The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • This is your daughter’s  body count (2)

    This is your daughter’s  body count (2)

    A female celebrity recently celebrated her love for being a “slut” on a broadcast programme. The male interviewer, intoning a slur, called her a slut at every turn until she felt comfortable and voiced her discomfiture. Having bragged earlier that her family supports her decision to self-identify as a slut and live as such, she suddenly developed a moral sense of things and asked the interviewer why he is unforgiving of a woman with a high body count vis-a-vis a man. Their dialogue ensues.

    “Why do you only condemn a female with a high body count?”

    “Because that makes her a slut.”

    “And what does it make you if you are a man with a high body count?”

    “A slut maker,” he said.

    As we condemn the slur intoned by the male interviewer, shall we invalidate the toxic femininity of the “slutty” interviewee? More is the pity that they both enjoy a cult following among modern, “emancipated” youngsters.

    While being male permits no one bragging rights to reckless sex life, the consequences for a female are often more devastating. Dissenters may argue with their keypads.

    There is a lot to teach our daughters. That chastity is nonnegotiable; it simply makes perfect sense. That promiscuity renders the female toxic, like a garden filled with poisoned fruit.

    Sleeping around projects a lack of morals. And lack of morals makes no one “emancipated.” It’s neither ennobling nor liberating for a female to stack up multiple body counts, let alone, a girl. It simply makes her a slave in a factory of fluid sharers. Intercourse with her, even in matrimony, is akin to coupling with an emotional cripple.

    This article refers to the millions of ‘daughters’ with a choice, the unmarried horde who embrace promiscuity as a sport. Not the percentage left broken by sexual abuse, rape, commercial sex work, to mention a few. Thus the flaming misandrist may stifle her gall.

    A female with no morals may consider herself free today; she may argue that she doesn’t need any man, quoting the married fraudulent feminist, who teaches women never to see marriage as an achievement, in time, she would find herself a broken debauchee.

    If your daughter tells you abstinence and marriage are restrictive, teach her to navigate their humane shoals; help her to appreciate why they have been grounded on human experience through the centuries.

    Teach her that the “modern” female with a high body count, will forever subsist as a gymnasium of bodies soullessly masturbating her psyche, until they rupture the membrane of passion she shares with any new partner.

    Teach her that promiscuity isn’t liberating. It isn’t freedom. Teach her never to see men as tools by which she could achieve all her acceptable and inordinate yearnings. A woman who approaches men as tools gets used up, like a tool, till she becomes broken.

    And if she’s smitten with feminism, teach her to project African feminism, developed outside sullied and biased academia, one that seeks the inclusion of both men and women in nurturing the family against social, economic, and political constraints.

    Teach her to embrace that brand of feminism that complements and humanises the patriarchy. Not the one that antagonises it. Help her understand that beneath the misandrist’s bedazzling, theorised nirvana, life is a purgatory.

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    Misandry eats deep into the contemporary female psyche, like a virus. It infects 13 and 14-year-olds. ‘Modern’ teens at 15 through 20, swim in its slurry. By age 21 through 30, they hasten through various stages of awareness, embracing furry anti-male slogans, weaponising felt and ‘unfelt’ grief into savage animosity towards men.

    Yet they need men to fulfil random impulses thus social media becomes their performance theatre, where they share everything mostly of a sexual nature.

    Once upon a time, a Facebook celebrity loved to post the adventures of her soul as she masturbated. She bragged about her capacity to attain mind-blowing orgasms and denounced the existence of God in the same breadth. She recounted with relish, how she screamed to taunt her very religious siblings and extended family, in the heat of a squirt.

    She condemned adultery but boasted about flirting with married men. Eventually, she got pregnant by a supposedly perfect hunk, who identified with her misandrist ideology. The latter, she bragged, begged to be with her knowing she could only offer him an “open marriage.”

    Unknown to her, her perfect beau belted out the notes she loved to hear. He was the liberal, feminist male, who joined her in scoffing at ”chauvinistic men,” online and offline, while raiding her secret places. 

    Her gravest mistake was getting pregnant for him. He deserted her in a heartbeat. Now a single mother, she “coaches young girls to achieve their dreams.”

    Like this curious character, many misguided females shop for non-committal sex with random males on social media. This minute, one such character brags about how many ‘oafs’ and ‘scums’ she has bedded in random, passionless sex in the backseat of her ‘personal car,’ on her ‘personal sofa’ and ‘six-foot bed’ inside her ‘personal apartment.’

    If she gets pregnant, she either terminates it or keeps the baby. Either way, she becomes the ‘sapiosexual’ man-hating feminist, who lives by her terms and ‘does not give a hoot what anyone thinks.’

    Innately she craves for someone to love and trust. Outwardly, she seeks solace in bitter, misandrist literature. Someday, she might write a daring, ‘feminist’ novel that gets her celebrated among the herd.

    Beneath the glitter of acclaim, however, she is a weak, needy female craving a man’s love and attention. Occasionally, she might “experiment” in the arms of a fellow woman or girl, a bored housewife or married woman who flirts with her on social media en route to a tryst or two.

    Eventually, the latter find her boring, her touches, gross, and her rant too repetitive. Then they run back to their husbands whom they never deserted for her in the first place.

    Now hovering in her late 30s, she realises that it is only on the pages of feminist literature and misandrist fairy tales that married women ditch their husbands to marry or move in with feminist lovers, no matter how earth-shattering their joint climaxes are.

    Forty creeps on her while she is busy posting anti-male messages on Facebook and Twitter; and penning yet another feminist-lit blockbuster. But where she attains no literary or artistic renown, she simply fades frustrated, into her life’s eternal midnight.

    Eventually, she finds religion and rediscovers sudden wisdom in the scriptures she hitherto pilloried as patriarchal nonsense. She has no more use for tired slogans and banal anger. Most of her peers are now quietly married away and severing connection with her kind. She begins to covet the marital securities and stability she scorned in her youth.

    She tries to live again but it’s too late. She discovers that she had been enjoying for years, her 15 minutes of fame. The truth dawns on her in a moment of eternal damnation. Her orchestra is done playing and it’s time to exit the stage.

    It’s about time we raised our daughters to be so strong they can be gentle, so educated they can be humble, so fierce they can be compassionate, so passionate they can be rational, and so disciplined they can be free. Apology to Kavita Ramdas.

  • This is your daughter’s body count (1)

    This is your daughter’s body count (1)

    There’s a TikTok trend that haunts us lately. It snuggles from your browser through catchy thumbnails and titles, into your phones. In the short videos, you see scores of fresh-faced girls blurt out their “personal truths.”

    In some of the videos, they spiritedly answer the question: “What’s your body count?” In between the question and their answer, they do not gag or try to squeeze the words out. Initially, you might see a few girls say, “two” or “three.” Body count references the number of sexual partners.

    Then comes the less inhibited girls, the assertive, daring stalwarts of Gen Z, in particular.  Spotting a contemplative mien, they proudly calculate their body count as ”five,” “seven,” “10,” and “16” after taking a trip down memory lane.

    One girl said her body count was “22” and “still counting.” About two or three others listed their boyfriends’ siblings and fathers as some of their random sex partners.

