The State of the Future

The Enugu State Government’s recent full page advert congratulating Chiwetel Ejiofor, the British actor of Nigerian descent, for his BAFTA award was a waste of public funds but it calls for reflection. As with Sade, Seal, or David Alaba, we often try to appropriate the successes of foreigners of Nigerian ancestry in a bid to achieve some vicarious proprietary pride. If Barack Obama’s dad had been Nigerian, the world would never have heard the end of it. Consider another high achiever, Jelani Aliyu, lead designer of General Motors’ first electric car. Could Ejiofor and Aliyu have succeeded in their chosen endeavours if they lived here instead?  It is a pertinent question.

Since the 1980s, we have lamented brain drain without interrogating it seriously.

Talent flows from regions with natural resource-based economies to regions with knowledge economies. Countries with value-added economic activities offer greater scope for self-actualization and upward mobility. Extractive economies end up watching their young literally follow their oil or diamonds to foreign lands. Countries that build their economies around people clearly outperform those that base their economies on natural resources.

The world can be divided into countries oriented towards the past and those oriented towards the future. Talent flows from the former to the latter. In societies of the past, access to opportunity is determined by questions of identity and ancestry. “Where do you come from?” is the most significant question in such places and the answer to it carries bread and butter and life and death implications. In states of the future, access to opportunity is based on the individual’s potential. The operative question is not where he or she comes from but what he or she can become.

In states of the past, citizens are defined by their heritage; in states of the future, they are defined by their aspirations. In the former, ancestry is destiny; in the latter, potential is destiny. States of the past consider shared memory the basic raw material for nation-building. For states of the future, it is a shared destiny. Talent flows from the former to the latter because above all else people want to transcend the limits of social ascription and be masters of their fate.

America’s ascent towards superpower status gained momentum in the early 20^th century when it absorbed talented Jewry fleeing anti-Semitic persecution in totalitarian European societies. These societies were states of the past where rabid identity politics excluded Jews and other minorities. That brain drain resulted in immense cultural, economic and military gains for America. Similarly, after Idi Amin expelled Indians from Uganda, the country’s economy tanked while many of the refugees made for England where they established businesses that boosted British commercial life.

When Martin Luther King declared his hope that his children would one day be judged not by their colour but by the content of their character he was urging America to more fully become a state of the future. Obama frequently says that his personal odyssey as an African-American in the White House could only have been possible in America. Given his Luo ancestry, Obama’s chances of similar success in his native Kenya would have been nil. A bitter joke which made the rounds in Nairobi after Kenya’s bloody 2007 polls held that a Luo could be elected president of America but not of Kenya.

In Nigeria, access to goods like public education and employment is shaped significantly by ethnicity and religion. Institutionalized discrimination in many places disqualifies Nigerians from accessing public goods that are theirs by right. Almost every official document defines us by our ancestry or “state of origin.” “Where do you come from?” is the most frequently asked question. Obviously, a culture of excellence and achievement cannot thrive where ethnocentric mediocrity and identity politics trump meritocracy.

It is more than likely that Ejiofor and Aliyu would not have made it here. At some point, their ancestry would have proven a fatal roadblock to their aspirations as it has for millions of talented Nigerians. They might have been labeled “non-indigenes”, or found to be surplus to acceptable ethnic quotas or in contravention of federal character. But they have been accepted by societies where a person’s true worth is not divined from his bloodline but derived from his gifts and dreams. People do not choose where they are born but they can choose to maximize their potential. Societies that enable them to make those choices without the fear that their heritage is a hindrance will always lead the world. Conversely, nations that define identity as a weapon or weakness minimize both their people and their chances of growth. A nation cannot outgrow the existential constraints on its citizens.

Enterprising Nigerians are daily defying psychic and institutional barriers in pursuit of the better life. The key to unleashing our national genius is to redefine ourselves as a state of the future. This means ending the use of identity as a determinant of access to opportunity and defining ourselves by where we are headed rather than we come from. It also means practically creating a meritocratic environment where people can aspire to their best knowing that their country genuinely rewards excellence. 

