Reappraise the awards

—    And what should that be if I may ask? —    To portray and reflect society accurately including its successes and failures. What you have consistently done however is to focus on the failures only, as was demonstrated on the issue of national honours, as if none of the awardees deserved his/her honour. A point […]

—    And what should that be if I may ask?

—    To portray and reflect society accurately including its successes and failures. What you have consistently done however is to focus on the failures only, as was demonstrated on the issue of national honours, as if none of the awardees deserved his/her honour. A point you people made so clearly in your editorials and opinions. It’s sickening!

—     Come now, with that word you have allowed your anger to get the better of you. If you feel so bitter about the matter, write to the editors. Am sure they will oblige you on their letter pages and that way you too would be contributing to the debate. But I can’t understand why you are so incensed, the last time I checked your name was not on the award list or have you started lobbying for one against next year already?

—    Don’t hide your professional flaw behind some sarcastic comment. It wouldn’t wash. Let’s trash the issues out.

—    There are no issues to trash out. I read the same papers you read and all of them were agreed –and  I am trying to summarize here—that considering Nigeria’s all round bad performance on every index of measurement  –health, education, science, technology, not to talk about governance and the economy, I can go on and on, it simply is not fitting to keep staging ceremonies, usually with  whopping amount of money to confer honours on people. Pray, what are we rewarding?   Certainly, not excellence; may be failure, and that would be strange indeed.

—    You see, all you have just said amount to a mere litany of woes, confirming what I have been saying all this while which is that Nigeria’s journalism peddles only doom.  If you look hard enough there is bound to be some redeeming or a saving grace somewhere.

—    Well, that is precisely the point. We should not wait for some isolated sterling performance that will attract our comment, because that will amount to a flash in the pan. What the critical comments implied was that it is not appropriate to perennially gather to reward civil servants, state governors and people who are still in government employment doing the job they are paid to do. If we are all agreed that the situation on the ground as at now, leaves much to be desired, then modesty demands that there should be a rethink of the award policy. And I am making bold to say that there should be a moratorium on it.

—     Moratorium? Am I hearing you correctly?

—    Yes, a suspension of the circus it has become, to put it another way. If you must know, the awards create a false impression of how we are performing as a nation. Year in year out, we put on our Sunday best, so to say, and strut about to give ourselves dubious awards that do not reflect our circumstances. It means we have not even begun to realize that we are lagging behind most countries and that we need to re-evaluate a whole lot of things for us to be able to catch up with the rest. But right now all we are doing is put on grandiose shows, ceremonies, fanfairs and making empty speeches. It is amazing really.

—    Problem is you journalists think you are the only smart ones around. You want to stop what has become an avenue for demonstrating the nation’s appreciation of the worth of its citizens because in your estimation the nation has not come to scratch, so to say.

—    Don’t blame journalists for the woes in our midst. All they do is merely to say it as it is, nothing more, nothing less. No one is saying people should not be honoured if they deserve them. The point however is that when honours are given in a situation where bad roads are killing people across the length and breadth of the country, when ailments that should be cured easily become epidemics, when students post abysmal results in public examinations from one year to the other, even the most tolerant of official idiosyncratic actions could be forgiven if they begin to see the honours ceremonies as stuffy undertakings by a government so enamoured of meaningless speech making and wasteful gestures.

—    You have not addressed the point of it being a unifying force.

—     I do not know what you are driving at. What unifying force? An occasion where men and women with connection to officialdom gather to receive awards from their patron does not lend anything to unity. If anything, it depicts the exclusive character patronage has taken in this country. It is rare to see a retired pupil teacher in a far flung corner of the country, who had spent a lifetime to ensure that generations of young men and women become enlightened nor some hard working midwife who has, even in the face of poor facilities delivered babies safely and brought joy to scores of families being called for any honours. It is so elitist.

—    Now, I see. You want to turn an august occasion into one for all comers—for farmers, cobblers, bricklayers and sundry people who are down on their lucks to be given honours.

—    Why not if they deserve them? How many times have you heard of a taxi driver handing over to the authorities several thousands of dollars left by some forgetful passenger in his car?  Such a driver deserves a medal for honesty—a rare value to come by these days, when the state is being stolen blind. It is not too late to undertake a wholesale reappraisal of the award system.