By Busuyi Mekusi
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Human experiences are usually reduced to records, just as record-keeping is strange to many developing nations, including Nigeria. The ruthlessness of Nigerians about their past, which has a way of advising the present, and composing the future, played out ridiculously in the abolishing of history in the nation’s curriculum. Whereas some hold the argument that the wilful forgetting inheres in the trashing of history is to blur local historiography, and enslave unwary people, others have posited that the demonisation of African-traditional tropes during colonialism and neoliberal cultural impositions in postmodern times is a calculated attempt to emasculate the constantly vulnerable occupiers of the periphery, who would always respond to the enticing manipulations of dangerous cultural hegemonies.
Apart from the imperatives of record-keeping that is now politically malleable and emotionally unstable, records are set in various human endeavours, leading to old records falling to the ambitions of newer goal-setters. Guinness World Records, which came to being in 1955, “is a British reference book published annually, listing world records both human achievements and the extremes of the natural world”, based on size, speed and distance. The reference book was started based on the idea of a British engineer and industrialist, Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of the Guinness Brewery, to resolve critical questions, and the initiative has inspired tens of thousands of people annually to seek record-breaking feats. The Guinness Book of World Records has been translated into over 40 languages. With this important documentation of efforts, thoughts and ideas are no longer homeless, as they get homed in this important material inscription.
As individuals are given the choice of record setting and breaking, one could either set or break good or bad records, depending on the outcome of evaluation that is done using established parameters and notable praxes. It is for this that a Nigerian chef, Hilda Baci recently, from her Lekki abode in Lagos, stunned the world by setting a new global record for the longest hours nonstop of cooking, as she cooked for 100 hours to surpass the old record of 87 hours and 45 minutes set in 2019 by an Indian chef, Lata Tondon. While the world awaits her inauguration as a new record-setter by Guinness, following the acknowledgement and the indication of the need for verification and procedural initiation, Baci, who cooked dozens of Nigerian delicacies, has inscribed herself in national and global spheres, and she too could sing like a free bird, hitherto caged by very many limitations.
Baci’s conversations with the public on her feat have ranged from personal glorification to collective acclamation. For instance, she was very specific in telling the world that her global cooking expenditure record was to demonstrate how hard-working and determined Nigerian youths could be, and to also enhance the worth of young African women, whom she said always struggle hard to access space in an overcrowded negatively skewed order or sequence. There is no gainsaying the fact that Nigerian youths have been clamouring for politico-economic inclusion in a country that is believed to have been choked up by gerontocracy.
Without any intention to recede to ageism, leadership in Africa has been captured by veterans of struggles for independence and their loyalists, with filial entrenchment taking hold of national interests in some instances. Gerontocracy is, however, not reserved for African countries as some countries in Europe and America have treasured apparently old brigades in political reckoning. This is not to say, nonetheless, that old age in leadership cannot be burdensome, as President Muhammadu Buhari has not left Nigerians in doubt that he is desperately longing to depart his official duties to the nation, even though some watchers have wondered while he could not throw in the towel, as constitutionally permissible.
One other stunning thing that Hilda Baci, the culinary world record-setter has recriminated over is that not so many people would remember that she was once homeless, thereby raising issues about the notion of homelessness. Baci’s theorising around homelessness contrasted the possibility of a space in the highbrow Lekki area of Lagos, which is naturally attributable to opulence and economic stability. This is without losing sight of the fact that spaces could be borrowed or accessed temporarily but audaciously as typified in the locus ceded to domestic servants and workers compulsorily, due to the inevitability of their services to cater for the luxury of the rich. The various movements of PMB and his family members from the Villa to the Glass House since initiated the idea of the movement away from the centre of authority and the notion of ‘homelessness’ of power and performance, while the gradual ingression of the President-Elect and his wife into the Villa is symbolic of how ‘restlessness’ could birth homeliness.
The political dispositions of most Nigerian youths in the 2023 presidential election that got them to align with the candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, were part of the restlessness that defined their approach to tackling the various challenges they have rightly classified as limiting to fully fulfil their potentials. Another response to the anxieties of Nigerian youths about insecurity, poor infrastructure, bad economy, and hazy future is the decision to ‘Japa’, an aphorism for desperate migration out of the country, in order to escape attritions at home. The troubling realities of the huge movements of Nigerians to other countries are not only now felt in the institutional spaces and gaps created back home, but by host countries like the United Kingdom that has started immigration restrictions that would mitigate the influx of Nigerians. Critically speaking, the reconfiguration of residency and citizenship by Nigeria migrants in the United Kingdom might deliver to us the essence of commonwealth soon.
Baci’s ‘homelessness’ has become a metaphor for Nigerian migrants, who do not just willingly abandon the ‘home’ they once had due to threatening circumstances or the need to respond to socio-economic desire of ‘a greener pasture’, as potential migrants to the UK are to be gated out of the enabling space. Restlessness is a product of anxieties that are precipitated by instability of different shades, and it has induced homelessness at various levels of emigration and immigration.
Homelessness is used to describe the condition of an individual or family who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate night-time residence, such as people living in emergency shelters, (Internally Displaced make-shift centres), transitional housing, or places not meant for habitation, etc. Illegal migrants, mostly Africans, who get pushed back on the sea by European countries like Italy and Greece, are not backing down in their restlessness and desperation to dare the dreadful Mediterranean Sea in overcrowded ship.
To be homeless means; being vulnerable, and it typifies exclusion, poverty and exile, rootlessness and marginalisation. No doubt, homelessness, either taking place within one’s original home-country or one sought through transnational migration, is disadvantageous, as it puts people in higher risks of victimisation, poor health, loneliness, depression, reliance on chemical substances, exposure to crime and criminality, etc. However, in spite of the negatives connected to homelessness, which could be caused by the restless movements of individuals lacking in discretions, people would always gravitate towards the uncertain centre that bears the narratives of betterment and splendour, in terms of possibilities and opportunities. This is more so for most Nigerians who are familiar with the stories of people who get internally displaced due to insecurity and natural disasters, and whose homes were taken away forcefully by bandits and vexatious floods, in what looks like a conspiracy to legislate vulnerable people out of existence.
The homelessness of Nigerians have not only played out in the cases of people who died abroad during medical tourism, it has also been felt by Nigerian educational exiles who got pushed back by conflagrations in war-torn Ukraine and Sudan, at different times. Unfortunately, ‘homeless’ Nigerian youths are still desirous of ‘homes’ anywhere around the world, as long as it would cure them of the social forlornness, economic deprivation, insecurity, etc., at home. They seem to be responding to the opinion of Carl Phillips on restlessness that “And I saw that restlessness was neither the problem nor the solution. Was just the fact. A force. And though eventually it might break me, I would not refuse it”.
We must, nonetheless, remind ourselves that home is better sought where it would be given, and not scrambled for in gated communities, as the best sought across borders could be emplaced right back here in the country, if we are all collectively committed to it, and when driven by visionary leaders. Even though the kitchen was before a circumscribing space for women in our socialisation, the paradoxical movements of Hilda Baci from homelessness to the kitchen, and eventually to the global home in Guinness Book of Records are very instructive to young Nigerians who are restlessly seeking homes across the globe. With the inauguration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu drawing close, he must be reminded that very many ‘homeless’ Nigerians look up to his government to provide them ‘homes’.