This week, I saw a remarkable film – “Coconut Head Generation”, which tells the story of the thinking students of the University of Ibadan (UI). The storyline is simple: every Thursday, this group of students from Nigeria’s oldest university, organise a film club, transforming a small lecture hall into a debating society seeking pathways to better understand their conditions of life and bigger questions affecting Nigeria, Africa and the world as they tour the universe using films as a medium of instruction. Themes explored include patriarchy, feminism, ethnicity, racism, authoritarianism and police brutality, and above all, the luxury enjoyed by my generation while in university and the misery and deprivation suffered by students in Nigeria’s public universities today.
Coconut head, a substitute for the brainless one, is an insult all of us Nigerians have been called by our teachers. Now students are posing the other question. What good is the brain when you study and learn for years and on graduation you cannot get a job? This is what they call “school na scam.” There is a further irritation for students because their mates, whose parents sent them abroad to study, for the most part with stolen public money, graduate two years before them as they did not suffer ASUU strikes. They come back to Nigeria, meet their idle classmates waiting at home for the ASUU strike to end and get jobs negotiated by their powerful parents.
The term “coconut head generation” has now been taken on by Nigerian twentysomethings, who have been dismissively labelled as lazy and apathetic. Since 2020, they have finally received the memo that being out of politics is the guarantee of loss of voice and the absence of someone to protect their interests.
This documentary film was made by Kinshasa-born, French-raised filmmaker Alain Kassanda, who was based in UI from 2015 to 2019 and decided it was important that he records the quality of the weekly film club debates he was witnessing. Of course, in 2020, the #EndSARS revolt occurred and the opportunity to capture the spirit of youth disgust at the political class and stirrings of the spirit of popular revolt.
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The film club debates are of a very high political and intellectual standard. The debates followed screenings of work by such directors as Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, John Akomfrah, and Med Hondo. The debates focused on understanding difference and the struggle for equality.
As the students engaged in spirited debates over contemporary Nigerian society’s manipulated mobilisation along the lines of patriarchal ideologies, ethnic and religious differences and the excessive power imbalances in the country, I got the feeling there is hope for a better future. The students could clearly see the manipulation and self-interest in the engagement of political actors and appeared determined to thread a different path in their life-spans.
The film also portrayed the reality of the lived lives of Nigerian students. The lack of electricity and challenges of trying to read for exams under street lamps from across the walls or using battery-powered lamps or the renting of generators. The massive over-crowding of hostel accommodation was also displayed. The film director set out to: “I would say that it’s an attempt to render visible the reality of Nigerian students. I wanted to depict the ordinary beauty and intelligence they display despite the challenges they face.”
The director had made another film, also in Ibadan – Trouble Sleep, about one day in the life of a taxi driver who graduated with a civil engineering degree but couldn’t find a position in his field. A common story in Nigeria. Then #EndSARS happened to Nigeria to crown the film ending, showing the analysis and anger was country-wide and not limited to a small film club in UI. Appropriately, the footage of the shootings and protests in Ibadan during #EndSARS was taken by Tobi Akinde, one of the students involved in the organisation of the film club.
Nigeria has a gerontocratic ruling class with little capacity or will to listen to or understand what the youths are saying and doing. #EndSARS movement had developed as a liberal movement among the minority within the youth – young, educated and smart people who decided to organise against police brutality and extortion they frequently suffer from. The movement was about the rule of law, respect for human rights and the Constitution. It was about deepening democracy and although there was massive propaganda to portray them as evil and violent arsonists, no campaign of calumny can hide the truth. The film showed that clearly.
The mistake of the Nigerian State was in not recognising the liberal and democratic content of their demands for police reform, which has been on the table of the Nigerian Government itself since the 2006, 2008 and 2012 Presidential Police Reform panels, none of those recommendations has been implemented. The government should have read their demands as allies urging it to do what is in its own programme.
The National Human Rights Commission panel set up by the Buhari Administration has made the same recommendations that #EndSARS was making and again had not been implemented. The response of regime supporters was to send paid thugs to break up #EndSARS protests and introduce violence and arson into the peaceful acts of the protesters. By so doing, they activated hoodlum violence and opened the route to the orgy of violence and looting that took over the movement.
Then the Lekki tollgate massacre by soldiers happened on October 20. The attitude of government was to deny it happened, which just increased the anger against the state and created a huge push factor as so many young people decided to take the Japa option and flee the country for greener pastures abroad. The big story is that the great majority of young people decided that staying at home and fixing the problem was the best option. That is the hope.
For Nigeria to survive, government must realise that the most important contemporary problem for the country is the lack of opportunity for the youth. We have developed a huge youth bulge that has been growing rapidly. This is happening at a time in which formal opportunities for employment are declining and having a job has become a minority experience. Meanwhile, the marginalised youth who are glued to the social media know we have massive wealth for a few and conspicuous consumption of the obscene ruling class. To think that they dared stoke the poor and were shocked at the explosions we have been witnessing is the surprise.
The danger in contemporary Nigeria is that increasingly, opportunities for the majority exist only in the sphere of darkness, the underworld, the criminal networks and in occult arenas where the devil can help the bold and needy. From the 1950s to the 1980s, migration to urban centres was based on the acquisition of modern education and skills. That was the era of cosmopolitanism. The pattern of migration, therefore, left the poorest in the rural areas and the adoption of urban life signalled social mobility.
However, as population increase continued and a significant youth bulge developed in the population profile, the poor youth in the rural areas have also moved to urban centres. In this context, these cities have become the new focal point for the aggregation and aggravation of poverty amidst massive accumulation by a tiny elite. This has to change.
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