” to consummate his “Nigerian-ness”!
