CORPORATE CULTURE
not lemonade or root beer that our foreign heroes drank .
Another wonderful aspect of this bygone era is that we quoted our own . Across the continent were iconic figures and great minds that spoke to our very fertile minds . We were also hooked to our local football clubs . In Nigeria we had the IICC Shooting Stars of Ibadan , Stationary Stores of Lagos , Enugu Rangers , Bendel Insurance Football Club of Benin and others . We were fanatical about our own and we supported our own . It was an era when even people who had studied abroad for years came back without an accent . We were very proud of who we were and how we looked and how we sounded .
Today it is different . A person goes abroad for a year and comes back with an accent . We aim for sophistication by always trying to show how much we know about others . A person who can tell another man ’ s story and does not know his own story is an insult to his heritage . Africans today pride themselves in how foreign they look and in the scramble to appear to be sophisticated , people totally lose who they truly are .
The truth is that when you see these things happen , they reveal people who do not know who they are and if you do not know who you are , you will answer to who you are called and you will conform to the desires of the audience you so badly want to impress . It gets doubly precarious when your audience also has no sense of identity and so they are wowed by how foreign you look and sound and their greatest aspiration is to be like you . This , dear friends , is how Africa has lost her identity , lost her relevance and indeed lost her voice in many circles .
Dare Babarinsa is a Renowned Journalist , Columnist , Historian and Author and in one of his articles he writes about a revered deity of the ancient Yoruba people of Nigeria . The deity called Ogun who was god of war and patron saint of blacksmiths , artists and travelers supposedly drank palm wine with the natives in his earthly sojourn and traditionally Ogun has been associated with palm wine and Ogun festivities and rituals always had a large supply of palm wine . However today the story is different . Instead of palm wine , even
“ In a world where so many people struggle for acceptance and where people measure their value by the amount of likes and followership they get on social media , there has never been a time when the gospel of authenticity needs to be preached with more aggression . People in the name of likes and follows have totally lost their identities .”
the local god now ‘ drinks ’ imported wines and spirits .
Now you see where our problem lies . If the so-called god of the people has moved on , leaving palm wine to waste in the forests instead of being tapped to create an industry , can we blame the citizens for losing their authenticity ? This is the point where you understand the title for the 1980 blockbuster movie and you must reluctantly agree that indeed , the gods must be crazy .
When our appetite for foreign drinks is greater than our appetite for what we produce , when our appetite for foreign clothes is so great that we would rather wear a second hand attire from Europe than wear a new tailor made attire from home ; when our sense of pride comes from how foreign we look and sound and we despise the one that looks and sounds local , then any dreams of development as an entity are likely to remain as dreams .
As a young person growing up in Nigeria , we saw the glory days of the seventies and the eighties and we also saw the decline of the nineties . I grew up seeing a Nigeria where the president ’ s official car was one assembled in Nigeria - the Peugeot 504 . We saw a Nigeria where people were jailed for importing foreign fabrics and the local industry thrived . We saw a Nigeria where people like my father who had schooled in the United Kingdom shunned an easy passage to British citizenship because they felt a sense of loyalty to the country and felt a deep need to contribute to the building of the country and indeed it can be argued that the glory days of Nigeria were those years . Nigerians were proud to be Nigerians . Think of it , our currency was stronger than the dollar and we could spend the Naira in different outlets in the UK !
One concept that is seldom talked about is the correlation between national pride and national development . When a people feel a sense of pride towards a nation or organization , they will own it and they will see to it that things go forward .
The question might however be asked : which comes first ? National pride or pride in the development of the nation ? When President Kennedy said that the people should ask not what the country can do for them but what they can do for their country that indeed the country was actually doing something for the people .
So , does the national pride of the American and hence the development rise out of the fact that America cares for its people ? We watch with envy as Americans at events like the Olympics shed tears when they win a gold and their anthem is played for the whole world . We watch how even in military exercises , no American is left behind . Indeed it is a military credo that none of their own will be left behind in the battle and that they will do everything to get their own back if and when captured . This care for their own seems to be at the root of their patriotism - the fact that you have a country that you know has your back .
They may differ in their politics but when it comes to the American idea they unite . In the book , The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism , George McKenna argues that what makes new commonwealths particularly vulnerable to destruction is that their people have not yet formed the common habits . This suggests that we strengthen our commonwealth when we build around the habits and beliefs on which we agree and when we allow these to be at the core of our patriotism .
We need to investigate this further by going to the family level . Even if one was raised in abject poverty with nothing to be proud of , the easiest way to make an enemy and
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MAL 44 / 21 ISSUE