RIGHT HONOREE, WRONG MONUMENT

This is one piece I wish I did not have to write.  But our penchant for feferity and spectacle at the highest reaches of our public life leave me no choice.  As long as this obtains and I have breath in me, I hope I do not fail to call us to account when this penchant gets the better of us.  Even if this does not resonate for many of us at the present time, my hope is that the future would at least find a record of dissenting voices insisting that we do right by ourselves and our posterity.

I woke up this morning in central New York State to the spectacle carried live on TVC News—thanks, TVC—of Akinwumi Ambode, the governor of Lagos State, flanked by the usual retinue, performing the unveiling of the new statue of Obafemi Awolowo.  The new statue replaces a previous one that stood at Allen Avenue in the state capital, Ikeja, that had been torn down.

I congratulate the governor and his executive on honouring Awolowo’s memory by commissioning this public monument.  More Jeleen to their elbows.  And had I not proceeded to read newspaper reports of the ceremony, specifically, Ambode’s address to the gathering, this piece would, perhaps, not have been written.  The main points of the speech reported in The Nation newspaper, online edition, are at variance with what I believe a proper monumentalisation of Awolowo should look like.  In other words, we have the right honoree, but, sadly, the wrong monument.

Public, physical monuments do not teach history.  All the things that would enable Ambode and his fellow leaders in the western part of Nigeria he exhorted in his speech to do the things that would really advance Awolowo’s legacy beyond material embodiments in statues are precisely what I find lacking in repeated celebrations and invocations of Awolowo in our public life.

I have nothing against statues but I am convinced that a world in which there are more plaques commemorating Awolowo than schools, research centres and organisations studying his ideas and enshrining them in the imagination of future generations and the leadership they will furnish; or scholars, not hagiographers, dedicated to studying his ideas, is a world in which Awolowo’s memory is dishonoured and his ideas ignored, if not abandoned.

A word of caution here.  However much we love plaques, we must not forget that it is a homonym of the plaque that our dentists are dedicated to removing when they afflict our teeth.  All it takes is a parvenu, culturally illiterate future governor to tear down this or any other monument and remove the plaque just placed on it.  It has happened before and, in light of our political culture, it will happen again.

But certain things are invulnerable to removal or the excesses of uninformed executives in public office.  Indeed, the deeper the roots in the imagination, the more committed the workers in the vineyard of Awolowo’s ideas and their continuing relevance to the history of ideas, the more likely it is that future parvenu governors will have a difficult time toppling statues and removing plaques.  Even when they do, more people will continue to live under the inspiration of those ideas and, therefore, be less agitated by the vagaries of a monument that remains forever vulnerable to the weather and human shenanigans. 

I would like to use two excerpts from Ambode’s address to make the core point of this piece.  According to him, as reported in The Nation, “Thirty years after his death, his thoughts and ideas on a wide range of issues relating to the economy, fiscal federalism and education among several others, are still relevant today as they were back in time.  His legacies and landmark achievements, particularly in the Western region including Lagos colony, had endured and remain a source of inspiration and benchmark for progressive leadership in the country.”  Further, “the vision of new generation leaders like us, is to consciously rise up to his ideals and principles.” [http://thenationonlineng.net/leaders-imbibe-awo-ideals/ (27/09/2017)]

In the two quotes, certain words stand out: “thoughts and ideas” and “ideals and principles”.  If Awolowo’s thoughts and ideas as well as his ideals and principles are not only relevant but are also supposed to inspire “the vision of new generation leaders like [Ambode and others]”, one is welcome to ask where they—governors, civil servants, journalists, etc.—who dominate our public life and discourse are learning those ideas and ideals from.  I am sure they are not receiving their inspiration from mute and inert statues.

In case Ambode and his colleagues need a reminder, ideas are not free floating like air to be inhaled from the atmosphere.  They are to be nurtured, cultivated, and carefully disseminated.  Given that Awolowo left us a sterling legacy of significant writings, one would think that those who are really motivated to be inspired by him would do the needful, especially if they are leaders and in control of the direction of the society, and invest in platforms dedicated to the study, development, diffusion of ideas and principles for which Awolowo is justly celebrated.

On this score, forget our universities.  What think-tanks or similar institutions exist where those who are interested in Awolowo’s ideas and principles can go and be edified?  Who are the experts and scholars, interpreters for the rest of us, of Awolowo’s recondite ideas, that the leadership in Awolowo’s backyard has trained, whose research it has supported and whose intellectual products have been disseminated, if only in the schools and institutions located there?

Mr. Ambode, whatever happened to the Obafemi Awolowo Institute for Governance and Public Policy located in Lekki and which was meant to do exactly the kinds of things that are sure to make Awolowo’s legacy available to future generations and make those who pass by the new statue better informed of why that new statue matters and become more appreciative of the ideas that are really the soul of the cold stone on a pedestal? 

Yes, the Awolowo Institute is exactly the kind of monument that would ensure the prolongation of the legacy of Awolowo; the new statue will not.  I went back to check the website of the institute before I started writing this piece and it is a shame to the memory of one of the foremost thinkers of the last century. 

If you were totally unaware of who Awolowo was and you are looking to be introduced to why his ideas matter—not just because he was a preeminent Yorùbá leader, a knock, if there is one, on his global status—that apology of a website for a state-sponsored think-tank is a sure turn-off.  A stone image can only complement a legacy; it cannot be a substitute for it.

As for Awolowo’s thoughts and ideas being a source for current goings-on in the administrations of his self-appointed successors in our part of Nigeria, only one who is ill-informed would even think that, beyond mouthing platitudes and mimicking raiment, anyone, repeat anyone, of them has the foggiest idea of Awolowo’s philosophy of anything from management to statecraft to education to culture. 

Who among the governors can claim to have any familiarity with Awolowo’s federalism, the subject-matter to which he devoted a substantial percentage of his writings?  If they are, what would explain their recent canvassing of a return to a 1963 Constitution that Awolowo made clear fell short of what federalism should be; that was used cynically by his opponents to excise the Midwest while (1) leaving the northern behemoth untouched and (2) pretending to be solicitous of the rights of the minorities in the Western Region but not anywhere else in the country?

I hope that no one believes that Awolowo was uninformed of the merits of the 1963 Constitution.  Yet, he called for its substantial revision both in Chapter 3 of Thoughts on the Nigerian Constitution (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1966) and in Chapter 10 of The People’s Republic (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1968).  I know at least one Nigerian political leader who was also an intellectual who turned Thoughts on the Nigerian Constitution into a constant companion in his struggle for the emancipation of the Ogoni.  Does anyone remember Ken Saro-Wiwa?  That was one man who took to heart what Awolowo’s theory of federalism entails.

