Still, in defence of lasting value

The juxtaposition of person and place and the merging of distinct, uneven identities provides a unique instance of the ways one person could extol a whole town, the curious manner a tree could make a forest.

And of course, all this was happening when the magic of Zik of Africa, Obafemi Awolowo, Chike Obi, D.O. Fagunwa ruled the airwaves. All kinds of myths emerged around these names and their Ekiti counterparts listed above, myths which gathered strength and girth as they rolled along the boulevards of time . Absolutely edifying were the personal odysseys of many of these individuals, the different ways they triumphed over their travails. Take the case of Afe Babalola who, owing to financial indigence, took and passed all his degree examination at home, and who, today, is founder and proprietor of a flourishing university. There is the fabulous story of Ojo Ugbole who, too poor to buy books, would simply saunter into the bookshop, pick up the required book, read and commit it to memory there and then, proceed to the classroom and excel in test based on that book! Our juvenal realities derived both fillip and fire from their myths as we strove to be like these prominent individuals and replicate their sterling accomplishments.

Yes, education was the core value and driving dream of the Ekiti of my youth. And I, standing before you today, am a grateful beneficiary of the Ekiti Ideal. Many fathers leased out  their cocoa farms; many mothers sold their favourite clothes to fund their children’s education. It was universally seen as the worthiest investment, as demonstrated clearly in the following  song, which was one of my mother’s favourites:

Elu o e

Elu o eee

Elu o aaa

Elu o aaa

Ku ‘ku ba ti mo mo p’omo mi lule oko o    If death does not kill my children in my husband’s house

Mo ti a p’itan ijo mo je o

I will one day tell the story of when I had enough to eat

Mo ti a p’itan ijo mom un o

I will one day tell the story of when I had enough to drink

Mo ti a s’eye Ologun Tisa o

I will be the proud mother of the Gallant Teacher

Particularly significant in this song is the singer’s aspiration to become ‘eye Tisa’ (Teacher’s mother), a clear indication of the high esteem in which the teacher was held in those days. An institutional figure whose role and impact went beyond the classroom by virtue of his enviable learning and education, the teacher was regarded as an embodiment of enlightenment, a community leader, public letter-writer/reader, consultant on matters many and varied, disciplinarian of the community’s wayward children, who also sometimes doubled as lay reader or choir master in the community church. In many communities, the Teacher’s pantry was regularly stocked with all manner of farm products as a token of appreciation of and gratitude for his teacherly duties and other services to society. Yes, indeed, time there was when the Teacher was both gallant and glorious. And Ekiti society was the better for it.

The Ekiti saw education as fortune-changer and tool of empowerment, the only way out of their land-locked lot with its rural privations and limited opportunities. People worked for it, hoped for it, prayed for it. Permanently etched in my memory is one of the events which occurred in Ikere in December 1971, during the Ikere Students Union public service drive. As Secretary to the Union, I was leader of one of the bob-a-job groups, armed with hoes, machetes, brooms, buckets, and all manner of tools,  ‘jobbing’ all over the town for donations to our bursary fund – an ISU initiative designed to provide  modest financial relief for needy and deserving Ikere students. As our group trooped through Ikere streets, townspeople stood by the roadside greeting ‘In okun o; In sere o’; and praying ‘A ye in o; Uku a pa in’ (Greetings. Thank you. It will be well with you. May you live long); with the women intoning this particular supplication ‘Ori mi, jo mo mi sayiye; mo jan an mu temi s’apinle’ (My God, let my children succeed; don’t let my own fortune become an additional bonus for others) . When we got to a compound in Iro quarters, greeted the family head, explained our mission, and were about to commence the clearance of the bush around the house and sweeping the dirty patch behind the kitchen, the man hailed us to a halt, and shouted ‘Abaekere, i a o’ (Young man, come here). A sully-looking boy emerged from the house and the family head, his father, requested us to ‘ko ri ire ran’ (infect him with your good fortune/success). ‘Asasukuru ni’ (He is a truant), the man continued; ‘In ba mu sure koo, koun naa yo ri bi tin in’ (Help me pray for him so that he too can be like you’. Whereupon yours sincerely went from  bob-a-jobber to priest, and a chorus of Ase, Amin pervaded the early morning atmosphere of the neighbourhood. But our advocacy went beyond mere prayers. I drew the young boy to my side and asked what was his problem with school. ‘Tisa ra i na niyan yiye’ (Our teacher canes people too much), he complained. We counselled him to stop doing things that usually attracted the teacher’s cane; to work hard and be of good character. We also told the father to see the teacher. The cloud on the young boy’s face cleared. He promised to mend his ways. Years later an acquaintance gave me the happy news that Abakekere had become a university undergraduate.

