The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • The glitter and the rubble

    The glitter and the rubble

    In Voltaire’s Bastards, J.R. Saul analyses how a mortal hankering to stifle divinity and demote the Creator inspired an earthly race for dubious renown via image commodification.

    The enthrallment with celebrity has led us to a whole new state of mindlessness as seen in Lisha Dachor’s bid to set a Guinness World Record (GWR) for the longest period an individual has painted artificial nails. Thus she embarked on a three-day nail painting marathon in Jos, Plateau State.

    Such a frantic quest for renown, sometimes, assumes a perilous turn as seen in the case of Tembu Ebere aka Town Cryer. Last year, the comedian became ‘partially blind’ for 45 minutes, after he experienced a lingering headache, puffy eyes, and a swollen face, during his attempt to cry for 100 hours and set a Guinness World Record (GWR) for the longest crying marathon (cry-a-thon) by an individual.

    The Lagos-based Cameroonian skit maker announced his quest in the wake of Hilda Bassey’s successful outing as the cooking marathon champion, after dethroning Indian chef, Tata Landon. Bassey later lost the title to Irish chef, Alan Fisher, who clocked in a time of 119 hours 57 minutes, at his restaurant in Japan thus beating Bassey’s previous record by 24 hours.

    Ebere is simply one of the curious characters that crawled through the womb-wall of Nigeria’s vanity complex, in the wake of Bassey’s renown. A curious thing happened before the GWR vetted Bassey’s record; Damilola Adeparusi aka Chef Dammy entered the kitchen in Oye-Ekiti, Ekiti State to best Bassey’s record by cooking for 120 hours. Dammy did 120 hours but the GWR invalidated her record because she failed to apply first.

    In Ekiti, another curious character, called Sugartee, proposed a 72-hour kissing marathon which he called “kiss-a-thon.” He looked good to go until the state government banned the event dismissing it as “unhealthy, absurd and an attempt to denigrate the image of Ekiti State.”

    Joyce Ijeoma fainted around 1 am and had to be resuscitated while trying to set a 125-hour record for body massaging. And in neighbouring Cameroon, Danny Zara, apparently infected by Nigeria’s GWR bug invited “strong men” for a 200-hour free sex marathon (sex-a-thon).

    Nigeria has since experienced an astronomical rise in attempts to set frivolous world records, from the longest kissing hours (kiss-a-thon) and massage sessions to the longest crying marathon (cry-a-thon) among others.

    Amid the hustle, the nagging question persists: “To what end?” Yet more youths commit their imagination and passion to extreme and featherbrained quests.

    Everybody is a sucker for celebrity; everybody wants to be “high society.” The youthful enchantment with instant fame has assumed a worrisome dimension as too much passion is squandered in pursuit of too little substance.

    The hankering for renown spirals across social platforms and pervades the public arena, insignificant as the spores of the toadstool yet impinging on the surface of the Nigerian mind, trashing it.

    Superfluity meets superfluity; when our lives cease to be inward and contemplative, dreams manifest as perversions, interaction degenerates to mere tittle-tattle and society relapses to the filthiest of averages.

    It’s about time we enlightened our youths that stardom and the obsessions it ignites are merely fleeting distractions from our social and individual afflictions.

    The youths should rather prioritise honest labour, education, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking above fleeting fame and fortune.

    We must return to grassroots empowerment and mobilisation around constructive industry as an antidote to societal decay. This requires fostering a culture of accountability, decency and social responsibility.

    For the youths, this also includes resisting the commodification of their identities by social media platforms and rejecting the false promises of instant celebrity and influencer capitalism, more youths can pave the way for a brighter future.

    The interaction between the public arena and the celebrity hopeful channels primal fantasy even as it skirts the borders of a business transaction. The result ultimately manifests in transient celebrity or the flipside of renown.

    Nonetheless, the proverbial 15 minutes of fame thrive by the same artifice, the same choreographed ruse, the endless exploitation of lust by fame junkies that never seem to peter out.

    Everyone is part of the con as celebrity hustlers and their audience jointly perpetuate a public pantomime of ambition, and a fervent yearning to get one up the system perceived to have denied them so much.

    Any story of an individual breakthrough is welcome as a hard-earned retaliation against the system. The jazzy, sensational backstory of each emergent celebrity is what drives the mob to a frenzy amid the dreary narrative of bankruptcy and impoverishment of a desperate, abused working class by a heartless business and political class.

    Through the burning banality of it all, many immerse in the illusions of the arena, embracing whatever delusions make it easier to endure reality or pervert it to their whims.

    The endgame is Nirvana. Living in a world of words and images, Nigerians have evolved from people who used words and painted images to depict reality to folk who deploy images to deny and escape reality.

    Even our children interact in varnished dialects; amid the racket of voiced imaging and painted words, a pagan illusion triumphs over our moral eye and mind. Thus heathen idolatry subsists in the absence of national heroes and heroines.

    In Nigeria, our gods are celebrities thus religious belief and practice, business, economy, advocacy and politics, are modelled around the idolisation of personages.

    Read Also: ‘Your days of worrying are over’

    In contrast, China prospers by native intelligence despite her love of celebrities. Likewise, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and Korea. These countries’ socioeconomic and technological progress were built on a sturdy foundation of autochthonous intelligence and wisdom.

    And even our so-called superstars have learnt to profit albeit fraudulently from society’s perverse curiosities about their affairs. From Chaucer’s early poem, “The House of Fame,” whose hero-poet wrestles with the fame bestowed on him by society to Martin Scorcese’s film, King of Comedy, in which an amateur comedian jokes to a national television audience that it is “better to be king for a night, than schmuck for a lifetime!” celebrity worship continues to fester.

    Even amid skyrocketing inflation, financial ruin, and insecurity, the obsession with celebrity thrives by the junkie’s smirking depravity and the sudden melting of inhibitions of the Nigerian public. It’s like the holocaust and the apocalypse.

    Society stands at ground zero, incinerated by external and internal invaders. The press, on its part, plays a pimping pawn; by constantly lending its platforms as channels to solicit secondary pawns comprising celebrity hopefuls cum fortune hunters, eager to do anything to achieve renown.

    Such characters simply cheat themselves of a learning experience; they circumvent a slow, steady, educative path to acclaim, to self-intoxicate in accidental celebrity. Unknown to them, the instant fame and opportunities in which they luxuriate are merely flash currents in the electric moment before lightning strikes, and they are reduced to rubble: celebs, glitter and all.

    A glance behind the glitter usually reveals something more than a colourful paradise. It invalidates the deceptions of fame and instant wealth. It is akin to what Saul Bellow likened to picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk or rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation, in his novel, Humboldt’s Gift.

    Many who grasped these super-charged wires and serpents have been found to incandescence in acclaim for a little while, and then they wink out, which leads to a more profound suspicion of celebrity.

  • Your child incarnal theatre

    Your child incarnal theatre

    There is a trending video of a scantily clad girl. The latter, while being interviewed, cheekily discloses that she had sex with her father’s younger brother and proceeded to have sex with her father’s older brother the next day.

    “Aiye n se iru e (It’s no big deal),” she said, stressing that she got paid for her services.

    Afterwards, her excited male interviewer coaxed her to twerk for the camera and she did with gusto.

    In yet another trending video, a girl in a mask revealed during a podcast session, how a male client paid to have anal sex with her. Despite the excruciating pain she experienced during the intercourse, the most painful aspect of her ordeal was discovering that her “client” sent her a fake alert.

    All through the two girls’ narratives, their interviewers egged them on with patronising smirks and gestures thus validating each girl’s escapade as some form of rare and appreciable feat.

    There is no gainsaying the lust for applause and cheap renown is the common grave of internet natives. This minute, it finds fertile tracts in the psyche of the Nigerian wilding on TikTok, Facebook, X, and Instagram.

    Sex and nudity are profitable in cyberspace. Thus you would understand why a struggling actress would sleep with a man and pay him to leak the sex tape subsequently. She took her cue from a music diva who did the same.

