Introduction
Funmi Iyanda according to Wikipedia is an award-winning broadcaster, journalist, columnist and blogger, but that does not half describe the phenomenal woman she is.
She has been in the forefront of
progressive liberal thinking in Nigeria for decades; bringing sometimes
untouchable and taboo issues as human-rights, child and women’s rights, gay
rights, poor governance and corrupt leadership into the public space for
engagement and discussion.
Accomplished and yet humble, down-to-earth
and matter-of-factly in her analysis of contemporary Nigeria, the keynote
speech she gave below cuts to the heart of the matter. The legacy of British
colonialism, a disconnected elite that provides the leadership pool that
plagues Nigeria today whilst debunking the aspirational aims of the youth to
continue in the same thinking as leaders before.
She identifies, contextualises, explains,
excoriates, condemns and instructs, leaving us with the soundest piece of
advice. “Write your own ending. Shape
history.”
I have put links within the text of the
speech to help in understanding or appreciating certain references she makes
beyond the core captive audience she was addressing.
This is one speech to read many times and
make necessary adjustments to help turn Nigeria, our great and dear country
around – this is to all of us, our outlook, our mind-set, our actions and our
dreams for a better country.
“On departure, these elites with their distinct cultural differences but common goal of avarice became the new imperialists. Imbued with a servitude underpinned by self-loathing and a voracious appetite to mimic their former bosses, they confused westernisation for civilisation and like all counterfeiters concentrated on the surface of things. Thus, to their thinking, the more resources of the land they could coral, the more trappings of the west they could possess and the more civilised they could become.”
OPEN LETTER
TO A NEW GENERATION
Keynote address delivered by Funmi Iyanda at ThinkOyo 30under30 awards 21/12/13.
The thing about age is, it is catching. It’s
like a hysterical jester lying in wait for the fool.
I want to tell you about Mrs Okoro. Before l turned nine, school was a vaguely irritating distraction from the pursuit of happiness in play and adventure. Every school day, I’d wear my red checked dress and burgundy beret uniform and passively submit to school.
l was not a rebellious child. I was a bored child who daydreamed through classes until lunch when the school served asaro and chicken with bananas and ground nuts as snacks. That was until l got to Mrs Okoro’s class.
Mrs Okoro made letters become words, words which
became stories, stories which became my life. I loved her dearly, perhaps it was
transference as l’d recently lost my mother but at nine, l started going to school
because she was there. One day walking out the gates after school, l saw Mrs Okoro
getting into a bus ahead of me so l ran across the road to get into the same bus.
I didn’t bother checking for traffic.
Free yourselves and
your future. Speak the truth to power and each other, not just on twitter, to face.
The next thing l remember is thinking heaven looked rather like Akoka road. I had been hit by a car and was staring up at the concerned faces of Mrs Okoro and others. The driver was distraught; he was a student at Unilag and in the moment before pain cut through my adrenalin, l remember being happy l had been hit by a grand university student not some infernal danfo bus driver.
He took me to the university health centre where the nurses gave me a large cone of ice cream to comfort me before treating me and putting me in the big university bus home. My heart was swollen with pride as the shiny big bus drove down our dirt street in Bariga. Not a dime was exchanged, no one called my father at work, there were no mobile phones and we had no phone at home. There was no need; the system took care of me. It was Nigeria in 1980.
Recently on my way out of Nigeria, the Murtala
Mohammed International Airport was thrown into chaos, people were sweating and
swearing, passengers stranded as all electronic equipment had stopped working.
The place stank because there was no water to
clean the toilets. I watched the white airline crew walk by with barely contained
derision as they gingerly sidestepped the mess. The problem wasn’t that there was
no electricity at the airport, that’s normal; it was that someone had not supplied
the diesel to run one of the generators.
I sat in a corner, observing people; those who
fascinated me most were the band of men, mid-thirties to late forties, Nigeria’s
emerging business and political elite. I recognised them by their Louis Vuitton luggage, logo
jacket and velvet slippers, disguising their social anxiety with an unabated desire for the pointless. Seemingly oblivious to their environment, they strutted about backslapping and rolling their R's, being cocky, rude and dismissive to everyone.
The system designed
by the British was to serve the big empire. It was not designed to work for us and
never will.
What struck me most about these preening peacocks
though, was their total lack of shame at the state of things. They are the band
of new-Africa-rising, proudly Nigerian jingoists, living in a glass bubble as far
removed from the Nigerian reality as you can get. For them patriotism is not a recognition
of failure and a determination to redress it, but a slogan to be worn, tweeted or
liked.
Later on, crammed into a rather unsanitary first
class lounge, I watched them posturing for furtive young female travelling companions,
clearly under instructions to pretend not to know them. The odd thing is that these
are no corn farmers made good from my native Ida Ogun, these
lounge dwellers are very well educated and uncommonly well-travelled Nigerians.
A defective fraction of the immense amount of brainpower and knowledge Nigeria has produced. They help prevent their peers fulfilling their potential and a pool of brilliant thinkers, explorers, scientists, innovators and artists is lost, squandered by a nation that strangulates its best.
