CHINUA ACHEBE. “The most commonly enunciated Nigerian ideal is unity. So important is it to us that it stands inscribed on our coat-of-arms and so sacred that the blood of millions of our countrymen, women and children was shed between 1967 and 1970 to uphold it against secessionist forces. I think it was Mr. Ukpabi Asika who defined Nigerian unity as ‘an absolute good’. How valid is this notion of unity as an absolute good? Quite clearly it is nonsense. Unity can only be as good as the purpose for which it is desired. Obviously it is good for a group of people to unite to build a school or a hospital or a nation. But supposing a group of other people get together in order to rob a bank. Their unity is deemed undesirable. Indeed lawyers would call their kind of unity by the unflattering name of conspiracy. Therefore we cannot extol the virtues of unity without first satisfying ourselves that the end to which the unity is directed is unimpeachable. [We] must ask: Unity to what end? Therefore “virtues” like unity ...are not absolute but conditional on their satisfaction of other purposes. Their social validity depends on the willingness or the ability of citizens to ask the searching question. This calls for a habit of mental rigour, for which, unfortunately, Nigerians are not famous. But the really interesting question is why were we drawn in the first place to concepts like unity and faith with their potentialities for looseness? Why did we not think, for example, of such concepts as justice and Honesty which cannot be so easily directed to undesirable ends? Justice never prompts the question: Justice for what? Neither does Honesty or Truth. Is it possible that as a nation we instinctively chose to extol easy virtues which are amenable to the manipulation of hypocrites, rather than difficult ones which would have imposed the strain of seriousness upon us? And was that one of the legacies of our Founding Fathers?”
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 17:44:41 +0000
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