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Adeoye Oyewole

Sometimes I sit down and stretch my imagination to pre-colonial Africa before Nigeria came into being through the process of amalgamation. Africa, at a time, was a force to be reckoned with in terms of civilisation.

Education, arts and science were well developed in Africa before the colonial masters came. We had our social welfare system and a form of government. Africa had demonstrated a form of primitive democracy with inbuilt checks and balances long before colonisation. The colonial masters amalgamated different nations in a geographical entity called Nigeria. They formulated different versions of constitutional apparatus to administer the geographical entity they created. The amalgamation of several nations had its profound psychological consequences, which became profound at independence. Prior to independence, the conflict embedded in the amalgamation project was latent until we achieved self-governance. At independence, our social welfare institutions were poorly developed because the colonial masters had displaced our poorly growing but native social welfare institutions.

Schools were organised for minimal literacy for the natives to run errands for the colonial masters and the prisons were glorified lunatic asylums reserved for those who revolted against the colonial process. It is noteworthy that a number of our earliest psychiatric institutions grew out of these lunatic asylums reserved for political offenders.

The colonial masters, with their psychiatrists, banished natives into asylums after some spurious non-empirical diagnosis of some mental illness. They had a theory of an African mind that could not cope with colonialism, hence developing mental illness and banished to the asylum not for treatment but for social immobilisation.

The inability of our post-independent elite group to forge a common ground in the leadership of the nation, possibly as a consequence of contending social forces, led to several political upheavals which snowballed into the disruption of development of social welfare institutions, with profound negative impact on the mental wellbeing of the citizens. Governance became dislocated by nepotism and self-aggrandisement, to the neglect of institutions that should facilitate social welfare.

Prior to the first military intervention, our social welfare institutions never acquired a culture of their own, as they were scanty, inadequate and poorly funded because they were not the immediate priorities of the political elite class. The military governed by decrees that never took into consideration the feedbacks from the people and gave very modest attention to the development of social welfare institutions.

The military years were marked with grave socio-economic difficulties that dislocated families, resulting in increased rates of abuse of illicit drugs among our youths, teenage pregnancies and school dropouts, to mention a few.

Apart from poor physical infrastructures, our social welfare institutions were being run by discordant cultural software that could not make a tangible difference in the lives of the ordinary citizens. As a nation, we have been floundering without a sense of history and destination that has impacted negatively on our mental health. Our universities and polytechnics are turning out graduates that are unemployable. The hospitals, schools, prisons and other social institutions have deteriorated without creative leadership.

The pre-colonial rulership model frustrated the potential of the ordinary citizens that could have been beneficial in nation building. This culture was also reinforced by long years of military rule where only a few privileged elites determined the fate of others without any mechanisms to channel inputs from the ordinary citizens.

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Democracy, culture and mental health