    It becomes worrisome when such creepy creatures emerge as popular role models for the young. Inspired by their theatrics, the Nigerian child resurfaces in the public arena in garish cruciforms: the girl child is no longer meek and innocent. She has grown from the temperate virgin without tarnish into the intemperate vixen with animal taint.

    The boychild needs saving but he is repeatedly ignored. Growing up is never easy on both. Puberty is their savage space. They get destroyed in real time by the jarring depravity of popular culture.

    Neither religion nor moral strictures could disrupt their induction into carnal space; the ritual riddance of their innocence takes place as you read. It is active and latent in our language, music, imagery and thought.

    Like the proverbial moral castrates, we have turned ritual orgy into a street carnival, feting the degenerate and debauched, while we consign the virtuous and pure to permanent ill repute.

    Little wonder many approach life as a pagan theatre. To survive, they embrace the brazen pomp of bestial personae. This perhaps explains why a teenage girl would rant and rave, accusing a popular TikToker of plagiarism, or rather, performance theft of her sex video.

    You just might understand too, why frantic TikToker, Veegoddess’ resorted to bestial hustle. If you ask her, she would tell you her grin is “expensive.” For the right price, it will slink into a sneer, while she receives pounding from a dog. The youngster went viral after claiming she slept with a dog for N1.7million. Scared by the backlash, she recanted, claiming she was simply “cruising” (fooling around).

    Through Erica and Veegoddess’ cocksure demeanour, their silent shrieks crash through the social space, like a broken scream, rattling the social space.

    The impact is chilling. It resonates in Lagos sex vixen, Angela Jika’s carnal roar. “I can act anything,” she told me, stressing that she would submit to restraints and take a beating from a dominant male or dominatrix. For N50,000, she would spread out and make a flora bed for the studio.

    Money teases off her inhibitions. Hard drugs too. Angela’s role models in the porn industry are Ajibola Elizabeth aka Maami Igbagbo and Tobiloba Jolaoso, popularly known as Kingtblakhoc. It would be recalled that Jolaoso was arrested for allegedly recording a pornographic movie at the Osun Osogbo sacred grove on the outskirts of Osogbo, the Osun state capital, and a UN-designated World Heritage Site.

    From Jolaoso’s desecration of the sacred grove to his teeming fans’ celebration of his “feat,” a generational conflict resounds with an instructive peal. It highlights the widening cultural chasms between the older generation and the young channeling degenerate impulses in defiance of Puritan values.

    As pop culture elevates morbid idolatry as fascism of the Nigerian psyche, every ravenous, roving eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience.

    Popular culture is the new Babylon, where defiant art and intellect thrive. Think of it as our imperial sex theatre, the supreme temple of the Western eye elevated as the Nigerian psyche. We live in the age of idols. Every child wants to be a star. And there is a downside to the scourge.

    If Veegoddess and the infamous Lekki girls’ alleged commercial sex with dogs, constituted our reality check, the Chrisland School underage sex scandal offers more frightful glimpses into our infernal core.

    Greater tragedy subsists in the adult public’s morbid fascination with the underage students’ sex video. On the pretext of condemning their sexual misadventure, several adults enthusiastically shared the video, drooling over the sordid imagery of a 10-year-old girl reportedly performing a sex act on her 13-year-old mate.

    Sadism manifests in the wanton sexualisation of Nigerian society. The sadistic voyeurism triggered by the Chrisland school scandal is a consequence of society’s broken moral compass and a manifest descent of amusement fare.

    Read Also: I’ll have 11 children until my late son, Kambili returns – Yul Edochie

    The kids are casualties of the corruption of societal values fostered by the mainstream media, unregulated cyberspace, and institutionalisation of perverse entertainment like the Big Brother Naija (BBN) reality show, among others. Disguised as modern entertainment, the show subsists as a rebuke to moral nature, an escape from the province of responsibility with its restraining womb walls and bowels.

    The show’s broadcaster via the digital satellite television feeds an amoral miasma, creating a world of fluid caprices, amid its carnage of incarnations.

    But while it’s starkly convenient to arbitrarily blame the BBN producers for normalising filth as media fare, it must be acknowledged that greater fault lies with Nigerian parents who manifestly fail their wards through poor parenting.

    Aside from the BBN filth, social media is rife with pornography; time and over again, teenagers and minors are persistently exposed to scandalous videos of revenge porn.

    There is no one to protect such minors from the aggressive cues and wild decadence insinuated into their psyches by the highly sexualised content to which they are exposed.

    Entertainers use porn to groom society, and youngsters, in particular, are dealt a gruesome form of psychological conditioning that leaves too many among them stirred, shaken, and receptive to dross.

    Porn has become pop culture, cutting through swathes of conservative norms and social correctness. As it knifes through the country, cyberspace becomes a garish, raunchy boulevard; a theatre of libertine delight, fetishes, and rendezvous for voyeurs and porn stars.

    It also offers a negotiation point for the addicted desiring real physical action. The social space thus unfurls as an esplanade of taboos and fetishes that expand and contract to temptation and patronage.

    In Nigeria, porn has won the culture war by fusing with the commercial mainstream. Modern fashion takes its cues from porn. Music videos and comedy skits mime porn scenes, presenting females as porn rats and video vixens. Everybody exploits porn for shock and commercial value.

    All these sever the exposed minors’ mental connection with moral roots. The leaders of tomorrow are thus lured backwards, away from menarche into the womb of regression.

    The solution, sadly, lies in proper parenting. But have we proper parents?

  • To nurse minds, not social cannibals

    To nurse minds, not social cannibals

    Nigerians are a curious breed. Think of us as the proverbial coastal dwellers dying of thirst. We complain of parched tongues, but every day, we defecate in our fresh springs and struggle to slake our thirst with poisonous waters from abroad.

    Beyond metaphor, Nigeria must be rescued from cognitive dissonance; the mental racket that triggers the Nigerian lust to relocate abroad and sustains it.

    Ultimately, it poisons our wellsprings of civilisation and knowledge: culture, family and academia. This corruptive mentality pervades the country’s educational and cultural institutions, aggravating the brain drain that robs Nigeria of the allegiance and contributions of promising citizenry.

    The multiple failures that beset the country, from the bungled economy to our subversive partisanship, to our lack of universal health care, to protracted terrorism, and the neocolonialist afflictions of our politics and media, can be adduced to the institutions that produce and sustain our political elite.

    Our local schools and even the elite schools most Nigerians throng abroad, hardly teach students to question and think. They focus instead on creating legions of effective systems managers via standardised tests and passive submission to authority.

    Eventually, when the systems fail the managers, they scurry out of the country in search of greener pastures abroad. When the going gets tough, they simply pack up and leave.

    The responsibility for the collapse of the Nigerian economy runs from the corridors of power, through the media soapbox to the lecture theatres of the academia; it pervades our banking halls, the comatose industry and the random trade zones of municipal sidewalks.

    Scholarship is crucial to the rejuvenation of our comatose state thus Nigeria must furnish an educational system that facilitates fearless intellectual inquiry; one that is constructively critical of authority, fiercely independent, and selfless.

    We must quit organising learning around minutely specialised disciplines, tapered solutions, and rigid structures designed to produce predetermined answers. As the government fixates on science education, it must equally furnish our arts and humanities.

    Nigeria must rejig her cultural foundations and ethical complex – and this is achievable through a partnership between the government and the arts & humanities. The result of such an endeavour would excite a social re-engineering built on character mending and economic restoration in consonance with our peculiar strengths and weaknesses.

    Restoring our cultural dominance would facilitate easier salvage of our society, particularly the engine wheels of our industrial complex. China, Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Sweden, among others, attained progress by founding their governance on a cultural experience indigenous to them.

    The wild pursuit of materialism renders large segments of our business and political elite addicted to mindless acquisition of ill-gotten wealth. Thus the ceaseless cases of corruption in public office. The lives of several culprits are funded by stolen money and beastly monopolies facilitated by heinous social and political contracts.

