Leadership, culture and mental health

Culled from Punch Newspaper

The Nigerian society will make an interesting study for any academic discipline that conducts investigation in human behaviour. Our society is essentially governed and sustained by a sentimental belief system which derives from sophisticated cultural software.

Despite our cultural diversity and growing population of the elite class, sentimental reasoning is a mental attribute that makes a thorough and objective engagement of our values very difficult as a people.

Sentiment is a thought, view or attitude; especially one based mainly on emotion instead of reason. It is an attitude, thought or judgment prompted by feelings rather than objective reasoning. Objective reasoning, on the other hand, is the ability to decide whether or not the information covered is fact, opinion or propaganda, since it is undistorted by emotion or personal bias.

A few years back, it was reported that Nigerians were the happiest people on earth. Literature from psychiatry research has shown that Africans and, of course, Nigerians, mask their symptoms of depression as they present to primary care doctors with vague, disconnected complaints that may not be immediately connected to mood. It is as though we are scared of confronting ourselves and our problems.

Our unbridled capacity for sentiments may be due to overuse of immature defense mechanisms which are mostly unconscious, and employed to protect us from feelings of anxiety and worry. The late social activist-musician, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, had described us as a people that suffer and smile at the same time. It is amazing that despite a growing number of universities in our country and the attendant rise in the population of the educated folks in all areas of our national life, we have not been able to objectively engage our values to a point of emancipation.

The university is no longer the Ivory Tower but has become part of the floundering population. There are no
more egalitarian ideas, as the intellectual space is governed by sentimental reasoning.

Despite our much acclaimed communal existence and strong sense of brotherhood, selfishness is the core of our cultural value system, propelled by sentiments. Our colonial masters were intelligent anthropologists who made effective use of our sentimental reasoning to plunder our land and remodeled us for self-destruction.

Lord Lugard, who was our Governor-General at amalgamation, gave an accurate ethnographic description of our socio-cultural dynamics in a book I cannot immediately quote. He described us as sentimental, self-indulgent without a capacity to plan for the future. It is disturbing that after 10 decades of his observation and five decades of independence from colonial rule, our overall attitude still validates his observation.