The Switched On Interview with Donald Duke

Donald Duke is the former two-term governor of Cross River State.  This interview was conducted in 2009 for our publication, ‘Howfar 2009’.

Where did you grow up? 

I grew up in Lagos, but I went to school primarily in the north—Sokoto, Zaria and Ilorin—for secondary and university education. My primary school was Corona and St. Mary’s School here in Lagos . . . we grew up with a lot of optimism.  Maybe we were going to be that generation of Nigerians that would turn the country around, make things happen, be greater than America, greater in some respects. We were all bubbling, education was good.  If you had a grade you knew that it was your grade; you earned that grade if it was awarded to you. 

Social life was good. We did a lot of partying in secondary school in Sokoto, where I was from ‘73 to ’75—it was fun social life-wise, lots of music. Actually, those days before an album was released in the United States, we got it in Nigeria. How it happened, I don’t know, but we will get a record out here and it will take another 2 to 3 weeks before it hit the stores in America. We thought we were socially more advanced in the scene of R&B. The groups then were the OJs, the Temptations, the Commodores . . . it was fun. We had lots of parties. We used to go to the Shrine in Lagos . . .

Fela’s Shrine, all the way from Sokoto? 

No, no, during the holidays. We used to go to the Shrine to have parties. Later on, when crime was on the increase, it was getting risky and parents warned their children, particularly their daughters, not to go out. Well, we adapted. We didn’t have parties at night . . . we had what we called ‘luncheons’. It would start by 2 pm and end by 8 pm. We would create a ‘night’ atmosphere during the day just because we had to party. It was fun. I think I would say that our social life while growing up was as good as you would find anywhere in the world. I would say I belonged to a class that was regarded as ‘elite’, so I’m describing life for that class. I won’t say that was what it was for everybody in the country and I want to be honest about this.

You said something about parents not wanting their daughters to go out. Was it something that started after the crime rate increased or had it always been the case?

It was a combination of many things. Yes, the crime rate was up, but there were still more restrictions. Parents were stricter . . . You don’t want your children to be wayward and all. Children were not as liberated as they are today, so you would have to find a good reason to go to a girl’s house. You couldn’t just go to a girl’s house and knock on the door and say ‘I’m looking for your daughter’; the father would probably shoot you. So there was a lot more control but of course there was an added fear that with these insecurities, it became even more important that there was control.

Would you say that today’s social life is similar to how was it then when you were growing up?

I don’t know if I can say what young people are going through today because I’m totally disconnected from that crowd.  But I don’t think they have the quality that we had. There are fewer places for them to go to. The society is also clumped up. Moving from one part to the other is just a hassle! You don’t have too many of your peer groups; we had a whole bunch and we didn’t necessarily belong to the same school. We had folks from Government College Ibadan, International School Ibadan, folks also from Kings College, but we were just peers regardless of which schools we went to. I don’t know if that is happening today. One thing I can commend about the social situation today is that the music you hear is indigenous. 90% of it is indigenous. In my time, it was not. 90% of our music was from Motown, The Commodores and all that. That is changing and that’s for the better. But in terms of quality of social life, we had cinema theatres. For instance, in my time, every neighbourhood had a cinema. In Surulere, you had Super Cinema.  In Yaba, you had Casino. On the island, you had Glover Hall and then you had the National Theatre.

But today, the only two you have are the Silverbird Galleria and The Palms and they’re so far out from everywhere. If you were in Apapa in those days, you had Roxy, and if you lived towards Ikeja, there was one there too. We had nightclubs all over the place. Now all the social action seems to be concentrated around Ikoyi and VI. If you want to watch a movie, you have to go to The Palms or the Galleria! The nightclubs I hear of are here [VI] and Ikeja. There is nothing in Surulere.

So we had a more decentralized lifestyle. Crime rate is high and it’s been high for a while now and the ‘elites’, which is the group I can speak of today, are not that indigenized. In my time, the elites went to school in Nigeria. They probably went to the university overseas, but they did most of their secondary school in Nigeria, so they were grounded. In this day and age, the elites send their children abroad, so they sort of disconnect. But that’s my reading on it. I’m not an integral part of it.

