Olajumokeism

bread seller the face of their businesses, at a time one desperate young man who stripped himself naked inside a banking hall has been ignored by his banker. She reminds us that we have missed the real message in the drama of the bread seller. “Olajumoke’s story puts a face to the grim poverty statistics in Nigeria. Yet, she is just one case out of many others. Millions of people have worse tales to narrate. Her account of poverty and deprivation up till this time, however, has been obscured by the sentimentality of her discovery. We talk about her being a bread-seller only as a jump-off point to narrating the other extreme of the tale where she becomes a model. This, in itself, is the trouble with sentimentality: it induces emotions, but never channels them towards meaningful socio-political action,” she wrote.

The danger of fairy tales, especially in a society like ours, according to Adelakun, is that they “are not only non-normative, they are sedative; that is why they are read to children about to sleep, not adults that live in a realistic world. Fairy tales do not expect us to question their plot, rather they gush at the saccharine sweetness of ‘happily ever after’…”

I agree entirely with her summation. In as much as we cannot begrudge Olajumoke her good fortunes, it is important not to send a wrong message with her story. To the extent that there is such a thing in life as the luck of the draw, as we often see in lottery and football, there will always be people who would “make it” without much sweat. But they will be only a negligible few. So, making Olajumoke a formula for success or using her as a prayer point just does not cut. Indeed, for a great majority of the people, they may work very hard, keep positive attitudes, and yet could still end up with some “sliding doors” slammed against them in as many times as they try.

Therefore, the message we should inculcate in our young people is that it is still work that enables opportunity, not luck or chance. We must constantly remind them of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s wise counsel that their task is not to foresee the future, “but to enable it.” And in the age that we are in, working entails certain preparations which include good education. Unfortunately, that critical area of our national life is where we are leaving many of our young people behind to be hawking bread and other commodities without any future beyond waiting for luck...

NOTE: Interested readers should continue in the online edition on www.thisdaylive.com