    On the flip side of the equation, the working class diminishes and struggles to maintain membership in the informal social caste imposed upon it by a raptorial ruling class.

    The general run of the masses supposedly dissents but many do so without any real awareness of the actuality of forms that define their existence. Plato’s allegory of the cave was meant to explain this. In the allegory, he likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. Plato’s allegory speaks to our individual and collective fate as a nation.

    For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge thus to train someone to manage a business account for Price Water Cooper, for instance, is to educate him or her in skill. To train them to debate the ethics of a business venture is to educate them on values and morals. A culture that disregards the vital interplay between morality and power, writes Hedges, condemns itself to death.

    Such existential truths are scorned by the modern fortune hunter. And the disconnect subsists across professions, government, and academia. Nigerian economists, for instance, chant elaborate theoretical models yet know little of how their fancy, soulless economics impact rural poetry and suburban lives.

    Our educational and social systems must quit churning out such products of a cultural void, casualties of a system that produces graduates who have been taught to cheat the system and applaud theft as a shrewd corporate strategy.

    Read Also:Senator Adeola organises ICT training for journalists, doctors, nurses, others

    The true purpose of education must be to make minds, not social cannibals. Education must furnish us with patriots capable of leading Nigeria’s charge back to rebirth.

    A recourse to educational foundations, in the light of Arnold’s 1869 treatise, could be in Nigeria’s best interest. This is attainable by conscious endeavour. President Bola Tinubu could lay the foundation for such a monument by increasing Nigeria’s education budget to 18 per cent or thereabouts, from the disgraceful fraction – usually less than seven per cent – budgeted over the years.

    The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advancement: problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life.

    Our quest for effective public governance can only be realised through the guidance of skilled thinkers, and a synergy between a public service that works and a humane corporate business sector.

    Nigeria could take a cue from Finland’s educational system. The transformation of the Finnish education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardised test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world.

    Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide.

    There are no mandated standardised tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. School managers at all levels are educators, not businessmen or politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators.

    The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education irrespective of his or her descent. The differences between the weakest and strongest students in Finland are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

    True knowledge essentially translates to being an emissary of truth, hope, superior culture and progress. It is never simply to teach bread-winning, furnish teachers for the public schools or vocation for the unemployed. It should above all, be an appendage of that fine adjustment between what Du Bois calls reality and the flourishing knowledge of life. An improvement of civilisation and solution to its seemingly intractable problems.

    The end product of such an educational process would be less likely to abscond in the face of odds because he or she must have learnt to courageously vie for truth and progress, not for vulgar repute or profit.

  • That boorish truth by Adelabu (1)

    That boorish truth by Adelabu (1)

    Insolence flaunts gruesome majesty, like the forepart of the Agbanrere. Even its hindquarters is painful to glimpse – horrid and menacing in its burly immensity.

    But while insolence may be forgivable in the rage of an underserved citizenry, it rarely suits the demeanour of a public servant. It becomes a misdemeanour, for instance, when a Minister of Power accuses Nigerians of being wasteful at power consumption, in his frantic bid to justify an outrageous hike in electricity tariff amid epileptic power supply.

    To make up for his inability to articulate intelligently, the reasons for the punishing increment, the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, resorted to gutter tactics, lambasting the citizenry for indiscriminately leaving their refrigerators and air conditioners on while going out.

    Although he could have adopted a less disdainful approach in communicating his views, Adelabu chastised the longsuffering and underserved electricity consumers, whose livelihoods are threatened and their lives destroyed by persistent power outages. No thanks to the managerial ineptitude of successive Ministers of Power.

    We relive Adelabu’s rant with a stunned combination of amazement and disgust. Call it his daemonic aria, a flight of feral imagination. If public governance thrives like musical theatre, Adelabu’s recent falsetto could be his cipher, the fault in his organ valve rendering his crafty melody a frantic fustian dross.

    It was painful to watch the portly minister blame Nigeria’s electricity problems, in part, on what he described as Nigerians’ wasteful consumption habits.

    The minister said this in Abuja, last Friday, while briefing journalists about the recent increase in electricity tariff by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC).

    Adelabu brazenly accused Nigerians of being wasteful at power consumption, blaming this on the country’s electricity affordability.

    Read Also; Lagos to London: Foreign airlines slash prices to compete with Air Peace

    He said, “A lot of people will come back from work, they want to have dinner, or they want to see their colleagues down the road, they switch on the AC for the room to be cooling before they come back.

    “Some people will be going to work in the morning, a freezer that you left on for days, they will still leave it on when all the items in the freezer are frozen and 5, 6, 8 hours of their absence will not make it to defreeze (sic), they will still leave it to be consuming power just because we are not paying enough.

    “We have all been overseas before; we know how conscious the power consumers are about electricity consumption.”

    If diplomacy is truly the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power, Adelabu undoubtedly needs a trunk full of gloves.

    His recent statement is unforgivably gauche and insensitive. His resort to sophistry to justify the extreme increment in the cost of electricity tariff, from the previous rate of N66 per kilowatt (kW) to N225 per kilowatt (kW), is abominable.

    Last Wednesday, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) approved an increase in electricity tariff for customers under the Band A classifications.

    The regulator said customers who receive 20 hours of electricity supply daily will pay N225 per kilowatt (kW) from April 3. The new rate is about triple the previous rate of N66 per kilowatt (kW).

    If there is a less insouciant means of communicating the increment and the wisdom behind it to electricity consumers, Adelabu would be oblivious to it.

    Thus he resorted to inflammatory speech. Should Adelabu convert public office to a conveyance of disdain towards the masses? Watching him berate electricity consumers is akin to seeing Olohun Iyo disappear to the lure of the proverbial fatal chorus.

    The tragedy of his outburst subsists in its brutal contrast between his smirking vanity and the sudden melting of his features beyond recognition. Call it his holocaust and apocalypse.

    Prowling at ground zero, Adelabu incinerates on the altar of insensitivity, self-intoxicated in the electric moment before lightning strikes and his mystique reduces to rubble.

    Adelabu knows that the outrageous increment of N66 per kilowatt (kW) to N225 per kilowatt (kW) barely addresses the many afflictions of the power sector. Even at that, power stays erratic for consumers categorised on the so-called Band-A divide.

    Just recently, the national electricity grid collapsed for the first time in 2024, on Adelabu’s watch, thus hurling Nigeria into complete darkness.

    The power generated on the grid slumped, on a Sunday, at about 11:51 am, falling from about 3,852mw at 6 am to as low as 59mw at noon.

    The grid managed by the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) had 20 power plants completely down, with just Ibom Power online.

    That 200 million Nigerians still depend on less than 5,000mw to power their homes and businesses, while the country loses about $29 billion annually (IMF estimates) to power outages should worry Adelabu.

    Yet he insists that he speaks the bitter truth, lambasting Nigerians tongue-in-cheek, to excuse his managerial inadequacy.

    In reaction to his disdainful remark, not a few Nigerians have taken him to the cleaners, berating him for his insensitivity.

    Nonetheless, the grandson of prominent First Republic politician, Adegoke Adelabu, insists he speaks the truth.

    He said, “The bitter truth we all need to tell ourselves as Nigerians. A few people are just privileged to sit on the high table. We’re on the same level, we must be able to tell the truth to ourselves.”

    In the spirit of truth-telling, Nigerians may also tell Adelabu that he is yet to assert the brilliance and ingenuity anticipated from a Nigerian Minister of Power.

    His ‘bitter truth’ fails the test of integrity and empathetic statesmanship. His conduct was a great disservice to the efforts of President Bola Tinubu to present governance with a human face.

    If there was any wisdom in Adelabu’s rant, it probably got buried in his snarl of spittle and disregard for the citizenry and electricity consumers whose interests he was appointed to protect and serve, among other responsibilities.

    Adelabu, a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in charge of operations, resigned from the CBN to contest unsuccessfully the 2019 governorship election in Oyo State.