And when it came to things like relationships? Dating and such?

Yeah, we dated, but then it was customary to ‘woo’. Women played hard-to-get. Not only do you date, you have to face the challenges of dating. In other words, when do you get to see her? Some girls couldn’t get out of the house, their parents wouldn’t let them out, so where do you take them to? You can’t be seen in public and so on. So there were a lot of restrictions. Now, the society is a lot more permissive. The children are more liberated, more demanding. It’s difficult to tell our children not to go out and all that. Again, because a lot of us have sent our children abroad, they’ve imbibed a different set of values. I keep on hoping for the best. Parents are a lot more permissive than they were then. I think dating now is a lot more casual; then it was a big thing when you dated a girl. I’m not sure that applies now. You know, you have a girlfriend and she has several others . . . not that she is dating them, maybe just platonic friends and all that. In my time, we were too jealous for that. Once you date me, you don’t talk to any other boy.

What’s the reason, in your view, why young people behave the way they do in comparison to your time?

We are in a different age. This is the information age. These guys have access to the internet. They live dual lifestyles. They see the lifestyles lived in the west and they try to adapt to the lifestyle back home. So we are haunted by that. You have a lot more children now going to school abroad than in my time, so that is also a reason. When we talk of globalization, it’s not just for economics; even the social values are globalized. Here we are in Nigeria, in Africa, trying to adapt to western ideas and values.

Even in China, you see that the Chinese are not what they were forty years ago. The Japanese are not what they were, too. Everybody is ‘break-dancing’. They are trying to be like the Americans; the western culture. The western culture has permeated the world. So the children that school abroad do not see their occupation in terms of what they can do when they get back home . . . they look at themselves as global citizens . . . what we can do regardless of where we are—so you have lots of kids who would study things that are not particularly relevant to Nigeria because they are globalized citizens of the world. That wasn’t the case in our time. We went for the more orthodox things. You want to be a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer.  We were not as liberated.

Even engineering back then was a male thing, very few females were engineers. Today, a lot of women do civil engineering, mechanical, and so on. Engineering even then was clear-cut. Now you have IT engineering, you have all types of engineers and all those things were more streamlined.

Today you have Facebook, where people communicate.  You have friends you have never seen, across the world.  In those days, we had what they called pen pals, but to communicate with your pen pal, you knew that if you write a letter, it would take at least 4 weeks before your reply comes back. You couldn’t really get into mischief because they were all letter-based, but we had fun. Talking about letters and all, I was teasing a friend the other day, a ex-girlfriend; I remembered a letter she wrote to me. She wrote: Dear Don, I hope you are swimming in the ocean of love, if so, splendid.

You know, that was how we could communicate. If I was going to see her, it would probably be during the holidays and I’ll have to see her in a back alley. We weren’t that open.

What is your biggest fear for the young generation today?

Values! Kids will be kids. They will do all their rascality and all that, but you must know when to draw the line because you are the depositors of the society in the next generation. Are we training our children to be able to take the society to the next level? Some of the most educated of our children school abroad and from there, they find opportunities elsewhere. Very few of them come back.  So it’s not the best that are being retained. In my time, we strove to take our place in the society. It didn’t matter whether they lived in London, New York or Paris, they were comfortable. Most of the folks of my generation cannot stay abroad for 2 to 3 weeks without feeling homesick you know; they want to come back immediately. Not with these kids, they are different. So there is really nothing that ties them back here apart from their family.

Are they hungry to make or develop this country? Can they take the frustration involved in development? Trying to convince the mass of the people that this is the way to go? I’m not sure. It reminds me of what the Minister for Economic Planning was trying to say to me. He said China has a one-child policy in the urban areas and it’s turning out to be a disaster, because this one child, with four grandparents and two parents, is thoroughly spoilt. He or she is pampered and gets anything he wants, so they are not toughened. Send them out there, and when faced with the least resistance they run back screaming daddy, mummy and all that. But the children from the rural areas are toughened but they are not refined.

