Niyi Osundare:
“But Nigeria government succeeded tremendously last year in tackling Ebola. People in America were saying go to Nigeria and learn how to control Ebola. We give that to the government of Lagos State and by extension, the Federal Government. This will show us that we are not a lost country. If things are put right, we can do it well.”

Q: What do you mean by, “certificating not educating”?

A: It took countries abroad a long time to get to where they are. The British plan our educational system to suit themselves but they also left something behind. Our system started going down the moment they left. Their system is different from ours. In Britain, the polytechnic system came into being immediate after the 2nd world war. Europe was producing many students and the university couldn’t take all of them. They wanted a stop gap but not just a stop gap; they wanted a kind of institution that would take care of technical people or technologist, or such like middle level man power. They worked on it and did it very well that HND is equivalent to B.Sc. HND graduate can go as far as PhD level. But in Nigeria, HND is devalued. In like term, we have devalued degree itself. The degree we are celebrating is not market valuable.

Your certificate doesn’t make you, but the education that has been instilled in you. It is not the number of books you read but the kind of books you have read. The problem today is that we are producing the so called educated but illiterate people. That you are in one field doesn’t say that you should not be able to say something about the other fields. Many of our students leave university really knowing very little. We are producing so many illiterate people. It is because they are not well taught. How can you say you have a degree in Journalism, History, Communication, Theatre Arts, and you don’t write essays? In our days, you had to write an essay every week. You know how to write by writing. Imagine a graduate of Communication who writes essays that is full of errors. He may not even know how the paragraphs are organized, or the law of concord because he is not taught. You have the certificate but you don’t have the education.

Q: What are the lessons you learnt from Katrina?

A: It will take me an elephant mouth to answer that question. The lessons are many. Katrina taught me that material things are just material things that you could be disposed of any time. Katrina taught me that everything we possess end up in possessing us. The more you have, the more you are possessed. The more you have, the more you are asked. For two weeks, my wife and I were just all over the place. I left my house without a pair of shoes. My shirt was torn. Water had taken everything we had away. We had money in our bag, but we didn’t have money to buy food until the Red Cross and aid agencies came to our assistance. At the Red Cross centre, I was there among hundreds of other people, ordinary man.

Nobody knew this is a poet or a great professor. I was a Katrina evacuee. I didn’t enjoy the experience but I learnt a lot that I will never forget. On disaster control, Katrina showed me that no country is beyond mistake. One would have thought that a country like America would have taken care of such a disaster easily. No, America didn’t. This is the reason hundreds of people perished in Katrina and why I nearly died. For about four days, there was no sign that there was any government in America. We were just there moving from one evacuated centre to another. A whole city was under water. There was no rescue plans. It took one week for helicopter to come and start evacuating us. You can imagine not having a bath, not brushing your teeth for eight days and that was in America. It showed the weakness of that country and I think the country has also learnt from it.

Niyi Osundare:
“We are driving them away in the name of foreign religion. The religion we practice here is of the people of the Middle East. Why must we destroy what is ours? Yoruba culture is extremely accommodating. You can add all these together and still function.”

The important thing is not to make a mistake, the important thing is to learn from that mistake and our country Nigeria has a lot to learn from that. Everything in this country meets us by surprise. Our country is never prepared. We are lucky that there is no disaster in this country like earthquakes, no major tornadoes. Remember few years ago when we had flood in some parts of the country, it caught all our government arms down. But Nigeria government succeeded tremendously last year in tackling Ebola. People in America were saying go to Nigeria and learn how to control Ebola. We give that to the government of Lagos State and by extension, the Federal Government. This will show us that we are not a lost country. If things are put right, we can do it well.

Q: What kind of change are you expecting from the Buhari-led administration?

A: At the moment, I am putting that change in inverted commas because that is what politicians promise us and I don’t trust politicians. APC has to be extremely careful. You are PDP in the morning and by afternoon you are in LP and in the evening you are in APC. That is what Nigerian politicians are doing to us. They do not mean well for the people of this country. Most of our politicians are rogues. Quote me, they know it. Otherwise, our country will not be like this. The APC came, we embraced its change. I hope it will be the real change that we want, not a deceitful change. The change should give us good roads. We want roads that will take us to our destination not to our untimely graves. We want good education for our children, food for everybody to eat, good medical care. The people of Nigeria must make sure that they get our politicians to respect us. We are too cheap.

They buy us with cheap money and we then vote for the wrong people. Afterwards, suffering follows. There is a logic to the kind of suffering we are going through in Nigeria. We have not learnt to hold our politicians accountable. A politician comes, gives you N500 and says you must vote for him. Without bothering about his ideology, you vote for that person, now in a day or two, you spend your N500. But you have already voted out your future and the future of your children. I know this is happening because there is extensive poverty in our land. We must find a way of reducing poverty, alleviating it, in fact extirpating it. We can do it. Nigeria has enough resources to go round. We are one of the richest countries in the world; number 7 producer of petroleum. Go to Kuwait, go to Saudi Arabia, Dubai where everybody is going now, you will discover that they have done something with their oil money.

Japan has no oil, has no natural resources but she is leading in electronics. We live on the ocean but we are washing our hands with saliva. The change we mean must be change from impunity. Those who rule us have to be accountable. In Nigeria, people behave anyhow. Criminals are not punished and that is why crimes keep multiplying. There must be rewards for good deeds and punishment for bad deeds. We are ruled by the people who steal our money and we allow them to stand on the pulpits in the church and make them imams in the Mosques. In this country today, it pays to do evil than to do good. That is why our country is in this way. But I know things can be better. We have to tell the politicians, change is what you promised sirs, where is the change? During the last election, there were two women on the queue waiting to cast their votes. They held their PVC in their hands. They are not university graduates or whatever. They said that they will use the voter’s cards in their hands to sweep off the government of thieves from power and if the incoming government doesn’t do well, they shall also use it to sweep them off.

They told me something a professor of political science couldn’t have told me. That is democracy in the street. That is the kind of things we need in this country. The politicians are few and we are many. Every Nigerians must be interested in how much the legislators are earning. We have to know how much is the constituency allowances. We have to know what is called security vote that governors are collecting every month and how is it being spent. We spend over 60 percent of our earnings on the maintenance of parasitic and prodigal political officers and the rest of us are suffering. So as Fela will say, you are suffering and smiling. It is your fault. We have to ask question. Don’t delegate the asking of your questions to a few people like Agbakoba, and Falana, It is our duty to make sure that we are governed well. We are led and not ruled.

Q; At what point did you pick interest in poetry?

A: Right from the time I knew how to talk. I was surrounded by culture. My father was a farmer, but he was a musician at a side. My mother was a cloth weaver and as she wove, she sang. There were drums around, Egungun, Olosunta festival, Oloba festival, Sango festival and so on. I learnt from those things. Unfortunately, we are driving them away in the name of foreign religion. The religion we practice here is of the people of the Middle East. Why must we destroy what is ours? Yoruba culture is extremely accommodating. You can add all these together and still function. Until we rediscover our traditional culture, the best part of it, we are not likely going to make much progress in this part of the world.

All that we are copying, we can never copy them well. The white people are laughing at us. A Nigerian leaves Nigeria to America to Christianize them. It was them who brought Christianity here in the first instance. You are now saying you don’t have Christianity again and I am going to give you more Christianity. They look at you and ask you about the country you are coming from. You told them you are coming from Nigeria, a country of corrupt politicians. You don’t only bless them in the church, you equally pray for them and call hell fire on their opponents. Jesus Christ didn’t do that, Prophet Mohammed didn’t do that, so, do it right. We could make this country better, there is no magic.