By Pius Adesanmi.
Some ask: Pius, why do you hold such a low opinion of the Nigerian social and political elite as a collective? Primitive is your ever ready descriptor when you write about them as a collective. Why? I will answer with one significant illustration. Come with me.
Throughout history, civilization has been measured in stages by man’s ability to impose order on primordial chaos by deploying his genius and gifts to exercise aesthetic authority and control over his environment. To achieve this, he innovates, he invents tools. This is the function of the elite.
In the crudest sense, the elite in hunter gatherer society in the Stone Age invented primitive tools to exercise aesthetic authority over his lived space and environment and this enhanced other activities pertaining to feeding and economics.
If you know the lived spaces of Nigeria’s elite as well as I do, you will feel truly sorry for Nigeria. I am talking about where he lives in Maitama, Asokoro, Lekki, Magodo, Banana Island. This is where the intellectual nakedness of this class is on full display.
It is in such lived spaces that you come to understand that the Nigerian elite has failed the most rudimentary test of civilization. As a collective, they have exercised no aesthetic authority over the conceptualization of those spaces. What they have produced are some of the world’s most expensive urban ghettos.
These are folks who vacation in Neuilly in Paris or in the French Riviera. They then return to urban ghettos in Nigeria where they build anyhow, do violence to every notion of spatial aesthetics and symmetry. No conceptual rigour in their approach to their own lived spaces and environment.
A man treats guests to haute cuisine. They discuss Naija politics while listening to Verdi’s Aida. At the end of this soiree, everyone drives out of this majestic compound to garbage, sewage, and other forms of conceptual and spatial violence.
Throughout history, man’s response to challenge has been innovation. The Nigerian elite is a unique species. His only response is primitive: escape. That is why he builds bigger and mightier fences to lock challenges out of his compound that other elites resolve with innovation.
The German elite may resolve certain challenges by conceptualizing better, futuristic autobahns; his Nigerian counterpart will respond to the same challenges by importing heavier & sturdier SUVs (Jeeps). When these prove insufficient, he escapes to the skies via helicopters and private jets.
An elite whose only answer is escape, an elite that has not colonized (in the Latin sense) its own environment in Maitama or Lekki cannot do anything about yours in Nyanya, Lugbe, Oworonshoki or Okokomaiko.
If he does so much violence to his own lived space, how can he organize yours as your political leadership? That is why slum clearance is his only answer.
NB: I left Ikoyi and VI out. He did not plan those. Rather, that which Oyinbo planned for him he has spent the last 50 years destroying. He couldn’t even maintain the canal. The aqueducts built by ancient Rome are still there…
