Think, for God’s Sake!

Think, for God’s Sake!

 “Doubt is the key to knowledge.” 

 Persian Proverb

Recently, I watched a thought-provoking episode of a legal drama set in the United States in which a 15 year old girl who had contracted HIV AIDS after having intercourse with her boyfriend sued her high school for failing to teach its students about contraceptives.  The totality of its sex education was summed up in one word: abstinence.  It even went as far as discrediting the efficacy of condoms, so when this girl was unable to resist temptation any longer the need to use some form of protection never crossed her mind.  She felt the school should receive a measure of blame for its failure to educate her and empower her with the knowledge to make an informed decision.

Ridiculous, right?  I mean, it did teach abstinence.  Why should it be held responsible for her failure to abstain?  Besides, where were her parents?  Whose responsibility is it ultimately to teach students the facts of life?  Or to teach them to think for that matter?  Where does the responsibility of parents end and that of schools begin? 

When it has to do with teaching physics or mathematics or English, that’s an easy one, isn’t it? That’s why parents pay school fees.  They expect the school to teach a curriculum.  But whose responsibility is it to teach children to think critically and creatively? 

For fifteen years now, I have been teaching English to children at both the primary and secondary level.  Each year I meet a new cohort of learners I am faced with the same challenge: inspiring them to use their imagination.

I like to use a story prompt:  ‘You are on your way back from summer vacation and your plane develops engine trouble and crashes into the sea.  You manage to swim, or to grab a piece of debris which helps you to float to a deserted island.  No one else is there.  Only you.  What happens next?’

Irrespective of the level of the students, 95% will almost always give one of two answers:

• I found out miraculously that my mobile phone was working and it had reception, so I was able to call for help; or
•  I prayed and God answered my prayer by sending a plane/ship to rescue me.

Every year it’s the same.  I am handed a set of students who have been inoculated by religion against creative thought.  God is the panacea to every kind of problem and they are absolved from any and all responsibility to use their God-given brains to think.  Rather, they are conditioned to seek miracles and ask for some sort of supernatural intervention as a first resort.  I’m too lazy to think – I’ll pray and let God do all the work!

At such times I hate religion.  I hate the way it sends people into a mindless stupor and divests them of their rational and creative faculties.  I hate the way it surreptitiously suggests that curiosity, asking questions, doubting, is somehow tantamount to unbelief. I hate what parents do to their children in the name of faith.  They indoctrinate them with religious dogma and instill them with a blind faith that strips them of a responsibility to exercise their minds.  (Why should this surprise me, though?  The parents who do this – are they not the ones who swallow hook, line and sinker what their pastors and imams tell then?  Are they not the ones who ascribe to their leaders a God-like infallibility and make excuses for inexcusable conduct?) 

And then they send them off to school to learn to think. 

Educators have two choices.  One, take God out of the equation.  This is what the Americans have done, isn’t it?  Or two, convince students that the miracle is their fantastically complex brain, and that the boat, plane or ship was there all along in the space between their ears!  We have to convince students that it is alright to think.  In fact, it is their God-given responsibility to do so!

I have an idea for a legal drama set in Nigeria.  It is one in which educators sue parents for brainwashing their children and depriving them of a capacity to think because they themselves do not.  In my story, educators ask the courts for an injunction preventing parents from dampening their children’s curiosity and damaging their ability to think creatively.  And since it is my idea, we win.

 Hussaina Ishaya-Audu

Of Pragmatism and Heroism

Of Pragmatism and Heroism

A man came to my office today.  The moment I heard his voice booming from the reception I had already passed a judgment.  I tend to assume that people who need to announce their presence in other people’s offices by speaking so loudly when it is quite unnecessary to do so have an exaggerated sense of their own self-importance.  I was right.  He had come to make an enquiry but he did all the talking, and in the space of 15 short minutes he had dropped the names of prominent politicians he knew, had just finished meeting with or was going to meet later on in the day. 