    In response to their disclosure, the interviewer, equally a bumbling teen or young adult bellows an overexcited “Mad o!” The videos get more interesting as the so-called “content creators” become more daring with the “Hit or Miss” videos showing young adult males interviewing females of their age group or younger teenage girls, about the possibility of having random sex with another male respondent.

    The female checks out the former and instantly decides if he is a “Hit” or “Miss.” Hit means she would hop in bed and part her thighs for him in a butt-beat. If she calls him a “Miss,” it means he isn’t her type.

    If the latter is the case, the interviewer asks if she would settle for him instead. Often, she makes a show of checking him out and says, “Yes.” In about five such sessions, the male interviewer asks if he could pat or grab her buttocks and she responds in the affirmative.

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    One interesting bit about these videos is that none of the female respondents is over the age of 22. None betrays an internal struggle; they neither gag on their answers nor attempt to squeeze out their morality-defying responses.

    In another video, a girl, presumably in her late teens makes a sordid show of riding a cucumber, cowgirl style, in her mother’s kitchen till she orgasms. Afterwards, she waves the cucumber thick with her milky discharge, before the camera, and places it on an overturned plastic bowl.

    The enthrallment with celebrity has brought us to a whole new state of mindlessness, no doubt. This frantic quest for renown assumes a perilous turn in the antics of younger Nigerians, online and offline, thus triggering frantic posers on the need to regulate social media.

    It also elicits crucial questions about the homes from which the aforementioned girls emerged: Where are their parents? Are they privy to their daughters’ activities online? How did they become so desensitised and permissive of such degeneracy?

    Degenerate Nigeria can only be cured by farming our loins for the hidden cowries of a nobler race. The uninhibited Tiktok vixen and her male enablers are in no way different from the brothel prostitute and her foul-mouthed roughneck pimp. Like the rapist, political assassin, ballot robber, kidnapper, and bestial public officer, they are the results not of society’s savagery or sexism but of society’s absence.

    The family is the building block of society and civilisation. But circumstances of its breakdown and reduction to a dysfunctional nature foists the responsibilities of raising a child on a single parent, sometimes the father, and often, the mother.

    In the wake of its collapse, several arguments have been advanced at home and overseas that children raised in a two-parent household often do better than their counterparts who were raised by single parents.

    It’s extraordinarily well-documented how much of a disadvantage children from single-mother households have over children whose parents remain together, but less well-documented is how much of a disadvantage they have over single-father households.

    For example, studies in the United States Department of Census and Health, among others, have found that children that from single-mother households are five times more likely to commit suicide than children from both unbroken households and single-father households, 9 times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape, 20 times more likely to end up in prison and 32 times more likely to run away from home.

    The list does not end there; single-mother households also account for 70% of all teen pregnancies and 70 per cent of all child murders and filicide.

    The debate has seen both sides of the divide advance uncensored empirical studies and sullied research findings to substantiate their arguments and validate entrenched truths or prejudices. Whatever the nature of their positions, and whatever the robust resources – in cash and kind – committed to their propagation and sponsorship by foreign interests, Nigeria must urgently commit to a moral recourse.

    The society is currently in the throes of moral turpitude that has quickened its ruin and complete subjugation to a new wave of what Bulhan aptly describes as metacolonialism, championed by supposedly developed but corrupted civilisations of Europe and America.

    Modern Nigeria is a product of the moral torpedoing of our families, schools, worship houses, the streets, and the media. The morally ambivalent youth is today’s amoral nomad, superbly conditioned by Western education and the media to scorn the native intelligence and wisdom of the ancient.

    Many morph in real-time into unthinking herds cum agents of colonialism. Hence the preponderance of skitmakers,  journalists, writers, teachers, economists, social workers, engineers, and health workers, to mention a few, who function as glorified stooges of the debauched world.

    The faithlessness and moral corruption that they personify 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 our youths 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.

    President Bola Tinubu, while presenting the 2024 Appropriation Bill to a joint session of the National Assembly, outlined human capital development among his administration’s priorities for the upcoming fiscal year. So, the budget places significant focus on children, recognising them as the most critical resource for national development.

    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 the number of likes or emojis attracted by a viral video of sexual misdemeanour on TikTok.

    The true purpose of socialisation dims in the camera lights and applause of degenerate Tiktokers. It’s about time parents began to monitor their children’s activities on social media – the girls in particular.

    And the reasons are hardly far-fetched. The lust for applause and cheap renown finds more fertile tracts in the psyches of females flaunting their “fleshly assets” in social media’s carnal theatre.

    But while sex and nudity are deemed profitable by millions of girls setting up shop in cyberspace,  time and over again, teenage girls and young adult females have become victims of cyber-bullying and scandalous videos of revenge porn.

  • Dirty gold: The child miner conundrum

    Dirty gold: The child miner conundrum

    In Zamfara, the Kadauri gold fields loom like artisanal dystopia. Think of it as the glitter belt where little boys toil, chained to manly lust.  

    The children, caught between the womb wall of lower earth and the dazzle of proverbial Midas’ spoils, illustrate embowered servitude in open fields.

    The boys are many and dispensable inside the mine pits of Kaudari in Maru, Anka, among other local councils. Far from the confines of their barely populated classrooms, they write their dreams in shiny beads of sweat: the indelible ink of their brow. It’s the only way that their absence from school could mean something.

    Scores of out-of-school kids, mostly boys, litter the dusty tract digging for gold. A dirt pan assures a full plate to their starving bellies. Thus they defy the heat, obstinate souls accustomed to searing whipping from the sun.

    If they aren’t deterred by the scorching heat of the mine pits, how can they recoil from the gold fields over the threat of a distant public officer?

    On September 3, 2023, the Minister of Solid Minerals, Dele Alake, issued a 30-day ultimatum to artisanal miners engaged in illegal mining nationwide to join cooperatives or find another vocation. He said, “On the expiration of the period, the full weight of the law will fall on anyone seen on a mining site without a determinable status.”

    Alake’s threat to crack down on illegal miners, however, hardly deters the underage gold prospectors perhaps because it doesn’t summarily address them. Mubaraq Baballe (11), Naziru Aliyu (13), and Naziru (eight), for instance, belch a narrative only hunger could reveal.

    Shouldering aplomb like a steel amour, the minors feverishly dig the earth and shovel sludge every day, hoping to hit pay-dirt. They have been at it for over four years, hunting for gold amid the dusty plains of Kadauri.

    The hope of hitting pay-dirt and earning between N500 and N1,000 (less than $1) for their efforts is overpowering. 

    Many of them have never been to school. They slave away at the various mine pits every day; when they get lucky, they give their earnings to their parents “to buy food.”

    There is a backstory to each boy’s presence in the Kadauri gold field. The recurrent strain recounts how poverty and hunger render them vulnerable to older associates and paymasters in Zamfara’s illicit network of artisanal miners.

    The latter use them as mules and errand boys in an illicit network that cost Nigeria about $2 billion annually and over N353 billion in losses in gold smuggled out of the country between 2016 and 2018, according to the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) audits and reports from international sources.

    The mineral-rich earth of Zamfara offers child miners several opportunities to make a quick buck. It’s a perilous keep, fraught with attacks by armed bandits prowling the region and toxic lead deposits in the soil.

    Despite the obvious perils, the dazzle of Kadauri’s gold belt lures the boys to turn up every day, armed with a shovel, a can-do spirit and a dirt pan.

