I stand here deeply honored by your presence, former students, friends, intellectual and political colleagues. What just took place here today is the culmination of a conspiracy that was initiated by my former student, Professors Tor Iorapuu, and Professor Irene Agunloye my colleagues, in Atlanta five years ago, when I had three years to hit the biblical 70 year’s life expectancy. This cohort grew in unfathomable proportions to exert pressure on me to accept to be celebrated. I dodged them with wily assiduity, until Professor Saint Gbilekaa, my intellectual mentee, friend, and colleague brought unbearable pressure to bear on me this year. I caved in and the rest is today’s excellent celebration.
I love being celebrated as a politician. Like all politicians, celebration is the oxygen that fuels our ego and drives our engagement. But as a writer, I am uncomfortable, nervous, and self-conscious, because we are always in the public glare and have no hiding place. We, creative writers, tend to pour our DNA all over our writings, and every character in our plays, novels, short stories, and poems is us. These great men and women’s summon to be celebrated today makes me feel like I am facing a public tribunal manned by ruthless executioners, or as if I am at the final judgment. But I am also, equally guilty of relentless celebration of life. Each story, each play, poem, and the novel is a celebration where the writer partners the reader and the audience with the divine. I am humbled when each of you reads from my works because you grant me intimate access to you. I believe that all excellent works of art are divinely inspired. I, therefore, stand here to thank and celebrate all of you for celebrating my literary works rather than my attainment of the age of seventy-two today.
The World is changing at breakneck speed. The rate of change and its acceleration is leaving more and more people unable to understand the moral choices of today. The world is also being dramatically reshaped. It is starting to operate differently. Advances in Science and technology and medicine have brought severe dislocation in our national life because the rate of change has exceeded our ability to adapt.
Two things happening in the world today are most worrisome. The first is the decay of democracy and the rise of autocracy, and the second thing that is even more worrisome is the invidious rise of poverty in the world today. Poverty is spreading its dragnets and changing the face of the world to misery. Democracy has come to mean different things to the peoples of the world today. We know that democracy is imperfect, but we all are agreed that there is no better system of governance for the human community. It is unfortunate that even in nations like the United States democracy is beginning to backslide and roll back and crack. Venezuela, Turkey, and Hungary are poster countries where democracy has rolled back to autocracy. Other countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, China,( include Hong Kong), Brazil, Ecuador, and Poland are signaling the rest of the world to roll back democracy.
Those who believe and practice the true tenets of democracy where the citizen is king have their hands tied behind their backs and are held accountable. On the other hand, those that merely pay lip service to democracy take democracy as a license to win elections by any means and then to become corrupt, unjust, autocratic, and mean to the citizens all in the name of a so-called electoral democracy without responsibility. Nigeria is at a crossroads and is on the tipping point to go either way.
By far the greatest challenge of the World today is how to stop the widening gap between the poor and the rich. This gap is morally evil, perverse, and deplorable. In the whole world, we are beginning to see the greed of the capitalist systems where the deaf, dumb, and blind market forces are determining the social and economic life of the citizens. This ticking time bomb will soon explode and cause social upheavals. Here in Nigeria, the deep social contradictions are forcing our nation to behold gaping wounds of political malfunction in their brutality.
Racism and tribalism have re-emerged as identity markers of exclusion. This irrational arbitrary estrangement, exclusion, and hatred for others based solely on skin pigmentation and differences in languages and accents (which we are born with and have no control) are used to hate and even kill the other. Regrettably, humankind has refused to learn the lessons of history and repeats the circles of tragedies enabled by human folly. In many countries being black and of a different tribe is a crime. Many governments have laws systematizing racism and tribalism to destroy diversity and uphold their species to thrive. We vilify others, estrange them, as the outsiders to be rejected and humiliated. We cling maniacally to our own cultures while dismissing and disparaging others. This is cyclical folly. Acceptance of our God-given diversity is best for human survival, and we need must open our gates of understanding to embrace diversity by closing the distance between us and them.
The World is crying out for leaders with unprecedented courage to advance the course of our common humanity by confronting the racists and tribalists. As leaders, we must be wary of race, tribalism, wealth, and gender as instruments of power and control. We need a new different and better world, where the weak and strong can look at each other and hold hands to sing aloud, “ arise all compatriots”, and mean it from our souls and minds to obey our calls for duty and sacrifice to re-build our systems, institutions, and resilience.