There is no way that any serious student of Awolowo would permit her/himself to embrace the illiteracy that informs the so-called debate on restructuring in Awolowo’s backyard right now.

Have our governors in the West studied Awolowo’s philosophy of education?  Have they studied Awolowo’s management strategies?  These are not rhetorical questions.  How many “model schools” did Awolowo build?  Could as many of us as benefitted from his educational philosophy and policies have done so had he settled on building a handful of “model schools”?  How many schools did Awolowo merge or vacate for other uses?

Do our new generation leaders know anything about decentralization, local government, and empowering those units not for donating boreholes and handing out Christmas and Sallah rice, but for providing agricultural extension services by graduates of Schools of Agriculture; health services by graduates of Schools of Hygiene and Health Technology; education through Local Authority Schools Boards; and so on?

I make bold to say that it is because the transmission chains for knowledge from previous to succeeding generations have been broken that the current generation of leaders are often found wanting when it comes to performance.  It is why a South-South governor would think that he has made a discovery in his grandiose announcement of a collective farming scheme modelled on the Israeli Kibbutz system.  Had the Obafemi Awolowo Institute for Governance and Public Policy and similar outfits been doing their work of guiding and supporting serious engagement with Awolowo’s ideas, that governor would have known of the Farm Settlement Scheme, the role of Modern Schools in the programme, and how those settlements were integrated into governance and the economy. 

Additionally, he would learn of the role of the Cooperative movement, introduced to Nigeria by Awolowo, supported and informed by a whole intellectual bureaucracy atop which sat the Cooperative College—state institutions, by the way—the Cooperative Bank and the panoply of Cooperative Thrift and Credit Societies, that ensured economic expansion to the remotest of areas in the old region.

I would like to congratulate Ambode, again, on raising a statue to Awolowo.  But we need monuments of a different kind, sir.  If you really want to build monuments to the man, build monuments that need no plaques on them, that cannot be toppled by future vagabond executives, that will ensure that his ideas and thoughts, ideals and principles, are shared, expounded, debated, criticized, and widely diffused through all the institutions where minds are molded and the future is prepared. 

Make resources available for scholars, young and old, wishing to study and write on Awolowo’s ideas, supporting the publication of books and journals of significant academic merit dedicated to critical engagements with Awolowo’s and similar ideas.  These can be in form of fellowships, residential and nonresidential, regular conferences, and huge material support for academic publications. 

From the vantage point of an Awolowo scholar, those are the monuments that would please Awolowo, even if they do not bear his name.  I can only hope that I am not mistaken.

HOLD THE CHIEFTAINCY TITLE, PLEASE!

A Nigerian doctor, a professor of paediatric surgery, Oluyinka Olutoye, has been in the news lately, the world over.  He has been the toast of the world of medical research.  He has been interviewed on BBC and has been written about widely.  All the accolades are well-deserved.  What he did was as close to a miracle as you will see science come to. 

He was the attending physician in a case in which a foetus early in its development was found to have a rare cancer on its tailbone that was sure to be fatal if not excised.  But what to do.  There were no precedents.  He led the team that took the foetus from the mother’s womb, cut out the cancer, and put the foetus back.  The baby was born after full gestation. 

I add my voice to the congratulatory messages that are being sent to the good doctor from all corners of the globe.  May he continue to prosper in his work and life.

Then, as if on cue, our parliamentarians must find a way to turn the occasion into an “Ówàḿbẹ̀ party”.  I saw on Nigerian television, with sadness, their giving a standing ovation to the good doctor who, of course, was not there.  Then, again on cue, the next thing is “Ìwúyè”—the conferment of chieftaincy titles.  At least, that is how I read their enthusiastic suggestion that the Buhari administration give Professor Olutoye national honours.  It is this idea that has provoked the reflections in this piece.

Needless to say, Olutoye will decide whether or not that is an appropriate way to honour him.  And it is not clear to me what getting a national honour has to do with celebrating a singular scientific, academic achievement.  It strikes as another example of how we cannot break from an outmoded past in which conferment of chieftaincies were in line with the kinds of endeavours that dominated our societies and lives back then.  New modes of living require new and more appropriate honorifics.  It is why the French and Germans abolished royalty and substituted membership of their respective intellectual academies as relevant honours for academic and intellectual attainments, generally.  Many prestigious prizes are endowed to recognize the likes of Olutoye, not meaningless “honours”.

Moreover, methinks, given some of the riff-raff on whom national honours have been frittered in recent memory, it would be infra dignitatem to bring the good doctor down to their level.

You want to honour Professor Oluyinka Olutoye?  I have an alternative suggestion for you.  I would like to offer it by way of a comparison.

It was 2009.  There was this Korean-American scientist who was doing such path-breaking work in his specialty—cell biology—that a year or two earlier, he had been named amongst the top 40 scientists under the age of 40 in the United States.  That year, Princeton, Yale, and University of California at Berkeley were in a bidding war for his services; they were all recruiting him for their faculty.  A Korean university joined the competition.  They knew that sentiments and patriotism were nothing; his constituency was humanity, no less.  Just like Olutoye. 

The reason he was so attractive to the competing institutions was the quality of his laboratory, yes, his laboratory, how many Ph.D. candidates and postdoctoral researchers were collaborating with him there and what quality attached to their output from this laboratory.  South Korea was not going to lose out.

The Korean institution involved was willing to build him a brand new laboratory, provide all the tools to work with to ensure that moving to Korea would not lead to any diminution in the quality of his research output.  There was yet a stumbling block: it was the case that in Korea only full professors were tenured and the gentleman concerned was still an associate professor.  Even with all the material requisites provided, he was adamant that he would only move from a tenured position in the United States to a tenured equivalent in Korea.  Remarkably, he did not ask to be elevated to full professor; just tenure.  At the end, the Koreans made an exception to accommodate him and the package to get him to move came to almost $2 million [at that time, the Korean Won was exchanging at 1000 won to 1US$].  The tenured associate professor was hired to enhance, in a big way, Korea’s ability to do big science, maybe even to attract that rare Nobel prize for science.

Of course, I didn’t read a word of Korean but I did not see in the English-language press any intimations of crazy-ass partying with overflowing, skin-lacerating, starched brocades, funny hats and lots of noise in the name of entertainment.

More important, there was no way his return home would have been possible if the university system in Korea had been under the thumb of a killer of all things quality called the National Universities Commission—by the way, the new resting place for expired vice chancellors—with no support infrastructure run by people for whom being professor, much less associate professor, is not enough; they must be dean, vice chancellor, and other irrelevant, distracting, real career-killing diversions.

