Until a country and her governments give priority to securing and improving the lives and well-being of all citizens, the national flag and its symbolism is inconsequent. Some things are more important than others. If a country is to make real progress, the more important things should be done first.
Nigeria’s national anthem was changed. The case made then was that the independence national anthem was written by a Briton and so on. It was successfully argued that an anthem written by a Nigerian was more likely to bring Nigerians together. What has happened since? The Naira replaced the pound as national currency. The original Naira was redesigned. What has happened to the value of the currency in Nigeria? The parliamentary system of government was replaced by a presidential system. Is public governance better? Nigeria has had more than enough cosmetic changes.
Changing the flag at this time will be a welcome gift to Nigeria’s politicians. It will be a timely distraction for long suffering citizens. It will be exploited to the fullest by politicians. Nigerians’ focus at this time should be building a united and prosperous country that serves her citizens, not its business and political leaders only, as well as successful countries all over the world do. If Nigerians do not rally around Nigeria’s flag today, it is not because of its poor design. National flags inspires patriotism and other love for country when citizens do not need persuading that their country is working for them and their families, and fellow citizens.
oa
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of shina73_1999@yahoo.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 9:06 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: [Raayiriga] Time to change Nigeria’s national flag
It's a while now since I have been expecting Farooq to send the usual enlightening piece on language that helps me to arrest my haywire linguistic ability and my rustic grammar. This piece on the Nigerian flag is however a surprise.
Of course, as should be expected, I got a few things to learn in linguistic aesthetics. However, the entire write-up is an exercise in how not to champion meaningful change in Nigeria. It demonstrates our aptitude in Nigeria for trivialities in the face of daunting challenges. The Nigerian governments over the decades have succeeded only little in confronting the many serious issues that make for nation building. Rather, they go about rescuing Nigeria through a sometimes diabolical attitude of chasing shadows. The clothes of the Nigerian police have been changed over and again; the honourables have debated gay marriage; Jonathan has eulogised the advantages of low-energy bulbs; we have considered a six-year tenure for political office holders; bla bla bla. Now, Farooq is raising the issue of changing the national flag. Ah!
It seems to me that the article collapses on itself in two senses. First, it provokes a false sense of well being for Nigeria. This is because, as my people say, " it is when we are well-fed that we can consider searching for dangerous pastime". But Nigeria is not well-fed to the extent of considering the dull challenge of changing our flag! Those who have changed their flags have genuine reasons for doing it. We don't have! (Well, except for the reason that we don't have a clue about the next significant step to take in national development.)
Second, and on the contrary, the article then goes on to recognise our collective realities that negate the seriousness and urgency of the change it proposes. For one, what would constitute "a faithful representation of who we are now"? Is there a sense of who we are NOW? Is there a WE beyond the geographical commonalities Farooq outlined?
If there is no WE (...yet), what would the flag represent? Farooq argued for our present circumstances sans the cocoa, groundnut pyramids, coals, the dependence on oil, etc. So, should the new flag depict the Boko Haram insurgence i.e. Bombs and guns? Or, corruption (with a backhanded money changing hands)? Shouldn't it represent an unruly and unyielding diversities with wiggly symbols (definitely not the stars as in the Stars and Stripes!).
If all this sounds ridiculous, it is because the thought of changing the national flag itself is ridiculous at this time in our national situation. What purpose would it serve? Well, maybe, given our predilection for supersition and vain wishes, it might just be the change we need to jumpstart the comatose Nigerian Project! We have began praying the national anthem; changing the flag itself would constitute spiritual armament!
Adeshina Afolayan
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
From: OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU <toyinvincentadepoju@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2012 22:21:21 +0000
To: usaafricadialogue<USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>; wolesoyinkasociety<wolesoyinkasociety@yahoogroups.com>
ReplyTo: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: [Raayiriga] Time to change Nigeria’s national flag
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Hussaini Jibrin
Date: Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 8:48 AM
Subject: [Raayiriga] Time to change Nigeria’s national flag
To: Ra'ayi Riga <raayiriga@yahoogroups.com>
WEEKLY TRUST
Time to change Nigeria’s national flag
Written by Farooq Kperogi Saturday, 27 October 2012 05:00
Nigeria undoubtedly has one of the world’s worst designed flags. It is unimaginative, aesthetically unpleasant, and sterile in imagery and symbolism. It is one of only few national flags I know that repeat one bland color twice and that does not faithfully depict the culture, peculiarities, and history of the people it purports to typify.