    He reportedly led the finance team on the CBN re-engineering and corporate renewal project and later left the firm in 2000 as an Audit Manager and Senior Consultant to join First Atlantic Bank as the Financial Controller and Group Head of Risk Management and Controls.

    Adelabu has also held various other positions while in First Atlantic Bank, including the Chief Inspector of the Bank (2002) and Group Head of National Public Sector Business (2003).

    Upon assuming his new office, he assured that the federal government would empower Nigerians through stable and accessible electricity. To achieve the feat, he said the ministry would leverage the Nigerian Electricity Act 2023 to boost power supply in the country.

    For a man who flaunts such an impressive trajectory, his recent tirade against electricity consumers leaves too much to be desired.

    His acerbic chant seeks to divert attention from the policy lapses, institutional corruption, technical limitations, regulatory failure, and his administrative ineptitude at according those issues the relentless exercise of the mind and will required to resolve them.

    Adelabu should attempt humility for a change. He could start by picturing himself as an iced fish seller, a tailor or a steel fabricator whose livelihood is dependent on a stable power supply; would he still affect the venom he displays to rationalise the unjustifiable billing, on his watch, amid epileptic power supply?

    Would he still submit to power and its infernal seductions?

  • Against fair weather patriots

    Against fair weather patriots

    There is no wisdom in appointing Nigerians who have ‘Japa’ to man sensitive public offices in Nigeria. This is akin to luring the proverbial skunk from its forest grove into our royal bed chamber, if it doesn’t sully the quilted sheet with its faeces, it will ruin the palace with its stench.

     Those who would ‘Japa’ to escape the ‘hell’ Nigeria has become should never be allowed to superintend our healing, ultimately because they lack the character and competence, native intelligence and maturity, selflessness and integrity, patience and sense of responsibility required to manage our healing process.

    It was disheartening to see a Governor’s recent appointee scoff at his fortune, stressing that he never needed the appointment – even though he barely survived as a canned fruit hawker and cab driver who squatted with friends in the United Kingdom.

    If we must invite a Nigerian from the Diaspora to serve as the country’s Petroleum Minister, one primary requirement should be his previous employment in a similar capacity. The same logic requires that only a seasoned General can become Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS).

    That said, it is often ill-advised to appoint an overseas cab driver, who is contemptuous of Nigeria, as a federal minister or director of a public agency. When Nigeria needs cab drivers with international experience, we may recruit such individuals. Our public offices are best reserved for patriots who keep faith in the Nigerian enterprise. It’s about time we stopped appointing leeches into public office. When the going gets tough, they simply pack up and leave. Nigeria’s public office is not a rehabilitation camp for fair-weather patriots.

    This is not to forestall, however, the likely benefits of appointing Nigerian expatriates, who have a lot to contribute to the rejuvenation of public governance and accountability. But where do we draw the line?

    We have seen governors appoint internet fraudsters and human traffickers as cabinet commissioners. We have also seen supposedly first-rate technocrats flaunting Ivy-League certificates earned abroad, sully our public offices. So, it’s not by the class of degree or the school that produced them, an individual’s academic or professional honours hardly translate to excellence in public governance if he is corrupted by arrogance and greed.

    Yet we have Nigerians doing well back home, despite the odds. They are the type that stay the course when the going gets tough. They do not bend and sway to every favourable draft nor pack up and leave at the onset of a storm. They stay back and withstand its flurry, surviving with tact, perseverance, faith, goodwill and native intelligence. They understand that only by salvaging what we have and who we are can we achieve our Nigerian dream. These are the ones deserving of public office.

    Still, it’s everyone’s prerogative to either stay or flee from perceived hostility in our homeland. But hostile politics and economies aren’t caused by phantoms or poltergeists. They are the result of our lack of humaneness and frantic avarice.

    The looters prowling our streets and corridors of power did not fall from outer space. They are the fruits of our mother’s wombs, sired with seeds from our fathers’ loins. They are the monsters we raised in our families.

    Modern Nigeria is a product of the joint efforts and inactions of our families, schools, worship houses, the streets and the media.

    Japa nomads taking the education or scholarship route, eventually find that their admission into elite schools overseas was purely a business decision by the schools and their host countries. The benefits are ploughed back into their host society.

    By the time they graduate, they are superbly conditioned for the drudgery of second or third-rate employment overseas. Some occasionally secure first-rate employment. But the very smart ones among them relocate back home to seek employment with Nigerian or multinational firms who prefer their foreign certificates.

    Many return to Nigeria as agents of metacolonialism. Hence the preponderance of journalists, writers, teachers, economists, social workers, engineers, and health workers, to mention a few, who function as glorified stooges of the so-called developed nations of the world.

    The faithlessness and moral corruption that makes Japa possible is similar to the one that drove African enablers of the transatlantic slave trade. This degeneracy remains largely unchallenged.

    To prevent its recurrence, we must hinder the social mechanisms that render people capable of such. And this can only be achieved through education. The Nigerian school must begin to impart more than money-making soundbites and status-conferring skills.

    Our schools must begin to teach values and history with a didactic bent. If they do not, another transatlantic slave trade is possible; we have seen it happen in Libya, where Europe-bound Nigerian youths were bound and gagged, raped and murdered by African slave drivers cum human traffickers; it happens every day to thousands of Nigerians crossing to Europe through irregular migration routes from Agadez through Tripoli to the Mediterranean bight.

    Read Also: APC settles for direct primary to pick Ondo Gov candidate

    President Bola Tinubu must understand that it is not enough to seek foreign investment and cooperation from abroad; such initiative, while appreciable, could be doomed by a lack of quality personnel and citizenship required to nourish whatever benefits accrue from his nation-building enterprise.

    If Nigeria truly seeks sustainable socio-economic growth in the long run, we must groom generations of men and women capable of nourishing and preserving the Greater Nigeria enterprise.

    Nigeria needs patriots amply groomed to understand that the most important achievements aren’t measurable by a title or figures. The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers, and as Deresiewicz writes, only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey or have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul.

    Nigeria must furnish an educational system driven by the sweat and exploits of such pilgrim souls. The country’s education curricula must be overhauled to impart a Nigeria-centred educational experience that could resonate with the progressive social re-engineering of the country.

    It doesn’t matter what quality of degrees are acquired if the recipients are furnished to operate like mindless robots, praise junkies, fortune hunters and crowd pleasers.

    William Hazlitt noted at the beginning of the 19th century that men do not become what by nature they are meant to be, but what society makes them. European society, according to Hazlitt, violently wrenches and amputates her citizenry thus making them unfit for intercourse with the world, something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their children, to make them fit for their future pigeonhole in life.

    This imagery of beggars maiming and mutilating children is discernible in the fate of the Nigerian kids birthed abroad; some are shipped overseas as regular or illegitimate migrants purportedly to grant them access to a better life.

    The lure of Japa validates Bulhan’s theory of metacolonism. The syndrome has taken so much from us, including our loyalty, language, history, and the cultural values that bound our community together.

    All that is left is our sense of attachment and moral responsibility borne of nostalgia. Yet Japa has corrupted even that.

    These days, I look at my children and wonder how much of Nigeria and their culture they will get to keep. How much of their Nigerianness will matter in the long run?

  • The Art of Nigerianness

    The Art of Nigerianness

    It’s instructive how blushes of the real world become real only when projected on TV or a cinema screen. Fantasy validates reality. Whatever the thrust of artwork, be it a culture in decay, a nation in decline, or civilisation taking its final gasps, imagination powers life in the fictional universe.

    A dead, forgotten race may attain rebirth on the pages of literary fiction, on stage or in a film reel. The scripted cosmos has its uses after all. Real life could be scary, often ill-fated and grim. Life is certainly not a feel-good flick with a PG rating, yet movies labour to document reality in acceptable montage – memorable scenes showing us that it is always possible for anyone to endure the ghastliest circumstances and yet survive.

    Art may be deployed to resuscitate a comatose culture or highlight broad, existentialist questions – staples of a deeply grounded, socially conscious didactic process. Through art, we may also challenge the superficial and deepest assumptions of Nigeria’s beleaguered economy and political culture.

