Category: Olatunji Ololade

The protracted fuel and naira scarcity furnish a panoptic of Nigeria’s political succession wars. It’s a blood feud taken to the extreme. Some would call it a perfidious game of thrones, a despairing caucus’ last hurrah against the hurricane that would consume them.

In a recent interview, Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, said some non-state actors would prefer an interim government as an outcome of the ongoing political transition. El Rufai characterised the culprits as elements whose conduct is consistent with plans to subvert a civilian-to-civilian transition after the next presidential election.

“What is happening is that there are people around the president that had their presidential candidates. They had two candidates that they preferred to succeed Buhari – Godwin Emefiele from the South and Ahmad Lawan from the north – and they got neither.”

To their chagrin, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu (BAT), two-time Lagos governor, emerged as victor at the All Progressives Congress (APC)’ presidential primaries.

Consequently, “It turned out that some of the wildest stories of conspiracy to derail the transition at best for APC to lose, preferably for the whole system to result in no election leading to an interim arrangement began to rear their heads,” said El Rufai.

And what better way to incite chaos than to contrive fuel shortage and naira scarcity? The major victims, comprising the working class, rural dwellers, unemployed and large swathes of the impoverished, are subjected to sustained hardship allegedly because some political actors dread the possibility of Tinubu’s victory at this month’s presidential polls.

They fear that he would entrench true federalism. They fear that he would immortalise his name in gold via humane and astute governance. They fear he would raise a new breed of young, patriotic, visionary leaders. They fear that he would change the class and culture of political patronage. They fear he would attain peerless repute by achieving what none of them could achieve all through their dalliance with power.

At the underbelly of their plot is avarice. Greed, wielded by these enemies of Nigeria, manifests in their sacrilegious scarring of the country’s fertile womb to protect their ill-acquired wealth.

There is no gainsaying Nigeria’s rape cycle is rooted in its cutthroat politics, surpassed only by the citizenry’s penchant for malice and sculpting of spite into an oratory, in praise of their oppressors.

The possibility of watching the ongoing crisis snowball into unimaginable proportions is scary. Thus the governments of Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara states resort to judicial intervention via the Supreme Court before the citizenry turns against each other and everyone.

The governors’ intervention, however, translates to a sterile reprieve as the Federal Government and CBN flagrantly flout the Supreme Court’s February 8 order of interim injunction, restraining both the commercial banks from suspending or ending on February 10, the usage and circulation of now older versions of the N200, N500, and N1000 denominations as legal tender, pending the hearing and determination of the plaintiffs/applicants’ motion on notice for interlocutory injunction.

The Supreme Court, on Wednesday, February 15, reasserted the ruling following a complaint by the lawyer to Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara states, Abdulhakeem Mustapha (SAN), that the Fed Govt and its agencies have failed to comply with the order and have allegedly directed the rejection of the old notes.

Consequently, the local economy and citizenry suffer unimaginable hardships. Amidst expectations that President Muhammadu Buhari would resolve the matter in seven days as he promised in the wake of the crisis, CBN governor, Emefiele, has admitted that the apex bank does not have the capacity to print adequate new naira notes.

Even so, he insisted that there was no need to shift the deadline despite a Supreme Court last week ordering the Federal Government and CBN not to enforce the deadline.

Pundits are having a hard time intellectualising why Emefiele and the Federal Government felt the need to rush the implementation of the new naira policy and invalidate the now older notes.

His insistence that there was no need to shift the deadline despite the Supreme Court’s order to the contrary, resonates ominously; it’s somewhat imperious, a caper of fiendish conceit and bursting insolence against the rule of law.

Predictably, several politicians, the media, and civil societies sympathetic to the plot attempt to intellectualise the grisly motif. Yet there is no excuse for hardships imposed on Nigerians via a policy borne of gall and executed in malice. There is equally no justification for the surges of aggression birthed by the new naira policy.

