OPEN LETTER TO PROFESSOR WOLE SOYINKA I

By Emmanuel Onwe 

Dear Professor Soyinka 

RE: YOUTH AND THE NATION: A SHARED RESPONSIBILITY 

I wrote this rejoinder many years ago and much has transpired over the intervening period. The passage of time has, inevitably, meant movement in age and history. It has also meant an escalation in the relentless erosion of the fortunes of the Nigerian youth. 

My recently published novel, Serpents and Doves, the first instalment of a trilogy upon which I am embarked, has witnessed its own traumatic metamorphosis. Initially entitled The Eye of Fire, it had to be re-titled following the publication of Chief Emeka Anyaoku’s biography. The irony is antipoetic in a benign sense - if publication had taken place immediately upon its completion in 1996, or shortly thereafter, the irritation of transmutation would have flowed counter-directionally. But I hold no grudges against our distinguished compatriot. I have read the Eye of Fire: A Biography of Chief Emeka Anyaoku: The Man and his Work with great pleasure and salute him for his enduring service to this nation, the Commonwealth and to humanity. 

This advertorial is partly instigated by your declaration that "Each time … I hear the sentiment: the youths are the leaders of tomorrow, I feel like taking out an advertisement in reasoned refutation," (my emphasis), but mainly informed by a simple desire to raise a small flag in declaration of the plight of the Nigerian youth. 

Although I share your sentiment - to the extent that it is concerned with the ineluctability of challenging supine assertions – I dispute your refutation of the notion that the youth are the vanguards of the future, the trusty shield against generational nihilism, and hope that you will be seized of your customary intellectual generosity to find my arguments "reasoned" or considered. 

In the deepest recesses of my intellectual soul - a magical plane where you exist as my Tai Solarin - a thousand dialogues have occurred and continue to occur between us, and this the first potential dispute. In that disembodied plane, I often ask the questions and presume, though not presumptuously, your responses. It is an exercise that has illuminated aspects of my imagination and solidified my faith in the interconnectivity of the human spirit. How lucky you were for the divine gift of Solarin. Gifts of such sublime nature are the cravings of the best elements amongst today's youth. So gallantly and so exceptionably did he discharge his responsibility to both the youth and to your generation. And so ably and irrepressibly have you first deputised and, finally, assumed the near-accursed task. Boethius played a somewhat similar role in degenerate Rome and one is here moved to recall what Chesterton said of Boethius: "Thus he truly served as a guide, philosopher and friend to many Christians; precisely because, while his own times were corrupt, his own culture was complete". The very completeness of your individual culture, sir, is your great redemptive contribution to this republic and I am, along with the vast majority of your compatriots, immensely proud. 

Who is a Nigerian youth? Or, put differently, who belongs to that shifting collective known as youth within the Nigerian context? This question is somewhat problematic. The concept of youth ought to be universal. However, there are inescapable social, historical and economic factors which result in demographic dissimilarities between nations and continents. These factors mean that the concept of youth is not and cannot be transborder neutral. It would be erroneous, for instance, to assume that the segment of the population that constitutes the youth in Nigeria is precisely the same as in the United Kingdom (this example simply miniaturises the contradistinction between the age brackets that comprise the youth of the third world and the youth of the Western world). If one were to adopt a mathematical expression, one would posit this formula thus: in a population where the average life expectancy is 75 - 80 years, the peak of its youth would be 35 - 40 years (this represents the Western model - thereafter, middle age ensues). Conversely, where the average life expectancy is 45 - 50 years, the peak of youth would be 20 - 25 years (third world model). It is a horrific and depressing fact of life that a 40 year-old Nigerian villager would have lost his vigour, reckless enthusiasm, alertness, zest for life and most of the attributes that characterise youth. He would be regarded not just as middle-aged but old. Contrariwise, a 40 year-old American is pretty much on the last furlongs of his youth. Our sociology would appear to be a curse to our biology. 

The intrinsic logic of the foregoing disqualifies me from claiming the status of youth in the third world model, as I am already above the peak of youth. However, having lived the greater proportion of my adult life in the United kingdom, I claim youth in the Western model precisely because my worldview, social proclivities and life choices have been formed, shaped and solidified from the perspective of an average Western youth (a form of neo-enslavement, a point to which I shall duly return). More importantly, my sympathies, both social and political, my sense of disconnection, and my ambitions (both long term and short term), compel me to identify myself, not just with, but as, a Nigerian youth. I have experienced, from two radically different perspectives, the unique frustrations, challenges and self-lacerating anger of youth, and feel qualified to speak on behalf of the Nigerian youth, without necessarily claiming the mantle of spokesmanship. 

