Between private greed and public need

BY CHRIS ANYOKWU 

Chris Anyokwu, PhD, a dramatist, poet, fiction writer, speaker, rights activist and public intellectual, is a Professor of English at the University of Lagos, Nigeria and has joined Business a.m.’s growing list of informed editorial commentators to write on Politics & Society. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com

Anyone living in Nigeria today would readily agree that reality as staked out within the geopolitical confines of the beleaguered post-colony is indubitably stranger than fiction. Writers of imaginative fiction years gone by used to look to the subterranean layers of the unconscious, the murky zone of the freewheeling phantasmagoria as a veritable site of a fecundating cornucopia of tropes and topics for yarn-spinning.  So droll and tawdry has brute reality become that, in order to excite  curiosity and interest in the seeker of poetic truth and aesthetic beauty, the writer has got to plumb the protean possibilities of the Ariadne Thread that is fabulation.   Folktales and fairy-tales usually come handy in this regard as do aetiological tales, myths of origin, hero archetypes, journey motifs, the myths of the dying god, and, of course the popular myth of eternal return.  As we all know, the myth of Eternal Return uniquely embodies the eternal, never-ending cyclicity of life, the always-turning Wheel of Time. In most literary works, little effort of the critical faculty is required to uncover their originating mythic substrata, their archetypal groundwork.

Iconic and canonical examples abound from classical magnum opuses such as Homeric epics – Iliad and The Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, the ancient Greek tragedies – works of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles and  the comedies of Aristophanes to Roman literature such as the plays of Terence and Plautus, Seneca, etc. and, down to our modern times.  When a living present-day situation appears far-fetched and catatonic, people are wont to dismiss it as “disturbed”, “doctored”, fabricated, a tissue of the fevered imagination. However, the postmodern angst has done away with all of that. We are effectively in the Age of Despair. The world has progressed from what Auden had called in the early 20th century the Age of Anxiety in the wake of the cataclysmic eruptions of the World Wars, the Great Depression and the apocalyptic dislocations that followed thereafter.

The traditional foundations of morality being a belief in God and, to a lesser extent, nature, had given way to the Age of the Machine. Thus, humanity lost the initiative to the creations of its own hands. A mechanised mentality made itself felt via the pervasive presence of such inventions as the steam engine, printing presses, the telephone, the radio, the telegraph, among others. The philosophical gurus of the modernist revolution included Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Frederick Nietzsche and Karl Marx.  Nietzsche, it was, who had captured the momentous exiling of God from the cosmos and with His banishment, the world became godless and soulless.  Humans assumed godlike powers over all creation.  Enter the Age of the Overman, a la Nietzsche.

The resulting godlessness of the cosmos led ineluctably to the regime of crass materialism, the coarsening sway of primitive accumulation and the final triumph of the apotheosis of GREED. The competitive spirit innate in humans bared its fangs, devouring whatever smacked of altruism and the pursuit of the public good. Concepts such as achievement and success were radically reconceptualised in the wake of the fierce struggle over scarce resources for individual self-validation.  Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism captured this intriguing scenario across Europe at the time and periscoped the foreseeable future. It is in this context that we could meaningfully interrogate the Calvinist work ethic which favoured delayed gratification as prelude to the bumper harvest awaiting the sedulous tiller of the earth. The celebration of achievement took centre-stage during the 18th century, a period in history captured in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. With the decadent and decaying gentry and the aristocracy giving way to the emergence of the merchant classes, or the middle classes, new money had sought to put old money to heel. The ensuing democratisation of both the civic and economic space created a mass society that promoted cut-throat competitiveness and mean-hearted egocentrism.  Charity fled.  Ever since, capitalism has had several sartorial makeovers but, at bottom, still remains red in tooth and claw.  Sometimes, it shows up with a human face as in a welfare state but often it swaggers through town in its birthday suit as it does in Nigeria.