To be sure, heritage matters. But what is heritage if not the stock of ancestral dreams and visions? We inherit from our forebears what they made of themselves and their times just as our children will inherit from us what we make of ourselves and our times. What better bequest to our progeny than a society in which their genius rather than their genes will speak for them?

(All images sourced online)

(Published in Thisday, March 9, 2014) 

2015: Who Speaks for Nigeria?

The first shots on the road to the 2015 elections were fired in January 2011 during the Occupy Nigeria protests. As President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration reeled from nationwide demonstrations against the unpopular hike in fuel prices, a previously unknown conclave of so-called Niger Delta elders issued an alarm over an alleged threat to Jonathan’s life. It was a classic instance of ethno-regional elites crying wolf over one of their own. Jonathan had campaigned for the presidency as a nationalistic everyman. The rhetorical appropriation of his presidency by a Niger Delta clique marked the beginning of the diminution of his stature.

 
Since then Jonathan’s presidency has been colonized by an increasingly provincial circle. He has failed to disavow Kingsley Kuku and Asari Dokubo who have threatened violence in the Niger Delta if he is not re-elected. Defacto spokesmen like Edwin Clark and Ayo Oritsejafor have only alienated people with their belligerence. The recourse to ethno-regional polemicists reflects Jonathan’s limitations as a politician who spent his entire working life in his home region and was suddenly thrust onto the national stage to handle a far more complex geometry of interests than he ever encountered in the homogenous Ijaw country. He was genuinely shaken by the ferocious opposition to his candidacy by some Northern elites, and the bloody aftermath of his electoral victory in some Northern states. The challenge of Islamist anarchist terror posed by Boko Haram seemed to fortify provincial paranoia within his inner circle in the early days of his administration. Since then, Jonathan has steadily de-evolved from a president with a fairly national support base to one whose loudest allies are in his home region. 

The close identification of Jonathan’s presidency with the Niger Delta struggle is ironic, if not fraudulent, because he has no history of involvement with the struggle at any level. The quest for equity in the Niger Delta never included “capturing” the national presidency. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the intellectual patron saint of the Niger Delta movement, advocated fiscal federalism, resource control and communal autonomy and essentially wanted communities to control their resources. Isaac Adaka Boro, who first sounded the trumpet for the rights of Niger Delta minorities in the 1960s, similarly sought autonomy for the region in the Nigerian federation. Neither of these figures thought an Ijaw president would be a victory for the Niger Delta and neither advocated such symbolic tokenism.  

That the Niger Delta question has been reduced to Jonathan’s political prospects signifies the supplanting of the intellectual spine of agitation in the region by brigands and political opportunists. Unsurprisingly, the Jonathan administration has not altered the material conditions of the Delta so much as it has transformed the fortunes of a small band of ex-militant chieftains and their acolytes. Tellingly, oil theft and piracy have skyrocketed since the administration outsourced coastal policing to an ex-militant. 
   
Jonathan’s 2015 campaign is likely to feature ethno-regional irredentism laced with militant gangsterism. It will not make for an edifying campaign. This is a shame because despite torrents of criticism, Jonathan actually has a few achievements which he could argue for an opportunity to consolidate in a second term without resorting to counterproductive threats.

This brings us to Jonathan’s adversaries. The subtext of the schism in the ruling People’s Democratic Party is the belief by some northern politicians that 2015 is “the turn of the North to rule”. As with the “Niger Delta Elders”, this “Northern” claim refers not to the region but to an elite formation simply casting its narrow ambitions in sectional language for greater appeal. At this stage of Nigeria’s history, any claim to power based on ethno-regional entitlement is a nonstarter. 

