That successive Nigerian government had to contend with the tragic and accumulated national burden of the past is a damning report on what has gone before.
But it is so easy to pass judgment on the past. What happens to the present? Most people in my generation are in their late 40s, in their 50s and 60s. I am in my mid-50s too. And the clock has not stopped ticking—Tick tock; tick tock. Posterity is also getting ready to pass the same judgment we eloquently passed on the past and its ambivalent generations of Nigerians who had so much but could deliver so very little. Do not get me wrong. Generational analysis of politics and development involves a complex analysis that cannot be understood in terms of white and black. There are a lot of grey areas that one must thread very softly so as not to sin against history and political sensibilities. Take Awolowo, Bello, Azikiwe, Adebo, Akilu, Eni Njoku and Okigbo on one hand; Soyinka, Achebe, Obasanjo, T.Y. Danjuma, Saro Wiwa, Bolanle Awe, Ayida, Fawehinmi, and Ahmed Joda on the other. These two strands combine politics, scholarship, activism and professionalism. In Awolowo alone you have politics and professionalism. Awolowo was a lawyer and a politician. Soyinka was an intellectual and an activist. Bolanle Awe, Mabogunje, Billy Dudley and Bala Usman were scholars and public servants, Tejumade Alakija, Francesca Emanuel, Joda, Asiodu were technocrats and civil servants and Gowon, Obasanjo, T.Y. Danjuma, and Ojukwu were soldiers and administrators. What united these people and their generation is an intricate relationship with the Nigerian state that begs for a delicate interpretation. Would anyone dare say that these ones were not committed to the Nigerian cause? That seems obvious, even if you are duly concerned about the ethnic dimension that Awolowo, Bello and Azikiwe introduced into the Nigerian polity. Or, the provincial turn that led some away from an otherwise national concern about Nigeria’s post-independence evolution. I doubt, for instance, that Nigeria appreciated Idika Kalu, Aboyade, Alhaji A. Alhaji (Triple A) and the significance of their national development economics.
Yet, Soyinka considered his generation a wasted one. Wasted in what regard? It is definitely not in terms of individual talents and endowments. In their own right, other individuals were as great as Soyinka and Achebe in their own personal endeavours. But then imagine that the activism of Soyinka has been multiplied several times into a thread of collective generational reaction against the Nigerian predicament? Imagine that the most endowed in these generations have the boldness of Soyinka and Saro Wiwa to engage Nigeria, the courage of Achebe to interrogate her, the vision of Aboyade and Mabogunje to propose alternative economics and spatial dimensions for her? Imagine we can abandon our self-centered pedestrianism and imbibe a sense of history and how our collective competences could facilitate social engineering. Unfortunately, generational capital is not working for Nigeria. I quake when I think of what the coming generation will (not) do? Horace, the Roman poet, already sees ahead. He pessimistically projects the enormity of generational deficiency: “What do the ravages of time not injure? Our parents’ age (worse than our grandparents’) has produced us, more worthless still, who will soon give rise to a yet more vicious generation.”
Today, we talk strenuously about human capital, social capital, moral capital, etc. Generational capital is equally fundamental, if not more so. The downside to deploying generational capital is that it requires a touch of patriotism, and that is in a critical short supply in Nigeria. In fact, those who deployed their talents and endowments to the Nigerian predicament that I call heroes and heroines—Billy Dudley, Bolanle Awe, Gambo Sawaba, Oladipo Akinkugbe, Umaru Shehu, Ojetunji Aboyade, Chinua Achebe, Margaret Ekpo, Bala Usman, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Pat Utomi, Odia Ofeimun, Chimamanda Adichie, Bukola Elemide ‘Asa’, Kanu Nwankwo, Hebert Ogunde, Joke Silva, Ahmed Joda, Ake, Peter Ekeh, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Taslim Elias, Ben Nwabueze, Christopher Kolade, Gani Fawehinmi, Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, Isawa Elaigwu, etc. Unfortunately, all these could not pull their generation behind their patriotic commitment to Nigeria in spite of grievous loss to being. In their cases, patriotism kills. Ask Aboyade, Saro-Wiwa, Ransome-Kuti, Fawehinmi, etc. I suspect that Achebe died very bitter about Nigeria. And yet, we could have made a lot of national recovery if we have paid attention to his masterly diagnosis of The Trouble with Nigeria. We did not. And our trouble remains.
Nobody wants to be patriotic in Nigeria today. It does not seem to pay any longer. But it is this patriotism that becomes the first condition for an enthusiastic deployment of generational capital. Generational deficiency is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. The first generation of Awolowo-Bello-Azikiwe failed in terms of leadership; the second failed in terms of deploying its intelligence and status to the crisis of national development. My generation is the next in line, and the jury is still out on our success or failure. I do not know whether my generation possesses the vast patriotic quotient of the first and the second generations. But I know their professional competences are unrivalled. At least, it is unrivalled just yet. But our responsibility has trebled; as accumulated and complex-ified infrastructural, institutional and value deficits. That is to say, we carry the burden of failure of the two preceding generations. And the additional task of rejuvenating the framework and dynamics of a value-based national institutional platform for achieving a globally competitive economy that can backstop Nigeria’s democratic governance experiment. This generation is the productivity generation, and thank fate for ongoing recession; a test for our creativity and innovativeness. It is equally the infrastructure generation. And lastly, it is on this generation that the burden of democratic consolidation rests. How far have we gone? I doubt we have gone far enough. How long do we have for any truly energetic interventions? Maximum: twenty years. It is at this critical point that posterity would be waiting for us with a sledgehammer. And we would be guilty, given that we have a lot to learn from the generational mistakes of the past, and a lot to tap from the immense opportunities of the present. Of course, the government has a lot of blame to process too. After all, it is the government and the policy space that has the responsibility to harness generational capitals. That fact, however cogent, would not absolve us.
Back to my friends. Since we are kindred spirit, restless and often grossly discomfited by disequilibrium, they will immediately grasp the logic of my discomfiture. I have no doubt how they will perform as provosts. But where are the others? It is time for my generation to come alive.