ONYEKA ONWENU: NIGERIA AND CHOICES

Joshua J. Omojuwa pays tribute to Onyeka Onwenu who passed at 72

These are just words on a screen or on the page of a newspaper, yet within seconds, if you are old enough, sing it and you will do a time travel.

“Fine young girl/ Love dey for body/ This thing they call love/ Na serious affair/ Make you think well/Before you gree/ Abeg o, if you love life, you go plan am well/ If you love me you go wait for me.”

Wait for me is a classic. Choices too. It probably isn’t as popular as the former. Leaves one wondering about the impact of music videos and the popularity of songs.

How was life then? I do not remember much from 1989/1990 but I do remember liking Wait for me a lot. We didn’t know much of the lyrics, but we knew the duo that made it a hit song; the peerless Onyeka Onwenu and the timeless King Sunny Ade. I was also aware it was meant to be a “Family Planning” song. That for me meant a campaign to discourage people from having too many children, to specifically keep it at four at most. That’s as far as I remember. The campaign was led by the Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria.

Nigeria’s population then was just under 100m, yet the government, and I believe the people, were concerned enough to advance and promote such a campaign. The population growth rate was about 2.6 percent, compared to 2.7 percent or more from 2002 through 2013. Interestingly, the immediate decade after the release of this song (1990-2000), and the other interventions that went with it, saw a marginal decrease in the population growth rate.

Onyeka Onwenu passed on Tuesday. In a glowing lifetime, she demonstrated her talents and abilities through music, broadcasting, activism, governance, movies, etc. One day, hopefully soon, Nigeria will return to having a crucial conversation about its population explosion. When that day comes, it will be clearer then than even now, that the lessons Onyeka shared through those songs, as with the songs themselves, are part of her legacy. Because any campaign around Family Planning will always be built on the success and lessons learnt from the Wait for me and Choices era.

This is being written before the August 1 protests. If the protests are half as popular as the noise before the day itself, then I expect some parts of Nigeria would have felt the weight of the agitations. It is my hope that it is well managed, that the people have their voices heard, that mischief makers aren’t able to create chaos out of it and that the authorities are able to keep things in check.

With its population rate hardly reducing despite the efforts of the late 80s and early 90s and without any major follow-up on the back of that, with the country’s poverty rate much higher today than even in those days, with the ubiquity of the Internet and the spread of information/misinformation and enhanced ability of citizens to organise, successive Nigerian administrations must always be ready for mass protests. The reasons may differ, the action itself is almost inevitable.  

According to an assessment that was carried out about 18 months after Wait for me was released, 64 percent of people in urban areas had watched the video whilst the number was 22 percent for rural respondents. 90 percent of those who were surveyed agreed with the message of the song and the idea of family planning. I saw tweets after Onyeka Onwenu passed suggesting that some people had their behaviour moderated by the song. Whilst it could be simply correlational, it is interesting that the decade after the song had a marginally lower growth rate than the decade that succeeded that. Note that the succeeding decade had a bigger base to operate from. Nigeria’s population was under 100m by the late 80s, it was around 130m by 2001.

We’ve got wicked problems scattered all around our country. Because of the pressures of politics, we are often given to fixing design problems like they are bugs. So, we patch things and keep going, aware that the problem has not been fixed. It has only been managed for the moment and will soon return to become a bigger and an even more complicated one. That was how fuel subsidies started about half a century ago in the 70s. That is how we have attempted to address a lot of our prevailing challenges; we want to fix insecurity by primarily deploying soldiers, we try to fix food shortage by distributing food. The system of education needs a hand, we try to build more school blocks.

We make judgments that suggest that we do not give much thinking to the future, we just want to get by today.

How can a country play by subsistence existence and then expect to build sustained wealth and prosperity for its people? A friend told a story of how his school mate had gone to the cash machine to withdraw some money. He kept pressing and punching the buttons and would not leave the ATM. Then, another mate screamed from behind, “buddie, you only get what you put in. Let it go!” You cannot hope to withdraw from an account you haven’t made deposits into. We aren’t invested in the future enough.

Nigeria must settle itself into accepting that there are no shortcuts to development. That are tough judgments to be made and hard decisions to be taken. Those will inform some policies that may appear bad initially but will ultimately lead to sustained development. Whatever government decides to take and deploy these decisions cannot afford to assume that the people will immediately get it. Just as important is the fact that, you cannot tell me to understand that we need to make sacrifices for a better tomorrow whilst even aides of government officials are living like ours is a country with so much money without a clue what to do with it.

Like Onyeka Onwenu sang, we’ve got choices to make. May her soul rest in peace.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing