I was at a Parents-Teachers Association meeting a few days ago and sat there wringing my hands over what
we sometimes do to ourselves.
As you make your bed so do you lie on it
that wise maxim reads. As a people and as a country, we are indeed getting a
lot of what we ask and prepare for. So why blame the gods?
The discussion in question had to do with
the practice of bullying and fagging. And as I sat there listening to speaker
after speaker make their case for or against the practice, I heard different
perspectives on the matter.
Some parents were bothered that it was a
brutalizing experience and wanted the school to put its foot down and totally
outlaw the practice while for others, they cited their own history and what
they termed the natural seniority pecking (and I dare to add here for good
measure, brutality too!) order in the larger society to justify why the
practice existed and why perhaps it should continue to be tolerated.
I listened and waited to hear someone tell
me about the pristine benefits of the system. But none came.
The world in which we live in today is
clearly not that of yesterday. A lot has indeed changed and continues to
change. And it is indeed only societies that very well appreciate this truth
and strive to work with it that will get the best out of their own lived
experience.
As a teen attending one of the government
colleges in our country in the decade of the 70s and 80s, I was seriously
bullied and fagged and it truly did not make sense to me and still does not
today what benefit I was supposed to get and had indeed gotten from that
experience.
On the contrary, what I got was
discouragement and pain that it has taken the grace of God to help me work out.
I am therefore at a loss as to why parents
and schools would continue to hide behind one finger and continue to condone
and advocate a practice that they seriously cannot point to its benefits.
I think it is laziness to ask us to condone
things because they always were there or that we can do nothing about them. The
truth is that many of the things we think were always there were really not? Was
fagging really always there? My understanding of history does not support this.
Relatedly, is it indeed true that there are
things that we really cannot change if we set our hearts to do so? Evidence
around us also points to the contrary.
The nearest that has come to an intelligent
defense of these obnoxious practices is that it prepares the children to be tough.
Perhaps they are right, but is this the only way to toughen children? If we
must toughen our kids can we not work out more ennobling systems and clearly measured
and beneficial structures to do that?
And then we must ask the other point
whether it should indeed be a policy to go all out there and just toughen them
for toughening sake. Do the streets in which they live today not naturally hand
them tough choices? Does life not throw one tough spell or the other from time
to time even as they grow up? What indeed is to be gained from a state policy
to just go out there and toughen them? What is the content of the toughening
programme. What is the end result?
When
I look around me, I see the literal example of what Jesus meant when he said
that I see the literal example of what
Jesus meant when he said that ‘I see my people going about as sheep without
shepherd.’ This I believe is the bane of our society and why relatively
puerile debates like this and unhelpful perspectives as the ones I am addressing
now continue to fester.
In countries around the world, people and
systems are put together at all levels of the development matrix by their
properly burdened leaders, read shepherds, to meet and achieve set national
goals and objectives that are derived from the lived experience of the people.
When Israel for example found out that it
was surrounded by relatively hostile neighbours that would rejoice vigorously
over its extinction, it elevated security and compulsory military service for
all of its adult population to the level of state policy. When India and China
saw that they needed to catch up with the rest of the world, they went for
cultural nationalism and longer hours and years in school, You just do not
enshrine a policy for history’s sake, you do so with a specific appreciation of
what you want to achieve in mind. And it must be quantifiable and measurable.
Maybe it is time some parents look back to
see how maladjusted they yet remain today, some of which may be traceable to
some of the brutal experiences of their past, fagging inclusive? Maybe it is
time for some forward-thinking university to commission a study on the short
and long-term negative implications of the practice on our national economy and
the psyche of our people? Maybe it is time to check and trace the connections
between such emasculating and dehumanizing practices and the continuing
inability of our people to stand up for their rights, speak truth to power and
tame the excesses of leaders, which has led to the deepening of other social
vices as unbridled violence, corruption and non-accountability. For if as
seniors and school fathers and mothers are permitted, and as is the case now,
even encouraged by parents to get away with literal murder because it is a fact
of life that ‘seniors would be seniors,’ why would our seniors in government
and our offices not think they can continue in the self-same mould in which we
had cast them?
On the contrary however, societies that
would be great do set up very high and ennobling standards and strive to reach
them. When the average accident happens in Lagos, you see crowds form in o no
time with almost no intention to do anything practical about the victim! This
is not the case with societies that take human life more seriously. When
someone adulterates fake drugs in Onitsha, he gets a chieftaincy title to boot.
In China, it is the death sentence for corruption, and in Abuja, Senior
Advocates of Nigeria fall over themselves to clinch the juicy account! We have
badly made our beds!
What about an alternative schema where we
teach the strong, read seniors, to stand up for the weak, read juniors? What
about teaching these uppity upstarts (excuse my French) whose only claim to
power and privilege in the school environment is the historical circumstance
that they were born first or got admission before the juniors that real
grooming and success in life which they had come to school in the first place
to be equipped for is more than skin deep? What about beginning to model for
them, even at this formative stage, that the doctrine of ‘equality before the
law’ - which is a critical sine qua non for effective democratic practice- is
far more than one line in their Civics and Government textbooks. And finally, why do we not elect to fill their
minds and heads with liberating visions and possibilities of the life not yet
lived rather than compel them to stagnate in old moulds that have essentially
not led us very far? The choice dear reader is ours to make.