The ongoing exploitation of Nigeria’s underprivileged divide unfurls like a Darwinian spectacle favouring fangs and claw over fur, a pratfall of predatory structures and agents of the State. The CBN and commercial banks, purportedly working to assert the whims of puppeteers tugging at the strings of all actors in the crisis, have mopped up trillions of cash only to dole paltry sums back into the system, thus creating an avoidable naira scarcity and impoverishing defenseless masses.

Commercial banks have virtually shut down operations, refusing the old naira while denying impoverished citizenry access to the new notes; and while the citizenry laments their fate with the banks, the neighbourhood POS operators subject them to a greater ordeal by charging exorbitant fees on every withdrawal they make.

The informal economies of the suburbs and metro business hubs consequently suffer massive contractions, due to the CBN’s stifling of the cash flow required to drive and sustain them.

For the umpteenth time, Nigerians witness a grotesque politicisation and perversion of the CBN and commercial banking operations. Against the backdrop of these realities, the citizenry (curiously in southern Nigeria alone) engages in heated protests, leading to avoidable deaths and imperilment of the country’s fragile peace.

Lest we forget the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)’s recent lament that if nothing is done to address the cash crunch caused by the CBN policy, INEC would find it difficult to deploy staff and materials for a successful election.

There seems to be a deliberate attempt to incite the citizenry to mayhem and prevent a peaceful transition from this civilian government to another. It’s about time Nigerians neutered the blooming anarchy; all stakeholders – every Nigerian inclusive – must cooperate to prevent a situation where the country implodes; where state power, lusted after by brigands, is defiled and entangled in a heap of corpses.

In the intense struggle for presidential power, national ethics gets assailed by pagan instinct. Yet Nigerians must begin to ask some crucial questions: Why are supposedly rival candidates in sudden cahoots to endorse the CBN’s ill-timed policy? Why is the CBN governor on a feverish quest to implement the policy amid dire circumstances? And why is Tinubu the only candidate speaking for the people?

 The enforced naira and fuel scarcity highlight the manifestation of oligarchic power in its crudest form, the subjugation of popular will by aggression. The resultant violence becomes both medium and motif by which frantic oligarchs, or the cabal if you like, sustain their choke-hold on political power and perpetuate the enslavement of the Nigerian populace.

 In one of the viral videos showing violent protests in Edo, a spectator laments that there was no need for the mob to destroy a bank building. “Our people don’t know. Dem wan take style cancel the elections,” he noted. More reason for Nigerians to persevere regardless of the miseries contrived against them.

It’s just a few days to the general elections. Nigeria must survive the plots of infernal groups and actors.

En route to the general elections, the charge persists that the race is dominated by controversial characters. Several pundits dismiss the political class as corrupt and attack the system that sustains them. But how did such a system manifest? From where do politicians emerge?

They aren’t from outer space. They didn’t fall from the clouds. Neither did they manifest through the membrane of an alternate reality. Rather they are sired by Nigerian families. They are produced from society’s cultured and corrupted loins. They are groomed by our schools, prisons, worship houses, and traditional institutions.

They are our fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, grannies, sons, daughters, concubines, and benefactors. They are a perfect reflection of the Nigerian family – a spitting manifestation of our clandestine quirks and professed values.

Among the contenders for the various public offices, some incumbents have boasted that they would turn scorched earth to gold even though all they did in their first term was pound the precious metal to dross. Some promised to turn the underdog into an overlord, but all they did was make street sweepers of the strapping, and sewage cleaners of the literate in the cold, harsh bowels of the diaspora.

More youth get by in the shadowy political economy as goons, assassins, mercenary protesters, and internet hooligans. Those who fall outside the bracket of patronage end up as armed robbers, kidnappers, drug mules, and human traffickers.

Yet en route to the 2023 elections, some presidential aspirants have presented their manhood in flight. Flaunting a juvenile skittishness, they leapfrog from mood to mood, from cloying fib to the ugliest lie, seeking to enchant gullible galleries.