    Alake’s warning bears no resonance among the child miners perhaps because they do not understand the magnitude of their work as ”outlaws.” A lack of compliance with his 30-day ultimatum made him grant another 30-day extension even as he warned that from October, a security task force would become active in the solid minerals sector and illegal miners would be prosecuted.

    Still, illegal mining persists. This may be blamed on the lack of effective regulation and punishment for flouting them. Miffed by their daring, the Governor of Zamfara, Dauda Lawal, on Sunday, September 23, issued a ban on illegal mining activities in the state and ordered law enforcers to shoot illegal miners at sight, claiming that such stringent action has become necessary to end the destructive activity and ensure the well-being of the people.

    Hundreds of people have been killed or kidnapped by bandits in Zamfara in the wake of a previous ban imposed by former Governor Bello Matawalle, and several miners relocated from Zamfara to less policed hubs of artisanal mining in Niger and Osun States.

    In their absence, field leaders contract underage boys to fill the vacuum created in the artisanal gold mines thus accentuating their predicament as part of the 10.5 million out-of-school children in Nigeria – 30 per cent are in the North-West (Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kebbi, Kano) and Niger States in the North Central region.

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    To cushion the huge foreign exchange revenue loss from gold smuggling, the immediate past administration of Muhammadu Buhari launched the Presidential Artisanal Gold Mining Development Initiative (PAGMDI), an artisanal and small-scale gold mining development programme meant to diversify the country’s revenue base.

    Initial forecasts held that the PAGMI initiative could add about $500 million annually to Nigeria’s foreign reserves, and contribute $150 million in taxes and $25 million in royalties.

    To guarantee the seamless actualisation of set goals, the federal government licensed two refineries to refine gold to the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA).

    Under the arrangement, the government was expected to buy directly from small-scale miners at designated hubs in their villages, while the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) buys directly from the state government.

    This was meant to prevent the locals from selling extracted gold to bandits and other illegal operators. The plan is yet to materialise to the advantage of all identified stakeholders.

    And neither Alake’s ultimatum nor Governor Lawal’s resort to hard power would resolve Zamfara’s illegal mining conundrum until stakeholders address the difficulty posed by the teeming army of underage boys scattered across the gold fields of Zamfara and other mining hot spots in the country.

    The government must work with other stakeholders to address the structural and institutional factors such as rural poverty and difficulties in meeting legal and regulatory requirements that tend to push artisanal gold mining operators deeper into the informal economy – where child miners become instant, defenceless tools for illegal miners and bandits.

    The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that about one million children work in mines and quarries. However, the actual number is deemed higher as the proportion of child miners in some countries is estimated to be as high as 30 to 50 per cent of the workforce.

    In Zamfara, many such children work in extreme conditions in remote areas like Kadauri and other parts of Maru LGA. Children work in ore extraction and assist in drilling. They push carts, clean galleries, and remove water from the mines. They crush stones, haul minerals, pick gemstones, and wash gold.

    They descend to the bowels of the earth to crawl through narrow, cramped, and poorly lit makeshift tunnels, where the air is thick with dust and smothering. They constantly risk fatal accidents due to falling rocks, explosions, collapse of mine walls, and the use of equipment designed for adults. It’s a very scary situation which could trigger another health crisis reminiscent of Zamfara’s lead poisoning disaster of 2010.

    Experts warned that the 2010 epidemic may persist in the environment for up to 15 years resulting in long-term health problems including permanent learning and behavioural problems, and brain damage.

    But the child miners of Kadauri are oblivious to such dangers. Their struggles blend into the toxic underbelly of their dreams and the vague promise of a better tomorrow.

  • The ‘shit’ it leaves behind

    The ‘shit’ it leaves behind

    A wolf disguised as a sheep will not be discovered simply because it bleats badly, but because of the “shit’ it leaves behind. No matter how lyrical Joe Ajaero waxes about his pummeling in Imo State, Nigerians must examine his claims with a quizzical mind.

    The diminutive leader of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has decided to punish over 200 million Nigerians for the beating he received from his kinsmen in Imo.

    The man who Nigerians labour to prop as the workers’ giant, has chosen to parade himself as the communal flyspeck bearing the plot of familiar predators in its droppings.

    Ajaero, while addressing workers at the NLC secretariat in Owerri, recently, was accosted by suspected thugs who beat him to a pulp. He emerged from the ordeal looking, like a poorly trained pugilist fresh out of a shellacking by an unforgiving opponent.

    Speaking at a press conference, in Abuja, he claimed that he was arrested by the police and handed over to thugs who beat him up, and threatened to kill him and dump his body in a river.

    But the police spokesman in Imo, Henry Okoye, claimed that the police went to rescue Ajaero and take him into “protective custody.” The Inspector General of Police (IGP), Kayode Egbetokun, has since removed the Imo Commissioner of Police, Mohammed Barde, thus arousing speculations that the police did a shoddy job.

    Perhaps IGP Egbetokun would order an investigation of the crisis, to determine if the police truly erred, and punish erring personnel to forestall a repeat of such misconduct.

    On the flip side, pundits adduce the pummeling of the NLC boss to his immoderate flirtation with politics. Ajaero, apparently miffed by the loss of his favourite candidate, Labour Party (LP)’s Peter Obi, seems bent on scuttling the fragile peace and stability of the country.

    The NLC has declared a nationwide strike, in protest against the brutalisation of Ajaero, in Owerri, soon after ordering the closure of essential services in Imo, including electricity, thereby throwing the state into darkness.

    There is no gainsaying the NLC has morphed into strange forms under Ajaero’s leadership; the body’s pre and post-2023 election conduct, for instance, resonate extreme partisanship and anarchic tendencies peculiar to political actors with poor spirit of sportsmanship.

    Few people would forget in a hurry, how the NLC boss, Ajaero, openly flirted with and endorsed LP candidate, Obi, during the 2023 presidential elections. In flagrant violation of non-partisan ethics obligatory of the NLC, Ajaero campaigned for Obi and forced the NLC to release an inglorious official statement calling for “all workers across the country to vote for Labour Party in the 2023 Presidential election.”

    Ajaero also in his May Day speech attacked the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), accusing it of conducting a flawed election to favour Tinubu and claiming Obi won the election.
    His claims of Obi’s touted victory depicted him as yet another emotive actor eager to hurl Nigeria into anarchy by declaring a candidate, who came a distant third, the winner of the February 25 presidential elections.

    There is no gainsaying Ajaero turned himself to Obi’s mouthpiece on several occasions. En route to the polls, he applauded Obi’s promise to remove fuel subsidy but condemned President Bola Tinubu for daring to implement such a measure.

    Ajaero’s anti-democratic stance hardly proffers solutions to the country’s myriad of problems. His ill-fated jaunt in Imo, for instance, further established him as a reject of his own people. On the eve of a governorship election in Imo, Ajaero tried to force an industrial strike on the State, claiming the Governor Hope Uzodinma-led administration owed workers as much as 20 months’ salaries. Governor Uzodinma has since declared that he was “not owing anyone.”

    It is noteworthy that Ajaero has failed to invalidate Uzodinma’s claims with facts and figures thus validating suspicions about his true mission in Imo.

