RECENTLY, I was told a story by my lawyer friend with whom I have developed a warm relationship for over 15 years.
He said while he was beside his window during one of his lucid intervals – in the quietude of his mind, he was disrupted by some people quarreling below where he could see them; a couple, and a young man, physically endowed. The young man was being dragged and hauled with insults, yet he wasn’t actually remonstrating. When the noise got nagging at him and consistent, he decided to intervene; he called them upstairs to ask what the problem was, none of them was really forthcoming apart from the couple claiming he owed them. He pressed to know what he bought from them, yet no specific answer until the husband opened up with his head turned towards the wall.
“Things were rough at home,” he said in a very low but audible tone. “The children had nothing to eat – four of them were crying so I approached our neighbour to give us loan until I can pay. He initially refused until I told him we can do anything in exchange – I couldn’t help the situation, my wife was crying, as well as the kids. Edward, agreed to give us some money on one condition,” he paused amid looked at his wife with that deep unremitting look. The wife stared away. “He said on the condition that he slept with my wife. It was a tough decision barrister but we agreed because our other option was to die of hunger. We agreed. After the deed, he refused to give us the promised money, that is what happened.”
My friend was numbed, he couldn’t say a word. He couldn’t raise his face to look at the couple who were pushed into such a state of social retrogression, from poverty. To him, the story was tragic and harrowing one to admit.
He told the young man what he did was wrong, and that could have led to his early death from the frustrated couple. He made him pay what he owed them and the matter ended amicably.
He said the issue trailed him for a while, he could not repudiate it. It was a nagging feeling he carried like a Sisyphean burden.
The story, like the plunging knife that sort the throat of Naguib Mafouz, etched a resonance in my mind, nudging my creative impulse.
These salient social issues in Nigeria are not being addressed with national concern – perhaps we are still at the early Stages of Grief after the post Supreme Court ruling. I have since recommended the stages of Bargain and Acceptance so that we can start looking at unmentioned social issues.
We need to understand what social issues are for us to start redirecting our unfocused attention towards them. In a recent trade fair in Cairo, Wole Soyinka said technology ia creating new generations of illiterates in Nigeria, and I tend to agree with him. “However, as a new, tyrannical, insolent, and abusive culture, the culture of submental humanity in our midst, which you can give the rough name Internet Culture, in which real creativity is being downgraded, even despised for cheap, populist, nasty, subversive, humanly subversive culture.”
Soyinka further said, “It’s creating new generations of the illiterate, who believe it’s up to them that it’s sort of noble, progressive, and populist to despise what I call the real meaningful culture that improves the mind of humanity, expands our horizons, offers numerous alternatives or interpretations of phenomena, et cetera, and leads to a new construct of a genuine new being.
“So that’s why I said it’s a large subject, which we must not trivialize. We shouldn’t take the easy way out. We shouldn’t go on the axial, black and white, and so on. It’s a work in progress, but we must not let the barbarians get away with this new project.”
Well, before the deliberate digression, as I have been victim of this technological illiteracy, a social issue is a problem that affects many people within a given society. It is most of the time the result of factors beyond the sphere of influence of individual. However, some specific social issues are not to be resolved, they just need to be discussed as thematic issues.
In Nigeria today, the populace are so distracted by the political class and others that social issues hardly make headlines. I do not think this is deliberate, but I know it is the people who are not paying focused attention on these social issues ranging from crime, unemployment, drug abuse, poverty, corruption, domestic violence, health, food insecurity to education. A woman recently committed suicide in Benin. Did it make headlines on national dailies? Did we form compact initiatives to discuss mental health and domestic violence which were associated with her premature demise?
I do not want to agree these issues are deliberately kept out willfully, it is that we are not focused on burning issues as a people. We need or we ought to start reflecting all these issues at a reasonable level on our discussions. There must be a balance between entertainment news and these grim social issues as contents. There are so many of these issues to be found by journalists – it is part of their duties and responsibilities to set the agenda for such discussions, and it is also a burden on the people to engineer the discussion using the social media and other platforms to discuss them. There are plethora of these social issues that define our realities today that never get to be discussed. They do not form our breaking news. There ought to be a national awareness on all these issues because there are collateral consequences left behind. Take for example the issue of drug abuse today among the youth. It is a growing clear and present danger but we do not consider it a burning issue and does not hit our headlines.
We need to focus some measure of energies on these social issues that are plaguing the nation and plunging it into retrogression. We seem to be encouraging the fracturing polity and deliberate polarization along ethnocentric, sectarian, political, sectional, mundane, parochial and religious fault-lines. These diabetic rhetoric that binds but blinds the mind are peddled by some in the mainstream media and others that have been persuaded to become agents of pessimism. A deliberate rethink and agenda setting will go a long way.
