By Olatunji Ololade
The people’s patriot is often a victim of his own love. Love for others’ well-being. His body is sculpted tilth and his soul unfurls as a humid bower. He radically bleeds body and soul to seek and fulfill his people’s voiced wishes and unarticulated simple lusts. He studies communal silence in order to speak it.
Eventually, he finds that he had squandered rhetoric and spunk on the perfidious. He is hung out to dry by the populace whose interests he sought to protect. Never inclined to be apostate, his passion dries out. Where it doesn’t, he is dismissed as a ‘noise-maker’ as Nigeria’s political class, partisan press and treacherous segments of the citizenry eventually labelled foremost patriot, late Gani Fawehinmi.
In Fawehinmi’s wake, successive “patriots” have embraced the wisdom of keeping quiet. They scoff at the romanticized clamour to topple the oppressive oligarchs knowing Nigerians would yet sacrifice them and settle for an opportunistic contract between their exploiters (the government), and a part of the exploited (labour and youth leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin aptly identifies as “the original sweetheart agreement.”
Enter the chameleon patriot: having witnessed the tragedy of his martyred peer, he seeks self-preservation. Every thought and action of his, is a frantic swerve to advance personal interests. He is also a victim of his own lust; he feeds flesh and soul to the dark fangs of its vampirism. His obsessive lust steals his years and drains his lusts but he hardly cares as he laughs all the way to the bank.
The chameleon patriot is more delicately constituted than the people’s patriot. He is sensible to pain and pleasure but trades and profits on collective miseries. He is the gubernatorial or presidential Chief of Staff, the Presidential Adviser/Assistant on Media Affairs, Attorney-General. Sometimes, he is the Governor, the President, dishonest bank chief, or Chief Justice.
Of course, there are always a few men and women, who are heroic indeed and candour but they hardly survive power’s serpentine corridors.
Thus the chameleon patriot dissolves into multiple identities characterised by the political arena’s familiar bogeys. His transformation is akin to Fagunwa’s mythical forest ghommid’s. Other beings pass through him as if he were a wraith; he mutates into a creep, a scalawag, dream-killer, and intellectual thug. He is the menacing snake in Nigeria’s green pasture.
He is the product of a moral void; the casualty of a system that bullies the populace to pacify and please authority. For education, he is taught to cheat the system and applaud financial theft as a shrewd corporate strategy.
He is unaware, writes Deresiewicz, that, the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. During the lockdown, for instance, when panic and states’ defensives against the COVID-19 were intense, several youths posted on social media, pictures of their newly acquired certificates. So doing, they rebuked with glazed contempt, those who hadn’t seized the benefits of the “free time” and acquired one or two certificates courtesy the numerous free professional courses online.
Oftentimes, such posts revealed the depth of the poster’s ignorance or the poverty of his or her mind. One such self-identified “over-achiever, sapiosexual and alpha-female” admonished her peers to quit reading “useless novels” and instead commit to more beneficial exploits, like earning a certificate in “coding” or “digital influencing.”
She shouldn’t be blamed for being so “practical” and “deliberate” to “make cheddar (money),” to borrow her words; many like her responded to her post, sharing pictures of their newly acquired certificates in fresh, tactual, vocational competencies that would supposedly improve their lot in the labour market for supposedly practical, futuristic jobs.
The poor missy and her ilk forget that even the fanciest certificates have expiration dates in the dynamic technological world. Only “useless novels” offer timeless nourishment of minds and souls.
The anomaly reflects a grievous affliction of Nigeria’s labour sector where individuals are propelled into trendy specialties. The frenzy to acquire fancy, professional certificates aids a retreat of supposedly productive segments into specialized ghettos spanning the range of vocational and academic disciplines.
Of course, there are gifted, evolved individuals who read to expand the life of the mind and ask the big questions but they are often a negligible minority.
Nigeria had brilliant geophysicists, accountants, and engineers working for multinationals and banks, but it was the Awolowos, Soyinkas, and Achebes that set Nigeria on the global map as a nation of genii and vast talents.
While the multinational staff clocked lucrative colossal hours and faithfully managed systems, it was the authors of what the misguided “alpha” missy called “useless literature” that inspired decisive national debates on crucial issues like the civil war, policy failure, foreign relations, political ethics, and the nationhood question.
For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge thus to train someone to manage a business account for PWC is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate the ethics of a business venture is to educate them on values and morals. A culture that disregards the vital interplay between morality and power writes Hedges, condemns itself to death.
Such existential truths are scorned by the modern fortune-hunting professional. This disconnect subsists across professions, government, and academia. Nigerian economists, for instance, chant elaborate theoretical models yet know little of how their fancy, soulless economics impacts on rural poetry and suburban lives.
The core of our education and politics is driven to replicate American values or secure a seat at Europe or Asia’s table. We must shun such colonial mentality and take visionary steps to build our own table and craft seats for our own table.
This would be asking too much, however, of the digital alpha breed, who see novels as “useless literature” ill-suited to nation-building and money-making ventures.
Their fancy certificates and futuristic competencies may earn them money in the short-run but they will lose it all in the long-run to the same system that taught them to be soulless savages.
Many of them study to obtain perfect grades in tedious economic classes and stirring literary lessons. But while they may know the plot and salient details of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, they are unable to tell why the story was revealing of colonial insolence or why Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was worthy as a bristling response.
Writers from Euripides to Banks, Soyinka, Achebe, and Fagunwa have used literature as both a mirror and a lens, to reflect society’s hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice.
It was Charles Dickens who directed the attention of middle-class readers to the slums and workhouses of London. Honors de Balzac ripped open France’s callous heart through the volumes of his Human Comedy.
And it was Fagunwa who took us all on a philosophical adventure through The Forest of a Thousand Daemons to uncover hard, immutable truths about life, spirituality, self, and wisdom. The messages resonate in the discerning heart and forelock, long after the last page has rustled shut.
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