The pseudo-intellectual has often mouthed all forms of radical slogans to attract attention to himself and is often ready to justify or condemn all policies and programmes according to whether the government or opposition is his pay-master that would have ‘rewarded’ him for his meretricious services. But the true intellectual, who usually concedes no primacy to myth, wealth or religion, keeps clear in his mind that the human estate is the centre of his interest and arena of his activity. For he is conscious of his role as a torch-bearer of society and pilot-fish of the social revolution and with his peers should conscientise the people and help them to place the interests of society as a hole above individual or group interests... A true intellectual should be completely numbed in seeing the fabric of his society turned into shreds by crooks high and low who have looted the national treasury or exploited every loophole in the law or administrative procedure to cheat or in any way diminish his country, sometimes in collusion with foreigners who care not about what they do so long as their personal interest is advanced. Mokwugo Okoye, ‘Treachery of the intellectuals’, in The African Guardian, May 30, 1994
Posted on: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 14:00:08 +0000
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