‪#‎Bring Back Our History

By Moses E. Ochonu

The Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, said recently that the Nigerian government will restore history to the secondary school curriculum. For inexplicable reasons, history was excised from the curriculum some eight years ago. They better get started on the implementation because historical illiteracy and amnesia is slowly killing the country. We are a country afflicted by an epidemic of forgetting and "moving forward." 

*Moses Ochonu

The absence of historical consciousness in Nigeria hurts the country in multiple ways. Take corruption. Many Nigerians believe that corruption only entered the Nigerian political lexicon during our latest flirtation with democracy, that is, post-1999. A few may cite the military era that preceded the fourth republic. Very few remember or are familiar with the corruption of the second republic, let alone the fact that the first republic was rocked by multiple corruption scandals.

The absence of historical memory in this domain of corruption is the reason many Nigerians say Nigeria should “move forward” instead of investigating past crimes. Grappling with the past and addressing its tragedies and residual pains is seen as moving backwards. It is the reason many are willing, even eager, to forgive past political crimes against the Nigerian people. It is the reason we are too quick to move on to new scandals, get bored with old ones, and fail to see a trans-regime tapestry of corruption and abuse of power. It is the reason we see political malfeasance and misbehavior in isolated blocks rather than as continuities.

This dearth of history in our public discourse is the reason old criminals are quickly ignored and manage to sneak back, unnoticed, into the orbit of power, their crimes forgotten. It is the reason that politicians delay their corruption trials, knowing that our legendary short memory and disconnection from history will buy them time, enabling their troubles to fizzle out.

It is as though our baseline of remembering is yesterday. It was Chinua Achebe who said perspicaciously that, if we are going to fix Nigeria, we should go back to when the rain started beating us. This was a compelling statement on the value of retrospective reflection, of history, in our search for diagnostic and ameliorative ideas. The irony and problem is that many Nigerians believe that the proverbial rain started beating us in 2010, 1999, or with the annulment of the June 12 presidential election in 1993.