Yoruba films aficionados would no
doubt be familiar with the spectre of the gateman, a comic relief that almost
always overwhelms the story arc. Most times, the gateman is caricatured as a
half-wit; his “acting” lacks any artistic subtlety; he talks too much and most
of the lines are improvised, and can be irrational and rude. Like Esu in Yoruba
cosmology who is the gatekeeper between the celestial and terrestrial realms
and therefore privileged to know many secrets of both humans and the gods, the
gateman in Yoruba films also knows too much for his lowly status. Much credit
can be given to Babatunde Omodina, the Baba Suwe character who turned the role
of a gateman into such an outsized and hyper-visible one. His natural
boisterousness meant no director could contain him and so he was left to roam
free. Without the discipline of a script, he was uncontainable, disruptive,
rude, and brash.
The gateman is also a reminder
that Nigeria’s technological evolution is static. Our society is one that
necessarily rigs the urbanscape with fences and manned gates because we have
not quite developed sophisticated and automated means of securing our houses.
We resort to fences and gates even though they are ugly and take up useful space;
some really beautiful architectural masterpiece cannot be flaunted because the
owner has to wall him/herself inside. Yet, without fences we would be doomed by
ravaging forces from outside that threaten our private domains. Since the
network of infrastructure that can help us manage our urban landscape more
efficiently is currently missing, we have the gateman.
The gateman thus signifies a
technocultural lack, a permanent reminder that we are a pre-automation society.
Another reminder of such lack is
the bus conductor. Bus conductors exist because our society has not yet engaged
technology. We still use bus conductor to chant destinations at the top of
their voices. We are not yet a cashless society where, instead of submitting
our money to a conductor, we can simply swipe bus tickets or cards. If we have
properly designated bus stops, and each bus has buttons one can press to
indicate to the driver that one wants to alight, we will have no need for
conductors. Just like we should, ideally, have minimal or no need at all for
gatemen.
However, Nigeria not only has bus
conductors, they also have an association run by a “national president.”
Typical of labour union in Nigeria to display socialist pretensions, the
president goes by the title of a “comrade!”
Lately, the President of Bus
Conductors Association of Nigeria, Comrade Israel Ade Adeshola, announced that
they were working with the Lagos State Ministry of Transportation to employ
1,000 graduates from various universities as bus conductors. He said they were
already training the graduates and they would be paid N50,000 monthly as
salary. Their objective is to make “bus conducting attractive, respected, and
dignified as obtainable globally.” I do not know how much of the globe
“comrade” Adeshola has travelled, but if he is talking about western societies,
he should know that the job of a bus conductor has long been phased out. The
same thing with jobs like car wash and fuel attendants. While those societies
are still experimenting with driverless cars – and one day their buses will
drive themselves – Adeshola should also know that those who drive their buses
are mainly those with equivalent of senior secondary school certificate and
some professional certification.
For the life of me, I had to
wonder why of all people they had to reach for to empower bus conducting, it
had to be university graduates. What becomes of the uneducated and the school
dropouts that currently do the job of bus conductors when graduates begin to
gentrify such occupations? Why not train those that hold the jobs if they are
concerned about the dignity of the profession? Either the proponents of the
idea have an aversion for what the university personifies or they are espousing
the Nigerian reality – that the quality of a graduate degree in Nigeria has
been so devalued it is no better than illiteracy, and should therefore be
denigrated accordingly.
Let me make it clear at this
point that I am in no way looking down on bus conductors. Through their jobs,
they hold up their own share of the Nigerian sky. Like many of us, they are
simply trying to live their lives with as much human dignity as they deserve. A
decent society is one where everyone, including low wage earners, is not only
allowed their dignity but also access to social structures that can guarantee
their upward mobility. If anybody with a university degree, of their own accord
choose to be a bus conductor, it should be no problem. My worry is governmental
involvement; it means they are not thinking with an eye for the future, just
merely widening the culture of poverty and underdevelopment.
We should be making plans towards
using technology to create more opportunities for the society and planning for
that time when certain professions would be inevitably phased out. This BSc
“Bus Conductor” plan will instead contract opportunities. Meanwhile, as they
are planning a future of “Bus Conducting” for graduates, Nigeria is busy
approving more universities and we are planning to turn more polytechnics into
universities. This kind of disparate thinking reflects part of the problems of
our society. We do not have an overall idea and philosophy that undergird
policies, and leaders in their various corners basically end up working at
cross-purposes.
What exactly does a Lagos bus
conductor do that anyone needs four years of education in the university to
execute? If you want people who earn low wages to aspire to get an education,
why not start with OND at least? Why start from the university which is the
pipeline through which societies train their elite and thinkers? Why send
people to universities and then provide them with jobs they do not need an education
for? Anyone that thinks that having graduates as bus conductors will improve
road business should first of all ask why Nigeria that produces thousands of
graduates every year has been unable to think her way through modernisation. A
number of the National Union of Road Traffic Workers’ officials in Nigeria
flaunt degrees but you only need to see their primal conduct when they want to
seize motor parks from each other. If we have to “use” graduates to try to
shore up what is deficient in every stratum of the society, then we would have
to take everyone through the university so they could get jobs as even gatemen!
We should be looking at widening
opportunities and one track is vocational education. A country like Germany has
a model of vocational education that enables students to attend schools for an
average of two days a week and spend the rest of the time being affiliated to a
company where they learn skills of professions. Although Germany has standard
universities, more than half of students who leave high school choose this dual
vocational training option rather than more conceptual kind of education the
university offers. Nigeria can refine this system to suit her own local needs.
There are university students who are unfulfilled because they would have been
better suited elsewhere. Ours is a society that places too much emphasis on
university certificates but not everyone is wired to pass through that system,
neither should a university degree be the only route or access to
self-sustenance in any society.
With vocational education,
Nigeria too can build students who will not only know crafts that can translate
into direct impact on the society through self-employment, but also build
theoretical education to boost their knowledge of how things actually work and
how they can be improved. Many technicians in Nigeria simply acquired the
craft, they cannot reverse engineer so as to improve on the manufacturing
process. Those are the aspects Lagos State should be looking at, not enticing
poor and desperate graduates with a N50,000 salary to take a job that is no
longer necessary in a modern society.
culled from PUNCH
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