By Uche Onyebadi
IT’s always nice to walk back in time. Moreso, now that this malevolent year 2020 is coming to its end. Some call it an excursion into history. In simple terms, it is just nostalgia, that is, if we are talking about a past that was full of sentimentalism that compelsone to seek refuge in the cliché known as the good old days.So, this piece is not an analysis. It is just a simple story that providessome glimpses into the past, with a caveat that it may sound like a page out of Alice in Wonderland to millions of younger Nigerians.
As a first-year studentat the University of Benin (Great Uniben), our daily meal ticket was worth50 Kobo. That amount guaranteed your breakfast (10k), lunch (20k) and dinner(20k). Sundays were delicious. We all yearned for it to arrive. Why? Because lunch consisted of jollof or white rice with stew, with the icing being thewell marinated and spiced chickenwhose compelling aroma could be sniffed and relished meters away from the cafeteria. Then, we enjoyed as much ice cream as one wanted for dessert. Looking back, it was an irony that we used to complain that it was too expensive to eat on campus!
Still talking about Uniben, I used to save up and treat myself after a good academic year by flying Nigeria Airways from Benin to Lagos. How much did I pay for my student’s ticket? I believe it was ₦8. Traveling by Ekene Dili Chukwu or Chi Di Ebere buses was not more than ₦3. And, our then military governor, Samuel Ogbemudia, made sure the roads in Bendel State were comparable to what you saw anywhere in the developed world. Besides, you hardly encountered armed robbers – police or civilian – on your way to Lagos.
Education was top priority. With about ₦300, you were assured of paying your school fees and living pretty well for one academic year. Teachers and students went on strike, but they did not really disturb the academic calendar. And the quality of education was world class. In fact, traveling abroad for studies was the remedy for our colleagues who could not compete for university admission at home, so their affluent parents shipped them off somewhere abroad. Then, the Nigerian civil service had no respect for university degrees from the United States, unless you studied at reputable institutions such as Harvard or MIT.
We used to pejoratively refer to U.S. higher-education institutions as one-bedroom universities. If you returned to Nigeria from any one of thoseAmerican universities of unknown substance with a Master’s degree and sought a place in the Nigerian civil service, you were treated like a person with a bachelor’s degree. India and Russia? There was no point thinking about such places because you would have problems convincing anyone that you had attended any meaningful higher institution of learning. Then, a four-year program at any Nigerian university was just that – four years! You knew going in when you would be graduating. So, you planned the calendar of your professional life. What years am I talking about? The late 1970s and early 1980s.
Here another thing that may sound unbelievable. As the person in charge of the foreign desk at Vanguard newspaper, my professional friends at the United States Information Service (USIS) tried several times to get me to work for them, but I routinely rejected their informal offers. In 1985 USIS organised an international visitors’ program trip for me to tour the US for 30 days. I accepted the offer, enjoyed my professional visit, made friends, learned a great deal about the U.S., returned to Nigeria and still would not be persuaded to work for USIS when the topic popped up again. Why would I? Our economy was so strong that one U.S. dollar was worth about 60 kobo in those days. Nigeria was then considered an expensive and hardship country to work in by my friends at the U.S. embassy because if you were paid about $5,000 per month, the real value of your paycheck was less than ₦3,000, which was just about the cost of buying one super-loaded Peugeot 505 saloon car!
Now, this would blow your mind if you did not experience what I’m about say. Private companies and public corporations used to visit our universities to woo final year students to work for them upon graduation. So, you would see them on a jobs-fair day, with their tents all over campus, trying to entice would-be graduates to consider working for them.What did people consider to accept a job offer in those days? Proximity to your state of origin.Comparatively hefty paycheck, and a motley of other perks, most of which were tangential matters.
Here’s another one. Around the time I was leaving Vanguard newspapers, I believe my monthly salary was in the range of ₦800 or so.That put me in the top-earning reporters’ bracket! With that amount, I paid the rent for my two-bedroom apartment at Ire Akari Estate suburb in Isolo, Lagos. I did my monthly shopping from the same amount, sent some money home to my aged parents, shared the much I could with other family members, including my younger brother who was a law student at University of Lagos, and still had some savings in my UBA bank account. Nostalgia!
So many good things happened in those days. My contemporaries reading this article no doubt have similar stories to tell, or even more exciting experiences. Nonetheless, we still had corruption in and outside of government. But, if you heard that someone embezzled ₦50,000, the news came with the force of an earthquake; 50,000 what? Hospitals and healthcare were still expensive and not too developed. But, if your hospital bill was anywhere around ₦2,000, then you were almost singing the Christian song, Nearer my God to Thee, because you were really sick.
The Nigeria Police Force was still called theNigeria Police Farce by my senior colleague and writer, Eddie Iroh. And we still had the branch of Mobile Police known as Kill & Go, but its level of brutality was nowhere near what we experience these days. Armed robbery was still the preferred profession for some people, but their activities were not at the same level of brazenness of today. Kidnapping? No way. You hardly heard anything like that. Boko Haram? Wishful thinking. Something that sounded like it, the Maitatsine group in Kano, was quickly rounded up and decimated even as the group regrouped. Insecurity? Yes, it existed at some level. Butit really did not make any sustained headline news. No one needed to go to the farm thinking about bandits with AK-45 showing up to kill and maim. Neither did cattle rearersterrorise any community that welcomed and hosted them.
What prompted this trip back in time was a recent chat I had with a Ghanaian colleague at ourTexas university. The subject was development in Africa. He presented a compelling case that a lot of good things have happened and are happening in Africa. There were several examples to cite. I agreed. Nonetheless, I expressed my cynicism especially about Nigeria. My challenge was how to explain a situation where we could boast of good road networks decades ago when, today, our expressways are full of surprises, as the late Chinua Achebe used to say. Nor, did I know how to describe the situation where Nigeria has become, or is becoming, a mirror image of Thomas Hobbes’ State of Nature, in which the English philosopher described life as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Or, how to describe Nigeria’s poor standing in the international community when I lived in an era when a Nigerian foreign minister commanded more respect and attention at various international forums than several African presidents and their counterparts from other developing nations.
Is Nigeria an example of visiblegrowth without corresponding development?
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