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    Governor Uzodinma accused Ajaero of polluting the NLC with Labour Party politics. Of course, he enjoys an inalienable right to support any political party of his choice but he has no right to impose his partisan politics on the labour movement.

    The NLC does not belong to the Labour Party and vice versa. Ajaero’s partisanship clearly jeopardises the integrity of the NLC. It has brought the labour union to disrepute.

    It is worrisome to see Ajaero sully the entire labour movement by pushing his partisan LP agenda as a workers’ agenda. By his conduct, he has established himself more as an LP goon than a national labour leader. His antics furnish the venom of aggrieved candidates and supporters of the LP, who had at various times, tried to instigate anarchy and a military coup d’état.

    Mayhem is the anthem that we should shun. It is the fruit of dissent that we must be wary of and I will continue to say this hoping the prospective tools – the youths – by which the masterminds hope to actualise their selfish plots, would listen.

    The biggest misconception about insurrection or whatever the anarchists choose to call it, is that it would help actualise their allegedly stolen mandate.

    It’s all dirty, greedy politics. The anarchists want the youths to fly the flags of their rebellion against the rule of law. They want everyone to brandish a bumper sticker that bellows: “Death to the Federal Republic of Nigeria!” simply because they lost an election, albeit deservedly.

    Sadly, these anarchists enjoy the “obedience” and support of several youths whose minds cannot discern their selfish plots. Thus the latter waste their passion recycling hackneyed rage and engaging in bootless pursuits at the end of which they accomplish nothing.

    Eventually, the smokescreen and noise of platitudinous chant begin to peter out and the anarchist realises that his or her rhetorical talisman is actually a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass around as a contemptible kobo. When a man becomes too accustomed to artifice, and disguising himself to others, he suffers a loss of self. Will Ajaero reclaim himself? Where is the self-professed “bleeding heart patriot” who – as a factional labour leader – backed out of a planned strike by the NLC?

    Where is the Ajaero, who condemned and rebelled against the indefinite strike action planned by the Ayuba Wahab-led faction of the NLC in 2016 on supposedly principled grounds? What has happened to the Ajaero who opened himself, like a tickled palm, to the courtship of the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari, in order to spite the Wahab-led faction of the NLC? Addressing newsmen in Abuja, Ajaero said his faction could not be part of Wahab’s industrial action because it was called at the wrong time and with wrong motives. He also accused Wahab’s faction of asking the government to write off the N2 billion loan the group collected, in 2012, to buy buses claiming that the strike action had “already been sold out before it took off.”

    Ajaero said, “We thought we should have managed this in the interest of Nigerians but from the look of things, it appears we have to go our different ways.” Seven years on, Ajaero has mutated into a markedly different character. If truly, there is a perfect rout of characters in every man, Ajaero looms like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures. The NLC leader brings bodacious theatre to his brief.

  • No perfect nation to be born

    No perfect nation to be born

    There is no perfect nation to be born yet Nigeria is deemed an ultimate hell to every newborn. Thus the rat race by most Nigerians to Japa. In 2013, an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) report ranked the country 80th out of 80 countries assessed in its Where-to-be-born-index.

    No thanks to the Economist’s sister publication, most Nigerian kids may mature knowing they had been born where the neurotic tick-tock of midnight silences the whispers of dawn.

    From birth through adulthood, each poor child glides down maturity like a greased pole to hell. The scriptural hell, we are told, shall be consequent at a future date: the judgement day.

    But here in Nigeria, we make our matches from mayhem and distil sulphur from sadness, ultimately to make our hell.

    Predictably, the EIU report inspired doomsday forecasts about the country; foremost columnists and newspapers penned damning editorials affirming the report. Child advocacy groups plotted to squeeze international donors of grants that would never get to their touted recipients.

    Amid the preachment and plots, a crucial voice died without recourse; the voice of the Nigerian child.

    If there has been any change since the EIU’s damning report, it is barely discernible. Warren Buffett, probably the world’s most successful investor, once said that anything good that happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country, the United States, at the right time (1930).

    Ten years ago, Nigeria ranked 80th out of 80 in the EIU ranking. What is the fate of the Nigerian newborn in 2023?

    To speak for the newborn and generations unborn, we must learn to speak ‘humane.’ We must evolve a national ethos and culture of citizenship to reinvent our country as a nation fit for every human segment, children in particular.

    For a start, Nigeria must stimulate growth in its education and health sectors.

    In June this year, President Bola Tinubu pledged that his administration would commit more resources to the education sector, promising that, every Nigerian child, regardless of his or her background, would have access to quality education. 

    Speaking while receiving representatives of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) at the State House, in Abuja, he said, “If we all believe that education is the greatest weapon against poverty, then we have to invest in it. If you eliminate poverty in one family, you can carry the rest of the weight. Poverty should not prevent anyone.”

    A 2022 UNICEF report states that Nigeria accounts for approximately 20.2 million out-of-school children, the second highest number of unschooled children globally after India. Tinubu’s promise to increase the education budget to 25 per cent of the national budget is thus commendable. But this budget, if truly implemented, must address issues of administrative corruption,  inadequate funding and infrastructure decay, brain drain, and incessant strikes by academic unions.

    On Tinubu’s watch, the education system must be re-envisioned to address the disparities that make education incompatible with job market realities. More importantly, a remedial education summit must be convened by the Federal Government where issues of impracticality and redundancy can be addressed; there, the curriculum must be reviewed and recalibrated as a Nigerian-centred syllabus driven to reflect global learning and cater to the immediate and envisioned realities of the country’s labour market and socioeconomic milieu.

    The Tinubu administration must also cater to the health needs of children, revamp healthcare services and institutionalise incentives for health workers, to arrest brain-drain within the health sector.

    A few months ago, the Special Adviser to the President on Health, Salma Anas, stated at a health summit in, Abuja, that President Tinubu has pledged to increase the annual health allocation to 10 per cent of the country’s total budget. 

    But a few days ago, the President of the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), Dr. Dele Abdullahi, urged Tinubu to allocate at least 15 per cent of the 2024 annual budget to the health sector.

    Abdullahi’s plea is worth consideration given the state of the sector; just 24,000 licensed physicians currently cater to the over 200 million population in the country. This negates the WHO minimum threshold that a country needs a mix of 23 doctors, nurses, and midwives per 10,000 population.

    Foreign Trade Statistics by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) also reveals that the country is heavily dependent on foreign drug manufacturers thus subjecting the citizenry to the machinations of the mercantile and much dreaded big pharma.

    Between the third and fourth quarter of 2021 alone, Nigeria imported anti-malarial drugs worth over N110 billion. This requires urgent reinvigoration of Nigeria’s local drug manufacturing capacity.

    Tinubu’s administration must also work with State governments to prioritise child protection by ensuring a comprehensive and enforceable legal framework and policies that safeguard children from all forms of exploitation and violence including child trafficking, sexual abuse, substance abuse and rehabilitating survivors.

    All these measures would be, however, inconsequential if Mr President fails to evolve and sustain an effective monitoring and evaluative mechanism to prevent sabotage.

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    It is never enough to allocate resources towards the implementation of a policy or programme, can Mr President guarantee the progressive buy-in of every member of his team?

    Does he possess the courage to defy human and structural elements of sabotage? President Tinubu must never shy from wielding the big stick and instituting punitive measures against persons, groups or institutions that may work against the realisation of the highlighted policy goals.

