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Tobi Amusan’s tears
Tobi Amusan’s tears
By now, almost everyone across Nigeria has heard of Tobi Amusan, the Nigerian superlative athlete who won a gold medal at the World Athletics Championship Women’s 100m hurdles in Oregon, the United States of America. That singular feat, the first of its kind for Nigeria, drew social media attention. When Tobi climbed the podium to collect her well-deserved medal, the Nigerian national anthem was sung, and she wept.
Those tears have generated countless emotional fellowship across the world, especially among Nigerians home and
abroad. Standing on that podium, and struggling with her tears, Tobi represented the very feature of a hero who had struggled with most herculean predicaments, personal and national, to arrive at that particular point in history. Receiving that deserved medal was not the social media story.
What is, is the singing of the Nigerian national anthem, and the evocation of national pride and national revulsion in equal measures among all those who have different understanding of what Nigeria means, especially for sportsmen and women. Why would Tobi play the national anthem when the Nigerian state nearly destroyed her ambition? Why would the Nigerian governmentman killing five-year-old son, others | Punch
associate with the success of someone it nearly cast, as is usual, into the rubbish heap of destroyed talents? These two questions have generated a serious social media furore.
My point of entry in this piece is Tobi’s tears. In depth and context, it is similar to that of Prof. Oyewale Tomori who, some months ago, teared up in agony over Nigeria’s protracted predicament. Tomori lamented the idea of a country that provided all it took for him to become a world-class scholar and virologist; the same country that is failing its own citizens now. On Tobi’s face, one could imagine the many thoughts rushing through her mind as the national anthem played—thoughts of pains and depression at what could have been her lot if she had not got the scholarship to the University of Texas; thoughts of winning at the Nigerian Olympic Trials but the officials did not turn on the electronic timer; thoughts of the injury that the Nigerian government neglected which could have ruined her aspiration forever; thoughts of all the greatness the Nigerian state encodes.
Like Tomori, what were Tobi’s tears telling us? Tears tell many stories and more so tears shed within the crannies of Nigeria’s governance failures. Let me borrow a sense of this from American historian and essayist, Washington Irving.
He said, “There is sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than 10 thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.”
Of course, anyone who insists that Tobi’s heart is not grieved, even to the extent that she was joyous at her triumph, does not know her story, and does not understand the
pain of not being encouraged to shine by one’s country. Her personal trajectory before she arrived at Texas and at that moment of fulfilment. In an interview, she said with tacit grief, “When I was injured, they didn’t care about me. That is how my career ended.” How could her tears not have been motivated by such an incidence of not fulfilling her dreams because of an injury the Nigerian state could have intervened in?
However, the power behind Tobi’s tears lies in her stubborn patriotism. Standing and crying while the anthem washes over her speaks eloquently about a sacred belief and, indeed, unspeakable love for a country that has the potential to be more. Citizenship in Nigeria is a baffling phenomenon. Outside of the spurious nationalism of the political class and elite, Nigeria has lumped almost all Nigerians into the same space of suffering and lack of fulfilment. There are many Nigerians who have fled that space in search of greener pastures. Who is to blame anyone
who is searching for meaning outside of the limiting confines of national space? Imagine the many professionals whose professional competence have almost been put to shame because of the constraint of practising in Nigeria. Many medical doctors/professionals recently left for Saudi Arabia where the medical infrastructure not only attends to their search for personal meaning but also enhances their professional skills and capacity to serve humanity.
But you also have those, like Tobi, who have been offered opportunities to become better in terms of career opportunities abroad, but who doggedly still fly the banner of the Nigerian state. This is the category of Nigerian citizenry that Tobi Amusan represented when she stood on that podium and sang the words of the national anthem. It was a moment of contrition; as if she almost made
the decision to reject Nigeria and all her woes, but she drew back at the last minute and chose to believe in Nigeria’s possibilities. But there is also a last category of Nigerian citizens; those who do not have the opportunity or simply chose not to travel out and seek greener pastures, but who have equally been worsted by the Nigerian government, but who have counterintuitively latched on to the Nigerian dream in its very absence. In the dark space of the Nigerian streets and several informal spaces, these patriotic Nigerians shed tears of frustration. And yet they have a glow in their hearts, watered by the possibility of Nigeria becoming great soon. When the Nigerian youth carried the banner of the #EndSARS recently, it was a demonstration of tough love for a country that must be forced to become better. No wonder many turn to the religious and the spiritual as the anchor to hold the soul in the face of the battering of life and the government misdeeds in the Nigerian existential space.
