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Are the Barbarians already by the gates?We just read the lashing out Otunba Femi Fani-Kayode gave to the executive governor of Rivers State, His Excellency, Rt. Hon. Rotimi Amaechi. He had called out on Amaechi, alleging that the guy is not only potbellied but that he, Amaechi, was born a peasant. According to Fani-Kayode, Amaechi, despite his high office, has remained what he was born, a peasant and a houseboy. Perhaps, the houseboy tag is a throw-in on the rumor as insistent as death, that Amaechi started life as a poorly treated domestic help. His was a case of the TV Gringory made good in real life. All this is the revelation according to Fani- Kayode. By the way, wearing a diseased potbelly, all potbellies are, is not a sin known to the law or the Bible. Or shall a man be deemed guilty if the gods and the lords of the law are not aware his is a misdemeanor?
Anyway, what were Amaechi’s other sins? Amaechi had, like a bull in the China shop, threatened to bring the priceless gems and jades of our democracy crashing down, if he and his APC vote machine are not elected or even electable. Apparently too, his language was un-circumcised, so much he was almost a Philistine, wanting to rule Israel or its African incarnation, Nigeria. Well, whether Amaechi deserves to be reminded of his past in the gutters of economic life is open to debate. But our interest in the matter is a certain underlying factor that no Nigerian, as much as we know, has pointed at.
Now, there is no crime in being born. At least, no one so chose to be born. It is also crimeless to have been born dirt poor or into a family of log cabins, as Americans have made fancies of it. In fact, we all may recall there are American sagas of the log cabin to the White House. And Abe Lincoln is considered something of the poster face to the epics.
But the American variety is essentially different from the Nigerian type. The difference is in education, the education-culture nexus. To give an example, Lincoln was one of the most learned men of his time. His oratorical gifts are gems of literary elegance. They are studied as prose and compositional classics in America and, perhaps, beyond. And we repeat the difference was made by education as pursuit of high and higher cultures. Lincoln was so well read in the cannons that he almost lost his eyes rummaging in his forest of books.
But in Nigeria, we have clearly replaced education with certificates. So, if one had a diploma no matter how he ‘sorted it’ out he thinks himself educated. But that never quite is. Education is really a cultural and not just cognitive phenomenon. You are not just taught that 2 + 2 = 4. More importantly, you are taught that the university (or life really) is made up of schools and faculties. The inherent logic of it is that the university is composited to mirror life. In fact, university is life or reality under study. That is why it is said in certain parts of Oru na Igbo Nkwerre wu college oyoyo. That is life is a university. And universities return the compliment by being or mimicking life.
What this silently teaches is that in every subject matter of fundamental importance, the several faculties and schools have their legitimate and sometimes variant viewpoints. It, therefore, follows that no perspective must superintend save by logic and persuasion.
In a sense, therefore, the whole of primary and secondary school life is a preparation for life as faculty units amongst other faculty units. So, when in school, you are collectively taken out on physical education training or excursions or all put in a classroom or asked to play soccer, the whole idea is to teach you that you can’t live alone, a standalone faculty. And to live as a group, as a community, demands that we be civilised in words and deeds.
And a key part of this training in the pre-university days was in being shipped out to live in boarding facilities, with total strangers. And that of its own was faculty training. You are left to learn how to live with and accommodate one another, strangers all. And this too required civilisation. And despite all pretenses by the time the white man came around and colonised us, we were, well, very well, not very civilised, at least, techno-culturally so.
So, when the white man founded the boarding facilities and hostels as a key part of secondary schools, they were not being extravagant or wasteful. We needed it. Boarding and hostels even more than classrooms were critical parts of the school system. It was not foolishness that led George Orwell to state definitively that Napoleon was defeated at the playing fields of Eton, the great British school.