This was the situation once upon a time. Education was Ekiti’s prime value and the acquisition of it was the supreme goal. The educated person was a respected, but the truly revered were the exceptionally brainy. At Christ’s School, the Oxford of Ekiti, the names of sterling academic achievers were etched in our memory’s hall of fame and passed on from generation to generation like invaluable legends. Who could pass through Christ’s School  in those days without hearing about the exploits of  the likes of Olukayode Osuntokun, Segun Aribatise, Kayode Obembe (then known as Ojo Lawrence), and  Wuraola Olaofe, all of who garnered A1  in all of their eight WAEC subjects  in their respective years; or Akin Oyebode whose performance in the Higher School Certificate exam of 1966 was one of the first stories of academic heroism I heard when I arrived at Christ’s School the following year for the same course?  These achievements  went a long way in confirming the Agidimo Citadel  as one of Nigeria’s preeminent institutions, and Ekiti as a region which softened the soil for the blooming of exemplary academic accomplishments . Remember that all this happened in an era when examination malpractices were strange to our educational system; when miracle centres had not made their infamous/criminal entry,  and unvarnished integrity was the crowning glory of the West African Examination Council.

But all this is now upon a time. Today a new god rules the waves from the nether world of nescience, a blindfold across its face, in its hand a spiked cudgel caked with dollops of the human brain. It hears no voice except its own. The book is its implacable enemy; enlightened discourse its deafening adversary. Permit me to quote a few lines from ‘The Spirit of Ikogosi’, my keynote lecture five years ago, not long after the era of darkness the like of which we have just been through in the past four years:

The book lost its allure, knowledge its aura, enlightenment its sparkle. For the first horrible time, I heard some Ekiti people ask, as is the wont in other parts of Nigeria: ‘Na bukuru we go chop?’. The Fountain of Knowledge was muddled by political madness; its mountainous fountainhead was bulldozed by political bestiality. Thus, even in Ekitiland, Iwe du un aripose/Aogo sukuru dun iparifo agba. (The book became an object so repulsive/The school bell sounded like an empty barrel).

Hand in hand with the precipitous fall in the value we place on education and rapid decline in its quality went a corresponding tumble of other elements on our grid of values. Poor teacher education led to poor teaching skills; poor pedagogic practices and half-baked, unemployable graduates. Education lost its purpose, then its attraction. The book lost its bounce.  Ignorance thrust up itself as a viable, unavoidable virtue. As the ranks of the unemployed swelled with the addition of the unemployable, school drop-out rates skyrocketed and our motor parks, marketplaces and other open spaces were turned into crowded haunts by desperate youths with ignorance in their heads, anger in their hearts, and anomy in their intent. These are the fodder for apocalyptic social conflagrations, ready and grateful recruits when diabolic politicians need murderous thugs at election times, for the elimination of political opponents, or the sacking of a sitting court of law, the tearing of the judge’s robes, and the destruction  of legal documents. These are the agents you need when you want to block all access roads to a whole state, or terrorize those luckless enough to be your political opponents.