I have had reasons to shed tears for what I have come to call the missing pieces in Nigeria’s development—the obstacles, misgovernance, lost opportunities and all sorts that keep putting Nigeria backward, and delaying her possible greatness. In 1992, I was on my own quest for meaning. I had started a family, and the responsibility to make ends meet had become quite
daunting. I had started working at the Speech Writing Unit of the Presidency when I then got a job at the United Nation. But then, the late Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade compelled me to stay on in the Nigerian civil service rather than pursue the more prestigious UN appointment. We had both shed some tears in my office at the Aso Villa that day. It was as if I was watching the promise of a better future flying away out of my reach. Aboyade was my mentor; and I had to believe his dream about
Nigeria. He regaled me with the story of how, as a student at Cambridge University in the late 50s, he was a part of a core of dreamers who were determined to redefine Nigeria’s greatness in the comity of nations. Those dreamers later reconstituted into different levels of multidisciplinary teams that began mapping Nigeria’s developmental path. Aboyade himself played a huge role in.
With the Tobi Amusan story, we are forced to ask: how many more generations will the Nigerian state waste? How many more heroic acts would the state reject from those who believed in her? I think it is most providential that the Tobi story is unfolding in the build-up to the 2023 elections.The electoral promises have started piling up without any significant nudge yet towards an ideological and issue-based itemisation and discussions about what matters in taking Nigeria seriously. How, for instance, could the heroism, energies and patriotism of the many Tobi Amusans all across Nigeria and around the world be harnessed to facilitate progress for Nigeria?
Nigeria, like the continent itself, is a youthful nation that embeds enormous human capital
development that could drive national progress. This makes education, across all spheres, a significant matter for electoral engagement by aspirants for the highest offices in the land.
How do we make education the bedrock of national development? If any of the aspirants does not have the blueprint for a genuine and realistic engagement with education, then such an aspirant does not deserve our votes. Any aspirant that does not have a plan for youth engagement is just a player who wants four years to squander Nigeria’s chances at national greatness. We have got to a stage in Nigeria’s national trajectory where political rhetoric should not sway us again.
A final message to Nigerians: Tobi Amusan demonstrated the dogged will to survive despite Nigeria’s crippling limitations. With her success, no one has any excuse to keep blaming Nigeria. The dreams we hold should become the touchstone of our successes. My dreams withstood the terrible dysfunction of the Nigerian administrative system and even an untimely retirement at my prime. Tobi’s dreams withstood the terrible mess of sporting organisation in Nigeria. Our collective aspirations can become the foundation for greatness; not only personal ones, but also our collective greatness as a nation.
Olaopa is a professor at the NIPSS, Kuru, Jos, Plateau State
Columns
Medical and Health Developments Amidst Insecurity: The Case of University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH)
Medical and Health Developments Amidst Insecurity: The Case of University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH)
By: Balami Lazarus
Insecurity challenges have pervaded and taken over every inch of the Nigerian estate, spreading their wings, casting dark shadows stealthily in silence of ambush. The predator has created excuses against growth, progress, and development among ministries, departments, and agencies (MIDA’s), including health institutions where medical and healthcare services are needed.
Development means a different thing to many people. “An improvement in people’s living conditions inevitably contributes to higher productivity and to economic growth, subsequently development.” Therefore the needs of people in a particular area are their development. For example, health.
Moreover, development is essentially concerned with continuous improvements of the human life and condition right from time, in its capacity for qualitative and quantitative reproduction and capabilities to control and manipulate the environment for the betterment of mankind as a whole. Therefore, the purpose of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, and creative lives at all levels of their growth and progress.
But for UMTH under Prof. Ahmed Ahidjo, the CMD, medical and health development in infrastructure, human capital, and healthcare services is a continuous process amidst insecurity in Borno State and Maiduguri, the state capital.
At UMTH, the story of growth and development has brought progress in health and medical services that are expected from institutional hospitals. The rate and level of medical and healthcare services through specialized medical centers equipped with modern state-of-the-art equipment second to none in Nigeria is a testament to health/medical development in the aforesaid hospital.
People have always examined the concept of growth and development from economic perspectives, refusing to align them to the objectives of human needs that will increase productivity to provide and satisfy these human needs to ensure good medical and healthcare service delivery that is available at all times in UMTH “Centre of Excellence.”
Prof. Ahidjo has no doubt facilitated the concept of health development through changes in the health and medical services provided by UMTH in spite of the ten security challenges staring us hard in the face.
Growth, progress, and development initiated by Prof. Ahmed Ahidjo is itself a concept of development in the health sector. The CMD has blended the concepts of development together through their aims and objectives, which are charted towards the improvements of the human standard of living in healthcare and medical services.
Prof. Ahmed’s efforts have therefore brought developments in the life of the hospital that have never been witnessed since the inception of UMTH, until the man with the Midas touch came on board with improvements and transformations of infrastructures and facilities.
Prof. Ahidjo had directed his development towards the satisfaction of the hospital’s needs, the primary objectives of UMTH, which translates to human capital development through teaching, practicals, medical research, and provisions of healthcare services to her immediate host community.
Therefore, development cannot be seen purely as economic, social, and political affairs but rather as an outcome of man’s effort to transform societal structures and institutions in the case of UMTH.
