Oshomole & the Nigerian Aberration

By

Tochukwu Ezukanma

Tochukwu Ezukanma writes from Lagos, Nigeria.

maciln18@yahoo.com

 

Ordinarily, the man of the year is the most important achiever of the year; a man who exceptionally distinguished himself in some field of endeavor. Some individuals are so renowned and the import of their achievements so far reaching that they were considered not just men of the year, but men of the century or the decade. For example, Winston Churchill was the Man of the Century, that is, the 20th century and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Man of the Decade, that is, the decade of the 1980s.

 

Undoubtedly, the world’s Man of the Year for 2008 is Barack Obama. He is also the Man of the Decade, that is, the first decade of the 21st century. Except that nobody can so early in the century predict what other wonders the century has in stock, it would have been reasonable to consider him the Man of the 21st Century. It was a monumental, unimaginable feat for a Black man to become the president of the United States of America. I could not have, by any stretch of the imagination, believed that it was possible in the 21st century. It was not just a Black American, but an African becoming the president of America

 

In Western nations, with the exception of Germany, citizenship is a cultural phenomenon. You are a citizen of where you are born and then most likely will be acculturated and socialized. In the African concept, citizenship is determined by ancestral lineage. You are a citizen of where your parents or at least your father is from. So, to the Africans, Obama is a Kenyan. For a Kenyan born in the USA to become the president of the United States of America was the dream of Martin Luther King Jr. coming true on a hitherto inconceivably grand scale. Martin Luther King Jr., that foremost Black American civil rights leader, talked about his dream of an America where people will be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

 

The search for a Man of the Year in Nigeria must be a daunting task. Our national character made for a dearth of achievers. For lofty minds, those disposed to refined attainments, the object of life is moral worth and fame. Years of official brutality and thievery vulgarized the Nigerian temperament. To vulgar temperaments material gain and pleasure are the primary aim of existence. And these negate enlightened accomplishments.

 

To cast a critical eye on the academia and expect to sift out the high-flier of the year will seem reasonable. After all, it is our bastion of intellectualism. However, it will immediately prove the wrong place to look. Like most Nigerians, the supposed polymaths that inhabit this realm have lost their sense of mission. Caught in the hedonism and wealth-neurosis of the Nigerian society, they are too distracted by the pursuit for money and instant gratification to focus on the demands of their profession.  

 

Discontent with the inherently scholarly and prestigious, but modest lifestyle of their profession, they covet the opulent lifestyle of the business tycoon. Devising ways to make quick money, they forsook the transcendence of an honorable profession to wallow in trivialities like “sorting out”, selling of handouts and demanding bribes from their students. Not surprisingly, therefore, no Nigerian university is listed among the top 50 universities in Africa, or the first 7000 universities in the world.  

 

To venture into our churches for the same search will equally prove a mistake. In spite of their higher calling, the men of God failed to cling to the weightier issues of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They became entrapped in the materialism of this world. With their prosperity doctrine, they shifted the emphasis of their Christianity from the central theme of Christianity (salvation) to that indispensable ingredient of worldliness (money). This perversion of the Christian doctrine engendered the amassing of enormous wealth by pastors and encouraged the false, but psychologically satisfactory belief among believers that the object of Calvary was to guarantee believers wealth and its associated good life on earth.

 

To rummage through the ranks of the politicians for an achiever will be a fantastic blunder. The political scene is studded with the shady, sleazy, and spooky. The generality of our elected officials rigged their way into power, and have shown no qualms in reducing the state coffers to personal bank accounts. So, it seemed the wrong place to find the Man of the Year.

 

Paradoxically, a politician, Adams Oshomole is the Nigerian Man of the Year for 2008. Ironically, Adams Oshomole played no exceptional role in the year 2008. His court victory in itself was not a colossal achievement because judges reach their verdicts based on evidence and there was no want of evidence of rigging in the Edo State gubernatorial election of 2007. As a recently installed governor, he is yet to provide any basis for assessing his performance as a governor. His fabled struggle against a greedy and amoral oligarchy was in the past. That should have won him the award then. Why did a man who played no dazzling role in a given year emerge the man of the year of that particular year?

 

It is because the moral and ethical collapse of the Nigerian society reduced her to an anomaly. She became a nation where universal aberrations are the norms and worldwide normality is either abnormal or strange. Nigerian politics is a citadel of mediocrity. It is made up of a noticeable number of those that are not just ignorant, but most disturbingly, unwilling to learn. Thus, a relatively educated man that had proved his mettle in something laudable, labor activism - crusade against social injustice - is an outstanding politician. Elections are stage managed by political godfathers in the interests of their political lackeys.  So, an independent-minded man with no godfather that won an electoral victory is a trail blazer. Politicians in Nigeria are flamboyant and arrogant men decked in colorful and sumptuously garnished agbadas. Then, that politician who can by his deportment and sartorial taste identify with the common man is an iconoclast.  

 

The political elite are indifferent to the worsening economic plight of the people they purportedly serve; therefore, a politician who identifies with the problems of the people is extraordinary. Elected officials in Nigeria cannot fathom the concept of power being subordinated to the public will, and hence accountable to the electorate. Thus, it is uncharacteristic for a governor to understand that his power is subject to popular will and therefore, invariably accountable to the people.   

 

If you are outstanding and extraordinary, a trailblazer and an iconoclast, and you can grasp that which is unfathomable to the generality of the Nigerian politicians, then, you are in a class by yourself. You are a constellation of distinctions: an Ubermensch. And of course, the uncontestable Man of the Year.