My
Oga at the top Redux
By
Tunji Lardner
Poor guy; Obafaiye Shem, the Lagos State Commandant of the Nigeria
Security and Civil Defense Corp (NSCDC) , whose meteoric rise to digital media
fame on account of a truly comical interview on Nigeria’s Channel TV must rue
day he stuttered the words ‘my oga at the top.’ In a truly classic display of evasion in the
face of pointed questioning and craven obsequiousness to his Oga at the top,
jabbing his fore finger heaven wards, he unwittingly created an Internet phenomena,
even as he spawned an instant cultural meme and wrote his words forever into
the Nigerian urban lexicon. The full story
of the actual scandal he was ineptly trying to explain away and the extent of
this viral contagion can be explored further in the links below:
THE ISSUE
Scandal Reports and the background:
August 25, 2012
February 17, 2012
Senate investigation:
Consider that the Lagos State Commandant of the NSCDC has a
Facebook page:
The Channels Interview (a
snippet):
THE MEME
Website:
http://www.ogaatthetop.com/ (Under construction already!)
http://www.myogaatthetop.com/ (Domain name speculators)
Facebook pages:
T-shirts:
Music Videos:
To some readers an explanation
of the meaning of the word ‘meme’ might be necessary.
Meme [meem] noun: a cultural item
that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological
transmission of genes. In the digital world, this cultural item can go ‘viral’
as was the case here. Now, the meaning of the word ‘oga’ so familiar with
Nigerians and other Africans as a distinctly Nigerian cultural trope requires some
effort. The easiest transliteration is to equate ‘Oga’ with the boss, the big
kahuna, the capo, the master, the big shot, the shot caller, de man, (as in ‘he
de man’), you get the idea. Another variant is the ‘Oga pata-pata,’ as in the
Boss of all bosses, or as my Sicilian friends would say ‘Capo de tutti capi’
a.k.a. The Godfather.
It is a safe bet to assume that
when Commandant Shem was referring to his ‘Oga’ at the top, he was referring to
the personage of Dr. Ade Abolurin the
Commandant General of the NSCDC ensconced like most other ‘ogas’ in that most
hierarchical of cities, Abuja, where our own boss of all bosses, the President resides. In sticking to the time honored
script of publicly pledging loyalty and fealty to his immediate ‘oga’ on the
hierarchical and mostly patriarchal totem pole, Shem was simply delegating
upwards the task of revealing his agency’s web address, ordinarily a fact that should
reside in the public domain. However his conditioning like most public servants
was not to advance the public good, but to propitiate the gods of the civil
service and damn the public’s right to know.
However in this rare instance,
the public’s right, specifically the digital public’s right to know pushed back
hard. In unwittingly creating Nigeria’s first real digital meme, Shem’s ‘my oga
at the top’ faux pas, was in actuality the collision of an analogue thinking
monolith with a digital generation whose domain the World Wide Web. Shem and his numerous ‘ogas’ will have reasons
to fear in the near future if these digital natives push home their advantage
on all fronts to bring thieving politicians, inept and corrupt civil servants and
irresponsible governments to heel to the tenets of open, transparent and
accountable governance.
It was also a battle between the
rigid, mafia like hierarchies where all knowledge is deemed to reside in the mounting
stacks of different ‘ogas’ embedded in the civil service machinery and the
newly evolving paradigm of flatten inclusive hierarchies of distributed
knowledge and participation in which the collective wisdom and input of all
stakeholders are deemed necessary for successful decision making as well as
successful outcomes, in a word good governance.
The relentless social media
parodies about ‘my oga at the top’ also signals the digital unmasking of the analogue
Nigerian ‘big man-oga’ masquerade in the digital public square. For too long
the myth of the invincibility of the Nigerian ‘big man’ and by extension that
bogus self referenced titled of being ‘The Giant of Africa,’ has gone
unchallenged in spite of the declining
quality of life for most Nigerians over the last five decades. I would argue that to understand the Nigerian
‘oga’ mythos is to delve into the pre-colonial patriarchal system that existed
in most indigenous cultures, which eventually evolved in the post-independence
era into the African ‘big man’ archetype; the one man that kept fractious
tribal sentiments in check, even as he, perforce of his personal strength,
wisdom and political acumen kept these fledging states together. A critical
look at the very mixed legacies of the various African Big men since
independence suggests that they wound up doing more harm than good to their various
countries. Even so, in Nigeria today the ‘oga syndrome’ persists in spite of
all evidence to the contrary, he or she is typically an insecure but powerful
office holder or authority figure, lacking in humility and compassion, more
style than substance, and the benefactor of the grand patronage machine of the
state. The technical word for this client-patron relationship is ‘clientelism,’
and its popular manifestation is the asymmetric power arrangement between
‘political god-fathers’ who are patrons to clients, who can be political
aspirants, or simply down trodden
unemployed young Nigerians, desperately seeking
jobs, as was the case in the NSCDC fiasco. Since it can be safely argued
that most big men or ‘ogas’ got to where they are today, not on account of
merit, but by simply riding the
patronage machine to the very top of
their incompetence, the net negative result for us all is the triumph of mediocrity
over meritocracy.
Femke
van Zeijl, a very insightful Dutch writer living in Nigeria put it so bluntly
and so clearly when she wrote that; “ Nigeria is
the opposite of a meritocracy: you do not earn by achieving. You get to be who
and where you are by knowing the right people. Whether you work in an office,
for an enterprise or an NGO, at a construction site or in government, your
abilities hardly ever are the reason you got there. Performing well, let alone
with excellence, is not a requirement, in fact, it is discouraged. It would be
too threatening: showing you’re more intelligent, capable or competent than the
‘oga at the top’ (who, as a rule, is not an overachiever either) is career
suicide. It is an attitude that
trickles down from the very top, its symptoms eventually showing up in all of
society, from bad governance to bad service to bad craftsmanship.”
In trying to think of a way
out of this infinite regressive loop of mediocrity, while the logical place to
start should be the very top with our ‘uber-oga,’ our own ‘capo di tutti capi,’
or more colloquially, our ‘Oga pata-pata,’ Nigeria again defies conventional
logic. As it is, we can’t presently start from the very top to begin to change
things, because it seems that our ‘oga at the very top’ also reports to his own
‘ogas at the top.’ ‘Das all.’
Comments can be sent to:
me.tlardner@gmail.com
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