If you can’t take a joke or see the funny side of every situation no matter how stultifying, your Nigerian-ness is suspect. This is the land of the happiest people on the planet. One day, one wonder. Every frown eventually creases into a smile. A Nigerian will tell you that,“I can’t come and go and kill myself because of any problem”. He deploys humour to neutralise latent tension, making lemonade out of the lemon of his circumstances.

Nobody outside the inner sanctum of power saw the change of the Nigerian national anthem coming. The issue was not even trending at the time the government decided to spring it out like a jack-in-the-box. The speed of the passage of the bill to revert to the old colonial anthem must rank among the fastest in the history of the legislature in Nigeria. And the president signed it into law immediately to press it into service without further delay.

OLD ANTHEM RESURRECTS

And the old anthem written by British expatriate Lillian Jean Williams with music composed by Frances Berda, became the new — just like that?
Arguments are still raging on both sides of the divide as always. Senator Shehu Sani argues that,

“Tampering with or changing the National Anthem or National Pledge of Nigeria should be done after wider public consultation and should be factored in the process of constitutional amendments.” In the same vein, the Country Director of Action Aid Nigeria (AAN), Mr. Andrew Mamedu, in an interview with Daily Trust on Sunday, said the bill to revert to the old National Anthem “is an absolute misplacement of priorities and an abuse of legislative privilege”.

On the other hand, the Director-General of the National Orientation Agency (NOA), Lanre Issa-Oninlu, supports the change because the colonial anthem was more action oriented than the one introduced by the military government in 1978. “it’s important that you have an anthem that connects with your sentiment; that calls you to action so that when carrying out those actions, the impact of the anthem will now reflect in our lives”, he told Trust TV’s Daily Politics.
To remove the ‘bite’ from the acidic comments of those against the move, local musicians have bombarded the internet with their own hip-hop, juju, Fuji and afrofunk versions, complete with titillating dance steps. It is amazing how an anthem that had been consigned to its colonial grave as one of the relics of our past, has suddenly risen to supplant its post-independent successor.
Some people say they don’t particularly mind the return of the colonial relic because of its evocative words:

“Though tribe and tongue may differ, in brotherhood we stand…”
And, “Help us to build a nation where no man is oppressed…”
Every attempt by legislators to make even the minutest change to the old anthem was rebuffed by the assembly leadership. For example, when senator Oshiomhole complained about the psychological association of the word, “Native” in the anthem, his complaint fell flat. But a cursory look at the Webster’s Dictionary confirms the following about the usage of the word, native:

PEJORATIVE WORDS

“In contexts such as a native of Boston or New York in “the summer was too hot even for the natives”, the noun ‘native’ is quite acceptable. But when it is used to mean ‘a non-white original inhabitant of a country’, as in “this dance is a favourite with the natives”, it is more problematic. This meaning has an old-fashioned feel and, because of its associations with a colonial European outlook, it may cause offence.” Bluntly put, the word ‘native’ has derogatory connotations which may have been acceptable in the 1950s but certainly not so in 2024.

The other word that has set computer keyboards pounding on account of its possible connotations is ”tribe”. In the popular imagination, tribes reflect a primordial social structure from which all subsequent civilisations and states developed. Anthropologist Elman Service presented a system of classification for societies which contains four categories: (a) Hunter-gatherer bands that are generally egalitarian; (b) Tribal societies with some limited instances of social rank and prestige; (c ) Stratified tribal societies led by chieftains (see Chiefdom); (d) Civilisations, with complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional governments.

This means that a ‘tribe’ is a more ‘primitive’ grouping of human beings than, for example, an ethnic nationality. You may say, what’s in a word? Well, words are the vehicles through which human feelings (including racism) are conveyed. Have you noticed that the word ‘Tribe’ is hardly ever used with regard to European groupings.

Writing in 2013, scholar Matthew Ortoleva noted that, “Like the word Indian, tribe is a word that has connotations of colonialism.” Survival International says, “It is important to make the distinction between tribal and indigenous because tribal peoples have a special status acknowledged in international law as well as problems in addition to those faced by the wider category of indigenous peoples.”

I admit to being sensitive to the continued use by our people of derogatory words inherited from colonialists. I flinch when I hear a governor talking about the stool of an Oba in his domain. In my books, our traditional institutions don’t have stools; they have thrones!

Away from all that, some Nigerians are grateful to the national assembly for saving them from what they saw as the tyranny of the former anthem as they recalled how they struggled in their formative years to learn its lyrics.

One “Donfaray” confessed that as a child, he didn’t even know that the Nigerian national anthem, “Arise, O Compatriots”, was in English language. He flaunted his childhood doggerel as follows:
Araiz oh companshon
Najuria skolobey
Tusa awa fadaslaaaa
witlo an anfre anfre
Dale shofo awahirosfa
Shaleba be invey
Tusa tusa amaachi
Wande shaban in frido
Pisan yuniti”

Well, to each generation its foibles. The children of today who have to learn the “Nigeria we hail thee” are luckier because of technological advancements, especially the contemporary developments in technology and mass communication.
As the passage of the bill for the recall of the old anthem was unanimous in both chambers of the national assembly, all serving legislators across political party lines ought to take ownership of the resort to the old anthem. For a change, for good or for ill, this issue is trans-party.

DUALISM

But that has not stopped the general public from noting that there is a spirit of dualism or ambivalence in the air, reminiscent of musician Sikiru Ayinde Barrister’s coinage: “Gbabí má gbabè, gbabè má gbabí” (Come hither, not thither; go thither, not hither.)

These fun-pokers on the internet claim that they are confused because the old Democracy Day of May 29 was the day President Tinubu chose to sign the bill on the new national anthem into law while the new Democracy Day of June 12 is less than two weeks away. According to them,

“The new democracy day is the old democracy day and the old democracy day is the new democracy day; and now we would have to explain to our children that we have two democracy days in Nigeria.”

They also note that the signing of the bill into law means that ,“The new National Anthem is the old National Anthem and the old National Anthem is the new National Anthem”. They say it is the social flu of the times we are living in for, if you just cast your glance towards Kano, “The old Emir is the new Emir and the new Emir is the old Emir”.

They also seize the opportunity to throw a jibe at the Buhari/CBN legacy of having two streams of legal currencies at the same time: “We are the only country in the world having two different types of banknotes for a single denomination”.
Now talking about the old and the new, if anthems were like humans, can anyone beat Nnamdi Azikiwe’s insistence on a careful distinction between a young old man and an old young man? Sing, Native, sing!