It is Thursday, October 1, 2015. I am writing these words, this column about six hours after the event I am about to reveal took place. I had just finished teaching my last class for the week at Emerson Hall. The class had gone very well and for this reason, I was in a pleasant mood. All teachers like their classes to go well no matter how long they have been teaching and how many teachers they have produced in the course of a long career. And there was also the fact that I was looking forward to a long “weekend” that would go beyond Sunday and Monday to Tuesday, the day on which my first class next week would take place. It was within the soft emotional glow of these pleasant thoughts that one of the students in the class that I had just taught approached me and with a warm, beaming smile said to me: “Happy anniversary, Prof”.
A little taken aback, I replied, “what anniversary”? realizing at the very instant that I asked the question that she is Nigerian and was referring to the anniversary of the country’s independence. And so before she could respond to my puzzling question, I said, “Oh, but of course, happy anniversary!” To this, I then added a rather mumbled explanation that my initial response of “what anniversary?” is a product of the fact that I normally do not remember birthday anniversaries, my own and our country’s included.
In the short conversation that followed this initial exchange with this young compatriot, the thing that stood out the most in my memory is the fact that she was very enthusiastic, very hopeful about many things “Nigerian”, so much so that she effectively sent a powerful if subliminal message to me that her state of mind, her euphoria distinctly reflected a generational outlook on the present historical period. She told me that she was in her senior year as a Biology major intending to go on to medical school with hopes of eventually qualifying and being certified as a medical doctor. She said that the majority of Nigerian-born students at Harvard were majoring in subjects that would lead to professions in medicine, engineering, law and business. She said mine was one of the very few courses in the Humanities she had taken in her three and half years at Harvard. She said that she is a member of the Nigerian Students Association and that they were planning a big gala in celebration of the country’s 55th anniversary on October 11 and I should please be sure to be there as guests were going to be regaled with many festive items like delectable Nigerian cuisine, music, a fashion show and a grand ball.
Oh, to be young and full of hope and a joyful openness to all of life’s possibilities again! This was undoubtedly the sentiment that I went away with earlier this afternoon after that conversation with this young student of mine. But closely following in the wake of this good-natured “envy” of the young by a man about to enter the eighth decade of his life was the recollection that throughout the first decade of our independence in the 1960s, I had also, like this young woman, been very hopeful, very sanguine about what the country, together with my sense of its place in Africa and the world, had in store for me and members of my generation who did well at school and university. Let me be very specific here.
When, at the end of the first decade of independence I graduated from U.I. I was not unaware of the fact that I was one of a tiny fraction of the members of my generation that had received a first-rate education that could take me to any educational or professional heights that I aspired to, not only in Nigeria but anywhere in the world. Over the decades, I have written extensively about the elitist privileges, together with the scholarships, that made possible the education that I received at U.I. as an undergraduate and in America as a graduate student. Additionally, I have written on countless occasions that my awareness of this elitism was, I hoped, neutralized by the fact that I and other members of the radicalized segments of our generation dedicated ourselves to extending the privileges from which had enormously benefitted to the less privileged groups and individuals in our society. However, as one decade succeeded another in the post-independence era, the realization gradually dawned on us that it was our fate to be the very last “fortunate” generation among the other generations of living Nigerians who, in the words of the title of this piece, are “older” than the country.
It is perhaps necessary at this stage in these reflections to clarify exactly what I have in mind in the phrase “older than the country” together with the observation that I belong to the very last “fortunate” generation among this composite cohort of Nigerians that are “older’ than the country. The phrase “older than the country” can be quite succinctly explained as a literal and perhaps even reductive understanding of the age of the country as appertaining only to the post-independence period. But we all know that with regard to the peoples and societies of which it is made, “Nigeria” is much, much older than 55! On this account, I and members of the small demographic group of Nigerians that are older than 55 – far less than 10% of the population – are not older than the country in any substantive sense. In other words, the “birth” of the nation is unlike the birth of an individual, any individual: one is subject to the biological determinism of one single life and its eventual demise; the other transcends biology and includes aeons of time and experience that come in stages or cycles of growth and decline, retrogression and renewal.