Others have flaunted the privilege of incumbency, frantically playing to more sterile herds. However, the leader Nigeria needs must be visionary, pragmatic, brilliant, and unflinchingly humane.

He must flaunt a brilliant track record, glowing and fruitful, like a blooming orchard. He is a true patriot, the type that wears altruism on his heart’s sleeves. Demagogues promise glory without sweat, success without sudor, and get significant segments of the citizenry, mostly youth, hung up on the fantasy of a world without hardship. That is not the kind of leader that we need.

If there is a cautionary tale in Nigerian politics, it is the tension between the politician and the voter. Both schemers, their hostility echoes the proverbial race between the fox and tortoise. The fox, for all its brawn and trickery, meets his match in the tortoise, whose cunning eventually wins the race. Thus goes the ethically-correct narrative.

The fable, however, dissembles in the Nigerian wild. Ultimately, it manifests in reverse: picture the politician as the fox, the electorate as the tortoise, and the political arena as the wild. The fox beats the tortoise silly thus winning the race time and over again.

At the forthcoming general elections, the foxes will carry the day. It’s a given. The race had always been rigged in the interest of the foxes. Thus Nigeria reels at the borderline between a republic and captured empire. The electorate’s bent, however, will determine if the country would re-emerge as a republic of free, fortunate people.

We need a victor capable of seizing upon his victory to humanely reconstruct the power equation, redistribute social privileges, and reinvigorate civil societies, and dormant economies. 

The public healthcare system, for instance, must be overhauled with better social safety nets and driven to earn foreign exchange. And this can never be achieved by gifting a frantic bigot or lying demagogue the presidential seat.

Something’s got to give. Renaissance hierarchies are dramatized in the noisy climax of gladiator politics. The average voter must re-emerge decisively as the political personae of a renaissance Nigeria, at this year’s general elections.

He must re-emerge as the cultured hero and worker of marvels: the farmer, painter, plumber, sculptor, street trader, student, unemployed graduate, and manual labourer must reprise their roles as fearless change-makers, irreconcilable to visions of them as pawns and inferior social elements.

In the ongoing duel with hardships triggered by misgovernance and accentuated by the coronavirus pandemic, the ultimate purpose of families, states, and nations, is to breathe. It’s a sublime irony: man labours to breathe in an atmosphere corrupted by his labour for material wealth.

To survive at a time like this, the Nigerian voter must quit participating in heavily choreographed elections, in which the demands of corporations, individuals, and banks are paramount.

He must vie to tilt power in Nigeria’s interest. It’s time to take back what’s ours. Yet slogans and scathing bromides are hardly the way to go in reclaiming Nigeria’s soul from the fangs and talons of a raptorial political class.

A new class of political leadership must emerge to assert the mental and moral freedom of the citizenry by communicating in a language comprehensible to the common man.

As we approach the general elections, we intensify our bid to sensitize our graduates and undergrads, street urchins, traders, commercial transporters, armed forces, and the unemployed, to scorn vote seekers who only visit the electorate to share roasted yam and ponmo (cowhide) at the dawn of general elections.

Teach them to scorn leaders that commit crumbs of their constituency allowances to empower the citizenry with wheelbarrows, machetes, sachet water, and pepper grinding machines, among others.

It’s about time we ended the charade and elect leadership uninclined towards misgovernance and pilferage of federal, state, and local government treasuries.

Nigeria must elect men and women incapable of stealing money meant to build schools, and hospitals, and rehabilitate crucial infrastructure into their private accounts at home and abroad.

Our resistance to predatory leadership would, however, be impossible if large segments of the electorate continue to scoff at progressive consciousness at ballot time.

Against the backdrop of this, we face a far more difficult problem: Nigeria’s affliction by an electorate nurtured on bigotries and savage materialism. Voters emerging from two societal extremes: the haves and have-nots, coalesce in ghastly pursuits inimical to the Nigeria project.