    Art may be consciously deployed to save floundering sovereignty simply by stirring positive emotionality or reawakening patriotic fervour in the citizenry.

    En route to the February polls, Nigeria flailed to impassioned hope and jarring cynicism of political actors. Politics stewed to a scalding broth as rival parties, posing as patriots, split private terraces and public courts in vulgar gladiatorship. They did it for the culture.

    Indeed, patriotism thrives on cultural standards. The politics that Nigerians espouse, the lore of nationhood, and the lyricism of partisan poetry manifest the kernel of our sovereignty.

    A similar dynamic undergirds our politico-literary traditions. Politics thrives on literary culture and vice versa. What shouldn’t we do for an evergreen story? What shouldn’t we give? Evergreen storylines make up the fabric of our collective narrative; when progressively spun, they are endlessly fascinating, yielding fresh insights through the imagination of the writer or filmmaker, who milks history and recalibrates reality to espouse a positive national lyric.

    What is the Nigerian lyric? What is our reality? In search of the proverbial elixir, we have drunk water from an unnamed stream and filled our bellies with toxins. The superiority of Western democracy is one of the supreme constructions of imperialism and the poisonous elixir of Nigeria and her neighbours on the African continent.

    Nigerians elevate it with obsessive love. It is the magic pill to the nation’s ceaseless headaches. Demagogues exploit its hackneyed tropes in a torrid caress of the vanities and base sentimentality of the gullible masses. Politicians chant its praise. Social commentators extol its virtues in their ever-resonant “In saner clime” chanted across media platforms.

    But the West must never be blamed for our collective ignorance – particularly the United States. The latter’s democratic enterprise is one of the most profitable constructions in its bid to “make America great again,” at any cost.

    It is both music and philosophy, a sensory stream of thought feeding generations of writers, political activists, filmmakers, politicians, gender rights activists, academia, and so on.

    Hollywood, democracy and foreign aid do for America, for instance, what painting and sculpture did for the Italians. They are potent tools for wooing and recolonising the world. A few good minds with an intuitive grasp of the hard-edged imperialist designs of the Western agenda are spuriously labelled as conspiracy theorists.

    Those who would die embracing colonist doctrines must understand that there is no way this could be achieved without horror, given the marked differences in culture, temperament, and histories defining different nations of the world.

    It’s about time we identified values complementary to our precepts of humane governance. We cannot dwell like the Americans or Brits in Nigeria. We can only assimilate aspects of their culture that complement ours.

    It’s scarier to note that our arts and literature have weakened in our bid to entrench American and European Renaissance in our cultural frames. More worrisome is our artists’ rabid deconstruction of Nigerianness.

    Writers and filmmakers, to date, struggle to acculturate the Nigerian landscape with defective foreign mores. Thus they corrupt their presentations and stifle the possibility of attaining homegrown, practicable solutions to oft-politicised conflict. Nonetheless, they have a dedicated industry of cheerleaders and courtiers who romanticise their follies as the valiance sorely needed to reinvigorate Nigeria’s creative sector.

    Read Also: National Assembly will partner Executive, others to stabilise economy, democracy, says Bamidele

    Themes glorifying repulsive gender wars, mindless youth rebellion, and the orchestration of social hierarchies are aggressively projected and patronised to the detriment of rational, progressive, and didactic art. This hurts us immeasurably.

    While creative industries in America, Britain, China, India, Korea, Malaysia, Russia, and France, to mention a few, commit genii and capital resources to constantly recreate and embellish their political narratives, with progressive outcomes, the Nigerian creative sector obsessively weaponises and projects vulgar themes of citizenship and romance.

    The projection of toxic consciousness has become a thing among local artists. We see it sprout across genres: drama, prose, poetry, and beyond. It seizes mainstream and indie filmmaking, corrupting Nollywood inside out, as you read.

    Otherwise brilliant and perceptive filmmakers denounce patriotism and attack Nigeria. They corrupt our artistic vocabulary, twisting it into a meditation on society’s debauched nature. Ultimately, they celebrate degeneracy via aggressive cues of prurient art, promiscuity, gendered storms, and virulent sexuality.

    While the consequences of such dross manifest in real-time, Nigeria welcomes from abroad, more insolent corruption of its media space through degenerate reality shows like the BBN without putting up a fight. The damage to the cultural psyche is incalculable.

    The United States has always appreciated the depth and promise of the arts and entertainment sector. Thus the US government and Hollywood’s symbiotic relationship. Washington DC provides intriguing plots for filmmakers and the latter reciprocates by glamourising the political class and reinventing America’s exploits on the global stage.

    Between 1911 and 2017, over 800 feature films received support from the US Government’s Department of Defence (DoD). These included blockbuster franchises such as Iron Man, Transformers, and The Terminator – mostly infantile reels.

    The entertainment partnerships and offerings are often deployed to foster a positive image for the United States on the international stage while offering its citizens ample channels to exorcise their post-9/11 demons.

    In 2022, Nigeria’s Nollywood made 1,923 movies, according to the National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB), thus making it the second most prolific movie industry after Bollywood and before Hollywood; yet Hollywood made $7.37 billion, while Bollywood made $1.28 billion vis-à-vis Nollywood’s $203 million revenue in the same year.

    Films and literature could be used to foster national healing and patriotism. And they may also be used to destroy a people and ruin nations in pursuit of global good or the “enlightened self-interest” of a dubious superpower.

    With very few exceptions, like Tunde Kelani, Kunle Afolayan, Femi Adebayo, Nollywood churns out too many rabidly wrought revenge-fantasies in which the Nigerian female perpetually scores retribution over her treacherous male; lest we forget the increasingly base novel and TV plots by which Nigerian audiences are lured to nurse demonic sexuality, ethnic intolerance, religious bigotry, misandry, and sexist rage.

    It’s about time the government partnered with the arts sector to reinvent the Nigerian story while channelling humane governance and patriotism. This is not a call for government censorship of progressive art. Rather it’s a call for institutionalised support via public-spirited funding and ideological partnership.

    It’s about time we refined the subtleties that make the Nigerian dream the fantasy of thieves, slatterns, and blinkered murderers.

  • Bandit boys of the northwest (2)

    Bandit boys of the northwest (2)

    If there is another storm that Nigeria should be worried about, it is the influx of teenage boys into armed banditry.

    Eyewitnesses revealed that teenagers were among the bandits that invaded the Kajuru Station in Kaduna and abducted 86 victims, on Sunday, March 17, 2024.

    This comes a few days after bandits abducted 280 pupils and teachers of Government Secondary School and LEA Primary School at Kuriga, and Buda, also in Kajuru, and abducted 61 people.

    This brings to 427, the number of people abducted in Kaduna, within two weeks, or thereabouts.

    The conscription of teenagers for such terrifying attacks has become a major source of worry for residents and security agencies in the state.

    Reacting to the recent attacks, Kaduna governor, Uba Sani, blamed the state’s inability to end banditry on poorly equipped local security.

    “Vigilance service cannot hold anything more than pump actions and these bandits, they come around with AK-47s and even more sophisticated weapons. That is where we are!”, Said Sani in a recent interview.

    Consequently, he advocated for the creation of state police, stressing that, “When you create state police, you will give the state police the legal authority through our constitution to hold firearms including AK-47s. Then those communities can defend themselves.”

    Bandits killed no fewer than 1,192 people and abducted 3,348 others across Kaduna State between January and December 2021. Those killed were 1,038 men, 104 women and 50 minors, according to a security report by the immediate past administration of former Governor Nasir El-Rufai.

    Until Kaduna became the epicentre of banditry, Zamfara was its major hub in Nigeria’s northwest. The scourge persists across the region due to the conscription of boys by bandit groups.

    There are too many boys pretending to be hard men. Many of them eventually enter the bush and join forest bandits. It’s a terror that must be nipped in the bud, said an inspector with the police command in Gusau, Zamfara. He should know better.