  Atiku Abubakar, an arrowhead of the current revolt had sought the PDP’s presidential nomination in 2011 as the “Northern candidate” but was defeated by Jonathan. At the time, Jonathan refused to engage in the reciprocal idiocy of declaring himself the “southern candidate”. Had he not subsequently compromised himself with his provincialism and his sorry cast of defenders, he could have made a compelling case for why Nigeria should look beyond primordial considerations in its leadership selection. Jonathan’s opponents evidently aim to raise the standard of northern irredentism against him. 

Neither Jonathan’s provincialism nor the northern irredentism of his traducers promises anything other than a bitterly polarized election. Neither offers a progressive future and neither even pretends to be remotely about the Nigerian people. With politics deadlocked between two equally ugly provincialisms, the stage is set for a third force. The opposition All Progressive Congress could conceivably be that third force. But it must avoid the very strong temptation to opt for northern populism; the calculation that merely fielding a Muslim northerner that can electrify the North is all that is required to defeat Jonathan. Any party that panders to our basest political instincts rather than our highest is unworthy of the progressive tag.

  A progressive third force would articulate a post-sectarian, pan-Nigerian argument for national leadership harping on themes like social justice, human security, education, healthcare, and job creation. We need an agenda that speaks to Nigerians in their generality rather than in their fragments. Decadent identity politics has only yielded atrocious leadership thus far. Only the best, regardless of religion or ethnicity, will do. 2015 should not be about the turn of the North or the South; it should be the turn of the Nigerian people.


(All images sourced online) 

The Essence of Achebe

News of Chinua Achebe’s passing struck me with a deep sadness; a sense that an era of Nigerian history is closing and that the guiding lights in the night sky of our national odyssey are dimming. The imagery is of a boat being set adrift from its trusty anchors. Achebe was one of those anchors.

Achebe did not stumble upon his craft by accident. He was initially admitted into the University of Ibadan on a scholarship to read medicine before electing to study English Literature, History and Religion instead. His decision cost him the scholarship but gained him his true vocation. He once declared that his calling as a novelist was “to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement.” Interestingly, the author most acclaimed as his natural successor, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, trod a similar path, leaving the University of Nigeria, Nsukka after a year and a half of studying medicine, to pursue her calling in writing. Finding one’s true place in the world often requires us to sacrifice the certainty of the popular paths to prestige and worldly wealth.

Christopher Okigbo the poet, Wole Soyinka the dramatist and Chinua Achebe the novelist constituted the literary trinity of their generation, all maestros in their chosen domains of artistic expression. Their travails at the hands of the state typified the perpetual battle between the realm of power and that of ideas. Okigbo took up arms for Biafra and was killed during the civil war, a death which deeply wounded Achebe. Soyinka, who had embarked upon a personal peace mission to the separatist regime in Biafra in 1967 in a bid to avert the war, was arrested by the Gowon regime and spent most of the war period in jail. In later years, he would flee into exile to escape the death squads of the Abacha junta. Achebe narrowly escaped assassination in the 1960s by forces who believed that his novel A Man of the People, which predicted the overthrow of the First Republic, indicated his complicity in treasonable activities. He was a Biafran functionary during the war. In 1990, a car accident in Lagos left him paralyzed from the waist down. Subsequently, he relocated to the United States where he held a teaching appointment until his passing last week.

Oddly enough, my first encounter of Achebe was not Things Fall Apart, the iconic novel and his best known work which earned him international repute and has been translated into dozens of languages. It was The Trouble with Nigeria, a stirring 1983 polemic brimming with righteous indignation at what his country had become. It was a searing indictment of his generation and his forebears and, as a work of social criticism, is startlingly relevant to our current struggles even though it was written thirty years ago. “We have lost the twentieth century,” he fumed; “Are we bent on seeing that our children also lose the twenty-first?” Soyinka would echo Achebe’s words in a 1984 essay in which he famously described his generation as a “wasted generation.”

I watched Things Fall Apart at about the same time that I read the book. The 1986 TV series produced by Godwin Ugwu and directed by David Orere is still one of the best Nigerian gifts to the small and big screen. It starred Pete Edochie as the tempestuous Okonkwo and Justus Esiri as his best friend, the sober and sagely Obierika. It is perhaps another portent of an ending era that Esiri passed away almost exactly a month before Achebe.