This may seem like a trivial subject-matter, but recent events in Nigeria should cause us all to question our representational images and the relation of those images to our experiential realities. As children in primary school, we were taught that the green in our flag represents agriculture and that the white represents peace. Contemporary Nigeria, as we all know, is anything but an agricultural and peaceful country.
But before I dissect the representational inexactitude of our flag, let me examine its creativity deficit. I have never been able to wrap my head around the justification for the repetition of the color green in our national colors. You would think the color green was in danger of going out of circulation and needed to be captured and curated on a flag—or that the scores of color types that could be worthy symbols of our everyday realities suddenly developed wings and took a flight from the earth.
Are colors the only symbolic representations we can invoke to depict our culture, peculiarities, and history? What about the awe-inspiring, time-honored rivers that course through the length and breadth of our country’s landscape; the rich, labyrinthine tapestry of our history; our uniquely sumptuous culinary treats; our valiant pre-colonial empires and their extravagantly elegant royalty; our creative orthographic inventions such as Ajami in northern Nigeria and Insibidi in southeast Nigeria? What about our rich ethnic and linguistic diversity? What about the creative genius of our art and craft and the fascinating meteorological diversities of our regions? And so on and so forth. Why is none of these captured representationally on our national flag?
It takes little or no imaginationto design a flag with two mind-numbingly commonsensical colors. In fact, it takes a spectacular lack of imagination to design the kind of uninspired and uninspiring flag that Nigeria hoists. It fills me with enormous shame that we call thatirredeemably nondescript esthetic embarrassment our national flag. Yet, a certain 73-year-old man by the name of MichaelTaiwoAkinkumi, who claims to have “designed” our national flag, perennially bewails that he has not been sufficiently rewarded by the Nigerian government for his “genius.”
During every Independence Day celebration, our newspapers never fail to tell us how Mr. Akinkunmi, an Owu man from Abeokuta who lives in Ibadan, is mired in grubby poverty in spite of having the “distinction” of “designing” Nigeria’s flag. If I wasn’t brought up to respect old age, I would have suggested that we start a national ritual of flogging the man every October 1st until we come up with a more creative and befitting national flag!
To be fair to the man, though, his original entry, according to the Wikipedia entry on the Flag of Nigeria, “had a red sun with streaming rays placed at the top of the white stripe.” But the judges, who chose his design as the best out of thousands of entries, removed the red sun. Any wonder we’ve been enveloped by metaphorical and literal darkness since independence? I imagine that the judges were British colonialists since this competition took place in 1959 when Nigeria was still under the yoke of British colonialism. What could be the judges’ motivation for foisting a bland, colorless (never mind that it has two colors!), and uninspiring flag on us? Your guess is as good as mine.
But we have been “independent” from British colonial rule for 52 years. Isn’t it about time we rethought the colors and design of our national flag? For one, it is a holdover from colonialism; it wasn’t a product of a post-independence effort. Since we changed our colonially inherited national anthem (which,sadly, is worse than its predecessor in content, cadence, and creativity) we can also change our national flag. Itisn’t a sacred symbol, after all. In any case, it’s customary for countries to redesign their national flags—if they have a reason to. Britain’s national flag, for instance, has been changed many times since 1603 when it was first designed.
And we have many good reasons to change ours. Nigeria is no longer the agricultural country it was when the flag was conceived and designed. The groundnut pyramids of the pre-independence and post-independence eras in northern Nigeria have evaporated into thin air. The cocoa farms in southwest Nigeria have been lost irretrievably. All over Nigeria, we have condemned ourselves to subsistence farming. So agriculture—or whatever the green in our national flag represents—isn’t a faithful representation of who we are now. It’s doubly shameful that we have repeated that representation twice in our flag. If anything needs representing on our flag, it is a color that signifies our dependence on oil. Of course, that, too, would be shortsighted since oil is a fleeting natural endowment.
And peace? Oh, please! Given the mindless, ever-present, fratricidal bloodshed that has been our lot since independence—and that seems to be deepening with every passing day—we should spare the world the horror of calling ourselves a peaceful nation.
We have no business having a green-white-green national flag.
__._,_.___
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