I often hear foreigners perplexedly comment
that Nigerians are some of the best educated, urbane and confident black people
they have ever met, so how come the country is so, well, Shit?
One reason staring them in the face is that,
the best-educated, urbane and confident elite they delight in meeting has failed
us.
The system took care
of me. It was Nigeria in 1980.
The question therefore should be, what is it
about the country that makes it impossible for its bright, hardworking, resource
rich population to organise itself into collective prosperity? What is it that turns
some of Nigeria's brightest technocrats into hand wringing, head-scratching incompetents
when they achieve power?
You see, Nigeria was founded as an economic
proposition to collect and remit resources to the empire, with the British government
entrenching a feudal, centralized, western-education-phobic elite in the North and
a westernized, Judeo-Christian, anglicised elite in the south.
On departure, these elites with their distinct cultural differences but common goal of avarice became the new imperialists. Imbued with a servitude underpinned by self-loathing and a voracious appetite to mimic their former bosses, they confused westernisation for civilisation and like all counterfeiters concentrated on the surface of things. Thus, to their thinking, the more resources of the land they could coral, the more trappings of the west they could possess and the more civilised they could become.
That unwelcome process continues today.
For this elite, the rest of their kith and kin fill them with unease and even disgust and they condemn them to poverty and a passive consumption of other people’s science, innovations, religions, art and technology as though such achievements are beyond us. They also condemn their own children to future poverty not just material but emotional and cultural. Notably the stolen wealth hardly outlives the first generation.
Each time the elite is replaced, it is by a
new generation similarly afflicted and culturally insecure with the same desire
to fraudulently acquire a large share of the common wealth themselves.
This is self-loathing in action. It is a terminal
disease.
Our common humanity and civilisation should be guaranteed by carefully protected, ever evolving structures, systems and processes, which reflect all our highest values and aspirations. Kajola ni Yoruba nwi. [The Yorubas say, “Let’s prosper together.”]
The system designed by the British was to serve
the big empire. It was not designed to work for us and never will.
We all know this and every so often the government
of the day will propose a state sponsored jamboree to endlessly chew the curd of
that vexatious issue of reform, only to artfully spit it out when the people are
sufficiently distracted by the increasingly circus-like, mad-max dystopia we are
living through.
The dysfunction at Nigeria’s heart remains because
it serves the interests of whichever big man muscles or cheats his way into power.
(Note; I said man, the system will never allow for a woman, at least not a woman
who won’t do the needful.)
But what about the people? What about the youth?
The subtext of Obasanjo’s recent letter
to Jonathan is what they used to call two fighting boy and boy in the streets of Shomolu. The people can sense this it is not their fight; they are as disconnected from the elite as the elite are from them.
The baubles do not make us civilised, a country built on
a political structure that allows the creativity, innovation, and talent of all
to thrive does.
They know their place is to submit and dream.
They want to be the next big cat. They have no real distaste for those who have
stolen their future; often they just want to replace them. The grudging admiration
seeping through their envy fuelled whimpers of protest reveals fragile egos easily
stroked by association with those who have raped them, then thrown them a bit of
Vaseline and warm towels.
They desire to be the ones at the airport with
the designer bags and unplaceable accent. The ones who are gearing up to follow
the path of those before them. To flaunt luxuries but live in situations so far
removed from the vision of life those luxuries where designed for.
When Karl Lagerfeld designs each
Chanel bag he cannot possibly
envisage it may end up in a place where the carrier can be dragged out of a car
and raped in daylight with witnesses and no repercussions. Yes, that happened. The
baubles do not make us civilised, a country built on a political structure that
allows the creativity, innovation, and talent of all to thrive does.
Nigeria in 1980 was by no means a perfect place but would my counterpart in Shomolu today have a Mrs Okoro or such access to public health care?
Let us sound a warning to our "betters," as they push and pull the country one way and another in their hustle; it is untenable, there will be a snapping, one, which no one can predict.
So what shall we do? What will the young intellectual
elite of today do differently?
A youth cultural revolution of ideology and
values perhaps? Jettison the hypocrisy, the pseudo religious, anti-women, anti-children,
anti-poor patriarchy. Turn away from the bigotry, the megalomania, and the cultural
bravado. Free yourselves and your future. Speak the truth to power and each other,
not just on twitter, to face. Refuse to participate in the racket, the hustle, and
the lie. Be better than that which is on offer.
“Watch your thoughts for they become words.
Watch your words for they become actions.
Watch your actions for they become habits.
Watch your habits for they become your character.
And watch your character for it becomes your destiny.
What we think, we become. "
Start now before you become the company CEO,
the minister, the commissioner, the senator. Lead from within and without.
Abraham Lincoln once said
of citizens desiring change; make me. Make your elders and leaders take you seriously.
Help the few good men and women in power by showing there is a generation who can
and will stand with them. Insist on the structural and constitutional changes that
which will free our collective creativity, innovation, science, ideas and culture.
Civilisation is neither westernisation nor exclusive to other climes. It is building a society on values and institutions designed to protect not the strongest but the weakest as we are only as strong, as honourable, as respected and valued as the sum of our weakest parts.
Now what? My job is to tell stories with context,
sometimes l don’t know the end. Write your own ending. Shape history.