Achebe’s true gift was prophetic; an ability to tap into currents in the nation’s soul and scrawl her agonies in compelling stories and commentaries. It is a mark of how acute his powers of observation and identification as a writer were that his works possessed a predictive quality about them. Things Fall Apart portrayed the fateful clash of civilizations between a pristine Africa and the West in Okonkwo’s ultimately futile struggle against the Her Majesty’s imperial juggernaut. His subsequent works followed the arc of our colonial and post-colonial traumas. A Man of the People which depicted the greed and power-drunkenness of the post-colonial political class prophesied and coincided with Nigeria’s first military coup d’etat.

In The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe declared “Corruption in Nigeria has passed the alarming and entered the fatal stage; and Nigeria will die if we keep pretending that she is only slightly indisposed.” Within months of the book’s release, the Second Republic had been overthrown by the military. Buhari’s incarceration of Second Republic politicians drew qualified praise from Chinua Achebe who saw it as “a new element in the political culture. Things can never be the same again.” Even so, he expressed misgivings about “the arbitrary and extreme way Buhari handled the matter.” Two hundred-year jail terms were absurd “but the idea that somebody could go from state house to Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison is extremely important. And it is an idea that ought to live in the consciousness of our people whether they are going to be leaders or the led.”

Anthills of the Savannah showed up the venality of Africa’s big men and the phoniness of their messianic claims. Released in 1987, Achebe told us that we had erred in placing our faith in military dictators. He was proved right by Ibrahim Babangida’s convoluted and ultimately fruitless transition programme and his successor Sani Abacha’s bestial tyranny. Achebe’s response to the return to civil rule in 1999 was a cautious optimism borne of a life time of bearing witness to serial abortions of promise and the chronic perfidies of political elites. His caution was vindicated. He rejected offers of national awards by Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo in 2004 and Goodluck Jonathan in 2011.

In the first instance, he was protesting against Obasanjo’s anti-democratic habits and his state-sponsored assault on the government of Achebe’s home state, Anambra. In the second, he said that the circumstances that had informed his first rejection seven years earlier had not changed.  In both cases, Achebe refused to negotiate compromises with his values and stayed true to his ideal of the writer as social conscience. Clad in the armour of his graceful candour and intellectual honesty, Achebe was invulnerable to the barbs of government hacks.

His last work, There was a Country, a civil war memoir released last year, is often described as his most controversial book. In it, he accused the Nigerian state of genocide against the Igbos during the civil war. He had harsh words for Obafemi Awolowo whom he deemed an Igbophobe and spoke vaguely of an Islamo-jihadist conspiracy against Biafra. In fact, Achebe had made essentially the same comments about Awolowo in The Trouble with Nigeria in which he also issued lacerating criticisms of Nnamdi Azikiwe. Laced with his personal experience of the civil war, and the threats to his life and that of his young family, There was a Country is understandably charged with emotion but also with Achebe’s customary penetrative intelligence. The vitriolic reaction to the book in some quarters, including from some who freely admitted that they had not even read it, said less about Achebe than it did about the anemic condition of public discourse in Nigeria, especially the triumph of ad hominem illogicality over reason and civility.

While I disagreed with some of his conclusions, I recognized that the work was a personal testament crafted to memorialize his own experiences rather than an attempt to fashion an objective historical record. Achebe did not seek to write with the clinical detachment of an impartial scholar but with the raw emotional depth of a scarred participant-observer. Its personal bias did not detract from the work but merely emphasized that the post-civil war generation cannot base its grasp of history on one writer’s recall. For Achebe’s There was a Country, one should read Ken Saro-Wiwa’s On a Darkling Plain to see how two writers can interpret the same event differently, and more importantly, how writers can offer only pieces of the puzzle of our past. The more pieces we gather, the more informed we are.

