Many Nigerians live in a bewildering world. They cannot make sense of their circumstances as poverty struts the land like a conquering giant with its Siamese twin, hunger, battling many to submission.
With inflation at an official 17.9 percent high, severe cases of malnutrition, last seen 46 years ago during the civil war, has made its unwelcome appearance especially in internally displaced persons camps. Nigerians grope around noiselessly, else they awaken their fears of the future.
An African proverb says if you do not know where you are going, you should know where you are coming from. We should know that a river that forgets its source, is bound to dry up. We have forgotten our source, in order not to dry up, we must reconnect with our origins and marry it with our present in order to flow into a smooth future. When my eldest brother was young, he was doing poll volt. Once, when he was air borne, the bamboo he was using broke under his weight. He came crashing back to earth with complicated bone fractures including his shoulder blade.
The Orthopaedic Hospital concluded that he would have to live with some disability. Neigbours advised my mother to try traditional bone setters. She did, and he grew up with no deformity.
That arm of traditional medicine is almost dead, as is the knowledge of curing lunacy. It is with a lot of efforts and foreign support that traditional midwifery is still alive. We have fertile lands with very wide food variety and millions of unemployed. Despite this, according to the Executive Secretary, Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria (ARCN) Prof. Baba Abubakar, Nigeria is the largest importer of US hard red and white wheat worth N635 billion annually; world’s number 2 importer of rice at N356 billion; N217 billion on sugar and N97 billion on fish. An irony is that we have varieties of local rice which are considered by many to be more nutritional.
The textile industry was the largest employer in the private sector. Despite increasing population which need clothes and hence, a captive market, almost all the textile companies are dead. Same for the footwear sector in a country with 180 million feet needing at least, a pair of footwear.
When I was young, some homes in Lagos were regularly raided by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) what was then, the secret service, on the suspicion that they sold the local gin, _ogogoro_ which in the laws passed down by the colonialists, was ‘illicit gin’ attracting fines and imprisonment. In contrast, the sale and consumption of imported Schnapps was legal. It has the same chemical components like _ogogoro _and both are used to preserve local or European vegetable and or root-derived medicine. So while our gin was banned, imported gin was freely sold in supermarkets and stores patronized by the same police who arrest our people for selling ogogoro and the same magistrates who sent them to prison. It took a long campaign especially by social crusader, Tai Solarin to legalize the local gin which until now remains unpackaged and without label. A gun is a weapon designed to discharge projectiles. All guns started as crude weapons before they were developed to their present state including machine guns. A vastly improved version was the gun with a wick tied to the hole which is then lit to ignite the powder.
The most popular on our shores in pre-colonial times was a flirtlock musket sold mainly by the Danes, and became known as the dane gun. Given our mentality, until today, all guns produced locally are still called, dane guns. While the rest of the world improved on their guns like the Russians producing and modernizing the Kalashnikov designed in 1946 by Mikhail Kalashnikov, we criminalize local gun production even when we have old gun producing communities like the Awka blacksmiths. Save for the foreign-built Defence Industries Corporation, the only period Nigerians produced their own weapons was during the civil war when the then Biafran rebels mainly through their Research and Production (RAP) Unit, manufactured their own rockets, armoured vehicles and anti-personnel mines. The most famous of the mines was called OGBUNIGWE, meaning literarily ‘killer in groups” as it was a mass killer. All these died in 1970 with the rebellion and the Nigerian military never inherited them. Forty seven years later, when the country was confronted with the terrorist Boko Haram Sect, it had no good weapons to meet the challenge, and many died due partly to an arms embargo by the United States and its allies. It is this challenge that has led to the arms scandal or what is called _DASUKIGATE_.
Like arms, the Biafran rebels produced their own brake fluid, built their own refineries which we are still unable to do in today’s Nigeria. IN THE NIGER DELTA TODAY, THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE BUILD CRUDE BUT FUNCTIONAL LOCAL REFINERIES WHICH ARE DECLARED ILLEGAL AND DESTROYED; YET, OUR OIL RICH COUNTRY CANNOT REFINE ITS PETROLEUM PRODUCT NEEDS.
We have built beautiful structures fit for temperate regions while abandoning our traditional architecture, fit for our warm humid or dry climate. We have built Nollywood with most of the films based on metaphysics in which foreign religions always overcome African religion.
We practice Western democracy in which our primary duty is to sign off our sovereignty every quadrennial while the dominant political parties fight like spoilt brats, splitting the country, and, one side replacing the other in an endless circle of deepening poverty and underdevelopment.
My position is that because we almost completely abandoned our culture of development including our traditional medicine, food and architecture. Abandoned our ancestors and followed the ghosts of others. Abandoned our knowledge and tried to learn only that of other people.
Abandoned our thought process and allowed others to think for us, we are stuck in the shallow, brackish waters of underdevelopment.
The Algerian medical doctor and writer, Franz Fanon diagnosed how we arrived at this station “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.”
Famous African culture writer Amilcar Cabral argued that we are underdeveloped because “They (the colonialists) made us leave history, our history, to follow them, right at the back, to follow the progress of their history.” But we cannot develop using the European template; we can create another Africa, we cannot create another Europe. There can only be one Europe.
Any other Europe, will be a pathetic or monstrous duplicate. We must return to our source in order to ford ahead.
Written by Owei Lakemfa.
