This is not that piece. This is an unconventional article. It comes in the main to tackle all that invidious generalisation about self-medication, self-congratulation and such other selfhood tendencies being anything but good. That age-long assertion is not only wrong and unfounded, it is also incoreect and false.
Self is the greatest interest of humanity, and of animals, and of plants. The three can do anything to get air, water and food without which they would all die off. Some human beings and lower animals occasionally sacrificing self for others is still a function of self interest. The magic for them could be natural or psychological or physical.
It is in the nature of some to please others to the detriment of self. There also exist a handful of others who derive joy all the way to their soul only when they put others first. Sometimes, all of that is for the concomitant bragging rights. Whichever and whatever, self is still being served.
However, this entry is particularly about self-help which, like self-medication, has been made to look like a crime. Self-help may technically be bad but as a last resort and in the Third World or developing country such as ours, there’s need to take a second look at it and this time -as we say in Nigeria- with the eyes of a big man. When push for survival sprouts into a deadly shove, any living thing -man, animal, plant- could keep living just by resorting to self-help (for example, self-defence).
Nigerians may yet have realised it, but self-help is a national strategy. No, unfortunately, it cannot be waved away as a new normal. It is not. Self-help has been a Nigerian culture since independence in 1960.
The indelible facts are there in history as well as the present, to our eternal chagrin and shame. Let’s begin from one of the fundamental aspects of nation building: leadership recruitment process. What do we think is at play when we celebrate coups, corruption, electoral violence, fraud, mediocrity, vote buying and sundry sillinesses? If you pretend you don’t know, I can help you for free: those vices all have one surname, self-help!
Our rulers and allied pretenders to the throne always reach down and out to self-help before they succeed. Just why on earth should people sell personal effects and assets to raise the political capital to see themselves through a process expected to culminate in a platform to serve? Silly, isn’t it? Both that and the forlorn hope by the masses for these same leadership traders to deploy their tenure for general good rather than self-gain.
So, the vicious cycle persists. Having come to the bitter conclusion that their country is trapped on the floor of a sickening political stock exchange, the electorate insist on -no, not excellence, not on ideology, not on manifesto; but on anticipatory payment or double assurance. We vote in either the highest bidder (it doesn’t matter if such a one is a village dunce) or our own blood/friend. Can there be a better example of national self-help?
What about the state of infrastructure nationwide? The noise and air pollution by generators everywhere you go in most sections of this country speak to the epilepsy that has enveloped our public electricity supply. No, please, this is not to indict anyone let alone the current crop of public policy makers. The rot has been long entrenched that it would take quite some tenures, patriotism and hard work to create a new reality.
Until then, thankfully, good old self-help that has been to the rescue remains on that beat. The situation is the same with water supply, security and what have you. Nigerians are all self-helping, one way or the other. In Nigeria, self-help is a national way of life.
The public officer with access to our commonwealth self-helps by embezzling or misappropriating, knowing that it takes more than enough money to make profits considering what was spent to get in and to stay in that office or higher or relevant. The subordinate who sees what’s going on but gets no share resorts to self-help by playing truant and disloyal. Traders and service providers who hear stories of humongous thieveries in high places jump on board the bandwagon of self-help by insane and insensitive price hikes. I bet you, you won’t find up to a thousand Nigerians who have not bowed to self-help.
More and more people would always seek a way out, differently. It’s human nature to do so. It’s human instinct to try unofficial channels of survival if the official ones are blocked or unproductive. It’s therefore hypocritical to preach order and due process in the circumstance.
That’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I mean, what has come out of all the perennial shouts and suchlike noisy scaremongering against negative self-helps like armed robbery, kidnapping, and cultism? Nothing has and nothing would, because we all know we are just grandstanding. Nigeria only needs to reset its system if it truly desires change.
We cannot and should not seek to delegitimise unofficial self-help when those in power are cooling off recklessly a la official version. And, mind you, it doesn’t all begin and end with money. Look at what we have done to our values. Even those in authority drive against traffic.
Who among us respects time? Which one citizen has continued to defy the so-called Nigerian factor? What about nepotism, ethnicity and clannishness? We must eschew these varieties of self-help if we want a better country.
Finally, seniors must do the needful or forever keep shut when their juniors resort to self-help. The will to survive and succeed is a responsibility that every living thing must discharge. Only a handful of the most fiercely loyal servants would remain so if they were told that all they needed to do not to die or fail was choose such self-help as disloyalty. Yes, self-help is that talismanic.
God bless Nigeria!