Bold new ideas often come trapped in the lurch, the communication lurch. It so happens that genuinely new ideas are not easy to communicate. The fact of this explains why orators, whose only contribution to knowledge is their supply of mellifluousness, beat prophets to rule nations. Orators often rule because the many, too many, the multitudes, are deluded every last orator is the seal of all knowledge, of all prophets.
Now, of the difficulty in pushing genuine new ideas, there are exemplars. Georg Cantor was a German mathematician. He single-handedly founded set theory, as it were. To evangelize the new knowledge, his prophetic knowhow, Cantor was virulently blocked by irascible haters. Just about all the establishment powers of mathematics, in his day, went up in arms, unjustly, against him. And this included the irreplaceable Henri Poincare, alas. Today, set theory, alongside Indian numerals, are among the half a dozen or so mathematical inventions that rank above all others.
Of course, there is the moral of one of the greatest poet-thinkers ever. Lao Tzu, for such was his name, lived during the decline of the [Chinese] Chou empire. And he was preaching a new idea of the rejuvenation of the Chou, indeed, the rejuvenation of all men and nations, in peril. Yet, all Chou accorded him were deaf ears. Tzu was so pissed off he fled civilization and plunged into oblivion. Till today, nobody ever heard anything of him again. His book, Tao Te Ching, his only work, is as good as any scripture.
But it was Leo Tolstoy, the preeminent Russian writer, who gave fine expression to the why and how of these things. It may also interest us to recall that Tolstoy was also snubbed. For instance, Tolstoy was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he over-merited. Anyway, here is Tolstoy:
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
This Tolstoyan insight is what explains the difficulty of Nigerians to come to knowledge that they have no leadership problems at all. This is especially so in contrast with the disastrous failings of her academics, repeat, her theoreticians, and not her poets and fabulists.
In fact, it now so happens that Nigerian academics, in a haste to heap all their failures on innocent leaderships, only foul up the field of inquiries, scoring own goals. And to worsen the brew, the Nigerian disaster has taken a pan-African concentration.
One great African orator, repeat, orator, is on prowl. He is Patrick Lumumba, a Kenyan professor of law. Lumumba is so hot on the lecture circuit that the blazing sun comes colder than his image. Just the other day, to give an example of his all-pervasive penetration, Lumumba was at Okija. Okija is a rustic rural Nigerian hamlet that’s hardly found in Google Maps. Apparently on hire, Lumumba was orating to the audience on how best to select local beauty queens, or such.
If Lumumba was alone, the matter would have come easier. But there is yet another, again a professor of law, a Nigerian. Chidi Odinkalu is a television and seminar circuit constant. And he too orates that it is leadership stupid.
Now, it so happened that, speaking separately, both men, zoomed in on Tanzania. For them, Tanzanian leaders are a model or special breed [African] leaders. Tanzania is relatively corruption and nepotism-free, etc, everybody or the statistics states.
However, if these twin professors of law had stopped at the physiognomy of the Tanzania leadership frame, they would have gotten it tolerably right. But by interloping into its anatomies, they darkened the darkness that is our body of knowledge. And did themselves and readers no great service. In fact, they ended up corrupting the youths and other innocents, a sin for which Socrates was given the hemlock.
To summarise, the success of Tanzania as a largely nepotism-free zone is constructional. It has nothing, repeat, nothing, to do with the genus of the Tanzanian helmsmen. In fact, all nepotisms or lack thereof are analogues of designed-in structures and distributions of powers, not persons. Please see Corruption in Africa: Resolution Through New Diagnosis, by your correspondent.
The only difference between the Tanzanians and Europeans is that, while the European structures are largely manmade, the Tanzanians are okwe agbala of eti okwe erie okwe genus.
Perhaps, we may best understand things by this exemplification. Natural harbours are harbours constructed by nature, for man and country. All other harbours must be constructed by man and nation. So, a natural harbor is nature’s default gift. The point is, this natural harbours gift and non-natural harbours constructions or commissions happen in all situational matters, including, as is relevant here, the constructions of the ships of state.
In other words, Tanzania, in terms of the construction of its ship of state, may be said to have a natural-harbours-like construction, a gift at its creation. Nigeria and most African countries don’t. The fact of this is made very clear in our book: University-Media Complex…
Thus, the first great duty of the scholar is to identify this and forewarn the leaders that nature’s gifts are not democratic. Next, if it is a non-Tanzanian style, say Nigerian state, the call of the scholar is to so design a ship of state that will be the operational equivalent of Tanzania’s default gift, of symmetry or dynamic buoyancy.
In fact, if these two scholars were not afflicted as Tolstoy correctly cited, they would have been on the verge of a low-hanging sociological discovery. They would have come to knowledge that Tanzania, counter-intuitively, is the fairest proof there ever is that the solution is in scholarship, not leadership, in Buddha, not Caesar, with Mother A’Endu, not Papa Doc.
That is to say, the problems of Nigeria are these professors and their scholarly tribes themselves, not the leaders.
Anyway, we have extensively treated this issue in our book, The University-Media Complex… detailing the failures of logic and history of these two professors. And excerpts may now be read for free: https://africanomics.org/university-professors-undoing-the-nigerian-mind%EF%BB%BF/
To summarise: Scholars are not called to compare apples and oranges. Scholars are called to distinguish between the default and the prompt choices. It is this category failure and a genius for confounding oratory as insights that have, ironically, become the gold standards of scholarship in Nigeria. And this, alas, has undone the Nigerian mind and made development as far away from Nigeria as hell is from paradise.
Finally, let it be known in Oru or Igbo, that poverty of leadership is merely a responsorial to the collapse and dearth of scholarship. All else is humour. Ahiazuwa.
Book reading
Yours truly will be reading from my latest book: The University-Media Complex: As Nigeria’s Foremost Amusement Centre. DATE: 18-05-2019. VENUE: Quintessence Bookshop, Parkview Estate, Ikoyi.
It is going to be interactively hot, hotter than yesterday’s burnt-out ashes. We can’t wait to jam with you, live, at Quintessence. Ahiazuwa.
One last point:
Just lately we responded to an alleged Pull Him Down, PHD, matter on Achebe. It may all be prescient, so we repeat it:
And when you write of Pull Him Down, PHD … In my travels or interventions all over the world and history, it is only in Nigeria that I encounter the ghoulish nonsense PHD.
Now, immediately a man, or even a god, publishes anything in the open, that publication is by logic open to interrogation, to criticisms, including pulling down, and that unto destruction of the said publication’s ideas.
And the idea is simple. A man, whoever he is, must be separable from the ideas he has stated in the open. And those ideas are open to being attacked, questioned, pulled down and even destroyed. And so doing has nothing to do with pulling down the author.
Achebe is not Things Fall Apart. He is its creator. If you can’t reach that level of abstraction, of taking on an idea and not its creator, then you might as well give up on your mind. It will serve humankind best if you got on with muscle work.
Anyway this: About the 1970/1980s, Professor Charles Nnolim put up a paper that Achebe appropriated Nnolim’s near relative’s work without attribution in his Arrow of God. Achebe groupies and other spineless intellectuals fought Nnolim. They accused him, just like you, of the same senseless PHD syndrome. Sadly, as Nnolim recorded, Achebe sullied himself the more by joining his groupies to dis Nnolim. Today, what is the verdict? It is that Achebe appropriated without attribution Nnolim’s relation’s work. The evidence is too damning.
Perhaps you are one of those dilettantes whose sun may only shine under the shadow of giants. I wish you well. That’s all I have to say.