“David, why is your own always different?”
I think I must have been 5 or 6 when I first heard this question. Over the next 25+ years, I have never stopped hearing it from multiple people. I heard it multiple times from my parents who did not understand why despite being lavishly gifted, I would never settle down in school and become the quiet, dutiful ‘A’ student they wanted me to be.
I heard it from teachers, instructors and lecturers who wondered why I made the subject choices I made when in their opinion, I could easily have gone with what they considered to be the subjects for “brilliant” students who would go into careers like medicine, engineering and aviation. I heard it from friends, former colleagues, girlfriends, ex-wife, other journalists you name it.
“Why is your own always different?” “Why must you always choose to be so difficult?” “Why not choose the path of least resistance even just once?” “Which point do you think you are proving, and to who?” “David, what is your problem in this life? Do you want to die before your 30th birthday?” These are all real quotes from the past 5 years.
Storytellers Rule The World
If there is anything I have picked up from my decade-long sojourn in marketing and media, it is that stories rule the world. Stories are what get people elected into powerful offices where they wield real power over real people’s lives. Stories are what convince people to give people jobs and opportunities that change their lives and those of others.
Stories are what politicians sell to voters and thus convince them to take actions with far-reaching consequences. A story told over 4 years between 2011 and 2015 is what took a decrepit old relic from Nigeria’s multiple-coio-plotting past and made him a funky granddad that people thought they could entrust the lives of 180 million people and a $500bn economy to. And we have all had a front row seat over the past 7 years to see the outcome of that particular story.
Basically, stories are powerful. More powerful than anyone reading this can imagine. Stories are the power behind the power. They are what animate the very building blocks of the political, economic and social world around us. Someone told a story 2,000 years ago and as a result, at least 3 million pilgrims visit Saudi Arabia every year. Imagine a story told 2 millenniums ago being the core of an entire country’s $68bn tourism industry today! Think about the implications that has for how powerful people think about stories.
And this is precisely why telling our own stories is such an important duty. Stories are not just our record of existence on the planet, but also – very literally – the economic and political inheritance we will leave for our children. If I consent to step aside and allow other people to tell stories that I am involved in or directly affected by, I also consent to have them disenfranchise me or cheat me if they so wish. As the popular saying goes, “Politics is much too important to leave to the politicians.”
If Not Me, Then Who?
Back in 2015, when I sat in shocked silence staring at the TV following INEC’s announcement of Muhammadu Buhari as winner of the presidential election, I was not one of those who could claim to have no idea what was coming next. On the contrary, I knew exactly what was coming next, and I could not for the life of me, understand why my coworkers at the time were whooping and celebrating in the office.
I later came to the conclusion that the unique brand of ignorance that had been incubated and promoted in the 4 years prior to Buhari’s win was due in no small part to a massive failure of journalism and the press to do their job. In the most basic of ways, I concluded, Nigerians had been thoroughly misinformed, misled, miseducated and maliciously deceived into becoming the proverbial slugs who voted for the salt-shaker. Only solid, no-holds-barred, public interest journalism could fix this, was my conclusion.
But who would do this journalism? I spent the first 4 years of Buhari’s tenure constantly griping and moaning to anyone who cared to listen about how compromised, insincere and unfit for purpose the majority of Nigeria’s press ecosystem was. None of them could do the work that needed to be done to inform Nigerians, and all I would ever do was complain, and complain, and complain, then complain about it some more.
Then one day in 2019, I had a brainwave. At the time, I was working for a number of American and European-centred finance news website as a staff writer, and I decided to pitch a story about Nigeria to my editor in New Hampshire. The pitch got greenlit, and I set about doing the sort of journalism I believed Nigeria needed. When the story was published and it received the coverage it got on Nigerian social media spaces, I realised one obvious truth – I had the ability to do the thing I had spent years moaning about other people’s refusal to do.
So if I wouldn’t do it even though I had every tool under the sun that was needed to do it, why was I complaining then? Why was I using my talents and skills to tell American and European stories when I could tell Nigerian and African stories that actually affected me on an individual level? Why was I expecting someone else to do the hard work because it was their job, but somehow it wasn’t my job? If not me, then who?
There is a proverb I came across recently that summarises this weird state of affairs. It goes something like this: “There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.”
I will end this column with an iconic quote from former US President John F. Kennedy, speaking in 1962:
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