As the Yorùbá might put it, Ọgbọ́n ọlọ́gbọn ni kìí jẹ́ ká pe àgbà ní wèrè.  So, here is my suggestion.  You want to honour Professor Oluyinka Olutoye?  Create just one university and an atmosphere in that university where the good doctor can come to spend just one year and not suffer a catastrophic decline in the quality of his research with appropriate levels of doctoral students and postdocs, and so on.  That, I trust, would be a recognition worthy of his attainment offered by a giant worthy of its name. 

For now, keep your aṣọ ẹbí and don’t distract a worthy intellect serving humanity in the ever bustling ambience of Houston, Texas, U.S.A.

WHAT THE OLD SCHOOL TAUGHT ME

Being the Text of the Keynote Address Given to the IXth Convention of the Ibadan Grammar School Old Students’ Association, North America, held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Toronto, Ontario, CANADA, September 2-4, 2016

Good evening,

President Adeyinka Okuwoga and his hardworking fellow Executive Members,

Fellow Mountaineers,

I would like to begin by thanking our president for extending to me the invitation to address this great organization and the rest of the Executive for agreeing.  And to the Local Organizing Committee, what a wonderful convention you all have put together.  Special gratitude Kayode Oyetunde, Bayo Laniyonu, Segun Onadipe [Captain Buchanan], Tunji Adeyemi, Jide Johnson, and others who, over the years, have reached out to me, persistently made it clear to me that this is my home, and have insisted that I report.  As I point out below, I may have missed the first bell but I sure know that my presence here at this convention is an indication that the second bell did not find me stranded between the assembly hall and Jordan.

I can only hope that what follows partly rewards your confidence and, minimally, does not fill you with buyer’s remorse.

“Grammar” was a crucible in which many of the founding pieces of my adult life were forged.  In many and diverse ways, elements of my experiences at IGS find all kinds of ways of infiltrating into my life till this moment.  Please permit me to share some of those elements and how they feature in my life and work with you.

Although I have long since abandoned the profession of faith, the lessons learnt in my Bible Knowledge classes and playing a dutiful Anglican lad at home and in school are gifts that keep giving in my personal and professional lives.  I have, on occasion, given as essay prompts in my introductory philosophy classes a verse from one of my favourite hymns, #507, from the Songs of Praise. 

Love is kind, and suffers long,

Love is meek, and thinks no wrong,

Love than death itself more strong;

Therefore give us love

I never fail to let my students know where the inspiration for that bit came from.  The old school is always with me.

At IGS, we were socialized into a tradition: a tradition of responsibility, of punctuality, and of distinction.  You all know that the school uniform meant that the school was vicariously held responsible for your misbehavior while you wore it outside the school’s gates.  I still recall vividly the last sermon that the Reverend Canon E.A. Alayande, our immortal principal, preached at, if I am not mistaken, the Founders’ Day Celebration, his last as principal, on the theme of “Character and Intellect”; later published in the school magazine, The Mountaineer.

The first mantra you learned was: “The first bell summons you to every assembly.”  If you are not at the gathering at the peal of the second bell, you are late.  And we all knew that you were better off absent than be late.  Otherwise, you turned tails, for the guys, and head for the safety of the maze that was Lower and Upper Canada, beyond the Jordan River, till your mates gave the all clear to inch your way to your first lesson, post-assembly.  I hope that at gatherings past some of our women have regaled you with their own spin on what I just recalled.

Certainly, being a student at our school, there was no pressure.  But if, in Form 1, as was the case with my set, you were being informed at assemblies that one of your distant predecessors, who had walked the same grounds you were treading, had just become your country’s Ambassador to Ethiopia—Ambassador Olu Sanu—or another one had just been elevated to the High Court Bench in the old Midwestern State—Justice Franklin Atake—you were left in no doubt of the gravity of the legacy of which you are an inheritor and that you are expected to contribute to that tradition and push back the frontiers of excellence that it signified.

This gives some meaning to the following lines from our School Song:

Illustrious sons who rose to fame

The scions of their days

Brought glory and unfading praise

To Alma Mater’s name

I am suggesting that each and every one of us privileged to have attended our school were charged in a not too subtle manner to bring some lustre to the name and reputation of our alma mater.  I have never been separated from that lesson all my life.

I already referred to two songs.  I am here channeling one of the most accomplished Nigerian Radio personalities in the 70s of the last century at the old renowned WNTV\WNBS, Bola Alo, who used to present a programme titled: “Say It With Music”.  Her audience would write a letter to their dear ones and use different musical numbers to express their sentiments and she would read the letters while playing the relevant music.  No, I don’t have Ms Alo’s gifts.  But I sure must remark her inspiration for the tack that I have taken in this address.

It was August 2, 2012, at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics.  A boys’ choir from Wales was singing a hymn, among others they sang on the occasion.  All of a sudden, they segued into “Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer” [Songs of Praise #508], and there I was, in the quiet of my then Seattle home living room, singing along with them nonchalantly.  Now, it is easy to think that my immediate recognition of and identification with the song came from my lingering Anglicanism.  But that would not have told the whole story. 

In reality it is but one small bit of the larger cosmopolitanism that our school inculcated in us.  For, at that very moment, the kids in that choir and I, Christian or not, were at one in our shared register furnished by a tradition that they got through their church and I got through my school and its devotional practices while I sojourned there.

Here is the larger point.  The world of our school was a cosmopolitan world.  We were trained to know and engage the world.  Our curriculum was not designed to produce local champions.  We were being suited for a global citizenship from the quiet of our then leafy Molete surroundings but by no means limited by that bounded space.  When our school song, there I go again, intones that we

Shout for joy with one accord

All boys from far and near,

it was and remains a fact and an aspiration.  How regularly that aspiration became a fact can be discerned in the global reach of our school’s alumni and alumnae.

To start with, it attracted students from “far and near”, from locals like me who were native born and bred to immediate neighbours from the Yorùbá heartland; to fellow Nigerians of motley ethnic, religious and cultural stripes; to West Africans from as far west as the Gambia to as far east as Cameroun and all points in-between. 

Nor should one fail to mention the wider community of the Aionian Group of Schools.  It has meant for me an ever-expanding circle of associates, nay, brothers and sisters when I meet other old students from Abeokuta Grammar School, Ilesa Grammar School, Ondo Boys’ High School, Manuwa Memorial Grammar School, Victory College, Imade College, Remo Secondary School, Ijebu-Ode Grammar School, Egbado College, Oduduwa College, and Gbongan-Odeomu Anglican Grammar School.  As a result of attending our alma mater, we all become integral parts of interlocking circles of membership of varying communities within our cosmopolis.