In Nigeria we have succeeded in copying all the bad table manners of the erstwhile British colonial masters. The ruling passion in these parts is capitalistic acquisitiveness, selfishness and the business ethic of beggar-thy-neighbour. If there is a word which totalises our philosophy of life, it is GREED. You would wonder whether our local comprador – bourgeois class has heard of the Social Contract Theory as expounded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). It does appear the raison-d’etre of governance is not public or common good but rather private greed. The masses themselves look up to their leaders as role models; they pattern their lives after the politicians who themselves know precious little about public service.  Since 1960 to date, it has been all about self-aggrandisement as the be-all-and-end-all of political leadership. Nearly always, private greed trumps public need thereby fuelling a default climate of disillusionment and disaffection across the land. The constituent units which make up the federation are permanently locked in feral and fierce competition over scarce resources at the centre.  This shows often in matters regarding job recruitment, promotion, appointment, school admissions, and award of contracts, among others.  In recent times, nepotistic and provincial considerations have ridden roughshod over pragmatic and patriotic logic thereby overheating a polity already grappling with centrifugal forces as well as the sundering effects of multiple fault lines. The domino effect of this skewed reward system, if we may so term it, has encouraged unpatriotic following amongst the déclassé. Anti-social acts such as the Yahoo-Yahoo scourge, violent crime, kidnapping-for-ransom, banditry, insurgency and traffic robberies are a direct reaction to the moral turpitude of the head. You cannot give what you don’t have, sadly. Various unethical business practices that we are witnessing in Nigeria today stem from the virtual absence of responsive and responsible leadership across the board. People cheat and cut corners in almost everything they engage in.  They tinker with measurements and dilute standards.  Anyone who has travelled overseas and experienced life there, however briefly, would agree that there is a great gulf fixed between the standards of products sold to us in our corner-shops, supermarkets and open markets and the standards of overseas products. The taste of the pudding is in the eating.  Taste a fizzy soda here and compare the taste to the same soda you drank overseas.  You would discover you had been quaffing poison all your life, and, that, in your own country!  Whether it is food, drink, cosmetic products, jewellery, vehicles, generators, tyres, etc., our local versions are dreadfully watered-down and sub-standard franchises of the real deal. In more ways than one, the words China, Taiwan or India and Malaysia carry in our collective ears echoes of fakery, chimes of Tokunbo. They strike us as far-flung outposts of “Oluwole”. Most products from these places are meretricious tinsel prepared and packaged for an undiscerning consumerist herd. Have you ever wondered why sleek top-of-the-range cars off the factory–line are returned from Europe and the USA to Asia and other places of manufacture on account of just air-bag malfunction? How come we never return brand-new cars to the manufacturers the way oyibo people do? It is because we are basically consumers. We don’t know Jack about anything!  We just consume, consume and consume. No gate-keepers of standards anywhere and where they exist, they are compromised to look the other way.  It is the law of the jungle: eat or be eaten!

Mulling over the whole mess, my alter-ego has this to say: “Our more clear-headed, enterprising and purposeful cousins elsewhere on the planet have expended unnameable amount of resources to explore the frontiers of our galaxy for various purposes, including locating a habitable planet similar to our earth.  There is a deluge of so-called Mars studies; a race to identify whether or not planet Mars has all the conditions necessary to support life as we know it.  In recent times, these planetary probings have become more feverish and earnest in its intensity, because of what has become a matter of public knowledge, that Mars has thick water ice caps at both poles similar to the earth’s North Pole. Simply put, scientists have discovered that water exists on Mars – the single necessary condition for the sustenance of life as we know it. That opens up a vast sea of possibilities and the hope that there exists, after all, a safe haven away from the earth’s depleting resources and spiralling pollution is reassuring. The unspoiled place, a refuge to which a privileged few can escape […].  While the world appears messed up by the unbridled industrialisation of the technologically advanced nations, here in Nigeria we may have done ourselves in by the curse of private greed.  Private greed, not in the sense that the phrase is sometimes used to describe capitalism as an ideology of materialist, private capital exploitation/creation of wealth, but rather in the primitive sense of thinking only of oneself to the detriment of others. This is our bane.  No one considers the other … We are locked in this game of subterfuge, this grim vocation of ever trying to outdo and outsmart others, to have one up over and above our neighbours, colleagues, friends and siblings. We generally define our success by the failure of those around us [..]  Nothing is considered a blessing or an achievement unless we can point to someone, somewhere who lacks them. This attitude of mind runs counter to the consciousness that seeks the public good, the progress of the community, and ultimately the peace of the land.”  My alter-ego has said it all!

The Seven Deadly Sins are said to be lust, gluttony, GREED, laziness, wrath, envy and pride. It is tragic that one of them, greed has torn our polity to pieces, in a manner of speaking. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs posits physiological (food and clothing), Safety (job security) love and belonging needs (friendship, esteem and self-actualisation).  The sad reality today is that the average Nigerian is caught between the private greed (or wants) of the ruling elite and the benumbing and dehumanising needs of the impoverished masses. And this has got to change.  We, everyone, have got to be guided by the ethical imperatives of the Social Contract. The individual fate must be tied to the collective destiny and vice versa. We must all rededicate ourselves to the ideals of nation-building, of the humanistic ideals of universal brotherhood. If we must practise capitalism, then it must be capitalism with milk of human kindness coursing through its reins, as it were.  Nigeria is long overdue for the establishment of a welfare package: the aged, people living with disability and other “dregs” of society must be adequately catered for. We must also enthrone meritocracy that would see to it that virtue is rewarded and vice punished, accordingly. A country that boasts such a huge youth population as Nigeria needs to set its priorities right.

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