The phrase “the very last fortunate generation” among living Nigerians over the age 55 has its resonance within this idea of cycles of decline and renewal in the stages of the historical being and becoming of the country. Let me be very concrete about what I have in mind here. Only five years separated my graduation from U.I. and my return to the university as a young lecturer but within that very short space of time, all the privileges, all the conveniences and all the rituals of an Oxbridge-type education that we had enjoyed as undergraduates had vanished completely and forever in the experience of all subsequent generational cohorts of university students since that time. Some of the vanished privileges were trivial while some were decisive and life-changing. Let me give only one example of the more trivial and ridiculous dimensions of our “fortunate” generational experience: Sunday afternoon “tea” comprising tea or coffee as beverages, with cakes and ice cream as complements all consumed in unison with the Hall Master and the Wardens seated at the High Table. By the end of the 1968/69 session Kuti Hall, of which I was a resident member, was the only hall of residence that was still clinging to a strict observance of this ritual. But during the second term of that academic year, the hall authorities decided to follow the lead of the other halls of residence and do away with Sunday afternoon “tea”. We successfully revolted against the cessation of the ritual and to my eternal embarrassment I was one of the leaders of the revolt!
The real “fortune” of our experience as the very last generation to be truly privileged with regard to the conditions under which we were tutored can be gauged by the inestimable fact that we were the last set of Nigerian university students to receive a qualitative education that was the equal of university education anywhere else in the world. I should qualify this portentous claim by two observations. First, it is my belief, my fundamental article of faith that quality education should be the birth right, the civil right of all the young citizens of our country, of indeed all the countries of the world. Second, quality education did not vanish entirely from the Nigerian university system with my generation; it was just the case that as from around the late 1970s, you could find it only in bits and fragments that were unequally distributed among the faculties and lecturers of our universities. For instance, when I taught at both Ibadan and Ife between 1975 and 1987, most students knew which faculties were reputed to have good numbers of conscientious and dedicated lecturers and which faculties were deemed relatively indifferent to high standards of teaching and research. By contrast, in our day, virtually all faculties were deemed reputable; moreover, we had the environment, the facilities for quality education that was equal to any other national tertiary educational systems in the world.
In bringing these reflections to a close, I must now disclose the reason why my encounter with that student in my class earlier this afternoon of Thursday, October 1, 2015 sparked these thoughts in me. As we talked and she seemed to be proud of, and was rejoicing in how well Nigerian students at Harvard were doing, I wanted to gently remind her that Harvard students are some of the world’s most privileged students; I had an inclination to remind her that hundreds of thousands of university students in Nigeria and millions around our continent and other developing regions of the world do not have even the most elementary infrastructures and the environment conductive to the kind of education that could prepare them for the demands of the world of the 21st century. Of course, I did not utter any of these thoughts to the student; I did not have the heart to spoil her spontaneous celebration that seemed to me both personal and collective in the sense that she was speaking for herself as well as for other Nigerian-born students at Harvard.
This leads me to the most important point that I wish to make in these reflections on the 55th anniversary of our country’s independence. I am afraid it is a gloomy thought; it is a thought that puts a damper on any hopeful prospects Nigerians might or should be feeling in the wake of the change that came with the last presidential elections: revitalizing education is by far the toughest task that Buhari and his administration will face and I have very serious doubts that they will be up to the challenge. This challenge is far more daunting than the war against corruption and I don’t think the new administration is aware of this. Yes, there are other seemingly intractable challenges like widespread poverty, joblessness and insecurity of life and possessions in many parts of the country. Heaven knows that these other challenges are monumental in their own right. But the challenge of reforming and revitalizing education in our country from its current utterly broken state is the mother and the father of all the other challenges that Buhari, his administration and the new ruling party will face, but I don’t think they are in the least bit aware of this fact. This will be a topic that we shall be exploring in future essays in this column.
NATION
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