In one of our secondary school English textbooks in the 1970s, we read about a New Year message that the old schoolmaster Tai Solarin wrote on January 1, 1964. He wrote, “I am not cursing you… May you have a hard time this year. May there be plenty of troubles for you this year! If you are not sure what you should say back, why not just say, ‘Same to you’?
Tai’s wish for a rough New Year was not as cruel as it seemed. His belief was that life is not a bed of roses and overcoming tough situations was needed for success. I have no personal knowledge of what conditions in Nigeria were like in 1964. I however feel that if Tai Solarin had lived through this outgoing year 2020, he would have thought twice before wishing for his countrymen to have a rough New Year.
A year rougher than 2020 would be hard to imagine. There have been epidemics in the past, but the world’s last pandemic was 100 years ago in 1918. There have never been lockdowns in most parts of the world, with wholesale closure of offices, factories and markets, grounding of airlines and trains, empty hotels and restaurants, collapse of tourism, suspension of major football leagues, closure of schools and overwhelmed hospital spaces. The last time that our schools in Nigeria closed for this long was in 1936, when they closed for a year due to a CSM epidemic.
It is not beyond the human mind to imagine and carry out the most senseless atrocity, but we do not expect any rough New Year package to exceed Zabarmari in sheer cruelty and senselessness. The heads of 67 beheaded farmers placed on their bodies; it is enough to melt every heart except perhaps Adolf Hitler’s and Pol Pot’s. No Tai Solarian rough New Year package should include Kankara, the largest mass abduction in Nigerian history, surpassing even the record of Chibok and Dapchi. Kankara however had a happier ending. Still, it was a national trauma that even Tai will not envisage in his rough New Year package.
A second economic recession in five years. Nigerians were still struggling to shake off the effects of the last recession when we plunged into this new one. Ok, it was precipitated by pandemic and lockdown but since a new pandemic wave hit as 2020 drew to a close, must it be part of a 2021 rough New Year package? Instead of coming out tougher and wiser from rough patches, as Tai Solarin hoped, Nigerians actually emerge from them weaker and less wise, as the EndSARS protests’ aftermath showed. The Yola man who drove away a tractor in the name of palliative; the Lagos youth who ran away with the Oba of Lagos’ staff of office; Ibadan youths that ran away with motorcycles from a senator’s house; the Abuja civil defence man who joined looters and carried a bag of rice through a garden, were those the lessons that Tai expected us to learn from rough patches?
I don’t think Tai Solarin, who was a stickler for quality education as evidenced in his Mayflower School, Ikenne, envisaged a university lecturers’ strike lasting nine months, continuing even after the lockdown ended. The rumour in 1979 was that had Chief Obafemi Awolowo won the presidential election, he would have made Tai the Minister of Education. That was why Archbishop Olubunmi Okogie rose in arms against Awo because Tai did not believe in mission schools or religious education. Could he have believed in a nine months’ strike, and paying people their salaries for all the months that they refused to work, whatever their reasons were?
I do not wish Nigerians a rough New Year. My wish is for a New Year without pandemic, lockdown, recession, kidnapping, insurgency, banditry, Zabarmari, Kankara or prolonged strikes.
