By Obi Nwakanma

I was watching a Channel’s TV programme recently moderated by Dr. Pat Utomi, and featuring Onyeka Onwenu, Tee-Mac and Sonny Irabor, on the potentials of cultural investments in the economic and social redemption of Nigeria. 

Among Dr. Azikiwe’s conceptions of rights, which he articulated in his ‘Blueprint for Nigeria,’ was the right to leisure. A leisure society is synonymous with national prosperity and well-being. 

It reflects the sense of the serene nation, a nation that is satisfied with itself, and can conceive its own beauty through the discrete production and imagination of a citizenry who find time to smell the coffee. 

Such a citizenry often is inspired to imagine, create and conceive the nation as a lived experience, consecrated by the common vision of shared nationhood. A cultured society prevents the emergence of what the Indian journalist, Ravish Kumar, calls the “robo-public.” 

The cultural life of a nation is the kernel of its self-expression, and the highest measure of its civic life and its confidence. But, above all, culture is business. The business of culture is in the books, the arts of a nation, music, film, theater, architecture and the ways they make vivid and visible, the imagined landscape of a national community. 

Last week, the Governor of Kaduna State and member of the APC, Mr. Nasiru El-Rufai, in what he thought was a put-down of Mr. Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the rival Labour Party, who is clearly surging in the polls, described him as a “Nollywood Actor.” 

Nollywood, being the term that has come to be synonymous with the burgeoning Nigerian film industry, was for El-Rufai, the meaning of the “unserious.” Actors and entertainers have always embodied antinomy; a dearth of purpose for, particularly conservative politicians who see no value in their work, other than to tickle the emperor. 

In a very swift and ironic move, Mr. Peter Obi embraced El-Rufai’s description of him as “nothing but a Nollywood actor.” Good for him! It would be too tedious here to fully unpack the kind of mindset that drives El-Rufai to imagine that being an actor is a waste of time and unserious business. 

Perhaps he does not know that Ronald Reagan, Republican Governor of the state of California, became the President of the United States of America. What was he before all that? He was “nothing but” an actor in Hollywood. Later, Arnold Schwarzenegger, another Hollywood actor, also became the Governor of California although he did not make it to the presidency of the United States. 

But talk about Presidents who are actors, the current President of Ukraine, currently leading Ukraine in war against the Russian behemoth, was a movie actor. For me, the best words in that regard, which respond very aptly to Nasiru El-Rufai’s terrible ignorance and self-regard, have been uttered by the Pakistani actress, Mewish Hayat, who aspires to be Prime Minister of Pakistan, and who said, “If a cricketer can be prime minister, surely an actor can as well.” 

Well, there is no question about that in my mind. The best Premiers that many countries have never had have been actors like Lord Attenborough, whom many Brits have said would have made a better Prime Minister than their current gallery of misfits. In any case, Peter Obi is not an actor. 

He is a gentleman trader and a philosopher. He belongs to a merchant aristocracy. It was the Onitsha trading network, from which Peter Obi was forged, that brought Nollywood to the marketplace. 

Besides, it requires significant acting skills – often acquired on the hustle – to be a really accomplished trader. It is only in that sense that Peter Obi is connected to acting and to Nollywood. Be that as it may, it is important to note that successive Nigerian governments have neglected to make critical investments in the culture of the nation. 

In this campaign season, I have not heard any of the candidates outline any culture program or policy. But the connection between culture and the economy is so critical that those who have neglected it have done a terrible disservice to Nigeria. I have only heard Dr. Pat Utomi of the Labour Party talk about it, but only generally about the “culture of entertainment.” But there needs to be a broader range of awareness to address this gap in policy. 

The idea, Utomi said, was that a Labour Party government will make investments that would position Nigeria’s burgeoning entertainment industry – the music; the film. That is all good. But I think it is important to address a broad cultural policy and the means for investing in Nigeria’s cultural infrastructure. The book trade and publishing for instance. 

