A Regime Of Illiterates, By Illiterates, For Illiterates, And The Rest Of US (1) by Prof Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

In his “The New Deal”, the late great Gil Scott-Heron intoned: “I’d said I was gonna write no more poems like this, but the dogs are in the streets….” Yes, I had promised myself to stop pointing out the negatives about our existence as a country. But it seems that our capacity for finding depths to plumb when I could have sworn that we had hit rock-bottom means that it would be next to impossible to keep my promise. No, human foibles and the stupidities of the American government and society at large kept Scott-Heron writing poems like that till he passed. I am more than proud to follow his lead. Except we be rid of the last louse, we cannot but have blood under our fingernails.”

Few who are knowledgeable about Nigeria and its affairs in the last two or so decades would deny that, pound-for-pound, the country must be in the front ranks of the countries with the highest number of degrees and other formal qualifications per capita in the world. And this not just because of the exponential growth of institutions handing out degrees by their thousands within its borders.

It is that Nigerians would go to the ends of the earth, hell even, to obtain a certificate, any certificate. As a result, the country is awash—I nearly said drowning—in a sea of formal qualifications across all demographic and economic sectors. Ordinarily one would expect that a country like that, one that even wrote into its constitution—such as it is—minimum educational qualifications for eligibility for elective offices across the length and breadth of the country, would do the most things right when it comes to running its affairs.

Unfortunately, a degree does not an educated person make. One sees a persistent disproportion between the proliferation of certificates and the quality of leadership in all areas of life in Nigeria. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the infiltration of university-educated types into the business of the country has witnessed the calamitous decline in the quality of the nature, level, and scope of services in all aspects of our life.

Over the years, I have often wondered why this has been so. Here is what I have come up with for an explanation. I am convinced that, contrary to received wisdom, the principal functions of public life in Nigeria—government and its related institutions, education system, health systems, agriculture, etc.—are designed by illiterates and run by same. It is a self-perpetuating regime of illiteracy with only the personnel changing from one set of operatives to another.

This is why successive occupiers of these institutions, their functionaries, from the president on down to the lowliest local government councilor, from the chief of defence staff to the newly-minted second lieutenant, from the primate of major church denominations and chief imams of major mosque congregations to the fresh inductee into either clergy, with all their fancy certificates in multiples, no less, form one of the largest coteries of illiteracies the world has ever seen. Notice how little change there was when we had our first doctorate holder as president.

If the knowledge of our functionaries is notable for its deficiencies, if the ranks of those who know better have no say in determining how things are, what we end up with is exactly what we have in Nigeria as I write this: a state of illiterates, designed by illiterates and run by illiterates for the benefit of illiterates. The rest, including the vast masses of our people who expect that their functionaries would at least have some idea of what they are doing, be damned!

I can only give you what I take to be representative samples of the ways of this confederacy of illiterates that passes for functionaries in my homeland. The question that keeps recurring as I write this is how, with all our talents and formal qualifications, we could be so consistently inept, inefficient, clueless, etc.—supply your own adjective. I can only hope that the irony is not lost on us that the country that proclaims its mostest in everything in the African continent could at the same time suck at the most basic task of organizing life and thought within its borders.

Where does one even begin? A plane flies into one of those prestige badges that have become a must-have for Nigeria’s beggared constituent states: an airport. I don’t think that one requires degrees and similar qualifications to know that a runway and an enclosed terminal do not an airport make. That if you are not flying those small planes that have their gangways built into their main doors, you need gangways for embarkation and disembarkation of aircraft. Yes, our local airlines fly jet aircraft but Bauchi Airport, on that fateful December day, had no working gangway for passengers to disembark on their arrival there in this most recent illustration of our capacity for high-class ineptitude.

The pilot, aware of his professional responsibilities, insisted on flying back to the port of origin. But, trust our multi-degreed, formally educated, Nigerian passengers, some of whom I am certain included the functionaries whose behaviour is referenced in this article. They asked the “officials”, not minding the pilot’s preference for the right thing—fly back if conditions were not right for disembarkation—to improvise. Lo and behold, a ladder materialized and our elite—few amongst the masses fly—disembarked. The cash-and-carry, let’s-get-it-done-somehow mentality that ruins our lives, corporate and personal, won the day, again. It is not beyond imagination that, given their conviction that that is how life goes in Nigeria, they might have turned their flowing garbs into rope ladders had those aluminium ladders not been available.

