When a Parent Says “Well-done”

By Okey Ikechukwu

The group conversation started innocuously enough. The major protagonist was raising issues about the impact of reward and punishment on the behaviour, attitudes and overall character of people, particularly the youths. He argued that there was nothing wrong with using any and everything possible to promote and project whatever you want at any particular point in time. But when he went further to use as an example the over one hundred and fifty million Naira given to the triumphant female football team to buttress his point, the conversation took an entirely new dimension. And that is how I got dragged into the melee.

My first salvo was to say that a parent who excitedly says “well done”, or gives something to one of his children for doing something, is signaling to the other children what to do in order to be in reckoning with him. But what if the parent is rewarding a child who is actually not making lasting contribution to sustainable family values?

Just think back to a hypothetical situation, wherein a child has just finished doing some tough bit of house work. He makes no noise about it. The task he accomplished is one of the less visible and less readily praised tasks that contribute to making a home really homely. Rather than doing the more easily seen and demonstrative tasks at home, he is more interested in doing the needful, the important and the ultimately meaningful, than the visible, the dramatic and the flattering.

Another child may opt for showy duties that attract praise. He would return from loafing about, wash a plate or two and declare force majeure, by displaying a wound on his little finger where a fork scraped it. This second child may actually be regularly rewarded with praise, and treated preferentially for frequently announcing how some neighbours or teachers praised him as a good product of the family he came from.  

A child of this second type may form the habit, over time, of always cleaning the parent’s shoes or wiping the centre table in the parlour, and then jumping up at the opportune moment to announce the wonderful work he/she has done. It is visible. Everyone can see it.  It is announced with fanfare. So, who can deny it?

Forthwith, the other children are urged by the unwise parent to observe the great deed(s) of their sibling. They are also then most likely to be advised to emulate the one that ‘knows how to make a parent happy’.

And it in the context of these thoughts that the conversation settled on the rather unsettling fact of successive Nigerian governments sometimes end up rewarding things which, though good in themselves, can never lead to lasting development should they become the major preoccupation of everyone. Overplaying certain things, to the detriment of other things that truly matter in the long run, is not the way to go. The fact that a child has a way of attracting ready attention to himself and his family, say by playing football, is not the same thing as saying that all would be well if every other child behaved in the same way.

I think back to the days of the Shagari regime in the late seventies and early eighties, then Vice President Alex Ekwueme was shown on television visiting the training camp of the national football team, the Green Eagles, at the time. We saw him on the 9pm bulletin of the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) telling the players that he had come with greetings from the president. He also said that the players should expect serious largess and financial reward from the government if they came back with the trophy. They did not.

Nevertheless, each of the players received a hefty sum of money and also, reportedly, got a house (I think) in FESTAC Town in Lagos.  I also recall the comments of Segun Odegbami, one of the players, many years later on how that experience affected some of them as professional footballers. He spoke of how many of them began to ‘play safe’ and avoid undue exertion in the field, since they had already made it. It had become a matter of making more money, in order to avoid any undue risks that might jeopardize their enjoyment of life after the windfall.

The memory of this incident, along with the serial repetition of this national proclivity for treating entertainers and sports men/women as though the future of the nation depended on them, stuck with me for years. Its repeated reinforcement in various forms over the years by successive governments, stuck in my mind and partly inspired the very first article I sent to The Guardian newspaper from my office as a lecturer in the Philosophy Department of the University of Lagos more than 20 years later.

Coming to the present, but backtracking to 2024, we all saw the team of young Nigerians who took part in an international mathematical competition last year. They beat all contending nations, including the US, Russia, UK, China, Japan and others that ventured forward against them. With that trophy, they stood before the world as the type of human feedstock from which nations get their best scientists, astronauts, agents of development and great leaders and innovators, et all.

They were welcomed with great joy back home. They were our source of pride, despite the gloom everywhere. These youths who had emerged as symbols of excellence, a source of pride to the nation all ‘locally sourced’ from the most unlikely schools and locations in Nigeria. They were officially received by the government on return.

How much was given to each of these brilliant youngsters, who are actually outstanding markers of Nigeria’s presence and relevance in the emerging 21st century world (of questionable humanity I dare say)?

Then come 2025, and another set of young Nigerians went out to do battle in the name of their fatherland. This time it was in the game of football. They played well and out-dribbled all comers. They stopped the most daring scoring attempts and corner kicks. Then they came home with the trophy.

It is to the credit of these young players that they came out for their fatherland. They fought with their blood to stand tall before the world. By this fact alone, they also made Nigeria to stand tall, and much taller, in the world of sports. Even as questions are still being raised regarding whether women should be playing football or not, their victory was generally acknowledged as a moment of glory for the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Now the buts!

Unlike our locally-sourced children who brought home the trophy for excellence in learning, some of our football trophy winners were partly ‘Tokunbo’ or imported Nigerians who became outstanding after leaving our shores. But let us leave these matters for another day.

The questions for us now are: Why would a nation give over a hundred million naira to footballers and less than 1% of that amount to purveyors of developmental possibilities and those who would end up as valuable professionals in various fields of learning. A man who struggles through decades of learning and diligent research to make an outstanding discovery gets a national handshake, a paltry sum of money and then returns to the oblivion from whence they came. That is our tradition today, in Nigeria.

But, just think back to the Athenian young man who was named Arsitocles by his parents, but who is known to the world as today as Plato. He was of aristocratic descent. His father was king, and he was in line to be king of Athens. He was one of the greatest Olympic athletes that ever lived. Unlike our Olympic games of today, wherein most athletes are restricted to just one sporting event, you could take part in multiple events; from field to track and swimming back then.

And this young athlete was said to be built like a special gift of ebullient manhood from the gods. He was barrel chested; a barrel chest like no other in the Greek Peloponnese. With Olympic competitions involving competitors from the then 150 City States of ancient Greece, everyone who did not know the name of a certain great athlete simply referred to him as ‘Platon’ (meaning: ‘The Broad One’). His performance was exceptional in most events, as he was always beating others to emerge victorious.

He later abandoned both sports and the possibilities of political leadership, to follow Socrates the wise. He studied philosophy under the later. But the name he got because of his physical from during his days in the Olympic games had taken over his real name, so he was generally known, and is still generally known to us today as Plato the Greek philosopher. He was the teacher of Aristotle, another great Greek philosopher.

Plato is remembered today for his contributions to knowledge. Pele of Brazil rose to the rank of Sports Minister in his country because of his education and knowledge of other things, beyond the skill of kicking a round inflated objects in a marked pitch. Our own Segun Odegbami could become one of our best sports commentators, running his own weekly television show, because he educated himself all the way to the tertiary level.

While athletes offer entertainment and could temporarily wipe away our worries, men of knowledge, innovators and all others who make a human society possible are actually the bedrock on which a society must be built, before you can talk of entertainment. That is why a system that over-rewards peripheral things only sows the seeds of value decay and eternal sociopolitical damnation. The breakthroughs of the world came from minds, not just hands and legs at play.

Let us not get so distracted, or so self-deluded, that we continue mouthing the illusion that the way to save Nigeria is for everyone to maintain the ‘patriotism’ that pervades everywhere during football competitions. The world we live in today did not get to where it is because people were having fun. It took science, the humanities and people possessing knowledge of various things, for footballs itself to even be produced. There have to be doctors to be treat players when they are sick or injured.

Sports equipment are produced by people whose sphere of knowledge has nothing to do with the skill of playing football as such. Just for the record.

In sum, a father who rewards those of his children who deliver ephemeral things has no idea how much effort he is putting into holding himself and his family down.