During the sultry British summer of 1994, near the peak of the great June 12 Movement, I gave a speech at the Commonwealth Institute in London on behalf of the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), UK Section. I was particularly struck and impressed by both the relative youth and boundless enthusiasm of the participants. It was my impression that the average age in the hall that day could not have been more than 25 years. I was one of the youngest participants. At the end of my less than radical speech, the Nigerian High Commission published a newsletter with a bold reactionary headline: Onwe Fires Tirades Against the Nigerian Government, with my photograph splashed on the front cover. As you know too well, under Abacha, that was as good as a death sentence. Regardless, I was immensely proud of the occasion mostly because of the unstinting commitment of the youth. Query: might I have done so if I had imagined that my hero was upset by the very concept of youth being the future? 

I could very easily have fallen victim to those "brutal images" which you so graphically deployed in your rather brilliant assault on the reputation of not just the Nigerian youth but the African youth generally. But I escaped by a margin as insignificant as the skin of the teeth - surmounting what seemed insurmountable, aided by the grit and fearlessness that engorge the blood vessels of youth. Yet, I belong to the stillborn generation – a uniquely Nigerian phenomenon. 

The lamentable daily experience of the Nigerian youth testifies to the criminal waste to which your generation has for far too long subjected them. Their anger and outrage are fuelled by the fact of the prevailing phenomenal haemorrhage of potential and ability. Your generation has dealt them a terrible hand, which means that the only currency in which they can trade is violence and thuggery; and more often than not they pay the capital penalty. Job opportunities are absent, education is mediocre at best and often utterly worthless, and the wisdom passed down from our elders is a digest of crime, corruption and licence. 

Common to youths everywhere is a deep dissatisfaction with the existing order and a burning desire to change this order. But the formulators of the existing order have erected impregnable edifices that hem in our youth on the precipice of continental sewage. 

I accuse your generation of a crime against a particular segment of humanity – a crime against the Nigerian youth. I accuse your generation of abstracted hard-of-hearing indifference and for a purblind attitude to the annihilation of the potentials of our youth. I accuse your generation of outrageous righteous lassitude for expecting Nigerian youth to be uniformly spastic, facile, lobotomous and criminal. I accuse your generation of spiritual, intellectual and material torture for handcuffing, footchaining and straight-jacketing our youth for nearly 50 years. And there is more: if sovereignty means nothing without the prospects of its preservation, and if said preservation is irreducibly dependent on the weaning and nurturing of the youth of said sovereign entity, and if a wilful and deliberate assault on sovereignty is treasonable, then I accuse your generation of treason against this republic.

J'accuse votre génération parce que votre génération est coupable de l'accusation.  

You are of course such an outstanding example of your generation, the exception that proves the rule; an impressive manifestation of what is possible and what might have been had your generation opted to shun criminality and taken itself seriously. We stand witness to your exemplary culture, but the joy that ought tremble our ribs turn into weeping that shake our bones. 

In a nation convulsing with destructive impulses, such as characterise ours today, the pedigree of the youth avails them naught, because at the helm is a cabal of renegades seized by an effervescent energy directed only towards the impediment of merit and the promotion of narrow self-interests and mediocrity. The full-scale effect of this mindset, which cuts right through the complex weave of social behaviour, is the contamination of the streams of achievement and the smothering of creditable ambitions. 

I wrote in Serpents and Doves that the utter hopelessness of the Nigerian youth is anchored in the depressing reality that "It was futile to have a sense of wonder, what with being exposed from the moment of birth, through cradle to the grave, to unrestrained moral, social-political and economic corruption; worst of all, what with being exposed to, and, finally, indoctrinated in nihilistic intellectual corruption. That last was the most crippling condition of all. Our quadriplegic status as a nation comes down, ultimately, to the rotten condition of our minds". 

The critical ingredients that would forge our character are either in severe dearth or altogether absent: decent education, a job that pays a living wage, a political atmosphere that fosters a genuine sense of freedom and a sense of effective enablement, and genuine spiritual leadership. The rotten condition of your generation's mind, therefore, remains the single insuperable obstacle to our national progress. 

