By Chidi Iketuonye
How can we cultivate excellence in Nigeria? Someone asked, as we were chatting last Christmas. “Remove the word hustle and hammer from our social life and conversation”, I answered, and then took off for a piece of chicken and half a glass of wine. She thought then it was a remarkable statement and I have often thought about it too, but it never struck home with such force until few months ago, when I met him on camp ground, after morning prayers. “Twenty million dollars na joke!? He shouted at no one in particular. “una don dey open fire now! When I start my own eh! He continued ranting. I noticed that other supplicants ignored him even as they kept their distance. He was directly in my path so I either had to detour in fear or continue on my way. I did a mental check of all my unfinished martial art lessons which appeared inadequate for my defense in the event of an attack from a raving lunatic. Discarding martial arts, I focused on the power in the name of Jesus and continued on my path. Interestingly as I approached him he kept moving further away until he was out of my path.
Twenty million dollars na joke? That question seized the young chap’s imagination and drove him to the point of insanity. Somewhere in his all too brief history – I surmised he was in his early twenties – he had gotten involved in some shady deal which had either fallen through or he had been duped. The sad contemplation of all that money escaping his young grasp was too much to bear, so clutching his beaten lap top, the only tool of trade he knew how to manipulate, he went “bunkers”. In a saner world, that young man should have been in school, studying to become something useful to society, learning a trade or vocation or serving faithfully under a master in the pursuit of some cause. But these days nothing matters anymore but the money. This is not a sermon, it is a fact. It is empirical. It is the undeniable diagnoses of an affliction upon us all from the least to the greatest, from the pulpit to the pew, from Asia to Europe down to Africa.
That affliction is captured in the phrase “hustle and hammer” here in Lagos. Every activity is regarded as a hustle with the desired end of “hammering”; that is making huge amounts of money by all means. It is not strange that people want to make money, considering that one can solve a whole lot of problems with it, nor is it evil to make profit from an honest endeavour. Indeed, profit in a capitalist system should be a measure of value added by a person to the society. So profit in itself is not an odious thing, just like food or water is not. What amounts to odium, is the unquestioning eagerness with which contemporary Lagosians in particular and Nigerians as a whole jettison every moral qualms whenever faced with an opportunity to turn a quick naira. Did I say naira? Our appetite has surpassed the purchasing power of the naira! We have eyes now only for dollars and maybe pounds and Rands in this micro wave generation.
I can daresay that almost everyone reading this article has heard the saying that the love of money is the root of all evil’. The saying is often modified and misquoted to say that money (not even the love of it) is the root of all evil. As popular as the saying is, together with its erroneous variant, it is a mixture of half truths which may bear some examination. Money by its material nature is morally neutral. It is a means of exchange and was originally conceived as a measure of value received for goods and services provided. That notion also relates to the principle of profit which is the additional value apart from the cost of a product derived by providing that product. Money therefore is not evil in itself until it becomes an obsession; until people divorce it from its organic relationship to the provision of goods and services and begin to adulate and idolize it as a proprietary end in itself. This is the state of mind that seems to agree with another popular saying, that money answers everything. It is the state of mind that elevates money to Godlike status – to the be-all and can do-all.
The elevation of money to God like status is one sub conscious delusion that fuels the spirit of hustle and hammer. We are living in a generation where people’s creative effort is not geared towards any lofty moral vision apart from the craze to amass sufficient green backs that can provide the trappings of recognizable wealth. The focus on this sort of primitive acquisition is what makes it nearly impossible to imbibe a culture of excellence. Take for instance the situation where one can no longer get artisans to do good job whether as plumbers, brick layers or technicians. Everyone seems preoccupied with the price. Even our educational system is over monetized. You pay for water, and then for football and then for music and dance. We have an emerging generation that has no value for character, goodness or any other thing outside of the raw purchasing power of cash. These are the ones that would be future leaders, legislators, civil servants, doctors and lawyers! The prospect is spine chilling and blood curdling!
Back to my screaming acquaintance at the camp ground. It was later surmised in a conversation that he could likely have been a victim of yahoo plus. For the uninitiated, that means advanced fee fraud combined with juju or voodoo. It was suggested that the dark juju he deployed to make a quick kill must have back fired and left him insane. That is not a strange occurrence in this part of the world. The alarming thing however is the age of these yahoo plus practitioners. Teenagers!. The rot has sunken deep, the infection has spread far too wide!
One can hazard that exposure to western consumer goods has made us loose touch with our values. Greed or lust of the eyes as the bible puts it now propels our thoughts and actions the same way it propelled our forebears to sell their kinsmen off to slavery for the pleasure of whiskey and looking glasses. We need to rediscover our values. Hustle is good. It represents a good day’s job in the process of which one earns a profit for rendering useful service. But put Hammer before hustle or make it the only cause for hustle and then excellence, and dignity goes out the window. But how can one stop thinking about money when you have to pay for your children to play football?
Outline………………………………………………………………………
Cultural roots of profit
putting the end before process
Colonial corruption through luxury and ostentation
Ostentation as a form of idolatory
Idolatory …loss of identity and values
Mediocrity and losss of values
A wasted generation!