By TazoachaAsonganyi in Yaounde
Another March 24 has come and gone, and
added a year to the age of the CPDM. And once again, the party spent the day in
the folly of talking about one man, and counting “his” achievements. It
continued to indulge in a simplification of politics that offers no real measuring
rod of success and failure. Indeed, it continued to indulge in a type of mob
action that betrays intellectual weakness, and a feeble mindedness that touts
around uncertain means of achieving equally uncertain objective.
The
party again indulged in the counting of their “greater achievements,” one by
one, in the certainty that even if the rest of us can argue about a lot of
things, we cannot argue about arithmetic. In this, they forget that quality is
much more difficult to handle than quantity; that the exercise of judgment is a
higher function than the ability to count and calculate.
Quantitative
differences can be more easily grasped and certainly more easily defined than
qualitative differences. The materialist philosophy on which CPDM arithmetic is
based makes it liable to overlook the most important pre-condition that make
all the difference between quantity and quality.
The
fate of Monique Koumate in Laquintinie Hospital in Douala, and more recently
the quintuplets in the Central Hospital in Yaounde tell us that what we see as
a modern hospital, a factory, a seaport – a “greater achievement”! – are just
the tips (the hardware) of complex infrastructures that perform the duties they
are meant to perform. What we cannot see is the software – the discipline, the
intellectual achievements behind the planning, the organization and the
functioning of the structures; the great inputs that are the pre-condition for
making what we see either an empty shell or a vibrant structure.
So
we see only the tip of the structure; the greater part of the structure is
invisible. The counting game the CPDM indulges in is usually based on what they
become conscious of – the visible; and they easily overlook the invisible
because they consider what they see as green pasture offered to some fanatical
supporter of their politics. Yet it is the invisible things that make the
visible possible, keep it going, and prevent tragedies like the ones we are
living in our hospitals and in many other structures in our society.
With
the hospital tragedies, many people are talking about the quality of training
in CUSS – a Faculty I have taught in for the last 30-some years - as if the
problem is at that level. Education cannot help us as long as it is detached
from metaphysics - our fundamental convictions. Education is something more
than mere training; something more than mere knowledge of facts. It is a
process of giving ideas that would make the world more intelligible to the
recipients. It is giving moral instructions that fill the inner spiritual space
with some higher motivation of love, goodness, and truth. Otherwise, the space
is filled with lower stuff like small, mean, and calculating attitudes to life
which are rationalized in economic calculus centered on personal gains.
Emmanuel
M.P. Edeh (Igbo Metaphysics) says that Africa had a Man-God-World conceptual
scheme or relationship. Its culture was (is?) based on understanding and
interpreting this scheme; on the influence of this relationship on life and
existence. This confirms TatahMbuy’s (The Faith of our Ancestors) statement
that African Traditional Religion (ATR) is the core of African culture, and
constitutes the grammar of existence for Africans. It is the location at which
the genuine African and his life-situation are encountered. This also confirms
John S. Mbiti’s statement that Africa had no written texts as such; their
religion was written in the history, the hearts and experiences of the people.
It
is this religiosity that helped our forebears to appreciate metaphysical
truths. It is usually said that Europe that sent forth the early Europeans that
came to Africa, was shaped by education, organization and discipline that
radiated from its metaphysics and ethics which brought forth its science and
technology. Those early Europeans that came face to face with our culture came
armed with the Judeo-Christian religion which was the basis of the metaphysics
and ethics on which their societies had been built, and which was virtually
congruent with our religious beliefs, in spite of its total exclusion of the
black person from the imagery that the religion left in our minds.
In
addition, they came with a “new” metaphysics enunciated in Darwin’s theory of
evolution, competition, natural selection and the survival of the fittest;
Marx’s concept of class struggle; the idea of relativism enunciated by Sophists
that denied all absolutes; and the idea of positivism that sought to extend the
positive sciences to social facts and so denied the existence of God and
repudiated metaphysics.
It
is mainly these “new” metaphysical ideas that were left with us and have
congealed in our consciences. By the time of “decolonization” and
“independence”, we were full of wrong ways of thinking and living, which only
bred/breed alienation. We were left in great confusion as to what our
convictions are. This is why the repeatedly stated idea of an education system
based on “African culture” – African metaphysics - is attractive to us, but our
hearts are somewhere else. We want to develop, to achieve happiness by
neglecting our true spiritual realm; we want to satisfy the body, neglecting
the deepest feelings of our soul. And so we hear often from those who govern us
– from Africans with religion as the core of (their) culture, and the grammar
of (their) existence – proclaiming: candidates should have so many GCE O/A
Levels, except “religion”! With nothing
to take the place of “religion”, the emotional part of our nature is enfeebled
and our moral character is injured.
The
key factor of all development comes out of the mind of humans. Development is
not about visible structures that are counted and boastfully proclaimed as
“greater achievements”; it is about people, their education, organization and
discipline. The emergence of a country is secondary to the emergence of its
people; just as the development of a country is secondary to the development of
its people. People emerge when they themselves are the owners and producers of
what they see around them: the ports, the roads, the stadiums, the industries.
Society emerges when its leadership is reconciled with democracy; clever
formulae that promote leadership without democracy cannot work because they
lose the very quality of human nature and human life. Power that excludes its
opposite - the opposition - can achieve nothing concrete.
As
is usually said, we should always let Athena spring out of the head of Zeus.
The cacophony in the implementation of “emergency plans” and “greater
achievement” projects, produce countable structures that are created for us,
without us; these cannot compensate for arrangements that insult our
self-respect and impair our freedom.
The
feeble responses of the CPDM regime to the tragedies in Laquintinie Hospital
and the Central Hospital are a result of our living with a kind of metaphysical
disease. The tragedies are a reminder that the primary cause of extreme poverty
is immaterial; it lies in certain metaphysical deficiencies; in deficiencies in
education, organization and discipline.
Even
if ‘old dogs cannot learn new tricks’ as the saying goes, ‘new dogs’ grow up
all the time; they will be well advised to learn what ‘old dogs’ are unable to
learn – that we need to integrate African metaphysics as the foundation of the
education we get. Only this can make our education useful to our daily
existence as a people with dignity, and prevent tragegies of disorganisation
and indiscipline that bring us so much shame.
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