Values and ethos: A new Nigeria is possible

“NIGERIA has a terrible reputation. Tell someone that you are going to Nigeria and if they haven’t been there themselves, they offer sympathy. Tell anyone who has been to Nigeria and they laugh. Then they offer sympathy. No tourists go there. Only companies rich enough to keep their staff removed from the realities of Nigerian life do business there. And big companies rarely mention Nigeria in their annual reports for fear of what it will do to their share price.

Journalists treat it like a war zone. Diplomats regard it as a punishment posting. Everyone has a Nigerian story from beyond the normal bounds of credibility. Some are terrifying. Most are funny.

Nigerian politicians try to pretend that its bad image is some Western conspiracy against Nigeria and Africa. The truth is that Nigeria’s popular image falls short of the reality. It is not just white visitors who fear it. I told a Ghanaian cab driver in London that I was going to Nigeria. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: ‘I lived in Lagos once. Give me a million – a billion pounds, I would not go back there. Never. It is the most terrible place in the world.”

The first time I read the opening chapter on Nigeria in the British journalist, Richard Dowden’s book, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracle (2010), from where I took the above excerpt, I was filled with a deep sense of shame. Now, when one reads a piece of this nature about one’s country, what is one supposed to do? The picture painted by Dowden above is what foreigners think about Nigeria. If one were to ask Nigerians what they think of their country, one is most likely to hear worse things. Even among those Nigerians who have an unambiguous loyalty to Nigeria you still find those who rubbish it and are cynical about its chances of going anywhere. In Dowden’s book, everything wrong with Nigeria comes down to two indices: Indiscipline and corruption.

One of the enduring legacies of the first coming of Muhammadu Buhari as military Head of State (1983–85) was the launch of the War Against Indiscipline (WAI) in 1984. I was born the following year 1985 and only got to know about WAI as I grew up. The last I ever heard of it was in 1996 when I was in primary six. Every day before the commencement of the day’s lesson, our class teacher and assistant headmaster, Mr. Yohanna Sarki, a man of tough discipline and stern reserve, would beckon on us to recite the WAI pledge individually as he dangled his “koboko” with relish before the entire class: “I pledge myself to Nigeria my country, to be disciplined and law abiding, to work faithfully for the good of the country, and to obey the WAI law.” You can imagine the fate of any student who couldn’t recite this pledge!

Many Nigerians who love to romanticise the “good old days,” have been agitating for a resurrection of WAI following President Buhari’s second coming. Some others describe WAI as a total fiasco as a result of the alleged draconian and unreasonable punishment meted out to defaulters for even the most insignificant infraction. However, on both sides of the spectrum, there is at least a general consensus that indiscipline remains one of the greatest obstacles hindering this nation from reaching the full potential we all know it is capable of attaining. In his celebrated monograph, The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), the late Professor Chinua Achebe drew serious attention to the entrenched malaise of indiscipline in our society. “Indiscipline,” Achebe said, “pervades our life so completely today that one may be justified in calling it the condition par excellence of contemporary Nigerian society. We see and hear and read about indiscipline in the home, in the school, in the public service, in the private sector, in government and in legislative assemblies, on the roads, in the air.”

Achebe further argued that there is no better place to observe the thrusting climate of indiscipline in Nigerian behaviour than on the roads where frenetic energy, rudeness and noisiness all conspire to paint a bizarre image of a country where lawlessness is celebrated.

Personally, I have observed how obeying road traffic regulation in Nigeria appears to be unrewarding. The law-abiding motorist is made to look like a fool in a society where utter disregard for traffic rules smacks of smartness. But it is not only on our roads that indiscipline and lawlessness exist. In virtually every department of our national life, all manners of brazen wrongdoing from corner cutting, queue jumping and rule breaking have conspired to paint a picture of a country well gifted in organised anarchy. It is not as if every Nigerian does it. There are millions of decent Nigerians who give a good image of their country both at home and abroad, and who spend their lives defending their country against those who would want to rubbish it.

In a special edition of THISDAY to commemorate the first 100 days of Buhari, ace NTA broadcaster, Eugenia Abu, spoke so passionately about how indiscipline, disorderliness and poor national ethos cripple the potentials of our nation. In her piece, “The Need for Value Re-Orientation,” she narrated her experience at the Murtala Mohammed Airport, Lagos, trying to board an international flight, and observed how some Nigerians have no regard for order, decency and protocol. “There has to be something in the brain of those who think everyone else except them are smart when they jump queues, break traffic lights, deliver poor customer service, are rude in public spaces, have poor work ethics and everything else in between.”

At home and abroad, this sort of loathsome behaviour has for a long time come to define what it is to be a Nigerian. For many foreign nationals, Nigeria is simply a jungle – a place where common-sense is in acute shortage, where the laws of reason do not apply and where decent people cannot fit in. But this is not altogether true. According to Abu, “Nigeria is a good country and can still be if the national ethos is transformed.” When WAI was launched on March 20, 1984, the campaign was designed to address the perceived lack of public morality and civic responsibility in the Nigerian society. Unruly Nigerians were ordered to form neat queues at bus stops, under the watchful eyes of whip-wielding soldiers. Civil servants who failed to show up on time at work were humiliated and forced to do “frog jumps.” Minor offences carried long sentences. Exam malpractice in schools was severely punished. Counterfeiting, arson and drug peddling could lead to the death penalty.

The crackdown on indiscipline was announced by Buhari’s second-in-command, Brigadier General Tunde Idiagbon. “I want you to bear in mind,” he said, “the need to emphasize self-discipline and leadership by good example. Begin by drawing public attention to little but important everyday manifestations of indiscipline such as rushing into buses, driving on the wrong side of the road, littering the streets, parks and dwelling compounds, cheating, taking undue advantage of scarcity to inflate prices for quick monetary gains, constituting ourselves into public nuisances, working without commitment and devoting little or no time to the upbringing of our children.”

Thirty-one years later, things seem to have gone from bad to worse, partly because of the poorly conceived strategies for waging the war against indiscipline, and partly because of the failure of successive governments to rein in the demons of lawlessness. Our leaders share a lot of the blame because they have failed to lead by personal example. In Achebe words: “Leaders are, in the language of psychologists, role models. People look up to them and copy their actions, behaviours and even mannerisms. Therefore if a leader lacks discipline the effect is apt to spread automatically down to his followers. The less discerning among these (i.e. the vast majority) will accept his action quite simply as ‘the done thing’ while the more critical may worry about for a while and then settle the matter by telling themselves that the normal rules of social behaviour need not apply to those in power.”

Clearly, something needs to be done to instil public morality and restore social order in Nigeria. We need not just public outrage against the brazen public display of indiscipline in our society, but also a national conversation that will crystallize in the value re-orientation that Abu strongly advocated for in her THISDAY piece. For her, parental upbringing of children is crucial: “Nothing beats national values taught to children from when they are very young to ensure it stays with them for life. I am over 50 but I cannot bring myself to throw paper/rubbish out of my car. My father who has long left us insisted when I was a kid and it has remained with me. We must do something to get young people to hold on to our positive values and traditions and to do the right thing.”

* Ojeifo is a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Abuja. (emmaojeifo@yahoo.com) / 07066363913.