Even without his saying so, it was obvious he was a politician of sorts.  He was so typical.  Which is why gentlemen like Nuhu Ribadu, Governor Fashola, Nasir El-Rufai and Governor Fayemi are so refreshing in their simplicity.  Frankly speaking, one is not surprised when the likes of Tom Ikimi break ranks, but Ribadu…

At first, I was as disparaging of Nuhu Ribadu’s desertion from APC as the next person.  I agreed with all those who called him a turncoat.   But as I thought about it at length, it occurred to me that Mr Ribadu and I may share a common trait.   Let me explain.  If you ask me which EPL team I support, I will tell you I support Tottenham.  Today.  But I may change my mind on Saturday.  It depends.  I can’t understand all those die hard Arsenal fans who cling to the false hope, year after year, that Arsenal will clinch the EPL title. Let it go! If they can’t see that Arsene Wenger has lost the plot then all I can say is: ‘sad!’  It is obvious that some people have a strong emotional attachment to certain causes or interests for no apparent rational reason.   It doesn’t make sense to me.

Does that make me a traitor?  I wouldn’t say so.  I would say it makes me a pragmatist.  I think too, that Nuhu Ribadu is a pragmatist.  He did not actually desert APC.  It was just ‘a tactical maneuver’ to PDP.  I totally understand.  Where we differ is that, after publicly disparaging Arsenal as I have done, I can never publicly claim to support them if they should happen to top the table hereafter – except if it happens after Wenger’s demise. (I say demise because it’s obvious Wenger has no intention of resigning and Arsenal has no intention of letting him go.  Between Wenger and Arsenal, it’s till death do them part.)

In the same vein, I empathise with the 480 Nigerian soldiers that fled to Cameroun in the heat of battle with Boko Haram.  I agree with the army spokesperson who described this as ‘a tactical maneuver,’ though not for the same reasons.   Why should they lay down their lives for a country that would send them out to war like sheep being sent to the slaughter?  Why should they lay down their lives for a country that cannot guarantee the welfare of their families were they to die on the battlefield?   

Why would anyone want to lay down their lives for the cause called Nigeria?  I think you would have to be a politician to claim that you want to do that.  You see, politicians tell us that the reason they are desperate to get into power is so they can serve their fatherland.  Yeah, right.  They claim they want to serve but what they actually do is serve themselves.  And then pay the police and soldiers peanuts to risk their lives to protect a nation they themselves will flee when the going gets tough.

Have you noticed though, how the people who actually serve their country are those whose cause is not Nigeria but Nigerians?  Like late Dr Adadevoh, for instance.  I don’t think she did what she did because she was thinking of ‘Nigeria’.  She was simply thinking about people.  She just couldn’t let Sawyer infect innocent people.   She was passionately devoted to a cause and it had nothing to do with politics.

And Prof. Dora Akunyili.  As the Director General of NAFDAC when her commitment was to protect Nigerians from fake or adulterated food and drugs she was an unstoppable amazon.  That was when her passionate commitment to a cause distinguished her and won her numerous accolades.  It was for her work in NAFDAC and not as Minister of Information that she will be remembered.

True servants do not need to make any claims about wanting to serve their country.   They simply devote themselves to a cause bigger than themselves: people.  These are Nigeria’s true heroes.  Claiming to want to serve Nigeria is politics.  That is also where I differ from Nuhu Ribadu.  He is a pragmatic politician.  I am simply pragmatic. 

Hussaina Ishaya-Audu

Different Shades of a National Identity

Different Shades of a National Identity

Recently in the United Kingdom, there has been a great deal of talk about what exactly it means to be British.  The conversation sparked off by Operation Trojan Horse in Birmingham schools, led to investigations by Ofsted which uncovered plans by the Park View Educational Trust to expand its influence beyond its own academies and enforce its extremist views on secular state schools.  Consequently, the erstwhile Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove deemed it necessary to introduce new rules compelling all schools not only to promote British values but to actively teach them.  Janet Daley explained Gove’s motive as an attempt ‘…to inoculate the children of incoming ethnic groups against this seditious separatism’. (The Telegraph, 14 June 2014)

In an attempt to define ‘Britishness’, some interesting questions have been asked.  For example, is the ability to speak English a requirement for being British? This question in particular surprised me at first because it seemed rather odd that one would claim to be British without speaking the major language of the British Realm.  Of course the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh have their own dialects, but I doubt if it would be argued that English is, prima facie, the language of the Brits.   

