by Tunde Leye

Many will complain about funding and lack of government backing. There is some truth in this. But I know of many professors who receive research grants and use it for personal purposes. I know of those who have government backing but see it as only a means of entering into government to eat of the national cake.

The young man swaggers in with his glasses perched on his flat nose. He has a PHD in History and Archeology and has read all about Leakey’s work in East Africa. He can name all the long xyz-cus type fossil names and speaks fluent nasal English, with an accent he picked up on his several trips to attend various conferences in various European countries he has been to. He has delivered papers of all color – white, red and blue. He is a member of all the social cum professional clubs. He has a massive following on twitter, at least by Nigerian standards and his every tweet is retweeted by his plethora of adoring voltron followers. Once he and his friends begin to discuss any issue, from semovita to space travel, it becomes the topic that will trend on social media that day and for days some times. All his articles get syndicated on the online platforms and he sometimes gets a feature on CNN, NY Times or Aljazeera. He is interviewed on Aljazeera, Channels and other international stations and is referred to as “expert in…”

He is an intellectual.

So as an intellectual, he will not do any specific work. He will not spend long years in obscurity researching anything. He will not produce new practical knowledge to solve specific problems in the Nigerian society and then maybe the world at large. In fact, he will look down through his spectacles on non-intellectuals who gripe daily with the problems his intellectual impigidi-migidi is supposed to solve. He does not involve himself in politics, except to espouse theories that are as divorced from the realities as the sun is from the moon. He reads journals and online theories from foreign “experts on Nigeria” and builds his theories on this, without as much as leaving the comfort of the city where he is to do the most basic thing intellectuals do to establish facts – research and observe.

So we have mechanical engineers whose generators breakdown, but cannot tinker with anything until the uneducated, self-taught generator boy comes around. Our historian above is Yoruba, but does not know the location of Old Oyo, or any of the trade routes that went from Fezzan in North Africa, through Kanuri, Hausa and Nupe country and finally terminated in Yoruba country on the coast. None of our agriculturalists seem to know that Lake Chad once supplied vast areas of West Africa fish and that with all the water resources we have, it is a travesty that we import fish. But they know all the French, Italian and Japanese recipes for cooking fish. So our intellectuals who should be at the forefront of discovery would rather revel in the knowledge of the discoveries from other climes.

And this is what makes it hard for us to catch up with the west. The leaps forward that nations take comes from a culmination of the accumulation of long stretches of incremental discovery by their intellectuals. The Industrial Revolution was the culmination of and synergy between different discoveries coming to solve a very practical problem in the England of that time. The leap forward in productivity in the Americas was as a result of such cumulative intellectual work that resulted in the cotton beam. The race of the Asian nations to meet up with the west was first fueled by a transfer of intellectual knowledge (by front door and some by intellectual espionage) but became a real juggernaut only when the Asian intellectuals built on this transferred knowledge and made it their own.
We in Nigeria do not have this kind of culminating intellectual discoveries.

We have done little or nothing in the area of knowledge transfer, real hard technical knowledge, from those who have. We prefer to enjoy the fruits of their intellectual labor than to undergo the same for our society. In fact, we expect, many times demand that society rewards us simply for being intellectuals, not for any specific contribution.

Many will complain about funding and lack of government backing. There is some truth in this. But I know of many professors who receive research grants and use it for personal purposes. I know of those who have government backing but see it as only a means of entering into government to eat of the national cake. And the honest truth is this – most of the intellectuals in the countries we look up to did not have the government backing when they were quietly researching what made them famous and changed the world. They took it upon themselves to do this, and in many cases, sought the funding to make their inventions useful, against many odds. We the intellectuals here need to buckle up and get to work.

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Tunde Leye tweets from @TundeLeye

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.