    Three years ago, the Police Command in Zamfara arrested two students, 15-year-olds Donatus Ejeh and Tukur Bashir, in connection with their threats to abduct a staff, principal and students of their respective schools, the Dominican College and the Federal Government College (FGC), Anka.

    The teenagers were arrested following reports of their threats by the authorities of the affected schools.

    In another incident, a young boy narrated, in a viral video, how he was taught to shoot and kill by one Alhaji in Gidan Kaso village in the Birnin Magaji area of Zamfara State. The teenager claimed he had used his rifle uncountable times, adding that members of his gang, had kidnapped so many women. Some of those abducted were raped and killed, he said.

    Read Also: Soldiers killing: No one left in community, says governor

    While kidnap for ransom and armed robbery constitute a nationwide scourge, the situation in Zamfara is particularly worrisome. It affirms suspicions that a lot of Nigeria’s security problems have sociological roots. They are traceable to unstable family structures.

    Insecurity takes its toll on everything, especially the family. As family falls apart, everything else falls apart: school, religion, local government, community. Family is the thread holding them all together. When it is severed, life, everything ends as we know it, according to Aliyu Daji, a sociologist and humanitarian volunteer.

    Every day, in Zamfara and other affected regions, children see their parents take flight. Fathers, who used to be seen as powerful authority figures are established as cowards in such situations; many of them are beaten and killed by younger men and even teenage boys, all these in the presence of their wives and children.

    Consequently, children don’t see their parents as authority figures anymore. Several boys at the cusp of adolescence and young adulthood suddenly discover that their fathers are very weak and defenceless before the brute force of armed bandits. Thus they see no reason to fear, obey or respect them anymore.

    In a sad twist, they have taken criminals and bandit leaders as their heroes and role models. And this explains why a lot of boys are joining criminal gangs.

    Several boys that I interviewed in Kadamutsa, Tsafe, Maru, Jangebe, Bakura, Talata Mafara, Gidan Zago Dansadau, rued the attacks that cost them their peace, education and homes, and extolled in the same breath, the notoriety and perceived mettle of their favourite bandit leaders.

    The northwest is a mess right now. But it’s a mess made of human error. Teenagers speak glowingly about bandit leaders.

    Ali Kachalla is particularly a teen favourite; it was his group that shot down a Nigerian Air Force (NAF) alpha jet on June 18, 2021, and subsequently burned a Mowag Piranha armoured personnel carrier in Dansadau on July 23, 2021.

    Rather than be repulsed by his viciousness, the teenagers whose lives have been ripped apart by the carnage he perpetrates, aspire to his notoriety.

    More worrisome is the perversion of the family dynamics where residents live in fear, the men in particular. Murtala Kanwuri is one of such men. Bankrupt and displaced from his home in Gidan Baru, when he spoke to me, the 68-year-old was visibly distraught. His youngest wife, Usama, was “sleeping with his former herder Bilyaminu.”

    Bilyaminu, 17, was entrusted in his care from childhood, soon after his parents died in a vehicle accident in Bauchi. But the teenager has grown from a mild beneficiary pecking on superfluous affection into Kanwuri’s nemesis.

    Men like Kanwuri abide in Zamfara’s troubled crannies. Occasionally, their wives leave home, sometimes in a group, under the pretext of petty trading or begging for alms. Often, they return with food and money.

    Eventually, some husbands learn to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, bidding dawn to intrude apace and rid them of tyrant imagery of their wives splayed apart before bandit goons, their ripped moans spearing their peace through the night.

    Some women do it for food and some do it for money, I learnt from a Tsafe-based sweets hawker, Habibatu Mafara. Some wives, she disclosed, cuckold their husbands as a gesture of personal sacrifice.

    Some husbands, on discovery that they had been marked for death by bandits, who accuse them of giving up their informants to the military, become jittery. When this happens, the accused man either flees with his family or takes the initiative to approach the bandits, through a proxy, to plead for leniency.

    In doing this, he must be ready to abide by the bandits’ terms: a cash penalty or fine, or giving up his wife or wives for several nights in the bandits’ leader’s bed. Sometimes, the bandits visit the home of their victim and lay with his wives in his presence.

    They do this when they truly intend to humiliate the husband. Even so, they kill the man afterwards. There are, however, instances whereby the wives seize the initiative to approach the bandits to plead with their bodies on their husbands’ behalf.

    Sometimes, a wayward wife could also collude with her lover among the bandits to force her husband to give her up as a comfort wife or concubine to her bandit-beau.

    Banditry has ruined the sanctity of family life in the Northwest. There, several men have resigned to wretchedness, bearing their grief like a secret shame.

    For instance, Kanwuri, struggled to hide his misery during his conversation with me until his eyes parted and peeled from the burden, to spill the rivulet of a prodigal tear.

  • Bandit boys of the northwest

    Bandit boys of the northwest

    The boy bandit manifests as our reality check; the frightful glimpse into our infernal core. Aliyu Jatau, for instance, is a spear of consequence impaled into Nigeria’s northwest.

    In my encounter with him in Zamfara, the 17-year-old’s face spooled the mathematical grid of our defeat by chthonic lust and Nigeria’s retreat into bestial nature.

    Life as a bandit oft becomes heated and extremely dangerous but the likes of Aliyu are ready to die with the gun. In their reckless, macabre life, peace is overrated and school, a terrible bore.

    Their loaded rifles spit nutriment to their malnourished minds. In their world, bullets glow like ‘dabino’ and a rocket launcher excites their thirst for mayhem.

    Strife has poured into them its metal and chaos in queer doses. And they will give them back, first, in bitty slugs of rampage. Then, in mammoth dispensations of carnage and bloodlust.

    This minute, the carnage presents with the umpteenth scare in Nigeria’s grisly drama perhaps. Few days after bandits abducted 280 pupils and teachers of Government Secondary School and LEA Primary School at Kuriga, Kaduna State, they struck in another part of the state, Buda, in Kajuru local council, and abducted 61 people.

    This brings to 341, the number of people abducted in Kaduna, within two weeks, or thereabouts. The latest mass abduction occurred late Monday night around 11:45 p.m. while many residents were fast asleep.

    Residents claimed the kidnappers stormed the community in large numbers, shooting sporadically as they abducted residents.

    But for the swift response of soldiers, who were about two kilometres away from Kajuru, the bandits would have made off with a higher number of abductees, according to residents.

    The recent abductions, like a few before them, neither triggered national outrage nor elicited the urgent concern, protest hashtags and virtue signalling inspired by the abduction of the Chibok girls in 2014.

    Civil societies and governments at home and abroad are disconcertingly quiet and have conveniently turned a blind eye and deaf ear to the recent incidents.

    Against the backdrop of their indifference, hundreds of minors, wives, daughters, fathers, sons, breadwinners and dependents are languishing in captivity in the forest havens of their abductors.

    Thus at the start of a new year, the dominance of despair seems so complete and insurmountable; amid widespread hardship, Nigerians cringe in anticipation of the next bandit attack.

    Predictably, the usual actors have slithered onto the stage, all working the same and discordant angles. Public officers issue habitual excuses and ripostes to critics and families of the abducted. Shady negotiators emerge from the woods, like knights in shiny armour. But all they do is chant frantic banality to insentient bromides.

    In response, governors of the affected northern states, Katsina, Niger, Kaduna, Sokoto, Zamfara, among others, jointly endorsed the deployment of trained vigilantes in their respective states, to shore up the presence of security personnel in the rural communities.

    To check armed banditry in Zamfara, the state government announced the suspension of weekly markets and restriction of fuel sales to the state capital and the headquarters of the local government areas of the state. In addition, no filling station was allowed to sell fuel in jerrycans, or of more than N10,000 to a single customer.

    The Kaduna State government, on its part, ordered the suspension of weekly markets in Birnin Gwari, Chikun, Giwa, Igabi and Kajuru LGAs and banned the sale of petrol in jerrycans in communities across the five local government areas.

