Category: Olatunji Ololade

John Eka Ewa aka John Lyon’s tears offers a simple yet poignant proof of the powerful bond between crime and retribution, cause and effect. The now-viral video of the suspected kidnapper kneeling and pleading for mercy, in abject tears, reproves the masculinity and celebrity culture that fostered him.

It speaks to our direful values and realities. It depicts the awful fragility of repute and toxic manhood. It is a reminder, in a sea of kitsch, of karma’s infinite malice.

The so-called Abuja-based big boy was arrested by the police, on Thursday, September 15, for allegedly belonging to a kidnap syndicate responsible for several high-profile abductions in Bayelsa and other parts of the Niger Delta.

Until his arrest, Lyon, 36, channeled renown by flaunting wads of cash on social media and motivating his followers to “hustle” and work hard. He posted pictures of himself with police orderlies at a political function and a church programme, where he is seen singing intensely and praising God.

He equally brandished an interior design business in Abuja as his source of wealth. Then his cover got blown as a N70 million ransom was allegedly traced to his bank account.

In a viral video after his arrest, Lyon, handcuffed and only in boxers, is seen kneeling on the floor and weeping profusely. He confessed to being a kidnapper claiming that he had only kidnapped two victims. But a man in the video who claimed to be one of his victims insisted that Lyon had kidnapped more than two people. The man narrated how Lyon’s gang abducted him and threatened to kill him if he did not part with a hefty ransom.

A kobo for the thoughts of the bedazzled horde smitten by Lyon’s social media repute and presumed fortune. Another kobo for the indolent herd that let the dubious renown of the Lyons of the world lure them to a dark path.

Predictably, social media has become a hot zone of bickering for conflicting divides among youths – some rationalise Lyon’s resort to crime stressing that the government had offered no enabling environment for the youths to engage in honest endeavour anyway.

A more moral divide argues otherwise stressing that there could be no acceptable rationalisation of his crime. There is, however, a third divide comprising the ubiquitous ‘cruisers’ or infinitely permissive youth segment, out to simply “catch cruise” by glamourising appalling sophistry and justification for the misdeeds of Lyon and his ilk.

There is a lot more ignorant folk debating how to feel and respond to the tragic turn of life for a kidnap kingpin like Lyon. What is apparent is that too many people simply wish to vent and feel gratified – call it an addiction to gratuitous fury. Victim or exploiter alike. Most Nigerians just want to be on the winning side. This mentality has so far foisted on Nigeria a generation of desperate and indulgent youths.

Lyon’s predicament mirrors several young men and teen boys’ frantic lunge for sudden, unearned wealth. In January, Bayelsa teens, Emomotimi,15, Perebi, 15, and Eke, 15, were arrested while trying to use one Comfort, 13, for a money ritual. They reportedly“hypnotized” her and led her to Emomotimi’s apartment, where they cut her finger and sprinkled her blood on a mirror for ritual purposes. The ritual was supposed to make them rich. But for vigilant village youths, Comfort would have been history, perhaps.

A creepier dimension ensued a few days after the arrest of the Bayelsa trio as three other boys between 17 and 20 years were arrested in the early hours of Saturday, January 29, by men of the Ogun State Police Command for allegedly killing their friend’s girlfriend in a money ritual.

The suspects, Wariz Oladehinde, 17,  Abdul Gafar Lukman, 19, and Mustakeem Balogun, 20, and the boyfriend of the murdered girl, Soliu Majekodumi, 18, were arrested after they were seen burning something suspected to be a human head in a local pot.

They confessed to beheading Rofiat, who was lured by her boyfriend, Majekodunmi, to where she was murdered by the quartet. They cut off her head, packed her remains in a sack, and dumped it in an old building.

Read Also: ‘How suspected notorious kidnap kingpin John Lyon terrorised Bayelsa for seven years’

Nigeria evidently careens to the shove of dissembling manhood. Consequently, we suffer a fatal forming of maleness and society. Lyon and the teen ritualists, without doubt, are products of a value system fostered by materialism, lacking in compassion and exemplary filial ties.

Their actions aren’t accidental; from plotting to execution, a hideous smattering of bestiality manifests as their victims’ misfortune and society’s just desserts. Some have labelled them freaks and social accidents, but they are simply karma coming home to roost.

Consider them the monsters we made, casualties of our toxic materialism, cutthroat gender wars, and celebrity culture. They are what we get from society’s virulent remoulding of gender and the precepts of becoming.

Hitherto unacknowledged, today, they manifest as society’s dirty secret. Now, running loose and untethered, Lyon and the boys are not much of a secret anymore; like their kindred spirits among child bandits, teen gangs, and Boko Haram, they are wildly miseducated and fair game in a smorgasbord of spurious labelling.

