RETURN TO SIMPLICITY FOR BUILDING A NATION

A return to simplicity would fire collective imagination, promote economic self-reliance and self-dignity, argues

Leaders of the Congress Party of India smuggled 18-year old Victor Anant to England to save him from being arrested and tortured by British colonial security officials. He had carried out daring sabotage acts, including derailing railway carriages. In England he rose to become Deputy Editor of Manchester Guardian newspaper. On realising that as a non-Briton he would never be appointed editor, he joined UNESCO and subsequently entered the United Nations, in New York, as a contract staff.

At the UN he reconnected with India’s nationalism through her diplomats. When he criticised their clothes they shot him down by asserting that the clothes were manufactured by Indians. Three decades of living in Britain had dimmed in him flames of self-reliance, pride and defence of sovereignty.

Mahatma Gandhi’s simple ‘’Trek for Salt’’ had mobilised minds of Indians to harvest their own salt and buy British salt. His simple call to Indians to burn in bonfires their British clothes had fired Indians to wear only clothes woven and manufactured with looms manufactured by Indian engineers and metal workers. It is to the trajectory of that spirit of self-reliance that President Buhari saluted in his first ‘’June 12 Democracy Day’’ address.

During the Buhari/Idiagbon military regime of 1984/85, Ms Debrah Ogazuma as Commissioner for Industry in Group Captain Latinwo’s cabinet, initiated a policy of integrating cloth woven in Okene Town into furniture-making in Ilorin Town. The factory in Ilorin was financed by funds from Germany. German officials vigorously opposed the initiative, demanding that the cloth be imported from Germany. Ms Debrah Ogazuma was transferred out to the Ministry of Health. Simplicity demands courage against opposition by vested interests.

Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Sardauna Ahmadu Bello used non-British public dress to affirm their regional cultural pride. They, however, turned to importing textile machinery for mass weaving cloth. These measures took markets, working capital, and vital income away from local rural and urban weavers. Local weavers could not lobby for shares of annual budgets.

Orders for official uniforms, curtains in government offices and official residences, were denied to them. Dye-pits in Kano continued to lack simple official support; and a vast community market. An industry which historically fed textile commerce across the Sahara Desert cannot today compete with textile imports from Europe and China. For local weavers, it has truly been ‘’Not Yet Uhuru’’ since 1960.

Local inventors and fabricators of footwear machinery were also left out from annual budgets of Western and Northern regional governments. This policy was similar in effect with British measures (documented in PhD theses by Ahmed Modibbo and Monday Mangwat), which made local copper smelting a crime and overtaxed local textiles brought to markets. A return to simplicity must confront the enormous appetite for luxury dressing by ‘’high society’’ elites anchored on covering what

Charles O’Tudor calls their deep ‘’self contempt’’.

At a commemoration of Dr Tajudeen Abdul- Raheem and Professor Abubakar Momoh (at Yar’Adua Centre on 11th June, 2019), Hafsat Abiola drew attention to declines of moral values and society’s simple constitutional tools for protecting vital principles of accountability, public welfare and punishment of offending rulers. The Jukun and Yoruba penalty of ‘’regicide’’ (through drinking poison served by community leaders), ensured good governance. She demanded a return to this polity. She met a tall silence.

That silence indicated lack of awareness of this constitutional system by a predominantly youthful audience exposed only to debates about ‘’parliamentary’’ and ‘’presidential’’ forms of government. Both forms are betrayals of the classical form which Hafsat Abiola had called forth from the darkness of intellectual silence by elites.

These alien forms have seized Nigeria’s academic scholarship and symbols of intellectual and cultural achievement. The parliamentary model comes from a long British tradition of class struggle between the monarchy, business classes, and workers. From the monarchy it inherited uses of awe endowed by grand apparel; the Speaker’s golden Mace, and rituals. From the business class it cherishes ‘’Question Time’’ by which they can protect commercial interests by demanding written and oral answers from the Prime Minister and cabinet about specific demands.

These forms share mechanisms of electing representatives from ‘’constituencies’’ as local spaces in which communities cast their choices. Experience has shown that classical African tools for ensuring accountability to the welfare of communities are lacking from their operations.

Military dictatorships, and intrusion by foreign multinational corporations, have aroused corruption; not accountability to the welfare of communities. Current demands in Nigeria for ‘’restructuring’’ to correct maladies in ‘’presidential’’ politics must retreat from feelings of ‘’I am not good enough’’ which fuelled the intellectual laziness which avoided simple road to traditional constitutional forms.

Mental injuries inflicted by colonial propaganda have fed scandalous groping for self-respect by high consumption of cultural and consumer goods – including Bokasa’s golden throne and a golden bed in Ghana. Intensive foreign invasion with KodaK’s coloured images erode Black self-pride. Fela named as ‘’Yellow Fever’’ a pandemic of craving for skin pigmentation.

South African Broadcasting Corporation and Nigeria’s television networks have exclusive preference for ‘’Yellow’’ news casters and brand advertisers. Brazil entrenches Yellow Fever (‘’Mestizo’’) as a political weapon for dividing Afro-Brazilians. A return to simplicity would fire collective imagination; promote economic self-reliance; value self-dignity, and a united community that is not engaged in permanent psychological warfare within itself.

A RETURN TO SIMPLICITY MUST CONFRONT THE ENORMOUS APPETITE FOR LUXURY DRESSING BY ’HIGH SOCIETY’ ELITES ANCHORED ON COVERING WHAT CHARLES O’TUDOR CALLS THEIR DEEP ‘SELF-CONTEMPT’