    To reinvent Nigeria, his administration, irrespective of its established and perceived shortcomings, must be inclined to rid the corridors of power of moral lesions, like avarice, selfishness and conceit.

    On Tinubu’s watch, we must quit being shameless and grand in disarray. We must redefine progressive consciousness to mean a lot more than cutthroat politics, political promiscuity, dubious programming and financial recklessness of the executive and legislative arms of government.

    Nigerians are caught in a perpetual cycle of disillusionment caused by successive administrations’ penchant for mortgaging their hopes and future, by diverting funding that may be used to stimulate and power development, to fund their reckless and selfish lust for bulletproof vehicles,  unjustifiable allowances, among other illicit perks.

    Previous administrations have shown that beneath their platitudinous chants, they never truly cared about Nigeria or the country’s future, our children.  

    Perhaps it’s because public office is obscenely lucrative at all levels of government. Some of the incumbent ministers and lawmakers, for instance, have amassed obscene wealth from their tenure as state governors; their wives and children live in an alternate reality, a gated Nirvana. Their kids don’t attend the same schools as our children. They don’t attend the same clinics as we do.

    President Bola Tinubu must appreciate his position for the wonderful opportunities it offers; beyond his hard-fought victory, the status quo provides a priceless opportunity to reconnect with broad segments of the electorate in realistic terms and convert them to ambassadors of the Nigerian enterprise.   

    Nigerians expect him to lay the foundation for the fortune he promised. They expect him to midwife national prosperity built “on a fast-growing industrial base capable of producing the most basic needs of the people and an export track to other countries of the world.”

    They expect him to deploy humane governance to resolve insecurity and socioeconomic crises.

    They expect him to rebuild Nigeria as the best nation to be born.

  • Hate is a polished tomb

    Hate is a polished tomb

    Hate seems like other people’s torment until it growls in you. Sometimes, it glowers in the eyes of a bigot and the scowl of a predator. Sometimes, it seethes in the quiet glances of their prey.

    These days, it shrieks in the rant of the Nigerian wild – our virtual wilderness to be precise. Here, we relive the infernal crud of frantic personae: the political animal, apolitical pacifist, hyperbolic ‘influencer,’ data-fabulous millennial, and the defiant Gen Z, scud to the shore of national consciousness on the world wide web – all hoisting tribal banners and interests. 

    Whatever the bent of their politics, they cuddle one prejudice and cringe from the other as their vanities dictate. Such is the tenor of political correctness that has seen many clash in defence and furtherance of random bigotries or a desperate demagogue. Journalists, activists, rights activists, and failed political aspirants afflict our social space like pitiless hooligans.

    They mistake lava for wit and molten banality for intellect. Their voices weigh like a thundercloud; whether debating celebrity scuffles or their political preferences, their passions sparkle and flit from fetid intelligence to brilliant witlessness.

    There is a cult of ignorance knifing through Nigeria right now, ripping all that should bind us apart – particularly in cyberspace. This cult thrives on anti-intellectualism and base sophistry – derogatorily dismissed as otellectualism in Yoruba parlance, to connote the presumed intellectual’s acquiescence to be corrupted by what the Yoruba term as ‘ote’ translatable as ‘perfidy’ or ‘treachery.’

    This strain of anti-intellectualism  rifles through our sociopolitical and cultural lives, nurtured by the false notion that the freedom of speech means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’ or that ‘my malevolence is just as good as your benevolence.’

    The malady manifests in cyberspace in real time. In this public space, everybody becomes a wilding, trading bitter realism, infantile whim, and pseudo-idealism with awful relish.

    The guts and sinews of every stereotype and theme-park hatred are validated via mind-numbing sloganeering, toxic bigotries, sophistry, and outright lies.

    A casual visit to Facebook or Twitter manifests as a pilgrimage; the esplanades of public discourse unfurl to a sordid, cutout version of anarchic thinking, replete with ethnoreligious bigotries and the hassle of incomprehensible logic. Then, there are the strange movements and morbid ideologies – all fostered and marshalled from bizarre platforms.

    In this public wilderness, everybody pontificates. Everyone mutates from philosopher to savage pawn and vice versa; they all speak impressive and atrocious lingo. Call it our patois of rebuke and immoderate assemblies.

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    En route to the 2023 elections, we encountered Nigerians of vast mental stripes in our social space: the BATIFIED, ATIKULATE, AND OBIDIENT. Once you get past the facade of slogans and artifice, it’s mostly the same defiant, virulent passion driving the mob.

    Even after the elections, the bickering persists. We see the savage mutations of the political Nigerian: persons of presumed higher learning, persons afflicted by poverty, persons of affluence, authority, and high glamour. The lambent complexion turns muddy. The aura vanishes. Integrity is innately borne and espoused as a kernel of character but respect is a gift under no one’s control. It peaks and ebbs as spectator mood at a crunch soccer tie.

    A familiar decline from admiration to disillusion, hope to disenchantment festers in the citizenry’s public engagement with one another and their elected representatives.

    Our greatest undoing, however, would be our inability to douse the flames of hatred incited by our bigotries and cutthroat politics; post-2023 election, our politics must be rid of rancour. There is no excuse for maligning an individual, group, or social divide for their political choices at the just concluded elections.

    Where such mayhem subsists,  everybody gets burnt: the ruling class, opposition parties, the entitled elite, and the wealthy upper class. At the bottom of the cauldron, however, roasts the incorrigible hordes of the boondocks, or ‘base’ electorate if you like.

    Through the inferno and chaos, we must seek a redefinition of the Nigerian patriot. We must learn from the chaos overseas. Again, I reiterate that Nigerians learn from the Afghan experience. In the wake of the United States-backed NATO’s sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan, Gaisu Yari, an Afghan refugee, now grantee of the Open Society Foundation (OSF), recalls his flight from his homeland as his darkest hour.

    As the U.S. and NATO commenced their hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, he had just four hours to pack up every personal item in his apartment. He had to decide, without wasting time, what to take and what to leave behind—knowing that he might never see anything left behind again.

    “One rule kept circling through my mind: Pack the life you have created here in Afghanistan into one suitcase and never forget the dreams of the people of this land,” he recalled.

    Thus in barely four gruesome hours, he anxiously stuffed a few belongings in his bag and parted with his life, his work, and everything that made him Afghan. In a pain-filled memoir, Yari revealed that he cried all through his perilous trip to the Kabul airport. He hadn’t enough time to say goodbye to loved ones.

    And as much he tried to conjure ways to plan, resist, and fight to stay in Afghanistan, with each passing moment, ”it became gut-wrenchingly evident that we had lost our chance,” he said.

    One year after his painful departure from his homeland, Yari relives the agony of his flight; he relives the pain of saying goodbye to his tearful mother on the roof of an old house, where he had been hiding from the Taliban for three days.

    He eventually evacuated to Poland, landing with his family in a refugee camp with scarce food or resources. Even so, Yari is luckier than fellow refugees and Afghans who fled to Poland, France, Canada, and the U.S. At least, he enjoys the momentary boon of an OSF grant thus he might not have to really worry anymore about the quality of his provisions, living space, and food supplies.