Obviously, one cannot ignore the fact that the character of Britain has changed substantially and that Britain has evolved into a multi-cultural melting pot.   There are different shades to Britishness.  One could be Black British, or British Asian, or White British.  And then even amongst the Black British you could be of African origin or of Caribbean origin, and amongst the White British you could be British British or of European origin. 

In order to arrive at a definition of what It means to be British the Prime Minister David Cameron, came up with a list of values he considers one must possess in order to be truly British. Michael Gove also came up with his.  A combination of their two lists looks something like this.  In order to be truly British you must subscribe to the following values:

·         freedom

·         democracy

·         the rule of law

·         individual liberty

·         mutual respect

·         tolerance of those of different faiths and different beliefs

·         respect for British institutions

·         belief in personal and social responsibility

Quite a few people took issue with the Government’s effort to define Britishness.  In fact, it appears that the very attempt to define it is in itself very un-British.  However you look at it, this very exercise in defining Britishness has to be seen as courageous.   How can you define something so complex?

Well, this entire exercise got me thinking.  Who is a Nigerian and can we actually define ‘Nigerianess’?    What does it mean to be a Nigerian?  Can we define ourselves in terms of values?  Can we say that a Nigerian must subscribe to a set of values or ideals? Is it necessary to even attempt such a definition within our context?

I try not to dwell on the possibility of Nigeria disintegrating but this thought has crossed my mind once or twice (or three times or four times): what would happen to people like me if, heaven forbid, we should divide?  Where would I go? Where do I belong?

I have always seen myself as a Nigerian.  I am Hausa.  I love my language and I speak it, albeit imperfectly.  I love suya and masa – that’s my staple.  I can survive on a diet of masa and pepper.  (So to whom it may concern: stop sending me whatsapp and facebook messages warning me to keep off suya because this is Boko Haram’s newest strategy – to poison us through this typically northern delicacy.  It has absolutely no effect on me.  I cannot be deterred!)

And I am a Christian. 

Yet when I am in the South, it is assumed I am Muslim because of my name.  And here in the North I have to explain that while I do come from Kaduna State I do not come from Southern Kaduna, because it is assumed that being a Christian from Kaduna State means you are from Southern Zaria. 

I don’t seem to fit in anywhere.  I say I am Nigerian but it is becoming increasingly evident that there is no such person as a Nigerian anymore.  You are either a Northerner, a Southerner, or an Easterner.  And if you are a Northerner then you must be Muslim.  And if you object to the type of shoddy governance we have today then it is because you are a Northerner and a Muslim and you have a hidden agenda. 

Well for the record, there are Nigerians who do not fit into neat compartments, who cannot be so conveniently stereotyped.  There are different shades of Nigerianess.  And perhaps, like the British, we should strive to identify and focus on what is common to us all and deemphasize our differences.  Cultural profiling as we have seen recently in this country is wrong and dangerous.  It has provoked an understandable response from youths is Kano.  This is the wrong dialogue.  And because this is a national issue with grave consequences if ignored, it must not be ignored.  The Federal Government needs to take a firm stand now, and not let unhealthy sentiments brew.  It is time to call to order those who are instigating such sentiments and reaffirm our constitutional right to move about freely without fear of harm or harassment.

 

Hussaina Ishaya-Audu

Make Love, Not War

Make Love, Not War

“Hatred we can manage. The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion and it is only a question of guiding this susceptibility into the right channels. If conscience resists, muddle him… But hatred is best combined with Fear… Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate.  And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame.”  Screwtape 

No-one builds a house or an enterprise and then deliberately pulls it down or through negligence allows it to be destroyed.   Why then would The Creator build a world and sit by idly while it is being ravaged?  