Like Achebe and Okigbo, Saro-Wiwa had finished from Government College, Umuahia before proceeding to the University of Ibadan. During the civil war, he had served as the federal administrator of Bonny in the belief that his Ogoni homeland would not be served by being a part of Biafra. In later years, he became an advocate of autonomy for minority ethnic groups and a critic of military rule even and was executed by the Abacha regime in 1995.

It is worth noting that figures like Raph Uwechue, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ukpabi Asika and MCK Ajuluchukwu issued very different views on the civil war that did not levy blame on Awolowo or alleged jihadists but considerably on the Biafran leadership itself. To assume that Achebe’s book is some kind of definitive bible of the civil war is to misrepresent both the work and his motive for writing what is a personal perspective on a harrowing period.    

Regardless, Achebe’s overarching theme in his last work was a heartfelt frustration with Nigeria that was itself deeply Nigerian. His charge of genocide against the Gowon regime called attention to the inhumanity of the post-colonial state and to our own tendency to amnesia. “Nigerians laugh at tragedy,” he once said by way of rebuke. At a time when we have become desensitized to violence and shrug off mass slaughter wrought by terrorists as a tragic normalcy, Achebe called attention to the slow hemorrhaging of our humanity. He was calling us to empathy. His urgent prescription – that Nigeria abandon the doomed infatuation with mediocrity that holds her in bondage and enthrone a meritocracy especially in her leadership selection – is undeniably our country’s path to salvation.

Achebe followed his activist instincts into Second Republic politics where he joined Mallam Aminu Kano’s People’s Redemption Party along with Arthur Nwankwo, Uche Chukwumerije (like Achebe, former Biafran functionaries), Soyinka and other intellectuals. The choice of teaming up with a Northerner who had served on Gowon’s war cabinet during the civil war was all the more significant at the time because most Igbo elites were in the ruling National Party of Nigeria (which the Biafran war leader Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu returned from exile to join) or the Nigerian Peoples’ Party led by Nnamdi Azikiwe.  Achebe penned a moving tribute to Aminu Kano, “a saint and a revolutionary” whom he admired for his complete identification “through struggle with the fate of the downtrodden…. Nigeria cannot be the same again because Aminu Kano lived here,” he wrote.

It is part of the pathology of our public discourse that different groups seek to appropriate national icons and induct them into ethnically-exclusive pantheons. Through this vain and narrow-minded sense of ownership, we shrink national heroes into the parameters framed by our prejudices. Achebe’s legacy defies such efforts. He was unabashedly Igbo but his interests were broadly humanist, African and undisputedly Nigerian. As he put it, “Nigeria is where God in his infinite wisdom chose to plant me.” He retained a thoroughly tested faith in Nigerian exceptionalism; a fervent belief that the country has been marked out by providence for leadership and was being subverted by mediocre leaders.

For those who have surrendered to millennial despondency and fatalism about Nigeria’s prospects and see an apocalyptic revolution as the only way out, Achebe offered perhaps his most important message in Anthills of the Savannah: “The sweeping, majestic visions of people rising victorious like a tidal wave against their oppressors and transforming their world with theories and slogans of a new heaven and a new earth of brotherhood, justice and freedom are at best grand illusions. The rising, conquering tide, yes; but the millennium afterwards, no! New oppressors will have been readying themselves secretly in the undertow long before the tidal wave got really going. Experience and intelligence warn us that man’s progress in freedom will be piecemeal, slow and undramatic. Revolution may be necessary for taking a society out of an intractable stretch of quagmire but it does not confer freedom, and may indeed hinder it.”  

In other words, there will be no miracle cures or quick fixes; only generations expanding the frontiers of our collective possibilities slowly and agonizingly, inch by tortuous inch, confronting charlatans and power-mongers with the weapons of truth and imagination. Creative writers matter in this regard because, as the Zikist politician Adegoke Adelabu once wrote, “Truth stands no chance of receiving an audience unless it is clothed in fashion, adumbrated in novelty, adorned in sensationalism and enthroned on the pedestal of originality.” Or as an Achebean character tells us, “Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control; they frighten all usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit.”