In their misadventure, however, we encounter afresh, the grotesque evolution of the Nigerian boychild. Culturally benumbed to maleness, he loiters at ethical crossroads. He is stuck at being a man while juggling moral and amoral precepts of his becoming. Through his dilemma, he is thought to scoff at traditional notions of maleness and embrace the dubious redefinition of manhood.

The Nigerian boy’s enthrallment with easy riches is a consequence of the get-rich-quick syndrome pervasive in their immediate society. The malady perpetuates a fable, not of hope, but disintegration. It resonates in wildly covetous youths’ frenetic cry: “Mad o!” in admiration of pestilent quests and attainments by fellow youths – their celebrity heroes and Yahoo Boys (internet scammers) inclusive.

The situation is aggravated by the frantic fostering and cues from mainstream and new media. For instance, several editions of scripted “reality shows” celebrate the preadolescent mind mired in a grave of delusions. Musicians, actors, cross-dressers, and the now ubiquitous “social influencers” participating in such shows personify a very deep cry for help but like Hoyle’s misdirected mortals, they will learn from avoidable mistakes, not from the example posed by the Lyons of the world.

Popular culture’s celebration of grotesque and increasingly infantilised versions of masculinity aggravates the malady – from Nollywood’s neurotic man-boys to the bestial and slacker dudes of feminist-misandrist literature.

Partnership and parenthood, responsibility, and security are projected as stultifying rather than instrumental to adult blooming. The gender wars aggravate this trend, thriving on the insecurities that drive the sexes apart.

The stakes are too high to ignore. If we care about our society, we must pay as much attention to boys as we pay to our girls. The ruckus of degenerate manhood, misandry, and toxic feminism, however, furnish a popular culture that offers young boys a dumbed-down version of masculinity and rhetoric around fatherhood largely predicated on the father’s dispensability and his absence.

Fatherhood is thus redefined in the public mind as an experience of failure rather than success; absence rather than involvement. In the same breadth, masculinity gets redefined as being embarrassingly brutish, effeminate, homosexual, brash, criminal, and incurably dumb.

At his arrest, Lyon cried, “Forgive me, make una forgive me, my wife just born sef, a boy.” And that is in a sense, some new tragedy.

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

It’s about time we addressed our innate demons. Call it our stratagem of healing or therapy of closure from our national trauma.

Too many Nigerians drift through each day with a siege mentality – each individual treating the nation as a savage space, where ferocity is fostered and spuriously condoned.

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

Our killing fields are infinitely diverse and horrific. They are ever-changing: whether it’s the bloodied rice fields of Zabarmari, the war-torn villages of Doron Baga and Sambisa in Nigeria’s northeast;  the gory abattoirs of the southeast; the bandit-scourged villages of the northwest, or the haunted highways and farmlands of the southwest, Nigeria unfurls as a sprawling temenos, flourishing precinct of the proverbial grim reaper.

Through the death toll, a new monstrosity festers in the rage of university students protesting the prolonged strike by their lecturers. The students under the aegis of National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), on Monday, blocked the road to the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos, in protest against the lingering strike of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).

As early as 7:00 am, the students, singing solidarity songs, blocked vehicular movement from the tollgate and major link to the international and domestic airport cargo terminals, thus paralyzing the flow of traffic and leaving travellers, airport workers, and motorists plying the Ajao Estate link road stranded.

In so doing, the students clearly demonstrate the siege mentality and selfishness characteristic of base Nigerian nature. Whatever their grievances, they aren’t enough reason to prevent fellow Nigerians from plying the road, using the public facilities of the airport, and engaging in lawful pursuit of their livelihoods.

By their action, the students impose untold hardship on other road users. If great care is not taken, the students’ protest could degenerate into more sinister forms.

Nigerians couldn’t have forgotten so easily, how the youths marched on the streets purportedly to protest bad policing, leadership failure, atrocious governance, corruption in government circuits, and insensibility of the political class.

We must remember #EndSARS for what it’s worth: its elegiac stanzas, propitious rage, and inauspicious demise. The tragedy caused by the protest is instructive; it bristles even as you read, with consequences of leadership insensibility and imprudence of youths cut to size. No thanks to hubris.

The #EndSARS protest was meant to rid the streets of corrupt police officers whose operations dawned on the country with a deathly couvade. In the same vein, the ongoing protests by the university students resonate in a troubling tenor. Its cultic maleficence resonates with the Nigerian psyche, thus the maxim: “There is a SARS in all of us” meaning: there is a savage (SARS) genome in every Nigerian.