    In addition to deploying hard solutions, the SBM Intelligence recommended the inclusion of more effective training, equipment and deployment of police and military assets into banditry hot spots – while the government addresses inter-agency conflict to foster better cooperation and capacity development of Nigeria’s armed forces.

    Experts suggest that state governments should take the lead in promoting harmonious relations with long-neglected communities – which will aid intelligence gathering – while partnering with the federal government to develop policies supportive of industries within their jurisdiction.

    This will increase the capacities of businesses with comparative advantages and create a diversity of economic opportunities across the country.

    Read Also: 61 feared kidnapped as bandits attack another Kaduna community

    But that is in the long run, in the short run, the government must address urgently the dangerous trend of teenagers taking to banditry in several parts of the northwest.

    More worrisome is the case of suspected girl bandit, Maryam Sani, 16, who was arrested alongside her male accomplice, Haruna with two local pistols, by a patrol team of vigilantes and officers of the Niger State Police Command. During interrogation, Haruna attempted to escape and was gunned down by the Police.

    Teen bandits, no doubt, pose a serious threat to the war against banditry in Nigeria’s northwest. Worried by the situation, former governor of Zamfara, Bello Matawalle, sounded the alarm that teen bandits were terrorising his state.

    Ultimately, they constitute a scary outcrop of the region’s insecurity scourge even as their individual tragedies blend into the hobbling footprints of the region’s failed agricultural economy.

    It’s harder to digest, however, their glowing admiration of bandit personae who harnessed their hitherto mundane, promising lives with strife.

    The fate of Jatau, 17, Sani, 16, and so many other teens, resonates a tragedy so intense it manifests as a protracted wail. Before he fell in love with bullets and guns, Jatau dreamt of being “a huge rice farmer.” Then he embraced banditry and strife, and his life transformed into a constant blur of anti-bullet charms, AK-47s, mindless rape and bloody raids on defenceless villages.

    Caught in the fast thrill of the forest, he often tells himself, he’s on a mission to rescue his mother and sisters abducted by fellow bandits.

    Every day, he prowls the fringes of the northwest on a mission only ruins could reveal; the forest heat kneading the rage in his heart and fat on his skin into liquid beads of carnage and sweat.

    Life as a bandit oft becomes heated and extremely dangerous but Aliyu is ready to die with the gun. In his reckless, macabre life, peace is overrated and school, a terrible bore.

    There is a reason the armed bandits’ creed of violence and wanton genocide is resonant among such brainwashed minors. The compelling nature of the grievances articulated, and the pervasiveness of poverty amplify the boys’ rationale for embracing a creed of carnage.

    A history of corruption and neglect at the federal, state, and local levels of government, among others, is a major source of widespread dissatisfaction with politicians, the legal system, and law enforcement.

    These sentiments thrive in greater depths and concentration in the north, where armed bandits, insurgents, and their sponsors, cash in on the situation.

    A dangerous storm is brewing as you read. The boys whose growth we neglected have learnt the ropes of savage being. Perhaps, we would worry what becomes of us when they set our neigbourhoods ablaze in search of the warmth and attention we denied them.

    Another major reason why kidnap for ransom thrives is the economics surrounding it. The sheer number of small incidents, at the heel of major coups like the recent abductions in Kaduna have established that the kidnap economy has become very lucrative. Just recently, kidnappers demanded a N40 trillion ransom for 16 people kidnapped in Kaduna.

    The situation surely deserves more than a couple of knee-jerk reactions.

  • Bleeding-heart patois

    Bleeding-heart patois

    The ongoing banter in social space is incantatory of Nigerian mind and nature. Whether online or offline, it is overtly ritualistic yet political.

    Post-2023 elections, politicians and vocal segments of the populace reconstruct Nigeria into a narrow commune, beholden to their selfish interpretations of citizenship, power, and democratic dividends.

    Each stakeholder manifests a peculiar morass of patriotic experience. Amid the drama, Nigeria thrives as a political theatre – an expansive stage where Nigerians of vast partisan stripes are entertained, misinformed, and informed.

    The process, in recent times, assumes the course of indoctrination by courtiers.

    The latter manifests as our most malignant affliction. Comprising journalists, politicians, NGOs, and rights activists, their machinations are oft inimical to nationhood, stability, and growth – perhaps because too many among them are deployed as weapons of adverse programming.

    This may no doubt resonate as far-fetched to individuals and groups profiting from the status quo, especially the press and civil societies. That is understandable. It is like a bacterium responsible for a pandemic to deem itself the next best thing to happen to earthlings.

    For a people programmed for conquest, Nigerians carry on with unabashed ignorance and arrogance. Arrogance is pitiable. But ignorance is expensive and quite scary. Yet Nigerians soldier on unperturbed by the ramifications of it all.

    This is what happens when a nation becomes unmoored from reality. It retreats into a fictive nirvana. In this predetermined cosmology, reality is redefined to suit dubious whims, and facts are manufactured to soothe relative bias.

    If Nigeria seems unmoored from reality, it’s because our lives and national discourse are dominated by fabricated events. From exaggerated grief over insecurity, misgovernance, and national disasters to celebrity gossip and pageantry of political artifice, the country is sold to desperate narratives at home and abroad.

    Whether it is the soaring price of Premium Methylated Spirit (PMS), the insurgent creed of violence resonant with brainwashed minors and young adults, or the virulent manifestations of partisan politics, the compelling nature of the grievances articulated and the pervasiveness of despair are wielded to justify the rationale for Nigeria’s creed of carnage and enduring portrayal as a banana republic by foreign governments and consulates.

    A history of corruption and neglect at the federal, state, and local levels of government, among others, has equally morphed into a major source of widespread dissatisfaction towards politicians, the legal system, and law enforcement by the masses.

    These sentiments thrive in greater depths across geographic and virtual space; as Nigeria rejuvenates from the intrigues of the 2023 polls, a wave of validation and reproof of the incumbent political class and the opposition seeking to dislodge it has produced a charged atmosphere of warring critics and apologists, cynics, and anarchists.

    Of the latter, the majority parade flawed presence because they have no real persona and moral substance. Yet en route to the polls, Nigeria suffered their storm of spunk and slogans.

    Several media houses, civil societies, and journalists pitched their tents with certain candidates, even as they parroted the official propaganda of foreign governments, consulates, and non-profits pushing predatory self-interest as “impartial observers.”

    The participation of large segments of the press, academia, and civil society pre and post-elections has been driven by funded partisanship but like Arundhati Roy would say, “I’m not against people being funded—because we’re running out of options, but we have to understand, ‘Are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you? Who’s the dog and who are you?”

    The situation triggers existential questions about the quality of political participation before and after the elections. How do we determine real and funded patriotism? Are Nigerians inured to the precepts of partisanship astride the politics of reality and illusions?

    The jostling over reality and illusion becomes most intense in an oppressive clime where both distort to preserve the status quo of exploitation or repudiate it.

    A failure to achieve a balance between oppressive reality and the placebo of illusion eventually leads to anarchy and societal collapse.

    In his book, Collapse, economist Jared Diamond lists five precursors to social decay, including a failure to understand and prevent causes of environmental damage; climate change; pillage by hostile neighbors; the inability of friendly neighbors to continue trade; and finally, how the society itself deals with the problems raised by the first four factors.

    A common failing of the last item is the dislocation between the short-term interests of elites and the longer-term interests of the societies they dominate and exploit.

    Diamond’s last point is critical. The ruling elite’s penchant for corruption, maladministration, and circumventing the law, almost always triggers widespread cynicism, disillusionment, apathy, and finally, rage.

    Those who suffer the consequences of misgovernance characteristically scorn loyalty to the nation and increasingly nurse fantasies of violent insurrection as revenge.

    The concept of the common good, mocked by the predation of the privileged minority, vanishes and is replaced by the self-seeking “Me-Credo” of the underprivileged majority. Society burns as individuals submit to primal lust.

    It’s about time Nigerians grasped the depth and ramifications of misgovernance perpetrated by the ruling class; too many are hoodwinked by the smokescreen of politics as they sheepishly submit their necks and minds to the leash of deified demagogues.

