Noise Of Revolt: In Nigeria, The gods are dead – Jonah Ayodele

“This is undisputedly the best time to live in Nigeria. As the country rides into animal savagery and as its people wallow in the somber mourning of their evaporating future, one could be lured to conclude that the good old gods have finally made it to their ancestral grave. If the good old gods, Awolowo, Azikiwe and Balewa were to come back today to see the trail of deserters, the thick wall of perfidy, the surging hypocritic disciples who shout their names in vain, the estrangement among their true followers and the stark diminution in the power and status of regional progressive groups, they would probably observe with great sadness and characteristic forthrightness. Sadly, these gods are dead.
I have an usual aggressive appetite to abuse protocols when I am addressing political vultures back in Nigeria. I always do that not because I am a political activist of sort, and I don’t hope to become any soon. I always do that because the person who steals my blood to fill his pocket without considering that my blood will drain away from his pocket does not deserve my respect. But because this is a gathering of Nigerians in a foreign land, I stand to revive the spirit of protocols.
Illustrious members of the High Table and the Table not so high, distinguished assemblage of intellectual warriors whose umblical cords were buried on our troubled fatherland, notable and budding philosophers of great influence, highly reverred daughters and sons of Nigeria. It is my pleasure to be invited as one of the guest speakers in this interactive session put together by Nigerians in Johannesburg. I thank you all for putting the issue of Nigeria’s lost intellectual heritage on the front burner of discourse again. I am sure that the gods themselves would have nodded in satisfaction at the act of aeronautical daring that have carried me here today and that will take me back to Nigeria where I have to resume at work in less than 24 hours. In all, it means I have less than 28 hours to spend on a soil that has produced notable heroes of Madiba’s status while we are still in search of ours.
But how did I end up here? How did I get to philosophize in a strange land? How did a Chemical Engineering graduate like me from a University built with cocoa funds in the heart of Ile Ife get to be noticed by my intellectual gangsterism, muscle-flexing in the midst of great minds like you? How did Nigeria get to this stage? What did we do wrong? When did our handshake go beyond our elbow? How did we make an unripe mango look like apple? How come we often display our extravagant social lunacy around? Why do we keep running into discomforting irrelevance? Why do we celebrate excessive illogicalities? When did we miss the art of balancing and moderation? And why did our creativity go awry? How come we keep talking of the good old days and not good nowadays?
Finding answers to some of the above questions may not require any stretch of thought, since we are a witness to a great national unease, of human eruptions on a revolutionary scale and scope, of a fierce contention between man and a capitalist machine that no longer recognizes even it’s own, of a trans-societal struggle to bring to heels a world in which inequity and inequality among classes and tribes have assumed a staggering and idiotic proportion. As for me, I am a product of such ironic society, so blessed and so poor. While you ran away to another black man’s land, I stayed back to fight on your behalf.
To appreciate the present drama called Nigeria, we must look back to the defining moment deployed by the dead gods in its heroic possibilities. This must be done not in anger, but in hope, with a view of unravelling when and how our shoes refused to fit our legs; and with the hope of bringing the magic of the past to bear on the misses of the moment. These dead gods are notable chapters in our history, titans that contended with other titanic figures. Their greatness was defined by the greatness of the historical circumstances that threw them up, the greatness of the expectations, and, of course, the greatness of many historical personages that gave them a run for their intellect, often in open confrontation. It is an embarrassment of human riches; a genetic scandal that these gods could be so stupendously endowed.
Since these gods died, we have struggled to get a grip of ourselves, with blood soaked proboscis of Boko Haram promoting our departure to proceed apace. Since the demise of these gods, we have lost our intellectual productivity to mental laziness, such that we are now blessed with a president whose sense of judgment has forced us to question the quality of his academic claims. We are now bogged down at the level of clearing the intellectual debris of misconceptions we inflicted on ourselves, imagine when we said we voted a man, not his party. There is a big hole in our sense of philosophy. Without a good sense of philosophy, we may as well be prepared to wallow in this chamber of sorrow for a long time.
My penchant for devouring books has revealed to me that a country will continue to move without leaving a spot if its people are mentally sick, with zero ability to philosophize problems and think far beyond out of the box. But what we have in our hands are a people blessed with the memory of goat, they often antagonize intellectual output they can learn from. The trio of Awolowo, Azikiwe and Balewa engaged philosophy till themselves transformed into gods of philosophy.
By philosophizing, I do not mean stringing together witticisms and wise-sayings into a coherent worldview. I am talking of the capacity for conceptual formulation and rigorous abstractions; the ability for sustained intellection and logical speculation. So can the current crop of Nigerian leaders philosophize? With the reigning imbroglio in our current political peculiar mess, one may be forced to agree with Thomas Jefferson, a founding father and third president of America, when he noted about black men that “It appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites: in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigation of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous”.
Now that our people are conquered and subjugated, we must place advertorials that we are in need of new gods since our good old gods have finally made it back to their ancestral graveyard. We are in dire need of gods, anointed messiahs that will be thrown up by our unfolding History 101. These gods may not be blessed with the gift of garb, they may be challenged in the faculty of eloquence and elocution. All we need are gods whose sense of philosophy will enable them to connect with the rage of the inarticulate masses in all their elemental portent. All we need the gods to say is to say nothing, we will join in.
Can you be the gods we are craving for? Can you be the Balewa of our time? Who among you is ready to masquerade Awolowo’s philosophy? Can any of you take the challenge that threw Azikiwe up? Who can be the commander of the angry Nigerian mob and it’s fatalistic foot soldiers? Who among you can go back home and become the mediating elites for the angry faithful mob since the direct rule of the masses is mobocracy not democracy? Or are we going to wait till the centre collapses and things fall apart?
If the gods are not among you, you need not worry yourself to force it. I know they will be eslewhere on the globe, for when the gods are ripe for worship, they will demand for sacrifice, sacrifice in form of votes. I hope to also be a part of such intellectual revolution, when intellectual gangsterism will not be seen as cerebral flamboyancy. Even when the gods are dead, the gods are still alive elsewhere.
Thank you.”
Being a text of speech by Jonah Ayodele Obajeun, delivered at the Soweto Gathering of Young Nigerian Thinkers in Johannesburg, November 12, 2011.

Jonah Ayodele Obajeun. Blogs @ www.obajeun.com.