The Nigerian youth are condemned to look abroad for self-actualisation and fulfilment, but only to become subjects of intellectual slavery, forever bonded to the thought process of our conquerors. Thus, that "priceless right called freedom", as you eloquently asserts, is worthless without the underlying fundamental elements: dignity, self-worth, pride, hope (for now and for the future). Every which way you turn, you find a sprawling plantation of slaves heaving with the glistening torsos of Nigerian youth, malleable tools in the hands of the discredited masters of your generation. A captured or bought slave is worthier. 

Your deployment of ghastly examples of the depravities of African youth in conflict situations as argument against the innocence/idealisation of youth is, with the greatest respect, sir, inapt. Those instances simply and brutally prove the misapplication of the energy, ready loyalty and inexhaustible capacity for evil which the youth embody both as a matter of nature and of nurture. The constituency of youth has elements of varmints, nitwits, vagrants and marplots. This fact is indubitable. But show me a generational constituency (with the emphatic exception of babies and infants) which is uncontaminated by these objectionable qualities and I will point you to Eldorado. 

Youth need not be idealised - youth are not in need of idealisation but of recognition. A recognition of both their legitimate place and role in society, and their duty to secure posterity. The nurturing of our youth is absolutely essential to the preservation of our future as a nation and as a people. I acknowledge without hesitation that the population that constitutes the youth is not adorable, unworthy of idealisation, not even trustworthy or commanding of confidence. Nevertheless, youth are the unavoidable link to our tomorrow, our passport to the future - for good or for ill. And I am encouraged by Dorothy Fuldheim's assertion that "Youth is a disease from which we all recover." Much, I dare state, depends on the availability and quality of care. 

The youth are the leaders of tomorrow. Science and history have conspired to bequeath, arbitrarily, upon the youth the celebration, perpetuation and destruction of the future. These noble contradictions are at the very core of human nature. The futility of quarrelling with science and history is a bitterly universal lesson. 

Your generation's sins pale in the face of the worst excesses of our youth. Not a single one of the crimes you attribute to the youths of Africa in general is independent of the direct instigation and active prosecution by your generation. To condemn the youth for those infractions is tantamount, in my opinion, to hanging the fence and absolving the thief; you "pity the plume and forget the dying bird." 

What your generation owes us goes well beyond responsibility or duty of care or commitment to good faith in our transactions. These may be for the future. But for the present, your generation owes us penance, expressed by way of apology, reparation and a fresh oath of good faith. These must be demonstrated through the institutions that cater overwhelmingly for the needs of the youth. Furthermore, specific provisions must be entrenched in the constitution, framed to recognise the unique rights and responsibilities of the youth of this nation. So badly have we been stung and brutally abused over so many decades that a constitutional recognition open to the trusty guardianship of the law courts is our only shield and guarantee. 

In most spheres of human endeavour, there is no space for the Nigerian youth to thrive. They have no foothold in their own country. They must therefore become exiles, refugees and sojourners in foreign lands. During my long days as a human rights lawyer in England, I had witnessed, from the fiery frontline, the abject desperation of Nigerian youth - the refugees and the exiles, modern day hewers of wood and drawers of water. You persuasively illustrated the degraded condition and dehumanised status of slaves in the classical sense. But the modern form of slavery, to which the Nigerian youth are subject, is almost equal in its dehumanising and degrading impact. I do not by any means seek to diminish or even compare the appalling tragedy of black African slaves centuries ago, but the contemporary and the classical share a common stench. 

The doors of our university campuses are frequently (and for a shockingly prolonged periods), shut in the faces of our youth. The political process shrugs them off at the points of value and profit, recruiting them only when the need for mindless violence and thuggery arises. Graduate unemployment runs at over 80%, a statistic that must shame us all. The incidence of homelessness amongst Nigerian youth practically tops the third world league, yet these are manifestly soluble problems. In the face of these crippling negations, for the youth to recoil from their nasty fate is quite simply to embrace the status of cooked vegetable - irreversibly useless. 

In part 2 of this letter, I will explore the plight of the most blatant example of the degradation of the youth of Nigeria – the Almajirai. I will also recognise and address the broader philosophical question provoked by your argument which is this: the tragically cyclical phenomenon which saw the promising youth of yesterday become the villains and despoilers of today.