    Yet every day he rues the misery of refugee life, the pain of sudden flight, those stolen moments with his mom, and the aching feeling of being abandoned.

    Every new dawn he spends abroad lacerates him to the bones and leaves a thick welt on his psyche. He realises that he is living some of his “darkest days a year after leaving” his homeland.

    Would Nigerians learn from the sad fate of the Yaris of the world?  Yari and fellow Afghan refugees never imagined that their country ”could fall back into the hands of the Taliban—and that no one could save it.” 

    As they fled, many of them took with them, what they thought was important. “A prosecutor told Yari in his OSF-sponsored documentary, “Afghan Voices” that he brought his  knowledge and experience to the U.S. “But does that matter here in the United States? No,” he said. Quite instructive.

    And despite their initial patronage by the bleeding heart  Western press, Afghanistan has faded from global news headlines.

    As we heal from the 2023 elections, let us be guided by the Afghans’ experience. Nigerians must desist from rancorous engagement with each other.

    We must scorn chaos and poisonous interventions by aliens, whose major interest is to abolish our sovereignty, plunder our resources, and strip us bare to devious elements.

  • Between hope and false fruit of rebirth

    Between hope and false fruit of rebirth

    The political class farms and harvests Nigeria as if she were an oyster and public office, the pearls. From Olusegun Obasanjo, Goodluck Jonathan to Muhammadu Buhari, successive administrations  eventually yielded to plunder by forces possessing the corridors of power and perimeters of governance in general.

    Pundits contend that, like his predecessors, President Bola Tinubu may feign the pursuit of the public good in alignment with his gospel of ”Renewed Hope” for a while but he will eventually lose steam. 

    This writer doubts that. His professed patriotism may beget symbolic gestures that would augur well in the interest of all, in the long run, if he could truly steer Nigeria out of the doldrums of misgovernance.

    Yet pundits argue that his government is chock-full of the usual characters; they claim that the new faces in his team may become swarmed and subsequently drown in the seductive channel of sleaze.

    So doing, his government may keel over and freeze in the sprawl of the proverbial paper tiger; stripped of sentient teeth, it becomes symbolically castrated.

    Cynicism leads to sadism. Can folk be less cynical? Tinubu contends with his most provocative descent into the maelstrom of toxic politics and governance. At the moment, his ritualized personality totters through a labyrinth of odds as he is sucked into the maw of Nigeria’s subterranean nature; will his government truly serve as a vessel of Renewed Hope or will it loom like a titanic funnel with a frail voice, half shrieking, half roaring in dubious clamour?

    In previous dispensations, Nigeria’s leadership handled the country like a funeral economy, where the public officer was a slayer and pallbearer.

    Think of him as ‘His Excellency’ who refused to build good roads but scurries to accident scenes to mourn the dead.

    Think of him as a mass murderer, who embezzles security and health funding thus afflicting the country with lingering terrorism and rising maternal mortality.

    Think of him as a cold cook, the mortician who denied Nigeria a functional health system that he might exploit citizenry panic, and steal health funding, in the throes of a global pandemic, like the coronavirus.

    Think of him as a grim reaper. Apology to the honest, humane public officer, if he ever truly exists.

    As Nigeria reclaims her corpus from the claws of misgovernance and hardships imposed by the removal of fuel subsidy, fresh afflictions manifest in sick bloom thus presenting the dubious public officer and his billionaire associates in the private sector interminable prospects as patriots and saviours, rhetoricians and pallbearers.  

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    Nigerians stirred to a rude shock as members of the 10th National Assembly, despite the tough economic situation, jettisoned the recommendation of RMFAC and opted to buy luxury vehicles as operational vehicles for “legislative oversight,” a move that many Nigerians have described as insensitive.

    The Senate has, however, justified the decision to buy imported SUVs for lawmakers. Speaking to the press in Abuja on Tuesday, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Services, Sunday Karimi, dismissed criticisms, saying that ministers who ride about four official vehicles were not criticized.

    His remarks followed reports that the House of Representatives members were set to procure 360 luxury Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) valued at N57.6 billion. According to reports, each SUV would cost at least N160 million.

    These are the lawmakers that Nigerians expect to work with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to sanitise public governance, stabilise the economy, and revamp education, security and healthcare, among others.

    For public officers in the legislative chambers, inflation, terrorism, banditry, a comatose economy, and unemployment, aren’t contiguous vehicles of compassion. The executive probably fares no better, as hinted by Karimi.

    Their gestures of patriotism and love for the masses are dubious assertions of power, class and dominance. They affect no self-sacrifice, only refinements of self-love and domination.

    The pervasive inflation, insecurity, and cash crunch experienced by the populace post-fuel subsidy offers veritable opportunities for social re-engineering and remedial measures by the incumbent political class.

    President Tinubu must make social and economic palliatives work for every segment of society irrespective of gender, tribe or social class. Nigerians expect him to fulfil his pledge to review the federal budgetary culture, revamp national infrastructure, drive an import substitution agenda, reform the taxation system whereby the rich will pay more for what they consume, and lastly fight corruption, inefficiency and waste in government.

    Nigerians expect him to fulfil his pledge to manage inflation, renegotiate foreign debt obligations, and devise a national industrial plan that extends tax and other credit facilities, encourages domestic manufacturers and develops major and minor industrial hubs in all geopolitical zones.

    His palliatives must be relatable to the people’s needs thus negotiations to increase the minimum wage must be wrapped up and devised to serve the interest of the masses.  It wouldn’t hurt his administration to devise measures like affordable public transport fuelled with cheaper energy sources, among other incentives.

    “Let the poor breathe!” the masses chant across social media platforms; this new refrain has, over time, attained toxic undertones as a language of disenchantment and protest.

    Beneath the rage carelessly spun and hurled in social space, however, manifests positive suasion for peace and patience with the new government. A new league of patriots emerge through the womb wall of our travails, preaching forbearance despite the threat of grislier hardship.

    Against the backdrop of it all, the crows are circling. This minute, Nigeria’s “friends from abroad” intone basement giggle, like the proverbial ghommid plundering beneath our nation’s sandcastle. Tinubu must beware of the patronage of the ‘superpowers’ of the world. Perhaps he sees the chill beneath their smiles.  

    They have seen him reiterate his intent to make Africa the centrepiece of Nigeria’s foreign policy. They have heard him declare Nigeria’s focus on Africa as the fulcrum of its policies on economy and foreign policy. They have estimated the import of Nigeria’s commitment to successful integration and implementation of trade policies, security and border controls with her African neighbours.

    It would be naive of Mr President to believe they applaud all these. His government must brace its hide against a slew of brazen and subtle assaults on her interests at home and abroad.

    With the rise and growth of globalisation, the calculus and dynamics of colonial domination have assumed more subtle and treacherous forms; superpowers of the so-called “First World” have redesigned their conquest expeditions to suit the poetics and mathematics of their “enlightened self-interest.”

    To counter this meta-colonial complex, the federal government must partner with progressive social actors to reinvent our national narrative in the language of patriots and deeds of an exalted ethic. This is neither a call to stifle constructive criticism nor self-censorship. Rather it’s a call to decolonise the Nigerian mind and political space.

    It’s about time we stopped being fawning and defenceless before oppressive hierarchies. Nigeria must no longer incur debts of impotence and naivete in the global comity of nations.

