Rebirth (3)

Olatunji Ololade

THE moral nihilism espoused by the Nigerian elite would terrify shayateen. Treasury looters orchestrate violence, feign a sickness, a handicap, or faint outright, in frantic bid to escape public inquiry and answer for their misdeeds.

Such comical jaunts have attained a pedestrian taste of the splattering caper. It’s gross buffoonery yet a pagan rite of worship in Nigeria’s sorely spiritualized and prejudiced political space – some rogue pastor or alfa, religious and ethnic group eventually issues subtle or fiery threats to perceived “detractors” of their corrupt but favoured son or daughter.

Thus any blockhead or egghead may attain public office, loot the coffers and collapse during public inquiry, guaranteed prejudiced support. It never gets old. Its a purely radical evil that eroticizes the horror banished by law and the moral parliament.

But how has a nation of 200 million people or thereabouts sustained her subservience to a predatory political class? By sheer ignorance and Stockholm’s syndrome.

Acquiescence to the tyranny of corrupt leadership is a betrayal of humanity and national ethics yet several Nigerians choose emasculation in quest of national spoils. Some embrace their oppressors for a sentimental token hence the preponderance of voters who squander mandate on a crafty bum simply because they are of the same tribe, religion, or political turf.

Morality gets smothered in their marriage to chthonian nature. But in such bestial union, who is the giver of pain, and who receives it? Who becomes the teat by which the other suckles nourishment? The citizenry, of course, always suffer the rusted end of the verminous spigot.

Wordsworth assailed the delusions and folly of men, who thrust themselves upon the passive world as dictators or tyrant democrats – for every system of government, democracy inclusive, is a tyranny, I would say.

Mankind thrives by repression and social hierarchies, and tyrannies nourish by feminizing victimhood and rationalizing oppression. Thus Hitler said, the masses are feminine, and like Wordsworth’s thrusting, tyrant rulers, the Nigerian leadership rapes the populace, impaling their passive void with sadistic totems. Like enfant terrible rapists, the political class reduces its victims to tools and possessions, passive objects that must be plowed and plundered in fulfillment of savage lusts.

Corrupt leadership breeds bad government and bad government ruins nations. A manipulable citizenry, however, repulses nature. In Wordsworth’s play, The Borderers, “the tyranny of the world’s masters” lives only “in the torpid acquiescence of emasculated souls.” Dominance requires submission. And if political power ultimately asserts its fangs with pain, like sadomasochistic sex, as Paglia would say, then Nigeria must wean her heart from emasculating food. If she fails to do that, she would remain on her knees, eternally, pleasuring a bestial ruling class, and sucking from the wrong spigot.

Gelded passivity manifests negatively when a nation acquiesces to the tyranny of a dominant, evil minority. Adorno understood that radical evil was possible by only the collaboration of a timid, cowed, and confused population, manipulable by a system of propaganda and mass media offering spectacle and entertainment as news, and an educational system incapable of transmitting transcendent values and nurturing individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hyper-masculinity, writes Hedges.

These are, no doubt, the afflictions of modern Nigeria. Thus to attain political and socio-economic freedom, Nigerians must seek first, mental freedom, and a new class of citizenship and political leadership must emerge to actualize this.

Revolutionary movements like the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT) have failed because its leadership spoke in a selfish, private dialect that obscured meaningful communication with the citizenry segments whose votes and support they needed to upset the status quo and gain a foothold.

Greed and covetousness stifled rationality and judgment among their elitist divide. Eventually, they failed to convince the people, let alone inspire their mandates.

To rescue Nigeria back from the vice-grip of its plunderers and oppressors, the new class of political leadership that I advocate must insert itself in the lives of the ordinary people, including street urchins, commercial transporters, the armed forces, students, shanty communities and the unemployed, whose votes and base sentimentality the ruling class consistently exploits at election time.

The ongoing pandemic provides this new breed of ‘elite’ aspirants ample opportunities to woo the people, the voter segment, in particular, but as usual, they have retreated into their fancy fortresses, deigning contemptuous glances at the boondocks.

How visionary it would be for the PACT collective, for instance, to launch a humanitarian effort to distribute justifiable palliatives directly to the citizenry segments impoverished by the pandemic, among other efforts. This, of course, could be misconstrued as a variant of the manipulative character often deployed as part of the political class’s artifice but it would be of a disarmingly milder tenor.

There is still time for the self-styled “disrupters” and “people’s liberators” to upset and re-order the political space. Most successful revolutions are fundamentally non-violent. The Russian Revolution was victorious once the Cossacks refused to fire on the protesters in Petrograd in 1917 and joined the crowds. And the clerics who overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979 won once the Shah’s military abandoned the collapsing regime.

The superior force of despotic leadership is disarmed not through violence but through conversion. The electoral ideal by which many vote for a candidate without reflecting over the import of their votes, is utterly wrong and must be repudiated. In Nigeria’s case, the revolution must be achieved via the ballot box.

There must be a renegotiation of norms and concessions around Nigeria’s nationhood. In the new deliberations, negotiating parties must come to the table as equals. Those human segments usually exploited as pawns by the incumbent political class must be wooed by offering them more dignified and pivotal positions at the table. This would excite their confidence in the hypothesized epoch where the government is humane and leaders truly serve the interests of the citizenry.

Then, there is the conundrum of Nigeria’s severely tribalized politics. The north of course, given its mythical expanse and population, may loom larger, casting a shadow over the sunny hopes of its ‘rivals’ and contenders to the spoils of the Nigerian enterprise. To this intimidating reality, the southwest, south-south, and south-east regions must unite and speak with one voice.

Come 2023, the southern regions must unite behind joint candidates, on one platform, driven by unity of purpose and enlightenment. To achieve this, however, the southerners must attain internal harmony and neuter all Judases. They must bury the hatchet, forgive old rivalries to birth a new trust, and the greening of their stakes within the Nigerian enterprise…If they could achieve this, they would earn the respect of their northern kin

Perhaps seeds of such giant elms may sprout by Nnamdi Kanu’s recent admonishment to his Igbo/IPOB brothers to stop insulting and alienating the Yoruba. Nigeria’s southern regions must thunder as one voice in the political arena.

So doing, they would earn the respect of their northern kin; the latter will grudgingly show them regard at first, then as reality dawns that their southern relatives are determined to renegotiate their stakes in the Nigerian enterprise as equals, they will learn patience and humble commitment to resolving Nigeria’s resource and nationhood rhetoric.