Nor are these connections limited to physical ties.  They all, without exception, are communities of affect; of sympathies, fellow feeling, mutual respect, and solidarity.  Certainly, there are some amongst us who have embraced bigotry of different sorts in spite our cosmopolitan upbringing, but I make bold to say that this would be in spite of the education that we received at “Grammar”, not because of it.

In my case, the influence reaches all the way home to my mother who never once forgot any of my complement of friends even when she had difficulty pronouncing some of their names. 

This is the place to remind us all of the role played by our dear school in the business of rehabilitation and reconciliation of our dear homeland in the aftermath of the Civil War.  Some of our peers from Eastern Nigeria were brought to our school to complete their high school education and we were all the better for their presence in terms of what they shared with us when it came to the horrors of war, learning new linguistic and cultural registers and just growing up together.

I was in graduate school in this great city [Toronto] when I had one of those epiphanies that define a life.  It dawned on me that the motto of the Boy Scouts—“Be Prepared”—had become the motto of my life.  I recall it here because I was a part of what is the 1^st Ibadan Troop for my entire period at “Grammar” and that experience forms another strand of the tapestry that is my life woven at IGS.

For those who recall the Scout promise, especially that of doing “one’s duty to God and my country, Nigeria, to help other people at all times and to obey the Scout Laws”, I can tell you that the only piece of that that I no longer hold dear is the one about God.  Although I have, lately, being rethinking my relationship with my homeland, Nigeria, that is a story for another day.  A country that would do what was recently done to its Olympics team, especially the soccer team, does not deserve any loyalty from its citizens, especially if they can go elsewhere.

I digress.  What is of moment on this occasion is that the patriotism that is summoned in another hymn:

Land of our birth, we pledge to thee

Our love and toil in the years to be;

When we are grown and take our place

As men and women with our race [Songs of Praise #488]

has, over the years, structured my relationship to Nigeria, my immediate Yorùbá nation, and the much larger race of Africans and general humanity that I now serve and pledge to serve till my breath shall cease.  No, these larger contexts did not frame my understanding initially.  I was a fierce and uncompromising nationalist.  And my life was all about ensuring that I “justified the talking drums of old” and was a fulfillment of “the hopes of those who laboured long”.

This brings me to one of the ways in which elements of what the old school taught me has manifested in my life since my exit.  I started my journalism career at IGS and although our magazine—The Siren—folded after a year—another story for another day—I continued on to a busy journalistic career throughout my days at the old University of Ife.  But life took a different turn and philosophy claimed me.  I became a teacher.

Through all those changes my commitment to the cause of humanity never wavered, my conviction that we must never be afraid to speak truth to power remains unalloyed, and that we must be, in the words of Frantz Fanon, “slaves to the cause of truth and justice,” remains the guiding principle of my personal and professional endeavours.

Several years later, I formulated a research question around why the politico-legal institutions that we have borrowed from Europe and America even if through the unfortunate medium of colonialism do not deliver on their promise of justice, fairness and inviolate human dignity to ordinary Africans.  Simply put, why has the Rule of Law not taken root in Africa?

My initial research led me in a meandering direction that ultimately included the re-discovery of a class of African apostles of modernity, as I dubbed them, led by that uncelebrated genius, Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther who sought to remake African societies in the modern mode that they had been brought into by, and which they misidentified with, Christianity.  Pivotal to the careers of those individuals was the singular institution that became the point of dispersal to the rest of West Africa: Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone.  This was the tree of which our old school became a veritable branch through the imagination and career of Bishop A. B. Akinyele, our revered founder and nurturer of souls and bodies.  I was ultimately able to inscribe my school’s name into the book that resulted from that effort.  Up School!  What connected our school to that illustrious line begun by Crowther was a desire to create new men and women who combined the best of their indigenous inheritance with the best of what they garnered from what we now identify as modernity.  On this score, it is not an accident that our motto is inscribed in both Latin and Yorùbá—the foreign/new plus the indigenous/old.

I have always described my work as one designed to bring Africa’s voice to the polylogue of the world’s peoples and, no doubt, that voice cannot elide the hybridity that marks all advanced cultures throughout the history of civilizations.

In the near future, I shall be unveiling another bit of this ongoing work through a major conference that I have been working on on the legacy of Samuel Ajayi Crowther.  Please stay tuned.

Here is another, less grave, instance of how “Grammar” has impacted my work.  At one time, I don’t quite remember the year, we had hosted some students from the then Dahomey, now Benin, on excursion to Nigeria.  They were with us in the dormitory for a week.  As I recall, they were seriously striving to improve their English while we, on our part, were assiduously working to enhance our French.  It was not until the eve of their departure that we discovered that most of them were, as were most of us, Yorùbá!  It left an impression on me.

I did not have an opportunity to reflect on it or work through the implications of the experience till 1985 when, as part of a conference on the centenary of the partition of Africa by European imperialists at their Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-85, I recalled the experience.  There it hit me that all along we had been focused almost exclusively on the political consequences of the geographical distribution of African lands and peoples among European robber barons.  What was missing, instead, was an appreciation of how those divisions not only parceled out our lands, they, in essence, simultaneously, also partitioned our minds of which our tender minds—Dahomian/Beninois and Nigerian—were instances.  That our minds would be sufficiently distanced from our immediate existence was not something that happened to us when we were born; that decision had been foretold way before even our parents were born by people who cared not the least bit about Africans and their posterity!  A single people ended up on opposite sides of a bastard border where “Túnjí” on one side is “Toundji” on the other; “Suleiman” on one side is “Souleymane” on the other, “Michael” in one place, “Michel” on the other; and we don’t even relate to one another at an immediate level.

I have continued to work on Yorùbá culture and this in a global context, be it Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, Grenada, Puerto Rico, American south, Togo, Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone, the Gambia and, lately, Burkina Faso.  And this should come as no surprise to many of you here present.

In that regard, I have to save the best for last.  Yes, I am one of those Irefin Boyz, the guardians of Jordan and the holders of the keys to the gates of Upper Canada and the realms beyond and you know where that is.  Of course, except for my dear Senior, JJ, we were not in my time noted for our fleet-footedness except for when it was scram time from overenthusiastic housemasters and overzealous prefects.

No one ever doubted our dominance in the sphere of culture and the arts, music, verbal, plastic and performing, name it, we owned it.  Forget that fluke year when the blue people, okay Olubadan House, with ‘kurubé’, courtesy of Oga Jossy, broke out of their blues with a one-of-a-kind performance of “Ògbójú-Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀.  That work of culture is now a full-time occupation for me and the path to it led directly from Grammar through the portals of the University of Ife to present work that I am doing on Yorùba Religion, properly designated Òrìsà, Yorùbá language and, most importantly, Yorùbá philosophy.