How do we counsel the masses to be prudent, honest, and just in their dealings? How do we teach them that toxic politics requires extreme sacrifice and that the bigot, in fulfilling his role as a virulent, gelded being, must silence his mind?

How do we reconcile politicians to the belief that politics should never be about accumulating obscene, illegitimate wealth to show off, but about the passion to live life more fully and engage more expansively, in the progressive possibilities of human existence?

As we approach the polls, the appalling recklessness by which some candidates propose, justify, and project “government with a human face” must be scrutinised and measured through the looking glass of their antecedents in public office.

Who knows? We may discover, in the nick of time, that the hallmark of our preferred candidate’s humanitarian disposition is the advocacy of some limitless, grand-scale public goal or initiative without regard to context, cost, or the means of achieving it.

For such a goal or initiative to be desirable to all, it has to be made public and glamorised because the costs are not to be earned but to be expropriated, and a dense patch of venomous fog has to enshroud such vital issues as the means of achieving it.

This is because the means could be human lives. Human lives like yours and mine: battered, bruised, browbeaten, easy to fleece.

En route to the February polls, Nigeria flails to impassioned hope and jarring cynicism of political actors. Politics stews to a scalding broth as rival parties, posing as patriots, split private terraces and public courts in vulgar gladiatorship. They do 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 political and 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? Nothing worth celebrating perhaps. 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 vituperation via mainstream and new media. Everybody is a sucker for its perceived benefits.

But the West must never be blamed for our collective ignorance – the United States in particular. 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.

We must understand, however, that Western democracy and foreign policy, while deliberately presented as two tines on the same fork, are sustained by oft-deceptive ideals and contradictory precepts of influence, crudely wedged into the nuclear powers’ global dominance stratagem. It is imperial politics without heart: ideologically deficit, dangerously manipulative, and Janus-faced.

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.

The Japanese, Chinese, Bhutanese, Arabians, Europeans, Americans, Ghanaians, Rwandans, to mention a few, all have different aspects of their governance traditions and cultures that are worthy of emulation but not until we sieve and winnow them to make their preferred aspects amenable to our politics, economy and socio-cultural institutions. We must always remember that the Libyans, Afghans to mention a few, wildly embraced a dandy dream of freedom, but instead, they got trapped in a sinister nightmare. To date, they are paying dearly for it.

Back home, it’s even scarier to note that our arts and literature have become very 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, for instance, 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.

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 had 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, more than 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.

On television, over 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005, from Flight 93 to Ice Road Truckers to Army Wives. The inclusion of individual episodes for shows with a cult following, like Homeland, 24, and NCIS, as well as the established influence of the White House and FBI, further establishes that the American government methodically supports thousands of hours of entertainment.

Aside from the profitable impact on the US entertainment sector, the entertainment partnership and offerings are oft 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.

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 and his Mainframe Studios, 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 innate demons of toxic sexuality, ethnic intolerance, religious bigotry, virulent feminism, and sexist rage.

It’s about time the government partnered with the arts sector to reinvent the Nigerian story while channeling 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.

Humanity thrives as political theatre. And Nigeria offers one big stage on which we are entertained, informed, and misinformed. 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 various forms of rights activists, their presence and machinations are inimical to nationhood, individuality, and self-growth, ultimately because they are deployed as weapons of programming.

This may no doubt resonate as far-fetched to individuals and groups profiting from the status quo, especially the press and civil societies.

Yet for a people programmed for conquest, Nigerians carry on with unabashed ignorance and arrogance. Arrogance is pitiable. Ignorance is expensive and quite scary.

But Nigeria carries 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 whim, and facts are manufactured, acknowledged, and disputed to suit 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 Boko Haram or armed bandits’ resonant creed of violence and wanton genocide among brainwashed minors 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 the country’s 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 prepares for the February 2023 polls, a wave of validation and reproof of the incumbent political class and the opposition seeking to dislodge it has produced a supercharged atmosphere of warring critics and apologists.