For all its symbolism and contrived grandeur, the anti-strike protest manifests the bestial tells reminiscent of the ill-fated #EndSARS protest. The protesters surge with constraints emblematic of the anti-SARS herd feral, going by their conduct.

The #EndSARS eventually malformed into a carnival featuring disc jockeys (DJs), free meals, wild cavorting, and the profane. The violent aftermath was predictable as livestock and vegetables coming in from northern Nigeria via trucks got stuck in the traffic as a result of road blockages caused by the protesters.

While the Mile-12-bound vegetables rotted, the Kara cattle market at Ojodu Berger, allegedly responsible for about 90 percent of the meat supply in Lagos and environs, suffered a lull due to the protest, according to a certain Chief Ojukwu, in his analysis of the incident.

Going by his analogy, over 1,000 meat sellers, traders, and menial workers, who source their livelihood from the affected markets were rendered jobless. Urchins attached to the market and similar markets across Lagos were also rendered jobless, all at once. These are folk, who reportedly live from hand to mouth – surviving on meagre daily earnings.

Not minding the effects of the protests on these human segments, the protesters set up camps on Lagos streets “with music, free food, drinks, shisha, weed and all types of profanity. It was only a matter of time for the so-called touts, hoodlums, agberos to get drawn to another source of food!” argued Ojukwu.

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The protesting students must eschew fractiousness and quit constituting a nuisance to law-abiding citizenry who must ply the airport corridor to eke their living.

Instead, they should take their grievances to the corridors of power in Abuja, in a peaceful protest.

They must understand the futility of embarking on yet another ill-omened sensationalist rally. They must also be circumspect of intervention from shady characters with intent to aggravate the conflict.

To what end has it served the cause of the university students to block the roads? Many applauded previous cheekiness displayed by the #EndSARS protesters. The worry lines were there but we ignored them arguing that the youths were finally becoming politically conscious.

People failed to look beneath the blankets of rage to see the true nature of dissent, its toxic traceries of thought, action, and reaction. While the tragic aftermath persists as a grisly narrative, its attendant pathos yields too easily to parody by fake news aficionados.

Whatever the renditions of the #EndSARS and the Lekki Toll Gate shooting, for instance, the pallid yarns of the incident resonate grotesquely, limiting and corrupting feelings, instead of freeing and deepening them.

We must avoid a reenactment of the stark horror birthed by the post #EndSARS carnage. We must shun insincere and mischievous dramatization of excessive plaint and hatred, the pitfalls of cynical revolt.

The exhumed and buried narratives of the #EndSARS hasten empathy and contempt for the university students as they insolently throng grief’s cottage.

But can misery so evident be sustained against the onslaught of hubris, insolence, morbid disregard for others’ rights, and the rule of law? Could the end justify the means of the disgruntled undergraduates railing against the political class and ASUU’s stinky quest to constrain their right to a decent education?

There is a tendency to empathise with the students given the government and ASUU’s recalcitrance to resolving the crisis. Yet base duplicity and sophistry are disguised dramas of the masterminds’ treacherous selves.

It is curious to see NANS reject an industrial court judgment, by Justice Polycarp Hamman on Wednesday, ordering ASUU to suspend its ongoing strike immediately, claiming it was a breach of Section 18(1)(2) of the Trade Disputes Act.

One would think the students would rather return to class and urge their lecturers to seek a more peaceful resolution of the conflict. But NANS’ spokesperson, Giwa Temitope, described the ruling as a “black market judgment,” stressing that the only remedy to this strike action is for the government to accede to the demands of ASUU and properly fund education.

Such outcomes, of course, can hardly be wrung, in a day, from the federal government’s practiced sidestep.

We must live wary of a relapse to the circumstances that birthed the #EndSARS carnage of 2020, the protesters have since dispersed into petulant segments and conflicting divides, their fraternal bond frayed to differences in politics and human experience.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm, notes Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac: one is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other, that heat comes from the furnace.

For the benefit of the superficial Millennial or Gen Z-er, the Curmudgeon paints a more fascinating picture of the source of all wealth. And in the true spirit of his portraiture, I’d say: Imagine yourself a ghommid, standing smack in the centre of Nigeria’s groundnut pyramids, animal ranches, and cocoa plantations, several decades ago.

You take your ghommid’s shears and cut down surrounding flora to make a clearing for a farm. As the crops flower and animals fatten, you harvest the best grains and herd all the supple livestock into a giant pile, wave a magic wand, and it’s all turned to industry, buildings and people spattered across gated high society and sprawling boondocks. You name this ‘progress’ and feign mutation from ghommid to giant.

Such is the relationship between cities and the countryside, the modern and out-of-date, the dwindling past, and the silicon age. We must understand, however, that mortal Nigeria as the metaphorical giant is nothing but a dispensable minion in the economics of life.