Emmanuel Onwe is the author of Serpents and Doves

Robot  # 1 | 28.05.2009 18:39

OPEN LETTER TO PROFESSOR WOLE SOYINKA I By Emmanuel Onwe Dear Professor Soyinka RE:YOUTH AND THE NATION: A SHARED RESPONSIBILITY I wrote this rejoinder many years ago and much has transpired over the intervening period. The passage of time has, inevitably, meant movement in age and history. It has also meant an escalation in the relentless erosion of the fortunes of the Nigerian youth. My recently published novel,Serpents and Doves, the first instalment of a trilogy upon which I am embarked, has witnessed its own traumatic metamorphosis. Initially entitledThe Eye of Fire, it had to be re-titled following the publication of Chief Emeka Anyaoku’s biography. The irony is antipoetic in a benign sense - if publication had taken place immediately upon its completion in 1996, or shortly thereafter, the irritation of trans...Read the full article.

emenanjo  # 2 | 29.05.2009 08:12

Wole Soyinka, out of anger of what has been happening in Nigeria, once described his generation as a "wasted generation". But the man is not wasted. He has contributed to activism in Nigeria and most youths have looked up to him as an epitomised role model, and I am quite sure from my understanding of your flowery write-up that Wole must have been one of your role models. His THE MAN DIED is a classical study in social injustice in that contraption called Nigeria. The book should be a MUST read to all Nigerian youths. Wole is an intellectual hippopotamus. He is not cut out for politics. As such, he has contributed and is still contributing his quota untirelessly towards empowering the Nigerian youths. His efforts at conscientizing the youths and fighting always for the right social causes, the import of which is to help torpedoe the unjust order and social arrangement in Nigeria, is unequalled and unparalleled. If the youths are waiting for Wole's generation in the political arena to hand over power to them on a platter of gold, then, let them keep dreaming, because to me, that is an ideological battle. Wole has done his bit as an intellectual of the oppressed in the literary world. He has raised in most of us a political consciousness that revolves on the need to fight for justice, liberty and equality, not to talk of decades of fight against high profile corruption. The youths should not wait for a silver spoon, they should pick up the gauntlets,challenge, cudgels and fight to liberate themselves and the country from a soulless leaderhip that has sold poverty, indigent, exploitation, alienation, backwardness and obscurantism to us all. Wole's generation of recycled and still recycling, gullible,wicked,ruthless and selfish politicians with a nest of killers masquarading freely, are the youths' oppressive burden. The youths should engage these clutches of evil in articulation, spin, agitation and propaganda, and some times open confrontations. Anything short of these active social involvement is superfluously unworkable. Ngugi Wa thiongo's DEVIL ON THE CROSS {1983) and Festus Iyayi's VIOLENCE {1979} verily, verily supports my ideological arguments.

Johntina  # 3 | 29.05.2009 17:29

Why do we describe Adults as youth in Nigeria and Black Africa while in the Western world the youths are teenagers? Why should Black African men and women in their 30s and 40s grade themselves with White children? How honestly equal humans are we if without coercion we should be rating ourselves inferior to other human creatures? In global socer competions, our over 20s clash with White under 17s and most ridiculously Black African nations or ethnic groups like the Igbos, Yorubas, Hausa/Fulanis etc refer themselves as tribes while Wales, a people of just about 3 milion is a Nation. When shall we begin to practically assert our equality?

Omowa2  # 4 | 31.05.2009 05:27

=Johntina;359835>Why do we describe Adults as youth in Nigeria and Black Africa while in the Western world the youths are teenagers? Why should Black African men and women in their 30s and 40s grade themselves with White children? How honestly equal humans are we if without coercion we should be rating ourselves inferior to other human creatures? In global socer competions, our over 20s clash with White under 17s and most ridiculously Black African nations or ethnic groups like the Igbos, Yorubas, Hausa/Fulanis etc refer themselves as tribes while Wales, a people of just about 3 milion is a Nation. When shall we begin to practically assert our equality? It is all about framing. How we frame concepts and the source of the knowledge that fuels the framing. To fully understand the language issue at play in this article lets do the ridiculous: take the idea into our various linguistic spheres and note the real meaning of the word Youth. What does it connote in our local tongue? Now back translate and you will be surprised at the limitation of the English language to bear the new burden Nation; tribe; youth; ethnic groups; mean what in your local dialect? Let us start from there and then end with the real meaning of a wasted generation Omowa2