First Gentleman with Wilson Orhiunu
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“You will see your children’s children” is the flagship invocation of the Nigerian elders. God seems to have answered this petition for, like the old woman who lived in a shoe, Nigeria has so many children she does not know what to do.
Not knowing what to do is intellectual poverty while having many children speaks of reproductive prosperity. How a society treats its pregnant women speaks volumes. The volumes in question can be found in the case of Nigeria, displayed in the infant and maternal mortality figures which make dire reading.
Children need to be delivered after a gestation period and it helps if there is an electric supply on the day of birth. A hospital staffed with doctors and nurses also helps. And after the festivities of naming ceremonies and prayers (during which the baby is adjured to see his children’s children), comes the business of staying alive. Nutrition, security and ofcourse immunization are essentials for child development. Every single child must be immunised against preventable illnesses.
Nigeria is that great shoe spoken about in the nursery rhymes they taught me in Sunny Field Primary School, Adelabu, Lagos (Value for money if you ask me. Respect to my Dad for paying the fees). Millions live in a shoe and the powers that be appear not to know what to do with them. How do you immunise millions of babies? Where would the nurses come from? How do you educate millions knowing fully well that a sound education is a vaccine against life-long poverty and ignorance?
Don’t quote me on this but, the cynics say that a certain leader distanced himself from this great responsibility by saying he had no shoes. Well, you have shoes now so that excuse will not wash!
The proverbial old lady had no money for education or supper but she had something trustworthy, a good whip. It never seems to fail in Africa actually. Just sell tickets to as many as want to buy and on the day of the game, when the surging crowd arrives, ‘koboko’ becomes the crowd control. In the absence of planning, the day of crisis will surely come. Our leadership just unleash the whip. Years of poor investment on road construction means that the official motorcades for the ‘high and mighty’ cannot drive through the traffic congestion. The solution is to ‘clear the roads’ and increase the congestion for the common man.
To refresh the memories this is the rhyme in question:
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
She had so many children; she didn’t know what to do
She gave them some broth without any bread,
Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
Here we find a woman who cleverly mixes force with a bit of ‘stomach infrastructure’.
Not knowing what to do seems to go well with having many children (On this question of ‘stomach infrastructure’, I quote my recent Facebook status update thus, ‘It is shameful that ‘Naija’ Politicians are ‘sharing’ rice, mobile phones, water and kerosene. What they are saying is ‘take 0.001% of what you should have had 40 years ago’. I hope they start sharing coffins for the thousands of children dying from preventable diseases. They might as well add ‘cemetery infrastructure na’. It goes well with ‘sorrow, blood and tears’, dia regular trademark’).
Let us go back to the elders. Since they have a good track record in the answered prayers department, I wish to humbly suggest that they start to also pray thus, ‘You will see your brain children’. In other words ‘your brain child will be established’.
My reason is simple, a poverty of ideas in the face of a teaming population means everyone gets cramped in a shoe. We also know how shoes are, hot, dark and stinking.
A shoe stuck in the mud requires ideas. The world is a place where ideas take things forward. Millions of uneducated clueless people would just hustle all the days of their lives and never produce anything that would enhance the world. The failure of each Nigerian to cultivate a brain child in an enabling environment is the reason why we all share just one Nobel Prize. The many children all have potential, but trapped in a stagnant shoe, potentials are never realised. Mineral resources are potential wealth but so what? Na potential we go chop? A single brain has great potential and Nigeria has over one hundred and seventy million brains, yet twenty four hours of electricity supply still eludes the nation. Everyone must ‘think outside the shoe’. Think before they vote. The government will never solve all the problems in a society but can create an environment in which the people can think up solutions by way of brain children. People must vote in the right government for the season.
The old lady in the shoe must be replaced with a visionary elder who knows what to do and does it. Then the prayers about seeing children’s children would be welcomed for all our brain children would be alive and well as our dreams come true.
But there was another nursery rhyme about a man and a shoe:
This old man, he played two
He played Knick-knack on my shoe
With a knick-knack paddywhack
Give the dog a bone
This old man came rolling home.
I have never understood the above nursery rhyme but perhaps the old man playing knick-knack on the shoe is an improvement on the old woman who knew not what to do.
Elders, over to you. Pray for novel ideas to sprout, pray for health and good education and finally continue to pray that we all will see our Doro Brain children and lastly, pray we see our children’s children.
Reference
‘Sorrow, tears and blood’. Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Afrika 70. Kalakuta Label. KK001. 1977.