Of the latter, the majority parade flawed presence because they have no real persona and moral substance. Yet en route to the February 2023 polls, Nigeria suffers its storm of spunk and slogans. Several media houses and journalists have pitched their tents with certain candidates, but at what cost? More news media and civil society groups parrot the official propaganda of foreign governments, consulates, and so-called non-profits pushing “enlightened self-interest” in the guise of transparency and as impartial observers.

The participation of large segments of the press and civil society is 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 en route to the February polls. How do we determine real and funded patriotism? Are Nigerians inured to the precepts of political participation astride the politics of reality and memory?

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

Hussein Bulhan addresses this anomaly in his treatise on metacolonialism as the latest modification and presentation of colonialism in the more savory euphemism of globalization – which enlarges the distortion of events in memory because written history is mostly about the valor and benevolence of the European coloniser.

The media, many of whom, are aligned to the doctored history of the presumed sophistication and unassailable humanity cum god complex of Nigeria’s colonizer(s), continue to propagate the imperial agenda to a society unmoored from its roots.

Students continue to learn this history in schools, literature and libraries preserve it, norms and statutes freeze it in time and place, and the media disseminate it. In short, our material world exudes, reflects, and perpetuates the reality of our coloniser.

The narrative valorises the coloniser and morphs into a potent weapon of subjugation while it invalidates and vilifies much about the colonised, including their culture, their epistemology, their ontology—indeed their very existence as human beings.

In reality, Nigeria is seen to exist to fulfill the needs and convenience of its modern colonisers. Consequently, the media and cultural agencies of imperialism become prime weaponry in the designs of the colonisers; the traditional press and new media, established and aspiring writers, musicians, actors, actresses, movie producers, social and humanitarian workers, healthworkers, NGOs, the academia and religious institutions, to mention a few, are often “empowered” and deployed as self-discerning social actors by the colonisers but in truth, they are expendable tools used to further the hegemonic plans (enlightened self interests) of Nigeria’s colonisers.

A citizenry shackled to such stricture is forever susceptible to subtle and pronounced capture. They are unquestioning, passive, and weak before the colossal might and influence of their colonisers. This is the Nigerian predicament.

A flawed persona, lack of pride, and moral substance have rid too many self-confessed patriots of grit and foresight. Consequently, they play court sycophant and pawn to foreign governments, financial lenders, rights groups, and non-profits with shady intent; they equally serve as tools to the local political class and the youthful, virulent herd.

They are pliable and servile, through political dispensations and conflict situations, projecting with slavish plasticity conflicting interests. Their identities are self-evacuated as they persistently open themselves like a glove to the political palm. Hence they serve as a medium of wheedling and imposition of pathologic rites and culture to the detriment of their own civilization. Ultimately, they elevate belly and bum over fealty and forelock in a flagrant rite of political intercourse.

En route to the February elections, the media must seek more altruistic means of participation alongside other actors. Journalists must seize the moment offered by the ongoing transition to regroup and recommit to a viable media practice, founded on humane principles of professionalism, nationhood, citizenship, and nativism.

To achieve this, we must purge ourselves of inclinations to redefine our reality according to foreign interests: digital satellite television channels, foreign consulates, arts, literature, and humanitarian agencies’ plots to stifle Nigerianness or redefine it in tune with obscure, pathologic civilisations from abroad must be resisted henceforth.

The story of the colonised often remains untold due to censorship and social amnesia enforced in crude or subtle ways, notes Bulhan. It’s about time Nigerians penned their own stories, not as the alternative stories, but as the unimpeachable, national narrative.

The local media must quit winnowing out our reality to reject all that some foreign actors deem too radical or proof of idiosyncratic compulsion to challenge their dominance or excavate a long-forgotten past too uncomfortable to recall.

It’s about time the media espoused progress relatable to the Nigerian reality. To what end are finely crafted homilies and treatises on the youths’ newfound political awareness if they won’t inspire the youths to participate creditably and constructively in the political process?