    The magnitude of corruption unearthed and currently being investigated by the incumbent administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should elicit somberness and widespread support for the surgical excision of the tumours of corruption from government machinery and public institutions.

    Sadly, Nigerians are split between prejudices and base sentimentality, nourished through the means and devices of political actors.

    The elections have been won and lost. Nigerians should quit bashing each other in public spaces. People should quit gloating and hurling blame at those who voted for Tinubu as the cause of Nigeria’s hardships. This is unforgivably puerile and infantile.

    The task before us belies divisions spurred by political, ethnic, and religious affiliations.

    If anything, the 2023 elections exposed our social institutions (cultural, political, religious, academic) as craven tools of prejudice, answerable to demagogues, the corporate state, and overseas predators. 

    As personal savings and retirement plans become worthless; as unemployment skyrockets and citizenry hopes plummet, we must scorn the call to insurgency by stooges and ragdolls posing as bleeding-heart revolutionaries and patriots.

    Their modus operandi is to highlight economic hardship as a consequence of bad leadership resolvable only by their favourite demagogues.

    Read Also: Time has preserved Awo’s principles, legacies – Tinubu

    They seek to weaponise our daily worries into a crisis of faith against the incumbent administration. Curiously, their silver bullet theory conveniently absolves their sponsors – oft among the ruling class – and other partisan actors of blame.

    They will not acknowledge that our current social crisis grew over six decades of misgovernance. They will not consider the massive depletion of the world’s resources, from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to soil erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming, and climate change as intervening variables in our social crisis.

    They would not admit that for several decades, the NNPC, power sector, banking industry, civil service, regulatory agencies, and private sector engaged in frantic pilferage of public treasury.

    They would not relate how these social actors jointly sabotaged the manufacturing sector and facilitated huge, unregulated international capital flows.

    They would not acknowledge how they wrecked the local economy and perverted the banking and financial system to serve the rich and enslave the poor.

  • Before we say a prayer to rage (2)

    Before we say a prayer to rage (2)

    In his viral post, a certain Dauda Lateef Olanrewaju analyses part of the reasons for Nigeria’s currency devaluation and economic hardship thus: “You have N200,000 to buy a TV, but instead you invest the N200,000 in buying dollars for hoarding. After some months, your N200,000 investment has yielded a profit of 200% which means you now have N600,000.

    “You are happy you made N400,000 profit. Now, you want to buy that same TV, you get there and you were told the TV is now N600,000 due to dollar increase; now you are angry, cursing and blaming the government for what you used your hands to cause. You think you can eat your cake and have it. Hell NO! It’s just unfortunate, that those who didn’t partake in this self-destruction are also suffering from it. Nigerians we think we are smart, but in actual fact, we be mugu.”

    While economic eggheads debate the logic and premise of Olanrewaju’s argument, it needn’t be too hard to distill its inherent wisdom.

    Together, we embarked on this Nigerian journey into savage nature, trading vistas of hope for caskets of greed. Together, we railroaded Nigeria to self-destruct. And collectively, we must salvage what’s left of it.

    But we mistake the path we must take as shown by our resort to rant and rave. We cannot speak angst to misgovernance while we nurse barbarism within us. Solution isn’t speaking rage to pain either but healing through our pains and living it out.

    As the economic crisis bites harder, President Bola Tinubu has come under intense scrutiny to fulfil his campaign promises nine months after assuming office. Since May last year, the subsidy removal, naira devaluation, and the implementation of a value-added tax on diesel imports have led to spikes in the prices of food items and material goods in the country.

    Despite declaring a state of emergency on food security and unveiling an immediate, short and long-term plan for the sector, average food prices of key staples across major cities in the country have surged by almost 100 percent.

    But while we rue the skyrocketing inflation and a sustained decline in Nigerians’ spending power, Nigerians must equally acknowledge certain impediments to successful realisation of the government’s policy objectives.

    Just recently, Vice President Kashim Shettima revealed that certain forces were “hell-bent on plunging this country into a state of anarchy…Instead of waiting for 2027, they are so desperate; that this country can fall apart as far as they are concerned. But we are going to visit them,” he said.

    Shettima also revealed that “Just a few nights ago, 45 trucks of maize were caught being transported into a neighbouring country. There are 32 illegal routes in that axis. At the moment when they were intercepted, the price of maize fell by N10,000, from N60,000 to N50,000. So, there are forces that are hell-bent on undermining our nation but this is the time for us to come together.”

    While many would scoff at VP Shettima’s claims, it is necessary to address the evils posed by saboteurs hidden in plain sight. To this end, a joint effort was reportedly launched by the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA), the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Nigerian Financial Intelligent Unit (NFIU) to combat economic saboteurs manipulating dollar/naira exchange rate.

    Against the backdrop of the situation, Nigeria’s inflation rate climbed to 29.90 per cent in January 2024 from 28.92 per cent recorded in the previous month according to data from the NBS.

    Consequently, President Tinubu’s economic policies have been heavily criticised as Nigerians, led by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) trooped to the streets to vent their anger and frustration.

    In his response, President Tinubu has assured that there is hope for the nation’s financial and economic prospects, citing efforts currently being made by the administration in all sectors. Speaking on Tuesday during the unveiling and launch of the Expatriate Employment Levy (EEL), at the State House, Abuja, Tinubu assured of the positive outlook of the nation’s finances and the economy in general, saying that though things appear harsh currently, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

    He said, “We might be going through difficult periods now, but when you look at the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission, the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning and people manning the ship of this country, including Central Bank of Nigeria, they have collaborated and in the spirit of development and progress, we are glad that good effort is being made to retool, reengineer the finances of the country and make growth our hallmark.”

    As we all await the promised dividends of his administration’s policies, shall we desist from measures that may inflame the polity? Already, the social space thrives as a repository of venom and virulent dissent, as viral videos of agitated and confused citizens protesting the soaring prices of goods and services flood the internet.

    Against the backdrop of the crisis, the possibility of the citizenry’s resort to anarchy remains the most frightful imagery. Too many social actors intensely replicate our primitive experience. But they have done nothing but reenact the vast facets of evil that we groomed them to personify.

    It hardly matters whether we publicly denounce them, Nigeria would never be rid of them until we set our grief’s needlepoint astride the prick of pain.

    Read Also: Oyo govt cautions against violence at parks, garages

    We shall never attain true freedom from their affliction until we treat ourselves as the pathogens breeding the plague. Our homes, families, worship houses, schools, communities, to mention a few, produce and sustain our affliction by corrupt leadership and citizenship. We must surgically excise from within our penchant for corruption and yearning to self-destruct.

    At the moment, the average Nigerian manifests the citizenry’s detachment from patriotic experience. Most guilty is the Nigerian in his youth. He samples dissent but will not commit to progressive intent. Rustling ‘wokeness’ out of tired bromides, his sterile passion stifles patriotic fervor even as he professes love for the country.

    How does one love or hate this country? To this, every likely answer may spiral into a fog or eclipse in a vapor of hanging participles. The ripostes may spatter and splay like a treacherous sandstorm but it’s about time we braved its tumult.

    It’s about time we addressed our innate demons. Call it our stratagem of healing or therapy of closure from our national trauma. Too many Nigerians drift through each day with a siege mentality – each individual treating the nation as a savage space.

    From the northeast’s terror cells, bandit groves of the northwest, unknown gunmen of the southeast to the teen gangs and kidnappers of the southwest, Nigeria unfurls as scorched, bloodied earth.

    Cut to a hodgepodge of civil servants and public officers jointly looting public funds and the industry of courtiers – comprising religious leaders, social influencers and journalists – vigorously rationalising such institutionalised and systemic corruption, and you have a clearer picture of the Nigerian conundrum.

    Thus, no one must be singled out as the cause of our predicament. The government and the governed jointly manifest as the cause of our travails. But we all assume the pose of the proverbial foresters earnestly burning off our infested boughs. What if the foresters are the disease?