The luminaries of generations past are leaving us in droves – Cyprian Ekwensi, Stanley Macebuh, Claude Ake, Bala Usman, Gani Fawehinmi, etc. Soyinka and his surviving peers are lions in winter but the grizzled Nobel laureate still steadfastly registers his presence at the barricades when it is needed. At a time when the avatars of mediocrity appear to have permanently installed themselves in the sanctums of power while subverting the possibility of collective action with sectarian rhetoric, the duty of speaking truth to power and reaffirming our shared humanity has never been greater. We must engage in what Achebe called “the patriotic action of proselytizing for decent and civilized political values.” Achebe left us a great literary and moral inheritance. We can only begin to repay the debt we owe him to future generations by inaugurating our own chapter of the struggle that he so valiantly engaged in. 






All images sourced online. 

The Science of Success

The reactions of Nigerians to our country’s dismal performance at the just concluded Olympics have been instructive. Nigeria has no medal to its name. Blessing Okagbare valiantly reached the women’s 100 meters final but placed eighth. The U.S. Dream Team beat Nigeria 156 – 73, the highest ever margin of defeat in Olympic basketball history. Many Nigerians have been caustic about our athletes’ performances perhaps because they had hoped for a sporting triumph abroad to punctuate the seemingly interminable cycle of dreary news back home. Yet, both the Nigerian showing and the domestic reaction reveal widely varying attitudes and beliefs about success.

For successful countries, success is a science – an outcome empirically determined by rational systems and structures based on the consistent application of effort and resources and the cultivation of habits of excellence. For unsuccessful countries, success is a miracle – a stroke of outrageous fortune; a whimsical gift from capricious deities; in short, an act of God. To this mindset, success can be no more predetermined than an earthquake can be choreographed. Excellence is a magical occurrence originating not from human exertion but from the realm of the unknown. This outlook explains why our sports teams customarily show up at international tournaments ill-prepared, banking on talent and prayer to clinch victory, only to be duly mauled by better organized teams.

Spain’s dominance of international football since 2008, to Nigerian eyes, is down to exceptional luck and a fortuitous surfeit of talent. We forget that throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Spain was a perennial underachiever. We forget that Nigeria beat Spain in the France 1998 World Cup. A comparative study of Spain’s recovery from that low point and the decline of Nigerian football from that moment will yield empirical data that explains Spanish supremacy and Nigerian decline. Success is the product of systems established to operate a culture of excellence. The Olympic medals table is an index of long term strategic preparation, discipline, research, constantly refined techniques and tactics, enacted on a systemic and institutional scale.

We have built no structures to entrench excellence but we demand results that are completely at variance with our investments. The more our athletes flounder, the more obdurate we are in our belief that we are entitled to success and the more biting our critiques of their failures to meet our utterly unrealistic expectations. In truth, our athletes deserve commendation for even reaching the Olympics – a feat achieved largely on the strength of their own individual efforts with minimal or negligible institutional support. Indeed, a Nigerian medal would only have been a deserved crown for the individual athlete’s hard work not an achievement to be claimed as a national triumph because it would not have been the product of any intentional systemic effort.

As our society has grown more individualistic, we have come to see success as the product of individual talent and effort alone. But the sheer precociousness of gifted individuals is not enough. Many prodigies are roaming the streets, denied the space for self-actualization. It takes institutions to create spaces for their prodigious gifts to bloom. Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt are supremely talented athletes and their personal exertions have surely been justly rewarded. But they are also symbols of systems that work. They are examples of success by design just as Chidi Imoh, Innocent Egbunike, Mary Onyali-Omagbemi, Yusuf Alli and Falilat Ogunkoya represent an earlier epoch when structures existed that, at least, made Nigeria competitive. That epoch also produced the Super Eagles that won the African Cup of Nations in 1994, stormed sensationally into the second round of its World Cup debut that year and won Olympic soccer gold in Atlanta ‘96.

