#MoralInstruction and The Real #10YearChallenge
Nigerians between the age of 23 to 33 will reap/suffer the benefits/consequences of what Nigeria our country will be like in the next ten years. This is the real 10 year challenge.
As I write this, Fela’s song ‘original suffer head’ is playing in the background. By all accounts, it’s a shameful and sad throwback into the Nigeria that Abami Eda lived in. Besides the jazzy afrobeat instrumental that one enjoys in the first ten minutes, the song is the perfect ‘moral instruction’ to his fellow Nigerian citizens about what the current situation is about that society and what must be done to move from what he calls ‘suffer head’ to ‘jeffer head’.
Original Suffer Head was released in 1980. It’s an epic 39 year throwback. Almost 40 years and the things that Fela sang about are as real today as they were in those years. EVERYTHING Baba Fela talked about! Everything! From lack of water to fertilizer scams to inflation to the daily troubles in traffic and the irritable transportation system to housing and the slums under the bridges. It’s as though we are stuck in time moving one step forward and then steps backward while the world moves on.
I grew up listening to Fela Anikulapo’s songs in my father’s red Toyota Camry as he drove I and my siblings to school every morning. But it’s not this memory that reminded me of those songs. As you probably can guess, Folarin Falana, a.k.a Falz recently released an album he titled Moral Instruction. Even though one way or the other, the conversation that is trending on Twitter and Facebook is the debate between slut-shaming, feminist defense of transactional sex and the use of either words — sex worker or prostitutes.
Unlike any mainstream artist since Baba Fela died, Falz put together probably the most conscious strings of songs in modern Nigeria decrying the ills of our society, pretty much repeating the same themes and sampling Fela in some of the songs, but what my generation chose to focus on for pretty much the period the conversation about the album was trending on social media was whether Falz had the right to detest transactional sex and whether it should feature in his songs as frequently as it does.
Asides the fact that most defenders of this line of argument are people who won’t advise their sisters or female cousins to go into this trade even if they themselves are into the trade, it somehow skips our mind that the prevalence of this trade which is responsible for 95% of the human-trafficking of females in Nigeria, is caused exactly by the backwardness, underdevelopment of our society and the lack of opportunities for young females in other ‘careers’ — a situation that Falz spends 7out of 9 songs in an album talking about without mentioning sex-work.
Just before the album was released, Falz had released a video of one of the songs titled Talk and Jude Abaga, MI had said, Falz had to be protected because he had talked about everything from elections, the promise of change and the failure of the political elite class in the two major political parties in Nigeria. His rationale was probably that when Falz releases his album in full, Nigerians will come into their consciousness and that will threaten the current political order, which might make them want to retaliate by picking up Falz. But here we are, the current political elite class if they lost their sleep at all, lost it about the early morning of the 15th of January. By mid-day, you would need great luck and you would have to dig very deep into the whole conversation to find any talk about the morals of our society and the rush to get reach quick that Falz sang about in ‘Paper’ or the continued incompetence of this administration that has claimed the lives of many ‘Johnnys’ in different part of the country from the hands of trigger-happy-policemen or bandits.
And this is where the challenge is. If I was Falz, I would probably be disappointed by now and the album was just released less than 48 hours ago as I write this. This is because I would probably be asking like I am asking, how do you get our generation to open their eyes and see the mistake of apathy that our parents made is what have ensured that our #40YearChallenge as a country is that things have not changed for majority of Nigerians. This mistake of apathy is what we are also making.
But as I noted when I ran for office this time last year, changing Nigeria is a MARATHON and we cannot afford to give up on the first lap. For people who belong to my generation, our real #10yearchallenge is to ask, what will Nigeria be like in the next 10 years? Which of us or our current leaders is thinking about this challenging task of building that Nigeria that we desire in 10 years time? Of those running for office today, which of them has a plan towards this challenging task.
If there’s anything we might have learnt from this throwback pictures that the latest trending hashtag has forced us to dig out, it’s that 10 years is not such a long time after all. And if Nigeria has remained relatively stagnant in development indices for the common man since Baba Fela sang ‘Original Suffer Head’ forty years ago, then we have a lot of work to do if we must end up in a different and better Nigeria in 10 years time.
I don’t know who’ll read this, but I hope the reader takes it to heart and takes the step in the right direction. Our very lives depend on the steps we take today.
God bless Nigeria.
