The late poet T. S. Eliot, writing about the hopelessness of man to rise above banality, said in his poem The Hollow Men, “We are hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” And Floyd O. Rittenhouse, an eminent theologian and missionary, describes undue concern over “small things” as “super- scrupulosity.” According to him, those afflicted with it are “under a cloud” of delusion – self deceived.
In the last days of May, our federal lawmakers “leaned together” and replaced the first indigenous national anthem, composed by a Nigerian and played by our military band, with the old one by the wife of a colonial official. They thought “Arise, O Compatriots, Nigeria’s call obey” wasn’t good enough and that “Nigeria, we hail thee” was better. And guess what, President Bola Tinubu just as promptly gave his official ink of assent. This coming after 64 years of independence!
Forgive me, I am tempted to quote, at length, the Voice America’s reporting of the passage of the law. “The federal lawmakers introduced and passed the bill in less than a week, an unusually fast process for important bills that usually take weeks or months to be considered. The “Arise, O Compatriots” anthem being replaced had been in use since 1978, when it was introduced by the military government. The anthem was composed at a time when the country was reeling from a deadly civil war and calls on Nigerians to “serve our fatherland with love and strength” and not to let “the labor of our heroes past (to be) in vain.”
“The new version that takes immediate effect was first introduced in 1960 when Nigeria gained independence from Britain before it was dropped by the military. Titled ‘Nigeria We Hail Thee’, it was written by Lillian Jean Williams, a British expatriate who was living in Nigeria at the time. The new anthem was played publicly for the first time at a legislative session attended by Tinubu, who marked his one year in office as president [May 29].”
The lawmakers argued that the 1978 anthem was forced on Nigerians as they had no input in its creation. Yes, it was introduced just a year before General Olusegun Obasanjo handed power to politicians and eight years after a gruesome civil war. But then, we may well ask which Nigerian had a say in the independence anthem. It is like mother hen scratching a stone to produce food for her hungry chicks. She knows there won’t be food there but she must keep up the make-believe to keep out the chicks’ impatient screeching. But the majority of Nigerians are no chicks. Educated and highly political, they can so easily tell truth from falsehood. For instance, if the military had been such foul smelling folks, Nigerians wouldn’t have elected two of their number presidents who governed for 16 years. What more, the constitution that keeps the legislators in office for which they draw fantastically fat salary, was the handiwork of the military. No. The real reason for the lawmakers’s action must lie elsewhere. This will explain the extraordinary promptitude of what they had done.
And here we come to the ‘sin’ of super- scrupulosity theologian Rittenhouse warns against. Being overly concerned about the speck in the eye and ignoring the beam as Jesus told His hypocritical Pharisee audience. What was so special and urgent about the national anthem that the lawmakers had had to rush to change it, asked a more rational member of parliament. Would it put food on the tables of hungry Nigerian families? Or was it more important than the wage fight between Tinubu and civil servants? Yes, the double crime of banditry and kidnapping has receded but hasn’t gone away. The infrastructure deficit is still there. Don’t even mention the rising population of out-of-school children – almost hitting 11 million. The lawmakers left all those to talk about an anthem that is meaningless to the common man – even them. A misplaced priority. A pointer to an atrophy of thought. A runout of fresh ideas. Someone recently said jokingly we should run the lawmakers out of town. Methinks there is sense in that.
