Tunji Ajibade; tunjioa@yahoo.com;
Very few comedy programmes on our TV stations retain my attention for any length of time. Lack of depth in creativity is one reason. The comedy series, Zone 222, gets my attention whenever I happen to find it airing though. The addition to the cast of veteran actor, Egbon Kunle Bamtefa, of the Fuji House of Commotion fame, got me laughing when I saw him in one of the more recent episodes. But Bamtefa is at the centre of the reason for this piece whose focus is the kind of message passed to viewers through different mediums, including this TV comedy series. I shall return to this point.
I’ve always been concerned about the kind of message anyone who’s in the public space disseminates. Values, morals, good character have become rare. Therefore, when people who are visible destroy what we have left, all of us should be concerned. It’s for this reason I’ve often wondered in private conversations why the lessons we were taught as children are largely lost when we become adults. We drop the virtues, but retain the vices. What we do in most cases are the very opposite of what we were taught in elementary school. For instance, I find it difficult to drop the wrap of any item on the floor, a residue of what is taught in elementary school. But I see people drop things on the sidewalk or out of the car. The reader can’t imagine how horrified I feel at such sights. Why? Some adults do this in the presence of their children and I wonder what examples they are setting. In any case, it’s in exercising restraints such as not doing anything anyhow that makes us different from the lower animals. More than anything, dropping wastes on the ground says a lot about you. Lack of self-discipline. Doing what’s right when there’s actually no sanction and no one watches takes a different kind of discipline. Of course, lack of discipline is fundamentally the reason we are where we are as a nation.
Another point I want to call attention to is the restraint people in the public space need to exercise so that they don’t pass wrong messages to the younger ones, especially. The regular reader of the page already knows what my views are when some in the public space say divisive things along ethnic and religious lines. That public figures criticise governments that they don’t like is not what I have issues with. People are free to send the usual insults to the administration that they hate. But in doing all of that, they should leave the ordinary folks out. For the ordinary folks aren’t the cause of the problem of this nation. It’s the elite in power who just won’t do what they should, and when crises arise (e.g. between farmers and herders) among our peoples as a result, they cast a whole tribe as demons, the cause of all of Nigeria’s problems. That anyone would see tribal affiliation as the issue is an interpretation I find baffling. Meanwhile, when the political class bands together at the national level to share positions and the national cake therefrom, tribe is never an issue. There’s no tribe whose members don’t cause local or external embarrassments for Nigeria. All anyone needs to do is check those who’re embarrassing us in either Dubai or South Africa, and see tribes whose members are all angels. Demonising ordinary folks from tribes other than ours has been the norm for decades. Public figures who continue to set such wrong examples for the younger generation can’t expect those of us who abhor it to keep mute.
The foregoing makes me return to the kind of message passed across especially on TV and in films. I recall a film in which the veteran actor, Taiwo Hassan (Ogogo), acted in the late 1990s. I walked in and met some younger people watching this particular film in which Hassan was a member of a gang of armed robbers. He made money and opted out. He became a respectable person in society, but his former gang members didn’t leave him alone. A stage came when they blackmailed him. His friends threatened to release recorded videos of some of their dealings together. Hassan didn’t want the name he had made to be soiled. So he committed suicide.
Hassan is a good actor and any film watcher would like him. The younger ones around me watching the film were sad; they wanted Hassan to live. I was convinced the character had to go with his ill-gotten wealth. But these younger ones argued that the character had changed and had become a good person, so he should live. I took my time to explain to them that if the storyline had pursued such a narrative, it would send the wrong message to the public. The origin of Hassan’s wealth and the do-good public image he cultivated later were rooted in blood, lives of other people taken through violent armed robbery attacks. I sympathised with the younger ones who liked the character of a good person that Hassan played late in the film. However, a thief must not be portrayed as good person under those circumstances. A society that projects such narrative destroys the very root of its existence.
Now, I return to Zone 222. Bamtefa was a professor in this particular episode, an eccentric one expectedly, especially from what we know of the roles he plays in most dramas in which he has featured over the years. The last time I saw Bamtefa in person was when my respected Egbon, Prof. Segun Ojewuyi, was still at the Drama Department of the University of Lagos in the early 1990s. Bamtefa used to come to UNILAG’s main auditorium for some drama events. Since then, he had become a household name for the believable character he had played across the years. In the episode of Zone 222 that I refer to, one of his students came to his office over a planned presentation. Bamtefa, the professor, didn’t like the idea. He chased the student away, and even threw the half of an orange he was about to eat at the student who hurriedly left the office. The professor walked across his office, bent down, took the fallen half of an orange, and blew on it extensively. At that point, I thought the image of a stingy professor which the director of the drama wanted viewers to see had been amply projected. But what followed was unbelievable. The professor ate the orange and declared that it even tasted better! This was too much.
I don’t know if it was the director of this drama who asked the professor to do this or Bamtefa used his own initiative. I worked under drama directors on stage in the 1990s and I knew directors were of the disposition that a professional actor knew what to do, and as such permitted them to express themselves. On this occasion, the extent to which the professor expressed himself was an overkill. The eating of this half of an orange should have been cut out at the editing stage. And this for the sake of children who watched and probably assumed it was fine to pick an item from the floor and eat it. It wasn’t fine.
This observation might be dismissed as a trivial thing. But the constant dismissal as unimportant the shooting down of our values and morals has brought this nation to where it is. What was done in that scene in Zone 222 was a destruction of six years of lessons in personal hygiene taught pupils in elementary schools. It is a destruction of the entire 1-18 years of lessons that parents typical teach their children at home. Mothers run to their toddlers on countless number of occasions and take from them items picked from the floor which such toddlers want to put in their mouths. Mothers’ patience is infinitely tested if their 1-3-year-olds have a habit of picking up items and putting them in their mouths. Such a thankless work that schools and parents perennially do has just been bungled, overturned in one minute of acting by a ‘professor’ in Zone 222.
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