This incident encapsulates all, repeat all that is wrong with how we live, and die, as the elite segment of our society. To start with, airports now vie with universities as the latest-chieftaincy equivalents for states and communities in our land. Everyone can have one and with time, must have one. There is no rhyme or reason to why they are established, how they are built, who builds them, who will use them and, most important, how are they to be funded in perpetuity. After all, in the places from which we borrowed these ideas, building an airport is much more than laying asphalt and enclosing a terminal.

Aircraft are responsible for two major types of pollution that decent societies led by thinking men and women worry and talk endlessly about when they think it is time to have an airport built or expand an existing one: noise and air. Has anyone ever heard of a debate in Nigeria in the last half-century over whether or not to build an airport with due regard to the environmental impact of such a venture? When was the last time the public was consulted on whether or not an airport should be built, where, and so on? The elite decide they need an airport because their peers in other states have one and they need to be spared the indignities that road and rail travel entails in Nigeria, etc. Pronto, one is built! No cost-benefit analysis, no studies on whether it would repay the investment, who will use it, and are the personnel available to run its very advanced operations? We build them in exactly the same way that newly-empanelled chairmen of local government councils put a wall around a dirt pitch and launches a new ultra-modern motor park!

What happened in Bauchi is the harvest of planlessness that is itself a fruit of our thoughtlessness. Of course, once the incident happened, all the other manifestations of our multiplex illiteracies kicked in. Certainly, you cannot have anything happening at the airport that answers simply to the officials on the ground as the agents primarily responsible for what transpires in their neck of the bureaucratic woods. The Minister has to intervene and has to appear to be doing something in the heat of the moment. Like clockwork, the minister has promised a “probe into the incident”. This is now part of the DNA of our functionaries and our fresh bevy of doctorate holders and other degree-wielding equivalents never pause for a moment to realise that the smell around them is coming from their own farts. Worse, sometimes as often happens, what are essentially crime scenes are contaminated by ministers—massive illiteracy!—and their retinue in tow appearing to be doing something by visiting the scene and ‘condoling’ with the victims justice for whom has been made unavailable because the scene has been messed up by the minister’s intervention!

Why do we need any ministerial intervention into a simple bureaucratic-cum-technical snafu at Bauchi Airport? They had equipment that was not operational. The pilot did not know or, what is more likely, pretended he had no reason to believe that he was flying to a destination that was nowhere ready for his flight. Meanwhile, the passengers, all clad in their flowing robes complete with the ‘shmiling’ in the face of ‘shuffering’ that is a hallmark of life in our homeland—apologies, of course, to Fela—had no difficulty defying, yes, defying the pilot. In civilized societies, in those situations the pilot has the last word and whosoever should disobey would have committed a felonious act for which they would go to jail. And the pilot, knowing full well the culture of impunity in which he operates could only shrug and watch his professional integrity flushed down the drain of collective lack of capacity for shame.

Pray, what would the minister’s intervention do that would make a difference? What did interventions by previous ministers do to ensure that what took place never happened in the first place? Sadly, given the generalized illiteracy of our elite and the functionaries we put in charge of our affairs respecting the nature, scope and mechanics of government and its operations, we have no reason to believe that things would turn out differently.

We are already seeing the signs that that is one area where change would not occur no matter how many changes of regime we witness. The new minister in charge of aviation who has already put in the ritual fulmination is not likely to step back and ask himself: why is it my business to ensure that things are done right at a regional airport with all the necessary functionaries already in place and paid, no less, to ensure that things are done right? Does the airport in question have a management? What is the management there paid to do? Where is the structure of responsibility? Who ought to have done what and when in the command chain of the airport where the incident took place?

When we have ministers in place who take a deep breath, take a hard look at what they have been appointed to superintend, some of them might begin to wisen up and see how often they play the fool in the name of performing their official functions. It may actually make some of them conclude that it is more honourable for them to decline the fool’s errand that their portfolio has saddled them with. But, first, they must be thinking men and women; nor ‘action ministers’.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Prof Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò teaches at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.

A Regime Of Illiterates, By Illiterates, For Illiterates, And The Rest Of US (1) by Prof Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò