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.
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