Balami, a Publisher/Columnist 08036779290
Medical and Health Developments Amidst Insecurity: The Case of University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH)
Columns
In Search of Our History Through Reconstruction and Restructuring of the Nigerian State for Peaceful Coexistence and Good Governance
In Search of Our History Through Reconstruction and Restructuring of the Nigerian State for Peaceful Coexistence and Good Governance
By: Balami Lazarus
This piece is an extraction from a paper I wrote years back intended to be presented to my society—the Borno Museum Society (BSM)—but it never saw the light of day. However, this is not the original title; I did some changes, putting in some terms to reflect the contemporary issues facing us currently as Nigerians.
Looking at the paper today, which had lain fallow since 1991, I laughed. Dr. Musa Hambolu and Mr. Kyari Bukar, as members, encouraged and urged me to make an effort and present the paper for onward publication in our newsletter, but it never happened. I believe this version will make sense to many more who believe in the Nigerian project as a sovereign nation.
And back to the main menu of the discourse.
One of the major historical developments in Africa south of the Sahara was the great Bantu migration that took place thousands of years ago. It was a mass exodus of the Bantu people, culture, and traditions; its droplets along the line of their migration gave birth to settlements, which had affected many ethnic nations’ language, culture, and traditions. What happened later is part of African history. We are now nestled between who are we? And what are we?
It is very clear that the reconstruction of our history through the restructuring of Nigeria and its state and conditions has long been toyed with, knowing fully well that it is the heart of our peaceful coexistence and good governance. It’s also the main bowl of our socio-political and economic growth and developments.
Our history, geography, and ethnology have drawn our attention to the state of sovereignty known, called, and addressed as Nigeria, a colonial creation, forgetting that we were here before.
the white man’s creation.
To trace the origin of the people that made up Nigeria, one cannot dismiss the substance of other disciplines like history, archeology, anthropology, geography, sociology, and linguistics, and other related subjects. These fields of scholarships have tremendously improved in the explanations of our history, artifacts, and cultural source materials of the people that were wrongfully and forcefully brought together to live and form Nigeria. Therefore,
There is the need for the restructuring of the Nigerian state for peace and good governance for the benefit of all citizens.
To achieve this, we must collectively agree with one voice to restructure our systems to find a lasting solution to our torn political garment, unity shredded with suspicion generated by us over the years. Because modernization is the process of change towards social, economic, and political systems.
Historically, Nigeria is a conglomerate of large ethnic diversities, and each represents a distinct nation with different cultures, traditions, and civilizations living independently before the forceful amalgamation of 1st January, 1914, carried out and executed by the British colonial masters. Sources available to political historians on our past underscored the necessity to shift from the present state of nationhood to a common ground that will provide us with equal opportunities to maintain and sustain our togetherness as one indivisible and indissoluble nation through reconstruction and restructuring.
The reconstruction and restructuring of our historical and political past is paramount; it will aid in checking the high rate of insecurity and criminal activities of bandits and kidnappers. And shall also clamp down on terrorists and the rise of insurgents. Restructuring will reduce sentiments and segregation in the activities of our national life.
History does not repeat itself. But people repeat history and then falsely accuse history of repeating itself.
We have consciously decided to polarize our country with Black Strike sentiments. And here we are, with agitations in different forms: Oduduwa, Biafra, Middle Belt, and Niger Delta.
Balami, Publisher/Columnist 08036779290
In Search of Our History Through Reconstruction and Restructuring of the Nigerian State for Peaceful Coexistence and Good Governance
Aspirations: A Compass for a Purposeful Journey of Life
By: Harmony Shimbura
A blueprint for a purposeful journey, the human experience is often defined not by where we are looking, but by having aspirations, a compass of purposeful life, and an act of claiming agency over one’s future.
My life’s aspirations are not merely a list of goals or a collection of ‘bucket list’ items. It is a living philosophy, a commitment to growth, connection, and the relentless pursuit of a life lived with intention. They are threads woven together for personal values and to give back to your community.
I believed the core of aspirations should be a desire for perpetual evolution. And I also believe that the moment we stop learning is the moment we stop breathing. Therefore, one of my primary goals is to remain a lifelong student where learning is a continuous process.
I aspire to deepen my understanding of the world through diverse perspectives, whether it is through traveling to places where knowledge is obtained by listening or observations, as is the case with the traditional Cherokee ways of learning.
I constantly challenge my own biases, spiritually and mentally. I aspire to reach the state of equilibrium where my peace is not dependent on external circumstances.
Do you know that aspirations transcend titles and salary brackets? Moreover, my true ambition is practical impact. I want to be engaged in work that I feel is the extension of my soul in it at whichever level. I also
I believe that work should be a contribution to the collective good of humanity.
As a young lady, I am on the self-push to achieve a level of mastery in my chosen field where my intuition is as sharp as my skills. I want to be known not just for what I did, but for how I did it with integrity, excellence, and a collaborative spirit.
Most of us neglect the vessel that carries us through life, but I aspire to treat my body with the respect it deserves. My aspirations for health are not about vanity but for sanity in purity.
These aspirations are not a destination I will one day reach; they are the fuel for a lifelong journey.
Harmony Shimbura writes from Zaria. 07033886918
Aspirations: A Compass for a Purposeful Journey of Life
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