It’s never been closer to my skin

FUNKE ADETUTU

One sunny Friday morning, I was getting ready for work when my phone beeped. I knew it was a text message but didn’t immediately know from whom the message came. Incidentally, I wasn’t eager to read it then, because I thought it was one of those promo texts that assault my phone from the service provider. You can’t blame me, can you? For weeks now, that particular line has been bombarded by different text messages announcing one promo or the other the network has to offer. Hence, when the text came, I thought it was the usual and so, didn’t want to bother myself. However, after a few minutes, my instinct told me to go through the text and when I did, I was taken aback by what I saw; “FGN: NIGERIA: Good people, great nation.”
After reading the text, for the first time in a long time, I felt there is a connection between my country and I. I also felt close to my country. I felt I was being remembered by those at the helm of affairs. Most of you reading this will agree with me that all these years, there have been a kind of disconnection between the Nigerian people and their leaders. So, for the first time, I’m sure, most of those who received the text message on their phones must have had this “rare” sense of belonging. I’m not saying that the Yar’ Adua-led government has achieved much since it assumed office, don’t get me wrong. The text message, however, in this estimation, is one way to re-brand Nigeria. This, for me, is a good move because the Nigerian people must first believe in who they are before they can tell their own stories to the world. For a long time, we have allowed foreign media to re-brand us, to tell the world who we are. But it is only we, as a people, that can tell our true stories because we know who we are and what we have to offer in the world that is fast becoming a global village.
I regard Nigerians as a bunch of faceless people who have been thrown into the cold by leaders who are too selfish and self-centred to give a thought to their sufferings. For sometime now, you will agree, there has been some kind of disconnectedness between Nigerians and their rulers. Nigerians do not have an identity in the scheme of things even in a country they hold dear as their fatherland. Most of us are unsure of when last, a ruler thought of us, either as a family or individuals. Of course, I’m not saying that the president should know us individually, but for God’s sake, our leaders must bear in mind they are ruling a people with diverse faces and needs. For instance, there is no social programme yet in the country which caters for the needs of families. I don’t think the family chain takes any prime place on the President’s agenda for instance. I don’t think those at the helm of affairs know the importance of families in a nation because if they do, they would have put this minute but important unit first in everything. The governments of most countries in Europe have special provision for the unmarried and married who are unemployed and for families who can not take care of their children, even the aged. But in Nigeria, such programme is alien to us.
As I write this, I recall what the founding fathers of Negritude like Late Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal and Aime Cesaire and others went through while trying to tell the world who they were with their “black is beautiful” slogan. As a historical movement, Negritude received two competing interpretations. Cesaire's original conception sees the
‘specificity’ and unity of black existence as a historically developing phenomenon that arose through the highly contingent events of the African slave trade and New World plantation system. This formulation was gradually displaced in intellectual debate by Senghor's essentialist interpretation of Negritude, which argues for an unchanging core or essence to black existence. Senghor's Negritude, nonetheless, served to reverse the system of values that had informed Western perception of blacks since the earliest voyages of discovery to Africa. Cesaire's developmental model of Negritude, on the other hand, continues to offer a model for the ongoing project of black liberation in all its fullness - that is spiritual and political. Therefore, like the Negritude movement, rebranding Nigeria is both spiritual and political. We need a kind of cleansing from the way we see ourselves as a people.
Beyond this, for the whole re-branding process to work, the government must strive and work hard at making Nigerians understand that the term ‘Nigerian’is beyond ethnicity. They must get Nigerians to understand that, being Nigerian starts from seeing one and another as human beings first and not as Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Efik, Ibiobio or others.
It is about respecting one and another as human beings, as a people that have gone beyond all forms of ethnic divide. It is only then, that Nigeria can be closer to our skin as a people.