It is never enough to parrot some foreign consulates and non-profits’ fosterage of Gen-Z’s virulent politics and their disregard for historical context, what are the likely consequences of such toxic partisanship?

Progressive citizenship requires more evolved and purposeful engagement in politics than wanton theorising and spouting on barrel heads to be seen.

If there is another storm that Nigeria should be worried about, it’s the conduct of buccaneer newsmen and women. The latter, comprising fortune-hunting men and women, soullessly maul journalism into an appendage of terrorism.

There are too many clowns pretending to be leader writers, investigative journalists, and opinion moulders. In the end, their conduct manifests like a perversion of Keats’s doctrine of the heart as “the teat from which the mind or intelligence sucks its identity.”

The media may be taken for Nigeria’s heart – Nigeria’s conscience to be precise. Yet several online and traditional media run the risk of functioning as tools of toxic imperialism for foreign press and so-called global superpowers. In several ways, the former (Nigerian press) validates the latter’s (foreign press, super powers) presumed hierarchic authority.

A few news media endeavour to fulfill the role of the transient ethicist by paying lip service to journalistic objectivity and professionalism. But all they do is merely illustrate a pitiful embowered passivity.

In a grisly mannerist metaphor, most journalists’ self-professed perspicacity protrudes from their frames like cruelly twisted lips – curled serpents, disconnected from their souls. The serpent lips are forever attacking society’s breasts with the presumed intent to nibble and feed. Nigeria is the doomed Cleopatra giving suck to their asps.

Few Nigerians clearly understand the magnitude of doom imminent upon the country. The cult of ignorance persists, knifing through Nigeria right now, ripping all that should bind us apart – both in physical and cyberspace.

This cult thrives on self-loathing, 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 and self-loathing blows like a constant storm, rifling through our sociopolitical and cultural lives, nurtured by the false notion that 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 is broadcast and sustained by the traditional and online press, it manifests in physical and cyberspace in real time. In these public spaces, 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 of sorts; 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 marshaled from bizarre platforms. In this public wilderness, everybody takes sides, “investigative journalists” and “leader writers” inclusive. 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. Here you encounter Nigerians of vast mental stripes. 

Once you get past the facade of slogans and artifice, it’s mostly the same defiant, virulent passion driving the mob. And it is all brokered from within and outside the country. More is the pity.

Shady media offer their platforms for dark propaganda and disinformation. Where journalists are driven by supposedly noble intent, they are too blinded by personal bias, ignorance, devilry, and greed to submit their practice to the stirrings of professed noble intent.

As Nigeria approaches the forthcoming elections and its promise of a new dispensation, journalists and the news media must unite to provide ethical and patriotic guidance. The overall intent must be to salvage Nigeria.

It might seem a hard task amid dire predictions of doom propagated by foreign press and consulates, as often directed by their governments and security handlers, but the onus rests on the Nigerian press to decolonise local news and editorials of negative foreign influence.

Much of Nigeria’s contemporary history is partly mythology, partly a product of selective recall, and partly interpretation of what transpired. What is recorded, however, is seldom that which actually took place – as exemplified by the doctored reports of the #EndSARS 2020 conflict, for instance. No thanks to media bias and the devilry of several other agents of destruction.

The conflict, like most disturbances of its nature, underwent different recall, interpretation, and retelling by the major actors and spectators – people who experienced it and people who heard about what had transpired.

The narratives of participants in the crisis, like those of most other participants of previous historical events, differ in the rendition of what actually took place.

History is in the telling. Thus each generation modifies actuality into written history according to its needs and interpretation, building on selective recall and distortion.

Having dodged the bloody missiles of the #EndSARS protest, the enemies of Nigeria moved to quash the dreams of nationhood and survival by fanning the embers of several other crises.

The nature of disinformation and outright lies fabricated about the goings-on in northeast Nigeria by certain international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in connivance with foreign press further affirms their destructive intent in the country.