During the week, former US Secretary of State, Madeline Albright made a statement that could be interpreted as an accusation against The Creator, for it is His World, after all.  She spoke the mind of many (honest) people when she complained that ‘the world is a mess!’  She said, and I agree, that, “there are an awful lot of things going on that need understanding and explanation.”    

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis records the strategic advice which Screwtape, a senior devil, gives to his nephew Wormwood, on how to frustrate the Christian experience of his subject, ‘the patient’.  (Essentially, the human can be substituted for ‘the patient’ and Religion for the Christian experience.) The book is written from Screwtape’s perspective, and God becomes “The Enemy” and “Our Father’s House” is not heaven but hell.

Armed with centuries of experience, Screwtape reveals to the green and inexperienced Wormwood the psychology of the human and suggests to him how best to manipulate the weakness of humans.  The secret? An understanding of the superiority of hatred over love.

The key to successfully diverting the human from the true purpose of religion is to fixate the human on hatred because hatred can be used to magnificent effect by The Force opposed to human existence and coexistence. If the human conscience should endeavour to defeat the influence and power of hatred, the next strategy is to confuse the human by convincing him of the morality of his hatred, persuading him to believe that his hatred is justified, right and necessary.  The stronger the hatred, the more righteous it is.

Hatred by itself is an effective weapon in diverting the human from God’s Cause, but when combined with fear its effectiveness is magnified many times over.  Fear has torment you see, and it is shameful, but camouflaged by hatred, fear is cloaked with the mask of respect and dignity. 

And so, Boko Haram justify their hatred, shrouding their unholy jihad with the garment of the righteous indignation of Shekau’s god.  Israel and Hamas perpetuate the war in Gaza, justifying their unconscionable savageries while protesting their innocence and blaming each other for instigating the need to retaliate in the first place.  And Nigerians, depending on which side of the religious divide they belong to, are either supporting Israel and condemning Hamas or vice versa. 

Screwtape warns Wormwood to not allow ‘the patient’ to wander into the realm of reason.

“The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?”

Therefore, Screwtape admonishes Wormwood to do all he can to discourage and distract ‘the patient’ from reasoning.  If the human is allowed to think, he would form the obvious conclusion that kidnapping girls and turning them into sex slaves or killing innocent civilians is sheer wickedness.  Heaven forbid that that should happen.  No!  By all means, the human must not be allowed to exercise his reasoning faculties; best to let him dwell on hatred.  For you see, love and compassion are actually reasonable emotions.  Loving your neighbour as yourself means respecting another person’s right to life and respecting their humanity.  Why, reason would actually require the human to be human.  No! The human must not be allowed to think, for if he is allowed to do so, he would end up promoting the Cause of the Creator.  He would end up making love, not war.

Hussaina Ishaya - Audu

The Spirit of Chief Festus

The Spirit of Chief Festus

 “The night before the meeting, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, whom I had visited two years before, gave us a banquet in the hotel.  Raja and I were seated opposite a hefty Nigerian, Chief Festus, their finance minister.  The conversation is still fresh in my mind.  He was going to retire soon, he said.  He had done enough for his country and now had to look after his business, a shoe factory.  As finance minister, he had imposed a tax on imported shoes so that Nigeria could make shoes.  Raja and I were incredulous.  Chief Festus had a good appetite that showed in his rotund figure, elegantly camouflaged in colorful Nigerian robes with gold ornamentation and a splendid cap.  I went to bed that night convinced that they were a different people playing to a different set of rules.”   

   Lee Kuan Yew in From Third World to First World.

When I sat down to write this essay, I had intended to focus on failing academic standards called to our attention once again by the appalling WAEC results, and add my voice to those of other stakeholders demanding educational reform.  But then I thought, why bother?  Who cares?  The Minister of Education, Ibrahim Shekarau, certainly doesn’t care.  He hasn’t even bothered to make a cursory statement, if only to acknowledge the poor state of affairs and to make a perfunctory pledge to look into the situation.  And while we may bemoan the state of our national affairs, how many Nigerians honestly care enough about the rot and decay in our country to demand for transparency, accountability and change?  