    As Nigeria struggles to rebuild, we must also scorn Europe’s lure and bouquets of dubious advocacy. Think of the West as the proverbial paramour who comes offering the worm with the apple while inviting our private glances to her public pleasures.

    But while other nations may consume the worm with the apple, let Nigeria eyeball it as a false fruit of rebirth. We must be wary of her sullied patronage including her gift of gendered and sexuality freedoms.

  • Your child incarnal theatre

    Your child incarnal theatre

    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 subsequently leak the sex tape. She took her cue from the music diva who connived with her boyfriend to leak her sex tape and afterwards feign victimhood. Even bad news serves the celebrity junkie.

    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 rage, accusing a popular TikToker of plagiarism, or rather, performance theft of her sex video.

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    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. 

    She said, ”I only slept with a dog, I didn’t kill somebody. You, in your life, you have done worse, and besides, have you seen N1.7 million before? As if it’s a big deal. And mind you I’m not infected or anything. Stop dying on the matter, I’m enjoying the money,” she said.

    Scared by the resultant backlash, she recanted, claiming she was simply “cruising” (fooling around). Yet, the fact that she deemed such social harakiri status-enhancing depicts a new low for modern Nigeria and her dysfunctional family units.

    Through Veegoddess’ cocksure demeanour, her voice crashes through the social space like a broken scream, and a silent shriek creeps into her narrative. The impact is chilling.

    It resonates in Lagos sex vixen, Angela Jika’s carnal roar. Jika can “act anything.” She would submit to restraints and take a beating from a dominant male or dominatrix. She would feign a rapture by draping a slick, sultry mask on her face. For N50,000, she would spread out and make a flora bed for the studio.

    Money teases off her inhibitions. Hard drugs too. Now 23, she is a prominent feature in porn movies. Angela’s role models in the 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.

    It’s about time we all understood that neither words nor images accede to moral control. 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.

    If the participants were the children of sharers of the disturbing video, would they excitedly share it across social media platforms? 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.

    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 every time they sit with them to watch and obsess about the sordid show.

    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. 

    Despite its apparent dangers, porn addiction 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?

  • Beyond farce and fury

    Beyond farce and fury

    It is an ideal of dubious clerisy to make the tragic sense of things the touchstone of Nigerian politics. This desire to daub life dire has for a long while, defined the tide of political partisanship and the transience of hope as a national ideal.

    In the fracas of faith and fury, the negligible attains significance while the essential gets consigned to the fringes of awareness. Thus the primordial fascination of presumed intelligentsia and thought leaders with trifles at the expense of issues pivotal to national progress.

    The moral and ethical issues of misgovernance, predatory corporatism, treasury looting, self-serving legislation by lawmakers, anti-growth economic policies, insecurity and sky-rocketing inflation appear to be irrelevant in the arena of public discourse post-2023 elections.

    Every critic is obsessed with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s academic credentials. Demagogues have, once again, set the agenda for media coverage and public discourse. And the media characteristically fulfil its role as a junkyard dog, drooling all over the bone of contention.

    Media platforms have become a sounding board for all shades of bigotry and suspicious clerisy. The latter, by their antics, loom as marketers of illusion, skittish shamans channelling deceit to profit from confusion. Even while faced with incontrovertible truth, they see what they have been paid to see or what they have trained their minds to believe.

    All is fair in pursuit of power thus at their victory or defeat, politicians recruit all shades of characters to condemn their defeat or celebrate their victory.

    To such end, a few privileged idealists assume the role of courtiers; to validate power in unworthy hands, they create a pseudo-reality plausible enough to redefine truth and distort facts. It is instructive, for instance, that a good many of them are still egging on Labour Party’s ‘Obidients’ that Peter Obi is set to grab power through the trapdoor of the Supreme Court after failing to do this at the elections tribunal, even though he came a distant third to the winner of the February 25 election, President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

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    Outside the corridors of power, they plot pseudo-events and pretend to speak for the people. They claim to work for the country’s good but they are performers whose chief intent is to make money. Conflict is their treasure trove. Call them political profiteers or merchants of misery.

    In the corridors of power, they shamelessly parrot official propaganda, polluting public discourse with sycophancy, and doublespeak, among other behavioural toxins. 

    Government and corporations allow courtiers into their inner circles imbuing them with instant celebrity but as Saul points out, no class of courtiers, from the eunuchs behind Manchus in the 19th century to the Baghdad caliphs of the Abbasid caliphate, has ever transformed into a responsible and socially productive class.

    Courtiers are, ultimately, political degenerates. They are intellectual hooligans committing the violence of pretence against Nigeria and her people. When they claim to be pro-citizenry, they carry on like “political hobbyists,” often lending their ‘voices’ to front-burner issues, and sponsoring hashtags to attain clout.

    There is little difference between them and the proverbial fawning page, who plays smooth flatterer and thug to both the government and citizenry-herd, twisting and turning with changing circumstances.

    They are deucedly reactive, a spectacle of submission and ideological sodomy, their words and deeds boom as a cloying mime of irate mobs, corrupt politicians, and corporations’ reprobate wiles.

    Eitan Hersh, Associate professor of political science at Tufts University identifies courtiers as “political hobbyists,” and highlights their perfect contrast in the person and politics of Querys Martias. The Dominican immigrant in Haverhill, United States, presents a rare exemplar of supposedly educated eggheads.

    For Matias, politics isn’t just a hobby. In her day job, she is a bus monitor for a special-needs school. In her evenings, she amasses power. By leading a group called the Latino Coalition (LC) in Haverhill, she unites the Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Central Americans who together make up about 20 per cent of Haverhill. The coalition gets out the vote during elections, but it does much more than that, notes Hersh.

    The coalition once met with the Haverhill representative in Congress and asked for regular, Spanish-speaking office hours for its community. It advocates for immigration reform and federal assistance in affordable housing. The coalition has also met with the mayor, the school superintendent, and the police department requesting more Latinos in city jobs and on city boards.

    Matias’ political participation is strategic; the 65-year-old influences governance to the benefit of her community. Under her leadership, the coalition operates with discipline, combining electoral strategies with policy advocacy under her leadership.

    Unlike Matias, Nigeria’s college-educated intellectuals personify Hersh’s political hobbyist stereotype. They are disproportionately educated, flaunting several awards, titles, and postgraduate degrees.

    They espouse politics of the soapbox; a wanton game in which they debate Nigeria’s big issues on abstract merits – often mouthing off their “superior” logic or sounding off for clout in social space, at events sponsored by meddlesome foreign consulates or on government-sponsored think tanks.

    Their assemblage thrives on pseudo-realism, their ability to propound and market spurious experiences. In reality, they are toxic to politics and harmful to the country. 

    Nigeria would do better if her eggheads redirected political energy to serve the people. For instance, they could start at the grassroots, where government presence is non-existent. 

    To re-establish relevance and repair integrity, Nigeria’s idealists, revolutionary heroes, youth leaders, or whatever other labels they answer to, must detach from ideological voyeurism and fault-finding – a tactic of assault and defence that eventually becomes their nemesis and tomb.

    They must seek to empower people. For so long, they have united to market cunning and rhetoric, for and against selfish segments of the political class; it’s about time they united in the electorate’s interest.