A spurious report on alleged forced abortions and killings of children of Boko Haram insurgents after they were reportedly grabbed from their mothers by the Nigerian army, resonates with unpardonable craftiness and intent to destabilise the region and Nigeria, in the long run.

It is to the country’s credit, however, that the local press has approached the poisonous and serialised narratives with caution.

Against the backdrop of the incident, INGOs in the country are working dark elements within certain foreign consulates in Lagos and Abuja and their home countries (whose agenda they are implementing) to report the Nigerian government and military service chiefs as war criminals to an international court. The intent is to blacklist Nigeria and further truncate the country’s war against terrorism.

Another curious angle to the plot against Nigeria manifested in the cheeky account of a so-called “humanitarian” agent and friend when she told me recently in Maiduguri that her country, a purported “superpower,” would influence the removal of the blockade preventing Nigeria from purchasing the weaponry needed to crush terrorism if the country repeals its law criminalising same-sex marriage.

To them, human lives are worthless compared to a minority’s sexual inclinations. They do not consider it sheer wickedness to deny Nigeria access to weapons needed to fight terrorism simply because it asserts its inviolable right to ban same-sex marriage.

More reason for Nigeria to re-examine its engagement with certain “superpowers” and their “humanitarian” agents vis-a-vis its distaste for such an agenda. Instances like this, among others, require local journalists and the Nigerian press in general, to be more critical of Nigeria’s engagement with foreign interests, and the quality, and nature of the latter’s interventions in the country.

Vast segments of Nigeria’s press personify Hersh’s political hobbyist stereotype. They are disproportionately educated and may flaunt several merit awards, titles, and postgraduate degrees.

They espouse professionalism 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 or on foreign-sponsored think tanks and ‘Twitter spaces.’

Their assemblage thrives on pseudo-realism; their ability to doctor, propound, and market spurious experiences as predetermined by foreign governments and INGO sponsors. In reality, they are toxic to politics and harmful to the country.

The best way to destroy toxic citizenship is to debauch its currency: fear.

Fear is what we should conquer; the fear of dissent, the fear of poverty, the fear of speaking out, and of being excluded from the government’s popular gravy train, and the fear of being ostracised by the tyrant mob.

Fear breeds insecurity, venomous entitlement, hate speech, online bullying, ethnoreligious conflict, racial bigotries, lawlessness, and a wild lust for inordinate acquisitions by corrupt citizenry and leadership.

Fear as a currency must be rendered worthless; its index of transaction must be shattered for Nigeria to progress. But for this to happen, Nigerians must evolve.

True, we live in a curious world, where morality manifests as a utopian ideal. The honest and industrious are bankrupted while looters, thieves, gangsters, terrorists, looters, kidnappers, liars, and lobbyists – to mention a few – laugh all the way to the bank.

In this dystopic clime, the prescript of equality and free market oft touted as the surest paths to nationwide prosperity have been exposed as a pathetic con game.

Some are aware of the con but their awareness hardly translates to concerted efforts to evade its lure. Perhaps because every Nigerian is at once a grifter and a victim of the con.

For instance, behind the cynical herd’s agitation and caustic reproach of the political class, lurks a postscript rife with emotive shingles that often drives many to embrace variations of the oligarchy they condemn.

Many more stand ignorant and proud, like a half-conscious mutter of men, chanting ‘humanity and freedom’ only to forsake the cause for a token or fleeting sentiment at election time.

This is the tangle of witlessness and resignation that requires us all to become better patriots. If we look carefully inwards, we will find that beneath our toxicity, selective morality and utter cowardice stirs gruesome airs and a quest for self-preservation.

Time and over again, a few critics and self-appointed leaders of thought have decried our ethical fraudulence, cutthroat politics, and lack of guts; such curious kinks of the Nigerian electorate, unfortunately, do exist at a grievous price and must be reckoned with. Yet these shameful twists to our psyches make us even more vulnerable as fair game to a predatory political class.