We know the cause of the atrocious WAEC results.  It is the same canker worm that has eaten into the fabric of our entire national infrastructure.  Do we really need more analyses and vituperations? Is that going to change things?  The vast majority of Nigerians appear to be trapped by a sense of helplessness, disillusioned by the heartlessness of the political class yet unable to do anything about it. 

The event which Lee Kuan Yew reports above took place on 10 January 1966, the evening before a conference of Commonwealth prime ministers at the Federal Palace Hotel in Lagos. 

I can imagine Lee Kuan Yew’s disbelief.  What kind of a mindset do these Nigerians have?  What exactly had the finance minister achieved that made him pat himself on the back for his contribution to Nigeria?  How could he imagine that imposing a tax on imported shoes so that, on retirement, he could grow his own shoe factory, was a national contribution worthy of commendation?  And how could he not understand that he should actually be hiding his head in shame rather than proudly sharing this testimony of his impunity?

Yet, sadly, 48 years later, what has changed?  Our politicians still have ‘a good appetite’ which they satisfy using the machinery of government to legitimize their pillage of our country’s resources.  They run government like a private enterprise and in some cases even justify their blatant impunity. Recently, we saw how our military was used as a functionary of the ruling party in the gubernatorial elections in Ekiti and Osun states, and heard the spokesperson of our country’s security service make partisan comments associating the opposition party with a terrorist organization. 

Furthermore, there are some very wicked and foolish people surrounding the president who are lying to him and attempting to deceive him into believing that he deserves to be equated with such extraordinary leaders as Martin Luther King Jr., Lee Kuan Yew, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama, so that like Chief Festus, he can also pat himself on the back for his contributions to this nation.  He does so at his own peril.

Less than a week after the Commonwealth conference while Yew was in Accra, “there was a bloody coup in Lagos.  Prime Minister Abubakar had been assassinated and so had Chief Festus.”

What happened, I wonder, to Chief Festus’ shoe factory?  Did it continue to be run by his family members in much the same way that Sani Abacha’s family has held on with dogged tenacity to the loot he stole from Nigeria?  I don’t know the answer to that, but what I do know is that the spirit of Chief Festus is alive and well.  What our history has taught us is that whether in military garb or civilian mufti the spirit of Chief Festus runs in our leaders.

Where then lies our hope as a nation? Definitely not in PDP or APC, two sides of the same coin.  It lies in our future.  A day is coming in Nigeria’s future when the youth will rise up in frustration and anger and will join hands to kill the spirit of Chief Festus. 

A UNICEF report (Generation 2030/Africa @ page 10) published this month, reports that

·         “At the country level, the greatest number of births in Africa takes place in Nigeria; by 2015 one fifth of the continent’s births will take place in that country alone, accounting for 5 per cent of all global births. From 2015 to 2030, 136 million births will take place in Nigeria — 19 per cent of all African babies and 6 per cent of the global total. By 2050, Nigeria alone will account for almost one tenth of all births in the world.

·         In absolute terms, Nigeria is projected to add from 2031 to 2050 an additional 224 million babies (21 per cent of the births in Africa and 8 per cent of all births in the world).”

Our country, in the foreseeable future, is going to have an army of young people who are not befuddled by the obfuscations of their parents’ or grand parents’ generation. 

The senses of our political class, possessed by the spirit of Chief Festus, have been so dulled that they do not see the enormity of the calamity they are courting by failing to attend to the welfare of our youth – present and future.  They do not see that refusing to address corruption, refusing to reform education, refusing to create employment, refusing to address poverty is tantamount to creating a world filled with tension that will one day erupt into a revolution the likes of which we have not seen in this nation before.  It will be a revolution that is not linked to any political party or any political ideology.  It will simply be a revolution to kill the spirit of Chief Festus, and all those in whom that spirit resides.

Hussaina Ishaya-Audu