We have our own problem, which is education.  It’s not what it was in the 60s, 70s and 80s. When I got my degree from Ahmadu Bello University, I sent it out to universities across the world and some of the best schools asked me to come over. I finally went to the University of Pennsylvania. It’s not the same as today and our university certificates are not seen in that light. You could do a postgraduate from Nigeria, but travel overseas and they might not respect it.

In those days, not many people went abroad for medicals. I had a sinus problem not long ago, I went to see a doctor and a month later, the problem was getting worse, so I took it abroad. In those days, if you see someone, you will know he is a professor because he looks like a professor. He carries himself like a professor, the demeanor, etc. He is not rich but he is comfortable and his comportment is what gave him that respect. The folks I see today, I don’t see that. In our younger days, we had the health centre in Apapa; we had one in Surulere, more like General Hospital. We had LUTH and you knew that the doctors you got were good. You were getting as good a treatment as you would get anywhere in the world. It’s different today. Would this generation or the next generation restore these values?

Given the chance, what would you do—what would you change? For example, would you create a programme or initiative to actually get people to come back home?

You can’t just get up one morning and say all our kids abroad should come back home. Come back to what? You have got to prepare the ground for them and that’s the responsibility of my generation today. We have got to lay a sort of foundation that allows them come back home. We have got to build our scale base and we have got to invest a lot more in education. We are not investing in education. The quality of a classroom is important. The quality of teachers, the books are not there. Inadequate number of schools, there are too many children in a classroom. Ideally, in a secondary school, you shouldn’t have more than 25 to 30 children in a classroom. In a primary school, it shouldn’t be more than 15 to 20. There must be that interpersonal link between the teachers and the students. It’s not there.

We must invest a lot more in healthcare, our hospitals should be improved. We are still one of the few countries with polio. This is not the kind of country we dreamt we have. If smallpox should come back to this world, I know that Nigeria will register itself.

These are things that we know we have got to invest in. We have got to invest in healthcare; we have got to invest in infrastructure. We don’t have good roads. We need to build a rail station. We need to embrace technology. After you have done all these things, that’s when you can start a mass campaign for Nigerians based abroad to come back home. Because when you have all that in place, if you have a good scale base educational system, if you have good healthcare system, good infrastructure, business will thrive.

Let me give you an analogy.  A bag of cement today goes for approximately 600 naira. Between transport and energy, that’s 70% of the cost. If you had an efficient transport system . . . if you had energy or gas or whatever, cement will cost you 250 naira or 300 naira a bag. So while I advocate that those based abroad should come home, those at home should also be made to want to stay at home. We should create opportunities for them. Then you can now with good conscience say, ‘Hey guys, let’s come home and develop this place’.

But right now, it’s difficult, come back to what? The guys who went to school here don’t have jobs—the other day I heard that unemployment in Nigeria could be around the 40 million mark. That may be conservative, I don’t think so. Maybe it’s more. But even those who have jobs, do they really have jobs?

How strongly do you feel that young people should embrace their identity?

I think we should lose a lot more of our primordial rules and become one Nigeria. That’s the only way to go. If we all see ourselves as Yoruba, Hausa, Efik, Ijaw and this and that, then we are not a nation and that’s part of our problem. We are not yet a nation, in our thoughts—we are more of a confederation. We are different nationalities under some common umbrella. You don’t build a nation that way. We must take out all these restrictions and all that and embrace a Nigerian identity. You find too often, someone comes up to you and calls a name and you say where are you from? That’s not important. The person is a Nigerian, so why are you asking where he or she is from? In the context of what tribe do you belong to and not where do you reside and all that.

In America, they ask those questions, but it’s in the context of where do you reside, otherwise you would not have a George Bush, father, whose son, George Bush Jr., was governor of Texas and another was governor of Florida. You can’t do that in Nigeria—let’s say, for example, Henry Duke, my father, has a son Donald Duke who was a governor of Cross River and another one George Duke who is governor of Lagos. In Nigeria, it’s not possible.