Grandiose Parlor

Nigeria just accomplished a rare feat some couple of days back by successfully hosting a grand musical jamboree to mark the 46th independence anniversary from the British. Though not a milestone by my standard, the organizers, from the information garnered so far, did an excellent Job in making the event a memorable one. The publisher of ThisDay Newspaper, being the promoter, played a significant role in this project. The job was a perfect PR job for the nation in general. It was fun and more fun while it lasted, but that is all there is to it. It brings little or no value to the society in general. It was an exercise that was far anchored from the realities of the Nigerian world and Africa in general. And this need not be.

The need for social crusaders can’t be over emphasized, particularly in developmentally challenged regions like Africa. They were the catalysts that initiated several paradigm shifts worldwide, and have continued to use simple common sense and well-planned strategies to invoke changes in every facets of life. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. is an example, and there are several others elsewhere with the exception of Africa.

The EthnicLoft blog framed the issue nicely by drawing attention to the MySpace concert planned to generate donation for the displaced Darfurians and increase the general awareness of the issues in the genocidal host-spot of the continent, where almost a quarter million people have perished. The last time I checked, the owner of the social network site is not African. Yet, the organization sees a need to pull its weight behind a social cause. 

If the organizers of the [tag]ThisDay Musical Festival[/tag] had the blood of social crusaders running in their veins, and in touch with the reality of events in Sudan and Africa in general, they would have used the opportunity the concert presented to help shed limelight to the Darfur genocide, and it wouldn’t have cost them a dime. But they would have scored a major point since fewer than 40% of Africans on the continent know what is going on in Darfur.

The celebrities and music are commonly used as agents for driving social causes is an old. Musical concerts in particular have been used to drive attention to social causes for decades. The “We are the world” concert was used to generate donations for the drought victims in Somalia some decades back. Then there were the quite controversial live8 concerts. Jay Z one of the artist featured in the Nigerian concert is using the tour to promote a social cause in Africa- the global water crisis - via the PlayPumb Interntational initiative.

How can it be explained that the unprecedented media blitz generated by the grandiose Nigerian independence concert missed Darfur? This is an unpardonable error. And I wonder how many more of those we would commit before we wise up.

It is our collective errors and failures as Africans that has led to the continent being a hot spot for what a Canadian activist calls “development pornography” - “the use by NGOs of shocking, graphic images of people in conditions of dire poverty [and distress] in order to prompt donations from the general public”, paraphrasing the All African Bazaar.

If the African continent would see the light of a new dawn tomorrow, when today’s myriads of societal ills are no longer relevant issues, we must not only live in the realities of our world, but have the ability to proffer innovative solutions to problems, as they emerge near and far. The world has shrunk remarkably so small that is now longer safe to have the NIMBY (not in my backyard) mentality. The shoking stench of Darfur is in every African’s backyard, and it has become so suffocating that no action is too little.

Photos of Jay z and Beyonce in some parts of Africa