The barbarism and jungle justice witnessed in this state in the past four years is, without doubt, a consequence of the decimation of those long-enshrined Ekiti values that have featured so prominently in this lecture. All of a sudden illiteracy became so attractive, even desirable in a state where virtually every family boasts a university graduate, and the designation ‘Professor’ used to rank close to highest in the order of  enviable titles. There grew a sickening mentality  that literally made you apologetic for being ‘too educated’. Our artisans, transport workers, okada operators, and others less privileged largely due to the bottom of the pit to which a satanically unjust  society has thrown them, were inveigled into thanking their stars for not having been corrupted by education. They were turned into the army for the enactment of wrong-headed, ill motivated civil disobedience, implementation of arbitrary political fiats and enforcement undemocratic edicts. A one-man authoritarian rule emerged that was strange even to the spirit of Nigeria’s ‘nascent democracy’. The incubus of demagoguery unleashed itself in a way it has never done in any other state in Nigeria. Ekiti became the laughing stock of the nation, the hellhole of country bumpkins ruled by fiat and fear, subservient like oxen who adore their yoke. Friends and compatriots from other states called me, asking, with a combination of shock and disconcertment: hey Niyi, what happened to the Ekti spirit we used to know; where is that enlightened bearing, that admirable pride, that stubbornly interrogative audacity, that  have come to distinguish the Ekiti character for so long?  A professor friend of mine who is one of the most erudite and most respectable sons of Ekiti jocularly threatened to tell the world about his intent to defect from our eviscerated state to one of the luckier states in the southwest. Dark humour, you might say, but one that stings like a scorpion  of a particularly venomous breed.  How could Ekiti’s once impregnable rampart against political manipulation have collapsed so calamitously? Why were Ekiti people so mindlessly satisfied with so little? How could demagoguery have succeed and spread so blissfully in the state of university professors?

Demagoguery, that cheap and hollow populism manifests itself in various dramatic ways: the ruler who stops abruptly at the marketplace, bolts out of his air-conditioned SUV, with his security detail in hot pursuit, grabs an otita by the roast corn-seller’s spot, grabs a cob, and starts eating it, to the thunderous cheer of adulatory market folks, and the frenetic clicking of assorted press cameras, for pre-paid posting on the front page of the next day’s papers, and as top news item on prime-time television. The next port of call in another three months or so may be the ponmon-seller’s spot; and much later, the agbo jedijedi-seller’s joint. Demagoguery is a calculated pretence, a cynical, clever exploitation of people’s vulnerability, a diabolic play-acting that keeps the exploited eulogizing the opportunistic do-gooderism of the ruler while turning their gaze away from their impoverished plight and the thieving antics of the ruler whose very policies and actions/inactions have kept the people in the abyss of penury.

Demagoguery is a melodrama and farce with a settled plot and protocol of enactment. First, impoverish the people, then try to impress them with the gravity of your specious care and concern. Work your way into the vulnerable part of their consciousness; let them know how safe it is for them to leave their thinking to you to do for them. Mock their poverty with occasional toys, pittance, and other tokens. Do everything to estrange them from the truth about themselves and their condition; build yourself into a god-like inevitability in the theology of their thinking; feed them with the lie that you are there to protect their interests, and you are the only one ordained to do so. Trick them into thinking – and believing – that in fighting for you they are also fighting for themselves.

Demagoguery is nothing but the ruler’s play on the intelligence of the people, his macabre dance on the grave of their dignity. The demagogue is, in soul, spirit, and design, a rabble-rouser. He derives his political capital and energy from manipulation and selfish control. For him to succeed in doing this, he has to constantly make a rabble out of the people. And as we all know, to rabble up a people is to dehumanize them, to deprive them of their right to genuine citizenhood.  The genuine leader is not one who joins the people in the pit for one ephemeral moment for a calculated photo-op, while pretending at being poor. Instead, he is the one who does everything  to lift them from that pit, to the point where they too can live and thrive as full human beings.