By Ibrahim Bello-Kano
I just read about a retired Professor in a Nigerian university campus who was virtually evicted from the university quarters and a long list of people of the same cadre who secretly wish to die in their university-allocated quarters. And others on their knees asking for a post-retirement contract which would, at best, pay them barely a third of their already-IPPISed pre-retirement salaries.
I think university lecturers are now the glamorised urban poor or worse! Perhaps the lecturership needs these shock therapies to get them to wake up from a host of dependency complexes such as clinging to official quarters, unwillingness to accept the inevitable post-retirement life, and a much lesser pension rate.
What is shocking is that in a culture that is always talking about death, that all must taste death, that death is a preparation for eternal bliss or damnation, there’s, at least among the most educated stratum of that society, an unwillingness to accept or reconcile with what the philosophers call “Contingency”, the wholly unpredictable and treacherous dimension of “being-in-the-world”, namely a sudden change of fortune, illness, capacity detemuscence, atropheee in body and mind, and the wholly earth-shaking reality of betrayal and insouciance from family members, relatives, spouses, and supposedly close friends.
So, I am wondering aloud why this lack of capacity to come to grips with “doomsday prepping” or what I could call “the shock of the new” (the surprising and the unfamiliar at one’s most vulnerable time).
The author is a Professor of Literary Theory at Bayero University, Kano