    Grassroots politics thrives on empowerment; helping imperilled peasant farming communities defeat desert encroachment, insecurity, and flooding; improving fringe communities’ access to health care, electricity, and good roads, and provision of soft loans to unemployed youths, SMEs, and agricultural start-ups.

    These could be achieved by influencing real political power. The political intelligentsia seeks collaboration in modest and large organisations to meet the immediate and long-term needs of the people. Then, when an election dawns, the community would show up. Call it dividends of their investment in the people’s emotional bank account.

    Some would call it strategic citizenship. It’s pragmatic, humane, and real politics. It’s the kind of engagement that public intellectuals must perform to give substance to their professed clout.

    And it’s precisely the kind of politicking that helps the electorate shun the tokens and humiliating food packs, often handed out by the political class in exchange for their votes, at election time.

    If we humanely engage with the people, we might attain noble repute with the grassroots and the grudging respect of the political class. We might assume a prideful place in the pantheon of Nigeria’s finest patriots and statesmen.

    True, fancy repute and ghostly online clout may earn us money in the short run but we shall lose it all in the long run to the same system that taught us to be soulless hobbyists.

    We have used fiery intellect and the soapbox as mirrors to reflect society’s hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice.

    It’s about time we walked our talk in the interest of Nigeria and the populace

  • Nigeria’s worst pandemic (1)

    Nigeria’s worst pandemic (1)

    This minute, Nigeria unfurls to a viral disease. It’s a psychological and social pandemic. And it afflicts both young and old, male and female, engendering disaster of vastly different stripes.

    The young, however, are more vulnerable to its scourge thus their enthrallment as spectators and tools for the proliferation of our social prejudicial complex.

    Societal foundries of thought including the academia, religious institutions, and the economic and political intelligentsia, are burdened by the yoke of prejudice fostered by political and religious demagogues, confused liberals, and partisan social institutions – all thriving by the participation of a fierce and furious youth mob.

    The ruckus of selective outrage and anti-Nigeria sentimentality championed by the young have become worrisome. But if these youths seem incorrigible and hopeless, it’s because they are consequences of bad parenting, casualties of the complete collapse of the family as a social unit.

    An older friend of mine argued that it’s her generation, the Baby Boomers, that started the malaise. “Our parents raised us well and disciplined us appropriately. But our generation decided to spoil our children. We condoned too much misconduct,” she said.

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    Her generation, she argued, suffered the boomerang effect; because many of them thought that their parents were too strict, they compensated by becoming “too accommodating” and “less stern” with their own children.

    The Baby Boomers, however, aren’t solely to blame. Subsequent generations of parents courted impotence by skirting around the contentious issue of discipline in raising a child. Tomes have been written about modern parenthood; modern sociologists, marriage counsellors, and child psychologists have promoted weird and tame techniques of parenthood, urging parents to experiment with ideas from the so-called developed but debauched societies of the “First World.”

    What they advocate in their books and podcasts, however, is hardly child nurturing. It’s akin to animal grooming; that is, rearing a child, like livestock or an expensive pet.  

    The lack of child discipline is a consequence of parents’ obsession with ego, among other social malaise. Damaged parents raise damaged children. Thus self-centred parents imagine that their kids are the centre of the world and incapable of wrongdoing; that was the general Baby Boomer attitude toward their own kids. And subsequent generations, like the Millennials, internalised and perpetuated this defective culture of parentage.

    This is not to dismiss the efforts of those parents who painstakingly nurtured and disciplined their wards, imparting in them highly sought moral values.

    As a child, my parents never harassed my teachers for disciplining me when I did something wrong. No sensible parent would do that except in rare circumstances of extreme abuse. Cut to contemporary society and life gets turned on its head. Parents jostle to enrol their wards in schools where they are taught to feign a foreign accent at the expense of cultured grooming and discipline. Thus the preponderance of schools coaching minors to speak in British and American accents while our native language is dismissed as backward vernacular. On the flip side, indigent families haul their wards to school to learn skills required to function as systems managers in our highly dysfunctional and corrupted social system.

    Lest we forget those parents who force their children – even when they evidently lack the interest or capacities – into medical or nursing school, in preparation for future job hunting in the United Kingdom, the United States or Canada. Everybody wants their kids to be doctors or nurses abroad.

    Some, however, encourage their children to settle for less endearing jobs as public toilet attendants, janitors, street sweepers, sewage cleaners, mall attendants and so on.

    A disdain for their homeland fosters the burgeoning brain drain afflicting the country. Thus whatever the class of their degrees and professional competence, an increasing number of Nigerians are raising their children to romanticise life as menial workers abroad as their passport to the good life.

    This mentality of parenting has so far produced in the country, a generation of citizenry afflicted with toxic personae; their lives are complicated and fraught with low self-esteem and an abiding disdain for their homeland. They care only about themselves and think that the world revolves around them.

    They despise their country because they have been taught to do so by their parents, their schools and worship houses.

    Thus the increasing number of youths – including the professional working class and unemployed – mounting the pulpit in the various worship houses, to celebrate their visas to travel or relocate abroad at “testimony” time.

    A Nigerian medical doctor who has been doing menial jobs in Canada disclosed, recently, that he had a fantastic practice back home in Nigeria. He said he had a thriving hospital, four cars; a personal driver, and two wings of duplex – one served as his family home while he leased out the other wing.

    Yet he “relocated to the UK for the sake of the children.” Things got tough in the UK as his “wife and children weren’t feeling the country.” So, he moved them all to Canada. “I did it for the sake of the children,” he said.

    No one should begrudge him for doing what he considers best for his family. But he has been doing menial jobs for about five years now, two years as an ambulance driver in London and three years now as a store attendant in Ontario because the Canadian medical authorities have refused to validate his credentials.

    Already, he has burned through his savings from the sale of his property before his relocation abroad. Occasionally, he mulls relocating back to Nigeria, but he lacks the courage to come back and start from scratch.

    According to him, he was a “giver” and a “very successful doctor” who consulted for government hospitals before he migrated abroad. He dreads returning to the country to restart as an underling or underpaid consultant to doctors who once looked up to him.

    He hasn’t practised for over five years and this may be used to devalue his competence and suitability for employment back home in Nigeria, he said. That is actually the least of his worries. In time, his children will outgrow his paternal authority and challenge it. They will grow disaffected with his sacrifice and would most likely tell him, “Nobody asked you to do all that, Daddy.” If he gets lucky, he won’t get kicked out of his own home.

    Back home in Nigeria, he deemed each day rewarding because of the volume and quality of patient traffic in his private clinic. More patients and consultancies translate to a lucrative practice. These days, success subsists in getting through each day without losing his spot to a younger and more agile immigrant. Forget the challenges at work, his greatest challenge subsists in surviving domestication by his wife even as he struggles as a beast of burden to his entire family.

    Again, no one should begrudge him for seeking a better life for his children; even if his family of seven must squeeze into a two-bedroom apartment ridiculously tinier and inferior to his luxurious mansion back home. He only took his best decision towards the attainment of the best living conditions and opportunities for his children

    Let’s hope his children aren’t blind to his sacrifice. They know the certainties and luxuries he had to forgo in order to relocate them abroad. They see his reduction from a medical doctor and a high-value man into a menial worker and just another immigrant scum hustling in the structured societal jail cells of Canada.