“For Nigeria to be what it should or what it could be, it is time for us to wake up, arise and stop the growing cancer of mental impoverishment.”
I have been doing some work on what I call THE MENTAL IMPOVERISHMENT OF THE NIGERIAN SOCIETY.
I have noticed that in almost all aspects of our life, the quality of output has remarkably deteriorated. We see it in mass media. That’s why somebody wrote about the failure of Journalists.
We see in the increasing lack of spiritual depth in the sermons preached in churches and mosques. We see in the depressing quality of speeches and addresses being made by public officials, including presidents, governors etc, even though such speeches get longer.
We see it in the quality of lectures being delivered by university teachers and teachers at other levels. We see it in the empty self-serving debates in our various parliaments.
We see it in the level of political campaigns that offer no light into the opaque slogans that are being repeated often and often. We see it in the lack of value-laden messages in our musical and dramatic presentations.
We see it in the growing irrelevance of domestic football, including the so-called Super Eagles. We see it in the ever-readiness of Nigerians to accept anything placed on social media without even scrutinising it. We will see it in the gradual drift towards anti-intellectualism at all levels of our life.
We see it in the way, otherwise knowledgeable people applaud mediocrity, under the guise of partisan political, ethnic or religious loyalty. The sum total of all of these is that we have nostalgic feelings for yesterday. We see our yesterday as the better times, most times with no hope for tomorrow.
And I get worried when a country begins to go in reverse gear…and believes yesterday is its greatest moment of glory. And I think it’s because we all are allowing ourselves to get so used to darkness that we almost don’t know what light is.
We’re beginning to believe in the pervading uniformity that makes those who should be beacons of hope and light to be scared of being different.
The dialectic theory envisages that for every situation or position,which the theorist called THESIS, for the society to grow,there must immediately arise an ANTITHESIS.
The theory posits that there must be a conflict…intellectual, ideological… between the THESIS and ANTI-THESIS… This conflict will produce a SYNTHESIS, which ought to be an integration of the best within the THESIS and ANTI-THESIS.
It is this SYNTHESIS that will become the new THESIS…and the dialectic process continues to guarantee the growth and development of the society.
But this contest must be based on ideas, ideology, and intellectual reasoning. It cannot be based on ethnic, or religious affiliation, which really are opium of the people, which make surrender their reasoning or make them go to sleep. This is what I call the soporific effect of surrendering our reasoning to some ethnic, religious and political board of guardians.
But for Nigeria to be what it should or what it could be, IT IS TIME FOR US TO WAKE UP, ARISE AND STOP THE GROWING CANCER OF MENTAL IMPOVERISHMENT.
•Dr Farounbi OON is former Nigerian Ambassador to the Philippines.