Finally, I must not fail to mention two other significant lessons that have continued to structure my life with their origins back at the old school.  A junior showed and taught me a lesson in courage and telling the truth to power back in the day.  He earned my respect for life even though that singular act most likely cost him the captaincy of Irefin House after I left.  But his is a lesson that I hold dear and is a story that I have shared with generations of students that I have been privileged to teach across the globe.  I am honoured to count him as a life-long friend and interlocutor.  I would like to dedicate this address to Dr. Kayode Oyetunde, that friend and epitome of courage.

My Higher School Certificate [HSC] years, especially my final year, witnessed my enrollment as a student in the school of PATIENCE.  I can tell you that when the Yorùbá say: “Sùúrù lérè” [Patience always pays], it is an incontrovertible truth.  To classmates and juniors who took seriously my then nickname, “Bàbá”, thank you for being the original inspiration in that school without walls from which I do not expect to graduate no matter how long I live.

I do not expect that I have shared with you anything that you did not know at the start of this evening.  I hope that I have managed to remind you of the stations that we all share as a result of our shared experience of being ex-students of an incredible institution.  I hope that all I have said here this evening is not my story but our story told from the limited perspective of one of us whom you have privileged to do the chore on this occasion.

I thank you for your patience.

A BREAK FROM GOD

Two years ago, I published a piece titled, “God Don’t Love Africa and Africans”, [http://www.pambazuka.org/governance/god-don%E2%80%99t-love-africa-and-africans].  For whatever reason, the piece never made it to the pages of any Nigerian publication, print or electronic.  This piece is a sort of follow-up to that earlier essay. 

Nigerians need and must take a break from God.  The God from which I ask Nigerians to take a break is the monotheistic, vengeance-seeking centerpiece of Islam and Christianity.  As far as I know, like other old religions characterized by pan-theism, Òrìsà, indigenous Yorùbá religion, was not a proselytizing one; the gods were infinitely interchangeable and, except for their priests, did not require total abdication of responsibility for their own lives from their adherents.  Furthermore, there was no profession of faith and whichever god seems to work for you is the one that you go with.  On this score, the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were very similar to our ancestors.

Now to the business at hand.  Nigerians need to take several steps back from the widespread God-intoxication in which the entire country is mired.  Put simply, Nigerians need a break from God and this they should do peremptorily so that their God-addled brains, damaged by a certifiable God-addiction, can begin the arduous business of recovery.  This recovery is requisite if we are to reclaim the dominion that both dominant religions claim to be our direct inheritance from God. 

We see a scientist like Albert Einstein uttering what to many in our country today would be a singular blasphemy when he declared that the object of his scientific exertions was “to know the mind of God”.  And our own Obafemi Awolowo did declare that when we call upon God to do for us what we can do for ourselves, something sure is amiss.  According to Awolowo, “because we can do it ourselves, why then do we call upon God to do it for us?  This is stupid.”  I am sure that no one would dare designate him an atheist.  But he took very seriously the injunction that only those could expect help from heaven who are prepared to help themselves.  A benefactor of many churches and a steadfast congregant in quite a few of them he was, nonetheless, clear that there is a reason that we were created with a brain.

When I was growing up, we went to church on Sundays; we were out by 12:00 noon and definitely not later than 1:00 p.m.  Our parents went to Bible class after work, mostly on Tuesdays, and the only real demand on your time was if you were a member of the choir or you were taking classes for your confirmation.  Church was a sliver of life, not all of it.  Work was more important than church.  Home life and other elements of living were more important than worship.  The prelates were well trained and, given the leisure they had during the week if they did not have pastoral visits, we had a reasonable expectation that they would be fresh on Sunday and the chance that they would have worked on a solid sermon for the service was quite ample.

There were consequences for the economy and they were no less salubrious.  People’s lives were dominated by productive engagements and I have no reason to believe that we did not find favour with God.  Indeed, some of the best schools and hospitals back then were mission-owned, both Christian and Islamic.

Back then, places of worship strove to be worthy sacred spaces.  Their architecture sought to “declare the glory of God” and the accoutrements of worship proclaimed God’s majesty.  We had serious theologians and even the literalism of African-instituted churches did not completely shun intellectual engagement with scripture.  Ditto for various Islamic denominations.  The Ahmadiyya Movement-in-Islam, before a section of it, under pressure from Sunni orthodoxy, styled itself Anwar-ul-Islam, competed with Christian denominations and other groups to exert themselves in the uplift of their congregations without demanding that their members abandon their life strivings, the deployment of their talents for the betterment of themselves and their progeny and, instead, leave everything in God’s hands and await whatever God has in store for them.

This reckless abandonment of reason, this criminal handing over of lives to a God that already gave you, if scripture is to be believed, dominion over all things; this vacation of our ability to take charge of our lives and add stature to ourselves in spite of our radical insufficiency as humans is the ultimate blasphemy!

No thanks to this handing over of control over our lives, we follow the reckless tale of a Daddy G.O. who spun a tale of driving a non-electric vehicle without gas over a considerable distance.  I hate to think how many hapless, ordinary Nigerians have come to grief in the stupid belief that their unroadworthy vehicles would miraculously get them to their destinations.  We have charlatans who prey on the separation of our people from their senses by asking them to come to services for the characterization of which they have an inexhaustible store of hyperboles and catchphrases.  The country is literally drowning in an ocean of meaningless but catchy slogans announcing “delivery”, “salvation”, “overcoming”, “mountain of fire”, “latter rain”, “winning”, and the like. 

Worse still, these marathon harangues in the guise of services are held on workdays and during hours when our people should otherwise be at work. What God asks you to abandon the means of your upkeep, lie to your employers about where you are when you should be at work earning your keep, shut down your private business while you are busy falling into false ecstasies under the direction of latter-day sweet-talking fakers dubbed “soul-winners”?

Of course, our spurious but nattily-dressed windbag predators-taken-for-shepherds have to keep the flock addicted to God so that the latter would have no respite, no quiet moments when life-changing questions pop up in our heads and make us come to doubt about the tenor and direction of our lives.  The God noise must be continually dinned into our ears such that the possibility of considering alternative ways of managing our lives would never have room to present themselves to the front of our minds.  Worst of all, because most of the activities associated with this exponential expansion of God in our lives are of a brutally unproductive type—what tangible products can you make at a revival service on a workday or at a night vigil?—our economy has not witnessed any concurrent expansion.  The only guarantee we have is the sapping of the productive energies of our common folk often to the detriment of their families, especially children.

