For an end to fagging

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.