Showing posts with label W.E. Forster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label W.E. Forster. Show all posts

Monday, July 19, 2021

Nigeria: Where is the 2014 Confab Report?

 By Dan Amor

In Culture And Anarchy, Matthew Arnold, one of the greatest social and literary critics in nineteenth century England, employs a delicate and stringent irony in an examination of the society of his time: a rapidly expanding industrial society, just beginning to accustom itself to the changes in its institutions that the pace of its own development called for. 

*Jonathan 

Coming virtually at the end of the decade (1868) and immediately prior to W.E. Forster’s Education Act, Culture And Anarchy phrases with a particular cogency the problems that find their centre in the questions: what kind of life do we think individuals in mass societies should be assisted to lead? How may we best ensure that the quality of their living is not impoverished? In this little book of about 238 pages, Arnold applies himself to the details of his time: to the Reform agitation, to the commercial values that working people were encouraged to respect, and to the limitations of even the best rationalist intelligence. 

Monday, October 24, 2016

In Jonathan's Confab Lies The Future Of Nigeria

By Dan Amor
In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold, one of the greatest social and literary critics in Eighteenth Century England, according to a reviewer, “employs a delicate and stringent irony in an examination of the society of his time: a rapidly expanding industrial society, just beginning to accustom itself to the changes in its institutions that the pace of its own development called for.”
*Jonathan 
Coming virtually at the end of the decade (1868) and immediately prior to W.E. Forster’s Education Act, Culture and Anarchy according to the same reviewer, “phrases with a particular cogency the problems that find their centre in the questions: what kind of life do we think individuals in mass societies should be assisted to lead? How may we best ensure that the quality of their living is not impoverished?” In this little book of about 238 pages, Arnold “applies himself to the detail of his time”: to the Reform agitation, to the commercial values that working people were encouraged to respect, and to the limitations of even the best rationalist intelligence.
I do not know how much of Arnold had former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan read. But a critical or psychoanalytic study of the former President’s inaugural speech at the National Conference 2014, in Abuja on Monday March 17, 2014 advertises a clear departure from the wayward past. Despite whatever anyone may say, the composition of the team of delegates was the best anyone could put together anywhere in the world. It was an assemblage of dynamic personalities, of the men and women who forged our freedom as a country. And in spite of my well-articulated reservations about some of Jonathan's previous speeches, I saw his address at the Confab inauguration as sublime. In that beautifully crafted, inquiring and highly readable speech, the President brilliantly shows how in the course of a single lifetime, Nigeria changed from a confident continental power into an uncertain, reluctant and domestically fragmented member of the African Union with all her institutions almost failing due to a misbegotten leadership.