Mentor, don't bully your mentee

Written by Adeoye Oyewole - Nigeria

Every society has its own way of life that is peculiar and held as being precious, such that those values are transmitted from one generation to the other. These values determine the operating facility of the society that must be inculcated through the process of socialisation which continues throughout life.

The crucial challenge of transmission of values involves many aspects of our lives, such as the peer group, the school, the religious institutions, the mass media and, of course, the family, which remains the primary agent of socialization.

Eloquent research findings show the link between the level of educational and later, occupational, attainment of the child and the quality of socialisation emanating from the family as a strong predictor. In the same vein, women that develop mental illness following childbirth require urgent attention so that the attachment and bonding processes are not disrupted, since children in such circumstances develop profound cognitive and psychosocial deficits later in life. Parents are concerned about the socialisation processes in the school their children attend but do not bother about other agents or agency of socialisation that could impact their children negatively, possibly because they are apparently subtle, often culturally sanctioned and not immediately visible like the school but equally potent in their impact.

Socialisation is life-long and the potential for mismanagement is high, with profound mental health consequences. Mentorship is a personal developmental relationship in which the more experienced person helps to guide a less knowledgeable person. True mentoring is an ongoing relationship of learning, dialogue, and challenge. This practice has existed since ancient Greek and was the basis of American management innovation, which was very popular in the 1970s. The focus of any mentoring relationship is to develop the whole person through 'accompanying process' where the mentor takes an active part in the learning process side by side with the learner. The sowing process, which prepares the learner before he or she is ready to assimilate the lessons; the catalysing process when the mentor chooses to plunge the learner into change, provoking a different way of thinking or reordering of values; and the showing process where the mentor demonstrates what is being inculcated by his own behaviour; while harvesting, as the last process, involves creating awareness of what was learnt by experience.

The quality of mental capital that a society enjoys is determined by the calibre of the mentoring facilities that are available from the cradle to the grave. Nigeria is faced with some peculiar challenges since we are in a cultural transition and our mentoring programmes are chaotic as we dismantle the traditional institutions of our cultural values but without enduring substitutes.

Our values cannot be meaningfully modified without a robust and pragmatic intellectual challenge of the existing ones, but Nigerians are intellectually indolent to do this, hence we settle for a confused pattern of ineffective replacement.

In our culture, mentors are unquestionable and dictatorial, while the mentee obeys unconditionally without any form of intellectual intercourse since the mentor assumes the status of a deity or a supernatural force. This practice derives from our pre-colonial style where the counsels of the mentor must be obeyed with repercussions of non-compliance spelt out in taboos, superstition and myths.

There is no provision of spontaneous facilities of feedbacks and engagement which is actually responsible for our mediocre materialistic preoccupations. A recurring character of our mentoring programmes is a setting where our rationality is either hijacked or hypnotized. Even in places where they adopt egalitarian corporate cultures, there is predominant psychological bullying going on.

I have often predicted that some strange patterns of sub-clinical mental distress will emerge as a consequence of these faulty mentoring programmes. Our popular religious systems adopt this strategy as they nurture delusion rather than faith, since the rational, psychological facilities of assimilation are usually suspended as the mentors are unquestionable, even when they flout the lessons they teach.

The older generations flow with this, but the younger generations will challenge this and I am afraid that our modern parents are ill-prepared for this. As our leaders flounder in search of an effective model, they resort to psychological bullying at home, school, and workplace; even in our places of worship and as a society in relationship with our government.

Several minds are hijacked and remotely programmed by the mentors in a way that there is no rational and intellectual engagement of the process. This psychological bullying quite obscures, because our culture provides an accommodation for it. Psychological bullying involves the use of force, threat or coercion to abuse, intimidate or aggressively impose domination over others.

The behaviour usually occurs in the context of an imbalance of social or physical power. Let us stop the psychological bullying as we nurture robust mental capital for the good of our society.