In the first place here, virulent inflation brought about by criminal mis-governance has reduced the value of your pension to a pittance and the administration of pensions has been reduced to the level of cruel and unusual punishment. Pensions are hardly ever paid on time and since records are practically nonexistent, pensioners are required to show up in person to receive their pension to guard against paying money to those who had died. Even then, pensioners are collected in some filthy location to have their names retained on the pension list. Such is the severity of this exercise that at least a few pensioners fail to return home any time this exercise was organized. To add insult to injury, pensions are the first group of payments to be defaulted on whenever there is a problem with salary payments in any sector of our economy. It is tragically ironic that I was the one who was not frightened by the prospect of ageing and not only that, was dispensing advice to someone heading to a much more promising future than I.

Now that I am an OAP or would have been if I lived in Britain, it has become clear to me that I was living in a fantasy world all those years ago when I looked forward with an impressive degree of equanimity to my achieving the grand status of an old man. Now that I have lost a lot of my hair and acquired a powdering of silver to what is left of it, I suddenly find that either I was wrong about the character of my society all those years ago or society had taken a turn for the worse over the intervening years. I am inclined to believe that the latter suggestion is the correct one as was the case in Sweden. Our Professor was Ola to everyone in the laboratory except me, as I could not come to terms with addressing anyone so obviously older than I by his first name. It was the Professor who told me that in the Sweden in which he grew up, nobody dared to all their seniors by name but that societal changes had brought the unwholesome changes in societal intercourse which I had observed and could not bring myself to be part off.

In the here and now, old people are officially abused and despised by Nigerian society. Thus it was that the eventual winner of the recent elections was subjected to rank abuse on account of his age. One of the more vocal of the opposition members, displaying a shocking lack of decorum showered abuse on a man old enough to be his father and showed that his upbringing was of questionable quality by his trying to score his asinine points at the expense of his own mother. It has been calculated that only three per cent of Nigerians are above the age of sixty and so this is an exclusive club, the membership of which cannot be taken for granted but this is not a consolation to those who have to live within a society which no longer puts any great value on age. And, the Yoruba saying that getting old comes with a legion of trouble has never meant more to the aged than now when rank disrespect has been added to the other troubles, both physical and psychological which the aged have to cope with. My Norwegian counterpart is now 64 years old and he can look forward to a life supported by a society in which everybody has a right to be sheltered from the vagaries of life in a way that is not now possible in Nigeria.

Professor Adebayo Lamikanra teaches Pharmacy at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife

Courtesy: The Guardian