Lionel Messi, Xavi and Iniesta may be superbly gifted individuals but they represent the cultural excellence of La Masia, Barcelona’s highly-rated youth academy. England is launching an U-21 youth league because it has realized that good old English grit and “getting stuck in” are not enough. If she is to truly compete with powerhouses like Spain, Germany and Brazil, then young British footballers have to become technically savvy and tactically aware. This action shows both the humility to recognize the footballing weaknesses of the “home of football” as well as the intelligence to mount an institutional response. A decade from now, when a generation of technically astute English players emerges, it will not be a product of fortunate happenstance but of strategic preparedness.

In Nigeria, a culture of planning and strategy is often seen as tantamount to playing God. But surely, the real folly is arrogantly presuming the certainty of a miracle to compensate for our habitual negligence, when God is certainly not a Nigerian.  Our conception of success carries inevitable implications for public life and politics. We persist in looking for messianic figures to perform miracles in spite of the dysfunctional environment while resisting the need to actually challenge the dysfunction itself. We erroneously focus on stumbling upon exceptional individuals rather than building sustainable institutions. To be sure, exceptional individuals exist but they are rare. This is why they are exceptions by definition. The specific historical factors that throw up a Nelson Mandela or a Lee Kwan Yew cannot be simulated. Institutions are the golden mean between the undistinguished normality of the masses and the extraordinary gifts of exceptional geniuses. They enable societies to function admirably even when they are not led by political prodigies.

Miracles are permissible metaphors in personal narratives but they are unknown in nation-building and development. There was nothing at all miraculous about the so-called Asian Miracle. Asian nations simply married Confucian rigour with western modernity. China’s ascent is the most compelling example of this dynamic. Just as the rise of nations is traceable to institutional and cultural engineering, so too is our decline rooted in the decay of our systems and values. The youth sports federations that oversaw the sporting successes of yore have withered away from lack of funding, corruption and inertia. The inter-school sports contests which nurtured athletes have disappeared replaced by the heroic but sporadic efforts of a few corporations and individuals to sustain sports.

But how much can we really extrapolate from a poor Olympic showing which, let’s face it, has become customary anyway? Nigeria’s youth bulge carries both the potential for powering a developmental leap forward as well as the peril of delinquency, crime and conflict in the face of severely constricted economic opportunities. Sports harnesses youthful exuberance and energies and can provide youths with gainful employment, while enabling them to bring honour to themselves and their country.

Secondly, in the 21^st century, nationalistic belligerence has been replaced by sporting nationalisms. Countries send their gladiators to duel in the sports arena rather than the battlefield. Victory boosts national pride and provides a feel-good factor, the sense of creative optimism societies need to grapple with the future. A vestige of the prehistoric tribal instinct requires the reality or fiction of an external adversary against which nations measure themselves and strive for excellence. The great sporting rivalries between nations derive from this. Just as Olympics medals tables of the Cold War era reflected the great power rivalry between the U.S. and the USSR, and between Western Europe and the Eastern bloc, recent tables reflect the emergent Sino-American polarity. Nigeria’s decline in sports and other areas is perhaps also down to the fact that despite our size and natural wealth, we have no conception of strategic rivals or adversaries. It is also conceivable that investing in sports and creating theatres of athletic competition will help defuse the aggressive micronationalisms and militant religiousities captivating youths across Nigeria. Sports show us that the natural competitive instinct that undergirds civilization need not be lethal.

In the final analysis, success in any field is generated by design. It is neither a miracle nor magic. It is ultimately a choice that we make when we adopt a culture of excellence. In our beleaguered society, where mediocrity has assumed a normative presence, the key to receiving excellence is to respect and reward it. As a first step, this means enthroning a meritocracy; selecting the best of us to lead regardless of their ethnicity, religion or gender. Only competent people can build competent institutions.   



(All Images sourced from Google Images)