In boarding school of the old days, you were not just taught, but were inducted into the practice of time budgeting, standardisations, self management and containment and above all sports. A sport is the civilised idea of factional-group wars as tools of teaching peace. That is why the modern British, the most sportive of nations runs its parliaments like chess games. They have been so educated. Professor Achebe showed enough appreciation of this genus of British education in his recent memoir, There was once a country.
But immediately the military boys took over, they thought or decreed all knowledge was in the muscle. For them, the major who commanded the most battalion had the most wisdom. And one of the things they did was to take over schools and later abolished boarding houses.
In their hands, education devolved into a question of acquiring diplomas. And an educated mind became not a man who is cultured, that is a man in pursuit of high culture, but any man or thug who has certificates. This passing off of quantity as quality of its own spawned a new industry: Certificate forgery and that made Oluwole a premium address.
And this is where Amaechi comes in again. By his declared age, he must have gone to school as built and or managed by thugs and or coup makers; are there differences? So, in all his getting, he all too probably got only diplomas, not wisdom, not culture. There was even rumour, that as the then Speaker under Governor Odili, he registered as a student in a London university. And arrangements were allegedly made flying him in and out of London as he literally got educated in the air. In all, since that foundation of scholarship as high culture was lacking he ended up getting only a London diploma. That, perhaps, explains his difficulty to be restrained in speech. So, rather than talk he barks.
However unfortunate the matter is, we must not blame Amaechi. He is too young to be wrong. The guilt belongs to us, his fathers and uncles. By the time Amaechi went to school, we had equated diploma to high culture. The consequences are part of what we sighted; legislators scaling fences like armed robbers in day light. I only wished they were really any better. And if you checked, you did discover that none of them went to good schools. Perhaps, like Amaechi, they all have diplomas but little or no culture, high culture.
A good school is not made up of great and magnificent buildings contrary to our innocence and ignorance. A good school (of thought, and schools are of thoughts, not of buildings) is a movement towards the pursuit of high culture, towards the march of civilisation. And you don’t go to good schools by behaving like or being an armed robber. Great schools un-fang the beast in you and leaves you a man.
Like we said, these legislators are all guiltless. It is us their fathers and uncles who are in sin and shame. What then is to be done? Whatever else is done, one thing alone is clear. It is that we have to rework the school system. Bring back the great boarding houses they are a key part of the curriculum of education. This is especially so for us as people who never founded a material civilisation.
If there were great boarding schools and these legislathieves and Amaechis attended those, political discourse and conduct would have been civilised. But the pain is not personal to them. Their ways are our ruin. It is in the sense that the greatest fear of all civilisations is the specter of barbarians at the gate. The Nigerian province has not even gotten any far, has not built any civilisation and the tragedy has already struck. And that tragedy is not that the barbarians are not at the gates. The tragedy is that it is the barbarians, who rule at the Government Houses and have taken over the parliaments.
It is not a matter of measurable qualifications, of diplomas. These barbarians have it all either by sorting or by Oluwole. What they missed is the experience of great colleges. Great colleges exist to transform peasants into princes and remind all humanity; don’t you know you are gods? That is how the Athenian, British and American empires were/are built. Even if you were born a thug or peasant but went to great colleges, there is no way in hell or its earthly variant, Nigeria, that you would scale fences like fleeing drug couriers and thieves; or attempt to head butt he chief of your ‘faculty,’ here a Brigadier-General retired David Mark.
In a related matter, it appears Fani- Kayode is just what Jonathan needs now. He alone seems equipped to go toe to toe, pound for pound and on the road-show with opposition propaganda. He is the only feral beast, literarily speaking, that Lai Mohammed fears, I am told. While Amaechi is a case of a peasant as emperor, Fani-Kayode may fit the bill of a prince, who was brought up in the streets, willing to give and take bloody noses and blows, literally or otherwise.
Thus it is indicated that immediately Jonathan wins, if he does, he should just hire Fani-Kayode as his megaphone, in whom he is well pleased. And we would have all returned, like Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier, to the rumble in the jungle: In Manila or Abuja, does it matter?
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