NigeriansTalk

This is my Busi­ness­Day col­umn of today. Cross-posted here.

Some­time ago, in a forum of Nige­ri­ans, some­one said that he did not know whether to be proud to be a Niger­ian. The response:

“How dare you say you might not be proud of Nige­ria? That is the kind of thing that makes other coun­tries dump on us! When they hear that some­one like you [a very well edu­cated young many] is say­ing some­thing like that how do you want them to feel about your coun­try? Nige­ria is a land flow­ing with milk and honey [and a coun­try of peo­ple who love bib­li­cal ref­er­ences], and every Niger­ian should be proud of his or her country!”

The young man realised that he had got more than he bar­gained for. He smiled tiredly and said, ‘See, what I meant was that I can only be proud of what I have achieved or attained. I was born a Niger­ian, so why should I be proud of being one?’

True, our young man has quite some things to be proud of – in the man­ner of the things he says one should be proud of. Mas­ters degree from an Amer­i­can Ivy League uni­ver­sity, where he stud­ied with a schol­ar­ship not awarded by the Niger­ian gov­ern­ment. Maybe if the gov­ern­ment had paid for the edu­ca­tion he would have had a rea­son to be proud of being a Nigeria.

The peo­ple in the audi­ence broke out into small dis­cus­sions after our young man said that. The dis­cus­sions were about whether achieve­ments should be what a per­son is proud of, or whether there were some other things that one could be proud of beside achieve­ments. The dis­cus­sion went silent after about a minute – you know that kind of silence that we attribute to the fact that an angel of God ‘just’ went through the room?

A voice rang out from the mid­dle of the room, ‘We Africans should be proud of our coun­tries. In fact, we should be uncon­di­tion­ally proud of our coun­tries’. One of those rare occa­sions when state­ments and dec­la­ra­tions do not need to be substantiated.

A few heads nod­ded. Those that did not nod kept quiet. This was not the forum for con­trar­i­an­ism. Before any­body could brave it and start a dis­cus­sion on the dic­tio­nary mean­ing of pride, the mod­er­a­tor moved in and changed the topic.

As this ran through my mind, I was reminded of a BBC Hardtalk inter­view with Mr Dimeji Bankole, the speaker of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives. When the inter­viewer, Mr Steven Sackur, described him as the speaker of the lower cham­ber, the speaker, his pride obvi­ously wounded, retorted, ‘I am the speaker of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tive. We don’t like to be called lower’.

Let me try and analyse this based on the dis­cus­sion in that forum of Nige­ri­ans. Like the young man who did not find any rea­son to be proud of Nige­ria, Mr Bankole has really good edu­ca­tion – you should have watched the inter­view to hear him speak­ing Oxbridge Eng­lish. Plus he is the speaker of the Niger­ian House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tive, how could any­one not be proud of that kind of achieve­ment? I sup­pose those are things he and our young man would agree that one should be proud of.

Although, unlike our young man, he would be proud of being a Niger­ian, a cit­i­zen of the land flow­ing with milk and honey. He might even sub­scribe to the idea that one has to be proud of Nige­ria sim­ply because.

But then, pride some­times results in laugh­able moments, even if they are laugh­able sim­ply because they are ludi­crous. This last week, Mr Umaru Yar’Adua was to present the bud­get of the coun­try to the National Assem­bly, with mem­bers of both houses of leg­is­la­ture gath­ered in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives. The sen­a­tors dis­agreed. The bud­get should be pre­sented in the Sen­ate, they said. Maybe some sen­a­tors watched the Hardtalk inter­view and realised that this would mean that Mr Bankole was right, and that the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives was indeed not the lower chamber?

In any case, the bud­get was not pre­sented to the National Assem­bly. Because pride was bruised and the two houses could not agree on where to sit and watch the pres­i­dent present a bud­get. Hmm… what kind of pride would that be? Maybe a close rel­a­tive of the kind that the ancient Greeks described as hubris?