Another public affairs analyst has taken a stand on the prominence of
the Big Brother Nigeria reality show currently airing from South Africa.
The other day, the Director General, National Orientation Agency, Dr. Garba Abari, speaking, said: “A significant percentage of our younger ones will not even remember that Nigeria is the original name of our country” as he pushed for Nigerians to stop calling the country Naija.
I engaged Mr. Olateju Oyelakin, the ace comedian popularly known as
Teju Baby Face, just before his interview with Garba, two weeks ago in
Lagos. I wanted him to take up the DG on why the NOA acts like it is set
up to propagate agendas in the interest of the party in power instead
of a national agenda that defies the interests of whoever is president
per time or whatever party is at the centre.
Mike Omeri, the immediate past DG of NOA, ran the organisation like
it was the media and propaganda arm of the last government. If the NOA
is 90 per cent dead and irrelevant, Omeri, in my opinion, contributed
89 per cent of that. But the current DG, while seemingly now interested
in an agenda that is about our collective interest has started off by
missing the point completely. This is a big example in how to miss the
point. Calling Nigeria Naija is not the issue.
Small Lesotho is defined as The Kingdom In The Sky; picture-esque
Madagascar is also called The Red Island; Rwanda is called the Land of a
Thousand Hills and South Africa is the Rainbow Nation. The United
States is Uncle Sam; Chile is the land of Poets; Iceland is the Land of
Fire and Ice; what is Nigeria? We do not know at the moment! Someone
should tell Mr. DG that Nigeria will always be officially Nigeria, that
it is okay to funkify it into “Naija” for cool points, that there is
nothing wrong with that, because Naija is part of our identity now and
our younger ones will not have issues remembering ‘Nigeria’ because the
older ones know when to use Nigeria and when to use Naija. Or are the
teachers in their schools now teaching them ‘How the British Colonised
Naija’ now? Or the “Constitutional Development of Naija from 1914 to 1999”
is a topic now? Please! Let us not try to justify the existence of the
National Orientation Agency because really, it is free to die if it
can’t find a reason for it to be funde
Another recent Nigerian anomaly is the Big Brother Nigeria.
Nigerians are asking tough questions about the reality show but we are
mostly asking the wrong question as usual. We are complaining about the
so-called immorality being espoused by the show as though whatever is
being reflected in the show is not a telling reality in Nigeria. Or is
it our usual, ‘it is okay to do bad, but at least keep it in the house’
mentality?
The show is rated 18, it means that before you commit to watching
it, you must know that there is a likelihood that there will be pictures
and sounds that should not be fed children and teenagers. If you, an
adult, then goes ahead to watch it, only to complain about immorality,
sorry, you are a hypocrite. And it is impossible for your kids to feed
on it consistently, if you, the parent or guardian is not also binging
on it. Back at school, their friends with the abnormal liberty to watch
anything on TV in their own homes can tell them stories about what went
down but the chances of your kids seeing a lot of Big Brother Naija
without you seeing a lot of it yourself is pretty low!
If you want to make change happen in a system, fighting against the
prevailing reality is not your best bet. Life comes with
contradictions; such that, the more you fight certain things, the more
people want to indulge in it. To make change happen, you have to offer
an alternate reality. Let people have a competing choice. I’d rather
schoolchildren tune in to Cowbellpedia Mathematics Quiz competition
instead of Big Brother. But if you as the parent continues to complain
about the show you don’t want the children to see while completely
ignoring the one you want them to see, you’d have made the un-preferred
the popular. We shouldn’t always be about what we do not want; we should
always pay more attention to what we want.
If you want better content than whatever goes on in Big Brother
House, create it; if you can’t create it, propagate what someone else
has created it. We are a country of some 170 million people; some of us
cannot decide what the rest of us watch in our homes. Let people choose
what they want to feed their eyes on. Until the Federal Government sets
up the National Moral Police Force, the National Hypocrisy Commission
must keep its cosmetic morality to itself.
On the issue of the show being hosted in South Africa, here is
another misplaced anger. Where is our recuperating President currently
being hosted? Where do private jet owners in Lagos prefer to park their
jets due to the expensive cost of parking them in Lagos? Ghana! Where do
our political thieves save their stolen money when not saving it
andreyakubucally? Anywhere but Nigeria. Where do the rich send their
kids for studies? The US, UK, UAE, Malaysia etc. Where do the not so
rich Nigerians send their kids when they can’t afford private
universities here? Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Sudan etc. Where do our fruits
often come from? Benin Republic.
If most Nigerians had a choice, where do you think they’d rather
be? You know the answer. Let us stop pretending about our reality. Life
in Nigeria is hard and tough, the more we pretend about the effects of
this reality, the more we ask the wrong questions. Big Brother Naija
will cost the organisers a lot more to host in Nigeria because they’d
need an extra budget to power the house for starters and they’d need to
move several hi-tech equipment over; they’d need to house the technical
team in expensive hotels after finding it pretty tough to get them visas
and while at that, they’d need to protect them from the now ubiquitous
kidnappers.
Patriotism is a beautiful ideal and you cannot say President Buhari
is not a patriotic man. But you see, when it comes to life and death
issues, when it comes to making rational decisions like, “what kind of education do I want my children to get?”; “when it comes to ‘what’s the best holiday my money can afford?”,
patriotism often takes a humble seat, because it knows enough to know
that it is not built on a vacuum. It is built on a two way street; your
country cannot ask patriotism of you if it does not even care enough
whether you are dead or alive. Or do we now know the names of the
thousands of people killed by Boko Haram? Do we have the names of all
the citizens killed extrajudicially? Let us even start by protecting
lives and property then go a step further by dignifying the dead
whenever we fall short of protecting citizens.
One day, we can justifiably wonder how irrational a company can be;
to leave Nigeria where it is much easier and cheaper to host a world
class show, then take it to another country that offers less value at a
more expensive price. Because you know what? Big Brother is not a
charity show; it is a business.
The winner gets N25m and an SUV. You can bet though, the organisers
make at least that amount via the daily voting to keep housemates in
the house. Then, do the numbers for the 11 or so weeks it gets to run
for, do the numbers for the advertising and then the numbers for the
partners. Why is no one asking why Big Brother Naija is hardly even a
Nigerian idea. It is just a foreign idea being served to a Nigerian
audience using Nigerian ingredients. We can do better as a country but
we must start by deciding to get angry at the right things. And people.
Written for Punch Newspaper by Japheth Omojuwa
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