As leaders, we must be prepared to rein in our greed and be prepared to die a little so that our country can live more. We need stellar leaders who believe in and do the right things for our country. We call on our elite to embrace nation-building as an intentional act of bringing together our different tribes and kingdoms, of uniting geography and demography into one cohesive country whose institutions, foundation, and resilience are enhanced. Nation-building is state-building. It is democratization, modernization, political development, and post-conflict peace-building.
The world is growing a younger population that must be prepared, for harnessing the potential of a better world. in
Nigeria 80 % of the population is under the age of 40 years. We need to prepare them with adequate knowledge and experience to live in a better world than those we live in now. We need to prepare these youth with universal access to economic opportunities and social services. Nigeria is a victim of multiple fatalities. The citizens are crying so much that the tears have obscured their ability to see and build a better future. There has been too much bloodshed in the country recently. It is necessary to say and again say a thousand times that there has been too much bloodshed in the country. We are adversaries to ourselves. We need leaders with strong ideals who are prepared for the pains and suffering needed to foster change.
We need politicians who look inwards in their conscience for approval rather than become outside approval-seeking machines, whose public action is measured only by external praise from their primordial base. To restore peace in the land, we must concentrate more on compassion and forgiveness than on brute military might, we must explore all avenues of restorative justice to replace retributive justice. Only by innovation, critical thinking, and conceptualization of our reality can we build lasting peace from the ashes of our security nightmare.
My colleague politicians must look at the present security challenges as a unique opportunity to rise to the true calling as leaders and to embrace healing. A young democracy like ours is bound to be messy. Democracies tend to be messy. This is the time for us to think deeply and far for the future of our children. Our present security nightmare and descent into dystopia have made responsible people reticent, self-effacing, and opting to hide to avoid being harmed or hurt. As political leaders, we must understand that leaders are leaders only when they act as leaders. Leadership is acting responsibly in doing the right things rather than doing selfish wrong things.
Leading is not seats and positions occupied. It is actions taken in situations that make the followers better. We need a different type of politics and politicians. We must shun the politics of meanness and cruelty that is in vogue for one of empathy and love. We must close the gap between elected officials and the voters. The voters do not deserve the horsewhips and the gun-totting invasions from the police that are their servants. We must stop acting like conquistadors but be each other’s keepers. We are all held together by our mutuality what affects one affects all. At the end of all governance, the duty of leadership is to make the citizens happier. We believe like Alexander Pope, that “ Of forms of government let fools contest, whatever is administered best is best.”
I challenge my colleagues in the theatre arts department to use the special skills we possess to urgently make peace-building the next arena. I advocate a national theatre tradition for peace-building. Our earlier focus on TFD must now move to TFP, Theatre for Peace because without peace there can be no development. I call on all Nigerian writers to muster the power of our writing to roll back violence from our land. We must infuse a new consciousness based on education and rationality rather than attempts to mirror the world of magic, spells, and enchantment which is killing our people, and making them spare human parts for rituals. Our rural people in villages and humble slums have been given a permanent inferiority complex. They shuffle and stumble along in this impoverished state bitter, and angry in the conviction that they have been deeply wronged by the political class and are brooding for ways to savagely overthrow us.
Our pens are mightier than the AK 47, and other arms. let us use our vocation to build a better Nigeria and rescue our people from wretchedness and despair. We must continue to talk truth to power, hold power accountable, and take command of our presence and future existence through humane policies and actions. I am aware that many writers in the Western world enjoy the luxury of ignoring the political turmoils of their times. They claim that it is not their responsibility to find solutions to the world’s problems. This luxury is unaffordable to the African writer and creative artist. For indeed while it may not be our responsibility to find solutions to Africa’s many problems, we are not free to ignore them, nor free to refuse to attempt to find solutions to them. All creative writing is political. We are either content with the status quo, or like me, we are dissatisfied with the status quo, of things in Africa. This is why we write, and I personally am not just dissatisfied, I am mad at how things are. I am mad at how we treat our weak and downtrodden, our youth, and our women.
I call on our writers to make the liberation of African women a top priority. They complete us. They are an equal part of us. We have continued to oppress them so much that they have become used to being beasts of burden. They carry the burdens of society’s injustices and suffer most when we go to war. They do this without a whimper. This is the time we must stand and have their back to rise and be an equal part of everything life offers.
Lastly, I invite all of us to join hands, and stand sentry at the gates of human consciousness, to fight ignorance, poverty, corruption, violence, and to lead in love tenderness, and generosity.
* Speech by Amb. Prof Iyorwuese Hagher , a former Nigerian Senator, Minister and Ambassador, at the Celebration of his Literary Oeuvre and life, by his Former Students, Friends and colleagues on 25th June 2021 at the Merit House, Abuja.
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