Akara Remi: Olodos By Will Have Reported For Duty
By Sayo Aluko
I have a personal rule when it comes to observing Nigeria as it is and as it has been through the years: the moment a supposedly educated person surrenders their independent judgment to the permanent defence of any government, they also surrender a measure of their honour for something profoundly unworthy of it.
Your voice should belong to your country, not to the politician temporarily governing it, because once every thought you produce must excuse power, reinterpret its failures or soften its insults, you are witlessly wagering your honour away in the performance of political servitude, paid or unpaid.
It should be beneath an educated person to view every national issue through the eyes of a follower, fanboy or fangirl, because such devotion will eventually make even your touted “brilliance” sound clever by half and obtuse by choice. And that is precisely what I’ve been reading from some of our “educated elite” about the First Lady’s akara and kuli-kuli remarks. [I mean, of course, a lot of things about some of you have to be placed in quotation marks you at this point.]
These people understand perfectly well why Nigerians are offended by those utterly mundane remarks from First Lady Remi; they have simply chosen to wilfully misunderstand the outrage in defence of power.
They know that citizens understand there is no indignity in selling akara, roasting corn or making kuli-kuli. They also know that Nigerians need no urgent reminder about how some have built honest lives from such labour.
They know that the citizens’ uproar over Akara Remi is not an attack on akara itself. Rather, it is a rejection of the maddening mundane-ness with which people in power keep reducing a national economic emergency to advice about what the poor can fry by the roadside.
Of course, Bayo Onanuga can’t know or admit this [he might need start taking Ginkgo Biloba tablets – ask your Doctor, Egbon], but there is unwhitewashable hardship in the land, no thanks to your boss’s defensible economic decisions in principle, but that were done without proper sequencing, credible buffers or meaningful protection for the citizens. It is a textbook example of reform recklessness dressed up as bitter medicine.
You cannot impose sacrifice from below while preserving extravagance above, then continue preaching endurance to citizens from inside convoys and bloated entourages, as part of a government still visibly allergic to austerity; and, in the middle of all that, insert akara and kuli-kuli prescriptions into the mix.
Yet, right on cue, the government’s volunteer interpreters have arrived to explain that the First Lady was only addressing poor women, as though poverty diminishes a citizen’s entitlement to dignity, vision and language proportionate to her suffering.
Well, Nigerians have not misunderstood her, and they are not outraged because they consider akara beneath anyone; they understand perfectly that power has reduced a profound crisis to mundane survival tips and now expects applause for the reduction.
Un-Dear Olodos by sheer will, well done on reporting for duty. You are supposedly educated; you can recognise insensitivity, incompetence, hypocrisy and an attempt to insult the collective sensibilities of citizens, yet you will deploy every ounce of your education to explain all four away.
Anyway, worry not. Y’all will eventually understand how expensive honour is. If history is any guide, that lesson does not always arrive as public disgrace; sometimes, it comes quietly and intimately as a private, nuclear shame; Yorubas call is èsín atúnidá – too deep to translate; one no applause, appointment or political access can remove. That is the cruel thing about honour squandered, its absence often hurts most where the world cannot see it. Heck, it is not even karma; it is simply life.
Keep it up.
