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.