No thanks to this God-addiction and the simultaneous abandonment of the capacity for a self-driven life, only goodness knows how many Nigerians have been killed by “Not My Portion” and how many more are going to succumb to needless death because they would not accept their portion, whatever it is, and steer it in the best way possible for them and their loved ones.  Disease, illness, misfortunes, accidents are all, without exception, part of the human portion, however you cut it.

The two religions under reference in this piece that are ravaging our people hold that we—our very humanity—were created in sin.  And it is a consequence of our having lost our ever so fleeting divine identity that toil, disease, hunger, pain, and so on, became defining elements of our inescapable portion.  Only a god\God, never any human, can be without this sorry aspect of its portion. 

So, why do these crazy prophets and prophetesses keep telling us that what makes us human, under the very definition offered by their scripture, is not our portion?  This can only be part of an elaborate swindle for, as theology, it is demonstrably false.  If I read my bible correctly, God’s grace is not for the asking nor is it for purchase by good works and the capacity to pray for hours non-stop.  Nigerians should stop behaving like children and cease believing false nonsense from too-clever-by-half, self-designing, power-hungry holy men and women.

Meanwhile, the originators of Islam spend good money building some of the best hospitals in the world.  Have Nigerian Muslims followed goings on in Saudi Arabia, lately?  For Saudis, whether or not they are well is not “Allah’s will”, per se.  Only after they have put into gear the best care money can buy do they resign to their fate.  When the immediate past guardian of the holy places in Mecca was battling ill-health in the dying years of his rule, he did not summon the best marabouts from the Islamic world.  He headed on several occasions to that nest of godlessness, the United States, to be treated.  Their hospitals are staffed by the best-trained personnel that money can buy from anywhere in the world regardless of their religious orientation.

Israel, to which we are happy—remember we are “a happy people”—to transfer a nice chunk of our patrimony to pay for some ill-advised pilgrimages of dubious religious value, has never pretended that the Negev is not a desert or that the challenge posed by this fact was not its portion.  Instead, it turned the desert into a breadbasket.  Surely, it did not do this with prayers nor did it do so under the influence of a band of self-styled prophets and prophetesses and “Daddy and Mummy G.O.s” who are on first-name terms with God.  Yet, it is home to all the original holiest shrines of the two rampaging religions in our land.  But Nigerians with their God-addled brains prefer to spend their children’s inheritance in fake acts of piety that can only make God continue to view our kind with utter contempt. 

There is more.  Our airwaves now are saturated with brain-killing noise, exceeding ugliness, mind-numbing drivel, and absolutely stunted language in the form of religious broadcasts, ministry announcements, and mediocre music in the name of gospel singing.  Our cities are now visibly blighted by posters, billboards, signposts, all proclaiming the availability of dial-a-miracle centres, funny-looking “Daddy and Mummy G.O.s” peddling snake oil in the guise of deliverance, salvation and sundry other outcomes that are designed to ensure that the preachers’ wants—and those wants can be obscene in their excessiveness—are met “in Jesus’ name”, no less!  Private jets for ministry, anyone!  My mother, a Christian herself, in utter disgust, recently remarked to me, that the followers of a certain Daddy G.O. are now certified blasphemers who are more inclined to obey their leader than obey God!  As the Yorùbá would say: “Wọ́n ti gba wèrè mẹ́sìn!” [They have mixed worship with lunacy!]

Our creative juices no longer flow.  Our language and diction now reflect the accursed stiltedness of an unimaginative religiosity.  Our bookstores are more than two-thirds filled with a whole library—a veritable assault on our dwindling forests—of pretentious garbage, much of it I am sure plagiarized from their Euro-American equivalents who pioneered this path to get-rich-quick schemes founded on the bent and broken backs of unsuspecting ordinary folk.

Our education system is now captive to this blight the perpetrators of which do not even know the inspiration for their interminable proclamation of the virtues of “religious education”.  For those who do not know, the insistence on giving Africans religious education did not come from a noble place.  I can say it with authority that it did not come from that original missionary cohort led by Samuel Ajayi Crowther who were more concerned to move Africa to modernity. 

It came, instead, from the warped mind of Lord Lugard, the one we still lionize by having one of our governors proudly operate from a house named in his honour.  He it was who said that British colonialism in Africa should not repeat the mistake it made in India where it gave Indians “education of the intellect”, as he styled it, which they later used to undermine British rule in their land. 

In Africa, he insisted that, given what he called the African’s natural proclivity for lying, the only education fit for Africans was a religion-inflected one that he called “character education”.  To think that in the 21^st century we would still be carrying the bag for our racist colonizers is the ultimate indictment of our God-addicted intellectuals and policy-makers.  We are still reaping the fruits of this unfortunate direction. 

The irony is that the more God-intoxicated we have become, the further removed we have become from our moral compass.  The cruel outcome is that we are doubly shortchanged: we have neither morals nor knowledge.  India is preparing a mission to the moon and now gives us alms.  Simultaneously, Nigeria, indeed, Africa, are headed for perdition afflicted with a terminal case of God-addiction.

I would not like to be misunderstood.  As someone who spent 22 years teaching at Jesuit institutions in the United States and a product of a mission school in Nigeria, I am well-placed to appreciate what excellent education religion-inspired institutions can produce.  But they do not offer religion-inflected or religious education.  It is why some of the topmost research institutions in the world are religion-derived or religion-affiliated.  But their business is education, not what goes on behind the closed-doors of their adult students’ dorms. 

Unfortunately, such is the reach of God-addiction that even the denominations that used to do what I just said have joined the ranks of miracle summoners.  Their educational institutions have become citadels of mystification.  The universities founded by these God-peddlers are more notorious for invading the privacy of their students, violating their personal dignity, and treating them like children, all in the name of ensuring that they are equipped with morals than they are noted for their giant strides in research or producing first-rate graduates who will change the world.

Why bother to organize your sports?  God will take care of it.  Just pray harder.  Why care about your healthcare system?  “God is in total control.”  In any case, whatever disease you may have cannot be real: it is not your portion.  By the time you come to terms with your portion, the condition can no longer be managed.

Nigerian adults reserve the right to throw their lives away.  Indeed, the world would most likely be a better place with such a thinning of the herd.  But it is a crime to incorporate our children in this mess.  It is for the sake of the children and thereby the future of our race that I ask that we consider a break from God.