Nigeria’s literary culture for instance is stultified. It is sick and, frankly, dangerous that the only time Nigerian writers gain attention and applause is only when they publish and win international prizes and affirmations by a metropolis whose vital codes of values might conflict or intrude in Nigeria, and, therefore, Africa’s values and culture of representation. And Literature, as Achebe reminds us, is about representation – the “balance of stories.” 

It is about time to have serious conversations around the development of Nigeria’s literary infrastructure – for both its national security and economic implications: the publishing houses, the major literary prizes, bookshops, the small presses and literary magazines; the fellowships; as well as subventions for the Art galleries; the city museums; the city philharmonics; the festivals; the exhibitions; the Biennials and Triennials, etc., etc. I have always argued that to verify the real state of consciousness of Nigeria’s “educated” classes, one only needs to go to the University Bookshops where they were educated. They are either non-existent or where they exist are great jokes. 

Everywhere else in the world, established governments anchor themselves on five policy points: Economic Policy, Culture Policy; Domestic Policy, Foreign Policy and Defence Policy. These are intertwined into a National Policy. Education is connected in a very unique way to National Culture. 

But even educated Nigerians today can no longer discern the difference between street culture and high culture. Here’s the deal: Street culture entertains the nation. High culture educates and preserves the nation. 

I speak about “educated Nigerians” only as an aphorism because it seems to me that, starting from the 1980s, a generation of Nigerians was improperly educated. I frankly do not think now that we have “educated Nigerians.” Nigerians today generally equate “literacy” with “education.” 

Literate culture is valuable and is sine qua non in the cultivation of conscious man. But it is not enough just to know how to read and write and acquire and interpret technical data. A bot, we now know, can do all that. The key aim of education is targeted at the mind. Education aims to produce or cultivate a cultured and polite person. Polite culture breeds self-respect and a sense of dignity and measure. 

An educated person, for instance, would never take a bribe. It would be insulting and beneath him to accept unearned gratuity. Educated people do not want to be associated with corruption because it would be an affront to their sense of worth. 

An educated, very cultured person is not loud or ostentatious. A serene culture breeds a sense of order and indemnifies a culture of production. It creates the means by which we measure public conduct. It enriches citizenship, democratic culture and tolerance. These are the intangible virtues of cultured society which itself is the product of a well-established public school system. Everywhere in the world, except in contemporary Nigeria, the school yard is specifically designed to provide a welcoming, aesthetically pleasing learning environment. 

The public school yard today in Nigeria is worse than a cowshed. No culture of learning or civility can thrive in those places. No child socialized in that environment can come out psychologically healthy. 

They would have problems with self-worth. Worse still are the campuses of the Nigerian university. To understand the dimensions of the crisis of consciousness among a contemporary generation of “educated” Nigerians, we must return to the space where they were educated. Let us use as an example the gate into the campus of the University of Ibadan. 

From evidence of extant pictures, in 1952, when the current campus of the university was opened on the road to Oyo, the gate leading into the university was the model of elegant simplicity. The entire campus of the university designed by the English Architects, Maxwell and Fry, was the model of high modernist elegance integrated into the tropical splendour of West Africa. 

Compare that to the garish gate of the university today which, in my view, is a reflection of the garrison mentality that has produced garrison architecture in Nigeria. Ibadan today is a ghetto, but it is even a better ghetto than the campuses of the universities that exist today, after it, in Nigeria. 

In these universities, without memorable architecture, with primitive student housing, where toilets are blocked and fecal matter floods the floor; where students – including female students – are forced to take bucket-baths in the open; where dining culture is non-existent, or are there, in the design of student life, the inculcation of a culture of leisure, including even, the virtues of elegant dissipation, what we produce is chaos, a culture of incivility, a lugubrious mass of poorly educated citizens that cannot build a nation because they cannot imagine it. 

That is why we need an urgent cultural policy that will integrate culture, and cultural production, to a system of highly thought public education.