Public policy analyst and International Director of Studies at the European Centre for Advanced Professional and International Studies, Lagos, Prof. Anthony Kila, has slammed the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio for describing President Bola Tinubu’s decision to reintroduce Nigeria’s old national anthem as the most profound act of the president.
He said Akpabio needs to be taken back to the classroom for diplomatic etiquette, condemning the Senate President’s proclivity to trivialize serious issues.
Akpabio had at a joint sitting of the National Assembly with President Tinubu in attendance, said; “Of all the significant things you have done, the most profound is to take us back to our genealogy — the genealogy of our birth — that though we may belong to different tribes, though we may have different tongues, in brotherhood we stand.
“Henceforth, we won’t refer to ourselves as mere compatriots, we will refer to ourselves as brothers, and as we go into battle in the field of sports or politics, in economic endeavours, we must hail Nigeria.”
However, Kila in a breakfast television show on Arise TV monitored in Abuja said Akpabio’s statement was a product of shallow thinking.
He said: “The statement of the Senate President Akpabio says more about him than the rest of us. We have to be very careful about how we speak with people in institutions. By defining that as a very important achievement or step is a shallow statement to make and it doesn’t show a connection with reality.
“So, I suspect the Senate President is living in a world that is very disconnected from the world in which millions of Nigerians are living.
“We need to guide our utterances and I think, of all people, the Senate President is somebody that needs to be taken to a classroom to be shown what he needs to say and what not to say any more.
“He has this habit of saying rather wrong things and it is unfortunate because he seems a jolly good fellow. Maybe he is too much of a jolly good fellow for that position and he needs to sharpen himself.
“The change of the national anthem came as a surprise. We didn’t see that coming. The swiftness with which it was adopted and executed is a new standard that we need to aspire to, for when we want to deal with pressing issues in the country. I think we need to look at it that way. It is difficult to understand the profound reason that led to that change. There are some things that led to that change. There are some things missing about those who purported that change.
At the moment in general streets of Nigeria when you say Nigeria we hail thee, it is a joke. You say it when things are tough or when the Nigerian system has done something wrong to you, but those are things of aesthetics and sentiments. I am not one that is moved by such symbolic things, I see the importance of them as a student of aesthetics, I can see the consequences of aesthetics, ethics and pathos and ethos in the society. There is a mix of all these things which I understand very well, but I think Nigerians at the moment are more interested in their jobs, the prices of food and other things that will affect them.
“We should appreciate the gift of 25 years of democracy but I do not think the president has done us very well by his own gift of the national anthem for this 25 years, because there is a contradiction in it. We have abandoned an anthem written by a Nigerian for an anthem written by a foreigner.
The one written by a Nigerian was adopted about 18 years after we got independence. In the language of today, people don’t use ‘tribe’ anymore, they use ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’. So, there is something about it that is not contemporary.
It doesn’t speak the language of the day. But then, again, I am somebody who would like Church services to be done in the good, old, Orthodox way, rather than, ‘look at your neighbour and tell your neighbour’ about things I don’t buy into.
I still like the classical way of doing things. So, it puts somebody like me in an embarrassing position, but I don’t think it would matter very much, people will learn it. It is just a shame that while some people were warming up to the new one, trying to learn it, then you are changing it and then when we go to the World Cup, All Africa Games or other international events, we have to tell everybody that we have changed our anthem. I predict that in one of these events, somebody is going to play the ‘Arise O’ Compatriots’, instead of ‘Nigeria, we hail thee’. I suspect the timing and I am not impressed by it.
“On the one year anniversary, I think it is the families and friends of those who are elected that should be celebrating. It is a year to mark and reflect on the stewardship of an administration that has four quarters and has spent its first quarter so far. Unfortunately for politicians, you judge an administration by expectations and realities. The expectations from those we elected were so high”, Kila added.
He said the government needs to work smarter and faster to deliver the dividends of democracy to Nigerians “because at the moment, what people remember in the last one year is the removal of subsidy and the attendant rise in the prices of fuel and cost of living”.