The two religions under reference in this piece that are ravaging our people hold that we—our very humanity—were created in sin.  And it is a consequence of our having lost our ever so fleeting divine identity that toil, disease, hunger, pain, and so on, became defining elements of our inescapable portion.  Only a god\God, never any human, can be without this sorry aspect of its portion. So, why do these crazy prophets and prophetesses keep telling us that what makes us human, under the very definition offered by their scripture, is not our portion?  This can only be part of an elaborate swindle for, as theology, it is demonstrably false.  If I read my bible correctly, God’s grace is not for the asking nor is it for purchase by good works and the capacity to pray for hours non-stop.  Nigerians should stop behaving like children and cease believing false nonsense from too-clever-by-half, self-designing, power-hungry holy men and women.

Meanwhile, the originators of Islam spend good money building some of the best hospitals in the world.  Have Nigerian Muslims followed goings on in Saudi Arabia, lately?  For Saudis, whether or not they are well is not “Allah’s will”, per se.  Only after they have put into gear the best care money can buy do they resign to their fate.  When the immediate past guardian of the holy places in Mecca was battling ill-health in the dying years of his rule, he did not summon the best marabouts from the Islamic world.  He headed on several occasions to that nest of godlessness, the United States, to be treated.  Their hospitals are staffed by the best-trained personnel that money can buy from anywhere in the world regardless of their religious orientation.

Israel, to which we are happy—remember we are “a happy people”—to transfer a nice chunk of our patrimony to pay for some ill-advised pilgrimages of dubious religious value, has never pretended that the Negev is not a desert or that the challenge posed by this fact was not its portion.  Instead, it turned the desert into a breadbasket.  Surely, it did not do this with prayers nor did it do so under the influence of a band of self-styled prophets and prophetesses and “Daddy and Mummy G.O.s” who are on first-name terms with God.  Yet, it is home to all the original holiest shrines of the two rampaging religions in our land.  But Nigerians with their God-addled brains prefer to spend their children’s inheritance in fake acts of piety that can only make God continue to view our kind with utter contempt. 

There is more.  Our airwaves now are saturated with brain-killing noise, exceeding ugliness, mind-numbing drivel, and absolutely stunted language in the form of religious broadcasts, ministry announcements, and mediocre music in the name of gospel singing.  Our cities are now visibly blighted by posters, billboards, signposts, all proclaiming the availability of dial-a-miracle centres, funny-looking “Daddy and Mummy G.O.s” peddling snake oil in the guise of deliverance, salvation and sundry other outcomes that are designed to ensure that the preachers’ wants—and those wants can be obscene in their excessiveness—are met “in Jesus’ name”, no less!  Private jets for ministry, anyone!  My mother, a Christian herself, in utter disgust, recently remarked to me, that the followers of a certain Daddy G.O. are now certified blasphemers who are more inclined to obey their leader than obey God!  As the Yorùbá would say: “Wọ́n ti gba wèrè mẹ́sìn!” [They have mixed worship with lunacy!]

Our creative juices no longer flow.  Our language and diction now reflect the accursed stiltedness of an unimaginative religiosity.  Our bookstores are more than two-thirds filled with a whole library—a veritable assault on our dwindling forests—of pretentious garbage, much of it I am sure plagiarized from their Euro-American equivalents who pioneered this path to get-rich-quick schemes founded on the bent and broken backs of unsuspecting ordinary folk.

Our education system is now captive to this blight the perpetrators of which do not even know the inspiration for their interminable proclamation of the virtues of “religious education”.  For those who do not know, the insistence on giving Africans religious education did not come from a noble place.  I can say it with authority that it did not come from that original missionary cohort led by Samuel Ajayi Crowther who were more concerned to move Africa to modernity. 

It came, instead, from the warped mind of Lord Lugard, the one we still lionize by having one of our governors proudly operate from a house named in his honour.  He it was who said that British colonialism in Africa should not repeat the mistake it made in India where it gave Indians “education of the intellect”, as he styled it, which they later used to undermine British rule in their land. 

In Africa, he insisted that, given what he called the African’s natural proclivity for lying, the only education fit for Africans was a religion-inflected one that he called “character education”.  To think that in the 21^st century we would still be carrying the bag for our racist colonizers is the ultimate indictment of our God-addicted intellectuals and policy-makers.  We are still reaping the fruits of this unfortunate direction. 

The irony is that the more God-intoxicated we have become, the further removed we have become from our moral compass.  The cruel outcome is that we are doubly shortchanged: we have neither morals nor knowledge.  India is preparing a mission to the moon and now gives us alms.  Simultaneously, Nigeria, indeed, Africa, are headed for perdition afflicted with a terminal case of God-addiction.

I would not like to be misunderstood.  As someone who spent 22 years teaching at Jesuit institutions in the United States and a product of a mission school in Nigeria, I am well-placed to appreciate what excellent education religion-inspired institutions can produce.  But they do not offer religion-inflected or religious education.  It is why some of the topmost research institutions in the world are religion-derived or religion-affiliated.  But their business is education, not what goes on behind the closed-doors of their adult students’ dorms. 

Unfortunately, such is the reach of God-addiction that even the denominations that used to do what I just said have joined the ranks of miracle summoners.  Their educational institutions have become citadels of mystification.  The universities founded by these God-peddlers are more notorious for invading the privacy of their students, violating their personal dignity, and treating them like children, all in the name of ensuring that they are equipped with morals than they are noted for their giant strides in research or producing first-rate graduates who will change the world.

Why bother to organize your sports?  God will take care of it.  Just pray harder.  Why care about your healthcare system?  “God is in total control.”  In any case, whatever disease you may have cannot be real: it is not your portion.  By the time you come to terms with your portion, the condition can no longer be managed.

Nigerian adults reserve the right to throw their lives away.  Indeed, the world would most likely be a better place with such a thinning of the herd.  But it is a crime to incorporate our children in this mess.  It is for the sake of the children and thereby the future of our race that I ask that we consider a break from God.

A COUNTRY OF HONORIFICS, BUT NO HONOUR

Not too long ago, a report in the social section of one of our national dailies caught my eye.  One of the celebrants was identified as “Princess, Olori, Deaconess X”.  Of course, I have been around long enough to know that such collocations are standard fare in my homeland.  Yet, it caught my eye.  More recently, I discovered via another public announcement that Town Planners, too, have joined architects, and sundry other professionals—pharmacists, engineers, etc.—in self-identifying as such in their designation in all spheres of life way beyond the confines of their professional memberships.

