OUR BARE MINIMUM EXISTENCE
We are in the age of information, average doesn’t cut it anymore. Life by definition is a process of dying, we are at liberty to choose how that process flows. If we choose to live an average life, our children will come into a bare minimum world created by average men and women!
The average Nigerian
I am in my thirties and one thing that has been constant in my experience growing up in Nigeria is the idea that we do only the bare minimum. When we build roads, we build them to look and work in bare minimum terms. Our national power grid works at its bare minimum, we know it’s there but we don’t see its real impact. Our politics is largely the bare minimum, only serving the few who engage in it, to secure power and nothing more.
The Independent National Electoral Commission operates at a bare minimum. Getting PVCs (Permanent Voters Cards) is a Herculean task. Even during elections, widespread irregularities are observed. The average Nigerian sees the country as a bare minimum existential entity. Only existing as a ground to walk, build on, and lay to rest in.
It is the average Nigerian who drives recklessly on the road, cuts into queues without regard for those who are there before him, and throws dirt into the gutters so that the environment becomes filthy. The outcry over the inefficiency of Cleaner Lagos; an environmental sanitation agency of the Lagos State government in cleaning up after the citizens is a confirmation that a lot of us are a dirty lot who wouldn’t even try to clean up after ourselves. Question: if the government was to abdicate power today will we survive and take care of ourselves or allow lawlessness and filth to overrun us?
It is the average Nigerian who gets employed as a police officer and uses his position to harass fellow citizens. The #EndSARS campaign on social media gets a renewed boost with every new brazen assault on unsuspecting citizens! Thanks to the widespread availability of cameras, a lot of their atrocities have been captured for the world to see while the upper echelons of the force carry on as if all is well.
How is the average Nigerian Created?
The average Nigerian education
The average Nigerian is created by an educational system that operates at a bare minimum. Both the formal and informal systems of education which feed off each other are broken. The preparatory schools which are largely government owned are underfunded and understaffed with unmotivated average Nigerians who regurgitate the same old outdated knowledge they got from the same broken system to innocent children, our supposed leaders of tomorrow. The infrastructure of these schools is usually dilapidated and security is practically nonexistent, some schools even take lessons under trees!
The kidnap of the Chibok Girls which sparked a massive global social media #BringBackOurGirls protest is a testament to the broken nature of the formal educational system so also is the saga of the snake that swallowed thirty-six million of JAMB (Joint Admission and Matriculation Board) funds. JAMB is the ‘formal’ system that ensures students get into tertiary schools in Nigeria.
The informal educational system is in a weird self-denial state. It's unaware of its importance and existence. The informal system is the way and manner through which our beliefs, values, history, and morals are passed down from one generation to another.
For the sake of this article, I will sum up everything that makes up this system as values. We are a diverse people united by history. We tend to tell tales of this unification from the colonial era, yet history has it that we had interactions with ourselves way before the Bible-bearing subjugators intruded on our lands. That ‘we were forced together and do not fit, therefore we should go our separate ways’ is an excuse of a political class who doesn’t want to task themselves with the required work of development.
Our diversity means we have various means through which our values are passed down, it is one of our greatest sources of strength as well.
We are at a point in time where children are taught to speak impeccable English and very little of their language. The colonial subjugators created schools where it was forbidden to speak local languages, they were termed vernacular, pedestrian, and unfit to be spoken in formal gatherings. This notion has survived through the ages.
Nigeria’s formal Language is English even though there are millions of speakers of Yoruba, Ibo, and Hausa in this country, none of those languages are formal Nigerian languages. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France came to Nigeria in July 2018, he commissioned the Alliance Frances Center which will deepen the adoption of the French language and culture. The first question that came to my mind was ‘How many African, Nigerian languages have whole buildings and people dedicated to its adoption across Europe, Asia, and the Americas?
The main custodians of our languages are the traditional institutions and the parents; they are supposed to teach the younger generation our values. Yet twenty-first-century African parents are too “tush” (Nigerian parlance for 'sophisticated') to even speak let alone teach in our language. Our traditional institutions are not striving to bring themselves up to speed with the advancements of the present and the future. What we get is an everyday watering down of our values.
The informal system of education is a whole topic on its own, I will not duel too long on it but it is worthy of note that the core of our languages that carry the essence of our values as a people will be lost in a few decades if we continue down this path.
The Future of the average Nigerian
The average Nigerian has the average output and average expectations of people and the government. We are in the age of information, average doesn’t cut it anymore. Life by definition is a process of dying, we are at liberty to choose how that process flows. If we choose to live an average life, our children will come into a bare minimum world created by average men and women!
The developed world is moving at the speed of thought already. By the time they are done developing and applying blockchain technology, virtual reality, and space exploration among other laudable innovations, Nigerians and Africans will say “Ah, oyinbo don go o!” (the developed world has advanced) while we sit and do the bare minimum.
Conclusion.
It’s not all doom and gloom. We have all we need to change Nigeria, Africa, and the world. The average Nigerian needs to realize that for him or her to change Nigeria, you need to start the change with yourself. Einstein once said; that we can’t solve today’s problems with the kind of thinking we had when those problems were created. We need to be willing to do better than the ‘average’. The conundrum is “Are we willing to become more, to rise above the temptation to be average?”
This bare minimum existence will be the death of us!
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