Is'haq Modibbo Kawu
5 November 2009
analysis
Abuja — It was Langston Hughes the great African-American poet of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that once asked in his 1951 collection just what happens to a dream deferred. "Does it dry up/like raisin in the sun? Or maybe it will "fester like a sore/and then run?"
He answered emphatically that a dream deferred eventually explodes! Dreams and hopes have very much been the central themes of my consciousness in the past one week; dreams of what a nation can be or mean to its very talented people and the hopes and longings to play a role in the actualization of dreams and hopes as well as the explosion of dreams and hopes when a nation's ruling class proves hopelessly incompetent and is lost in a paroxysm of theft and spoliation of the nation's dreams and hopes; as we have in Nigeria!
I spent the better part of the last seven days in South Africa attending the first Nigeria Achievements Awards. The background was bad. Nigeria faces a reputation challenge in South Africa largely because its citizens are seen more as criminals than respectable professionals contributing to the development of Africa's most advanced economy. It was felt that an award ceremony such as was put up last Friday, will show the multifaceted contributions of Nigerians to different areas of life in South Africa. Brilliant idea! And as we sat through the evening at the Gallagher Convention Centre in Midrand, Johannesburg, we were proud of the variety of human endeavours where Nigerians have excelled.
There was the remarkable story of Olubusuyi Asaolu who won the award for achievement in Information and Communication Technology. This young Nigerian is at the heart of some of the most important computing projects in South Africa that have implications for all levels of national development there. Forty years old Professor Olalekan Ayo Yusuf is at the University of Pretoria and is a Visiting Professor at Harvard University; his work in tobacco control advocacy has been recognized all around the world. On the other hand, Fred Eboro is an entrepreneur, with about forty years experience in the footwear industry, in Nigeria, Zambia and South Africa. Today his Fred Footwear is a big name in South Africa. Or Doctor Muhammad Kamal Abdulrahman, who won an award as most outstanding Nigerian in the Kingdom of Swaziland; he has done remarkable work in AIDS control projects that even the United Nations has acknowledged.
The list is as long as an arm literally. What was unstated but ran through the Awards night like a motif was the fact that the Nigerians being honoured have largely left our country because the ambience to actualize their potentials has been absent. From the mid-1980s, Nigeria's military regimes chose to impose Structural Adjustment policies which eroded the fundamental basis for intellectual excellence from our national life. The university system began to suffer a haemorrhage of the very best brains just as the authoritarian pall cast upon the society started to discourage genuine enterprise. A process of the entrenchment of cronyism and corruption took over the country and the raison d'etre of governance became the looting of the resources of the country in dubious privatization process which started under the military but was then accelerated under the civilian regime of the kleptocratic despot, Olusegun Obasanjo, between 1999 and 2007.
When the colourless and dour Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria's Vice President effusively congratulated the award winners, I couldn't but wonder if he ever thought for a moment that it was the way they rule/ruin Nigeria, which has largely forced our compatriots into the bosoms of other countries like South Africa. Similarly, spending a few days in South Africa, with its infrastructural development and the higher level of culture, in terms of the availability of books, music and other spiritual products of human achievements, underscored the fact that the duty on our hands to build a country that works for the Nigerian people is truly a massive one. Those who rule our country take away the soul of our society and make it difficult for the highly educated citizens to want to stay here; they emigrate forcefully and become part of the world-wide migrations so central to the processes of capitalist globalization. The underlining consequence has been the increasing deterioration of the educational system and professionalism in Nigeria. Most of the best brains oiling the machinery of globalised capitalism were trained from public funds in the seventies and eighties but are now unable to give back to the society which made them.
On the other hand, a reversed process of trying to bring them back as uprooted experts has become encouraged by the imperialist system in a bizarre process of returning experts who are then expected to be paid differently like the expatriates from the imperialist countries. In the meantime, knowledge production nationally has continued to deteriorate due to the per capita underfunding of national universities and research institutions. If national intellectuals are expected to think for their countries, a combination of capitalist globalization, deterioration of ambience of knowledge production and the corruption that has become the central purpose of governance have combined to uproot such a process. Nigeria is therefore much poorer and its future even bleaker than anybody is analyzing. The Achievement Awards in South Africa recognized the talent of very hardworking citizens of our country but they also expose the depth of rot that has overtaken us as a country. Unfortunately, Nigeria is being husbanded by the worst possible set of rulers it ever can be saddled with. If we do not struggle for national liberation, we will lose our country. It is as simple as that! So what happens to a dream deferred, as Langston Hughes asked? It explodes and a nation harvests despair.
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