No doubt, we are too familiar, those of us who travel to other African countries and interact with other Africans in various situations across the globe, with the many jokes about our love of titles in this neck of the global human woods.  Beyond the jokes lies the ugly fact that surreptitiously, and quite firmly, we have transitioned into a country drowning under the baggage of honorifics while the phenomenon of honour, the very idea that the honorific is designed to tag, to symbolize, to mark, has become less and less a presence in our personal, professional or, most importantly, collective lives.  This is the theme I wish to expound upon in the rest of this discussion.

Time was, at least, in Yorùbá culture with which I am exceedingly familiar, when death was preferable to living in ignominy.  There are multiple variations on this theme in the culture’s usages.  It was said that when a military general was cornered, rather than capitulate, he would eat a leopard’s liver.  The belief was that the liver was lethal.  In both cases, what is under reference is an insistence that there was no substitute for honour—living your life above reproach, keeping your word, refraining from behaviour that would tarnish your reputation for clean, honest living, characterized by consideration for others, scruples and staying within the bounds of decency—even if you are the privileged owner of untold riches, high office, multiple titles, widespread popularity, and such like.  The idea is that honorifics—the fact that you are a chief many times over, you are of the professional class, etc.—are no more than empty shells once they become bereft of the honour that is supposed to be their content, the real root of which the honorific flower is merely an adornment.

I argue that the proliferation of honorifics—chief, alhaji, Jerusalem pilgrim, town planner, architect, pharmacist, engineer, pastor, general overseer, supreme evangelist, bishop, archbishop, alfa, and so on, and so forth—in our life, public and private, is in inverse proportion to the increasing dearth of honour in our lives.  Ordinarily, when you are styled a professor, for example, you are supposed to “profess” and be known for what you profess—a discovery, a method, a point of view, a specific theory, and the like.  The honorific, “professor”, is only as good as the honour that is holder embodies.  Otherwise, there is no difference between Professor Peller or Professor Y.K. Ajao and the professors who have earned their plaudits through the distinction that attends their strivings in their chosen fields.  “Architect”, the honorific, is a hollow shell if its holder is a lousy professional, exhibits no professional ethics, and has no distinction whatsoever attaching to her commissions.  The celebrated architects in the world are not so celebrated because they go by the moniker, “architect”; rather, the solidity, originality, beauty and utility of their works are the stuff of which their honour is made.  When you are an officer in the armed services, you are supposed to be “an officer and a gentleman” whose bearing and acting are meant to be characterized by a recognition of bounds beneath which you don’t fall.

When you are a chief, honour demands that you be the head and not the sole of the feet dedicated to waddling in puddles or walking on the ground.  When your interactions do not evince the superior etiquette and ethics identified with such a title, what we are left with is the monk-less hood.

Think of yet another honorific that the country is awash in: pastor.  With a surfeit of pastors, the country is not comforted.  All manners of hustlers, tricksters, beggars are not only “men and women of God”, called by whom we can’t be too sure but are all too ready to exploit the faith people have that pastors are imbued with honour that grounds their titles, of that we can be certain.

If any more evidence be needed, and this takes us back to the news that triggered off these reflections, that we no longer value honour but instead are fully vested in the vacuity of honorifics, here it is.  Why is being a princess not enough?  Apparently, the honour of being and living as a princess does not suffice; you must add to it “Olori” and “Deaconess”.  “Professor” is no longer an embodiment of self-justifying attainment and attractor of requisite respect and honour in our society.  All and sundry must know that you are also an “engineer”, a “chief”, and, as is increasingly the case in our society, “reverend” or “pastor”.  The pride of a professor, when it is not a chieftaincy, is to have newly introduced acquaintances affirm: “You are the author of …” as they reel out those works\work of yours that make them feel honoured to be in your presence.

This unfortunate penchant has not left our “traditional rulers” unaffected.  To take the Yorùbá example alone, it is no longer just enough for our oba to be designated “Aláyélúwà”.  Such is their own addiction to honorifics that they do not realize how ridiculous to be tagged “His Imperial Majesty” when you or your predecessors never built much less ran an empire.  Why do you need any more meaningless titles when, according to the legitimating principles of your autochthonous traditions, you are the owner of the world and being itself?  But such is the lure of honorifics that every “ori adé” in Yorùbá is busy trying to outdo the other in terms of whose title is bigger than the others'.

There is no better metaphor for the decreasing role of honour in our lives than the proliferation of hoods at all levels and in all crannies of our society.  The more people adorn themselves in ridiculous-looking academic gowns, the less educated we have become.  What is more, as academic gowns multiply, so have academic dishonesty, sexual harassment, embezzlement of funds by all manner of functionaries at our institutions, examination fraud and motley other malpractices.  Most of all, our knowledge repository keeps getting depleted.

What continues to befuddle me is how, instead of pausing and asking what is going\gone badly wrong, we continue to multiply our addiction to honorifics as the younger generation, too, begins to mistake the hood for the monk.  The country is now home to a plethora of nondescript awards, prizes and dubious recognitions.  Our illiterate functionaries revel in being dubbed “man of the year”, “governor of the year”, and so on.  No one bothers to check much less establish the bona fides of the awarding outfits.  Our bankers behave like primary school kids giddy with awards that a moment’s thought would have shown that the so-called recognition is an infantilization of their kind.  When was the last time a South Korean Central Bank governor or his Belgian counterpart put on a dunce cap to accept some dubious “Central Banker of the Year” honours?  No, they are busy adding content to their stations and having their honour thereby deepened without the distraction of meaningless honorifics.  The only honour that should matter is that their policies work and they deliver on the promise of their office to make life meaningful for their people.  It is also why some decline those prizes and recognitions because having people celebrate their work is more than sufficient for them.  Think of all our multiple award-winning honorees who have been shown to be no more than common crooks, be they bankers, police and military officers, vice chancellors of universities and so on.  Think of all the pastors who have betrayed the trust of their flock either in playing fast and loose with institutional funds or the bodies and minds of their followers that they have repeatedly abused.  Sexual harassers in our academic institutions or at workplaces often have lofty titles that, heaven help you if you fail to address them properly, they think are emblematic of and deserving of respect.  All too often, in our mistaking honorifics for honour, we mistake the hood for the monk.

Finally, eléèébú ni mí, mo mọ èébúù mi, as the Yorùbá would say.  For those who know me as ‘Malam” and might think that I, too, am invested in an honorific, I have a caveat.  To the extent that it is an honorific either for a teacher or a gentleman, I plead guilty as charged.  I hope that those with whom I interact in either or both respects come away thinking that I strive to be a good instance of that general kind.  For the rest, ‘Malam’ is, for me, a nickname, no more.  Absolutely nothing rides on it.

Is it too much to look forward to a time when, as a people, we might begin again to reacquaint ourselves with honour and dare to truncate our investment in honorifics?  I can only hope not.