The patriot thus becomes society’s courier of dissent against raptorial hierarchs – whatever his calling, he must assert himself in the interest of Nigerians’ peaceful co-existence, unity, and progress.

If I could relate this to my field of endeavour, I would interpret the role of a journalist as a patriot. The latter must immerse in his role with unflinching courage and without prejudice. In so doing, he manifests as society’s shield against arrogant class hierarchs and mob tyrants.

There is no gainsaying that the advent of internet technology has birthed shades of journalism advanced by curious crusaders operating from various platforms.

Whatever the journalist’s platform, his practice must manifest fertile consciousness.

His passion is neither funded nor fathered by greed; he establishes his practice immune to the lure and patronage of corrupt local and international actors. He understands that they are all spawns of the same ogress womb, carnivores of the same badlands.

To the citizenry, he is a hero. To the government, however, he becomes a scourge. He must understand why the masses depend on him to be their voice while the government depends on him to smother the citizenry’s voice.

To achieve its strategy, the government lures him through the state’s revolving doors onto the corridors of power. The patriot journalist, functioning as society’s conscience, however, rebuffs such overture.

He understands the essence of his role as a policy analyst, governance watchdog, and peacemaker. Nigeria needs him to continually unmask the pious frauds of leadership and citizenship. We need him to constantly remind us that the ultimate aim of governance should be to lift the impoverished out of poverty and not to cushion their stay or relapse into it.

Thus as he asserts himself in the Nigerian enterprise, he must never take umbrage if society and peers seek to thwart and malign him. He should never flinch even if mistaken as yet another vessel for our errant demons.

Like the unappreciated hero, he would be periodically abandoned, assaulted, and stigmatised for lacking the bigoted’s essential traits: narrow-mindedness, base sentimentality, and hankering to traverse gloomy straits.

Yet he is immune to the lure of sullied money, funded outrage, dubious fidelity, and expedient inertia.

He does not surrender and seek fulfillment in the collective lowing of the herd nor does he seek to mould individuals or social segments into a compliant collective for the benefit of the mob or political class.

He does not personify the political hobbyist stereotype. Thus he scoffs at politics of the soapbox, a wanton game in which participants debate Nigeria’s big issues on abstract merits – often mouthing off “superior” logic or sounding off for clout in social or political space.

His journalism scorns pseudo-realism -that is, the inclination to doctor, propound, and market spurious lies as truth – even though it’s harmful to the country.

Nigeria would do better if its journalists redirected their platforms and practices to serve the people and heal the country. To reestablish its relevance and repair integrity, the mainstream press and new media must detach from ideological voyeurism and fault-finding – a tactic of assault and defense that has over time become the nemesis and tomb of many a promising newsroom.

For so long, journalists have united to market cunning and rhetoric, for and against shady segments of civil society and the political class; it’s about time they united in the interest of the electorate.

The general run of the masses thrives and vie daily against insurmountable odds, fostered by misgovernance and errant citizenship. Many do so without any real awareness of the actuality of forms that define their existence. It’s the press’ duty to make this explicit to them.

Plato’s allegory of the cave was equally 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 journalists to cover a conflict and write a story is to educate them in skill. However, to train a journalist to resist inducement and assert the ethics of his profession against a hostile political economy is to educate him on values and morals. A journalistic culture that disregards this vital interplay between morality and power condemns itself to death.

Such existential truths are scorned by modern professionals – even while identifying as patriots. This disconnect subsists across professional and government circuits, civil society, and academia.

But given the press’ crucial role in nation-building, journalists must begin to acknowledge the impact of fancy, soulless journalism on rural poetry and suburban lives.

The Nigerian press must quit functioning like products of a cultural void, the casualty of a system that establishes the media to serve as mob muscle or lapdog of the political class.

The true purpose of journalism must be to improve lives, not assert the whims of social cannibals. It must be far removed from a system that bullies the populace to pacify and please authority.