Silicon Valley, the Millennial and Gen Z’s most astute retort to the declining world foisted upon all by the older generation has done too little to improve our fortunes.

Ultimately, the burgeoning I.T sector fosters ephemeral growth, rather than give relief, it midwifes a Siamese bundle of utopia and dystopia in one birth.

Young Nigeria, like the rest of the world, is besotted by this twin grotesqueness for its dazzle and espoused freedoms, and understandably so.

More fascinating are the manifestations of the now ubiquitous start-up and fintech. A peculiar thing is happening: where the government fails to show up, foreign financiers or angel funders, if you like, are extending their interventions with curious funding.

Of course, nobody sees anything wrong with this. How could anyone deem such interventions scary in a world where oligarchs maul promising youths into armed bandits, career assassins, political hooligans, murderers, arsonists, and so on, while they embezzle public funds to entertain their wives and educate their children abroad?

Thus the argument that angel funding is great for the economy. These seed monies – irrespective of their slush equivalents used for funding regime change and dubious political springs worldwide –  are filling a crucial void empowering youths who would otherwise be unemployed and left out of the loop of social interventions.

Not all ‘seed money’ is a slush fund; a few agricultural startups have sprouted from the seeds of angel funders with stakes in diverse sectors of the agricultural economy. Some of their interventions subsist in the production of palm kernel oil (PKO) which is still currently inadequate for the companies that use it as raw material.

Then there are those that support farmers’ scale-up from peasant farming to commercial farming by providing extension services, quality seeds, access to finance, access to mechanization, and general advisory services on new and innovative methods in farming.

These appreciable interventions deserve sustainable partnership between the government and the so-called angel funders of Nigeria’s silicon valley. But technology, like the crude oil boom, is Janus-faced, often manifesting as development’s womb and tomb.

Little wonder silicon valley subsists as the playground of nerds and mindless herds on a leash. It is also the modern arena of the surveillance state, our private perversions and mob wars: government and the governed, husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and their sexual nemesis, politicians and electorate clash like gladiators – their mismatched whims the tools of shredding and seizure.

The history of technology has often been characterized by a debate between enamored romantics and dismissive skeptics. Neither divide, however, projects a convincing response to the opportunities and challenges that new technologies present; both in turn often exaggerate or downplay the impact of technology, and this leads to entrenched positions and polarization.

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Such entrenched positions can be harmful even if politically correct and more media-friendly than the highly differentiated analysis fostered by reality and careful, longitudinal research.

Advocates of technology integration in agriculture must understand the discourses that drive it and, in some cases, harm its acceptance, and find a balance between the technological innovations that can be sustained by sound policies and those driven more by Machiavellian interests.

Technology is useless if it isn’t humane and doesn’t improve life. Given the soil’s contribution to all life and wealth, technology must be deployed to enhance its healing and restorative properties by which disease passes into health, age into youth, and death into life.

The wellspring of wealth is agricultural surplus, the ability to feed more than one with the labour of one. Agricultural surplus built the groundnut pyramids of the north and the cocoa plantations of the southwest.

Agriculture became the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy and the foundation upon which the pioneer nationalists launched their agitation for independence.

Nigeria was a leading agricultural economy in the 1950s, being the largest producer of palm oil, groundnut, cotton, and cocoa globally. The sector employed over 70 percent of the labour force and accounted for as much as 62.3 percent of the nation’s foreign exchange earnings.

World Bank data reveal that agriculture contributed over 60 percent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Even so, the sector grapples with a poor land tenure system, deficient irrigation farming, climate change, and land degradation. Others are low technology, high production cost and poor distribution of inputs, limited financing, high post-harvest losses, and poor access to markets.

These challenges have stifled agricultural productivity, affecting the sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP. It has also led to increased food imports amid skyrocketing population and declining levels of food sufficiency.

For instance, between 2016 and 2019, Nigeria’s cumulative agricultural imports stood at N3.35 trillion, four times higher than the agricultural export of N803 billion within the same period.

Of its 92.4 million hectares, Nigeria boasts 82.0 million hectares of arable land; so far, just 34 million hectares of it have been cultivated. With population explosion and government’s renewed drive to boost food security, agriculture has become increasingly crucial to our survival as a nation.

But caught between the womb walls of the crude oil creeks and the silicon valley, Nigeria lives imprisoned in starvation’s bower. The country asphyxiates amid deathly oil spills, stolen crude oil, misgovernance, and the tinseled serpents of silicon valley.

We live in dire need of irrigated farmlands but our people shed more blood to irrigate the seasons. Think farmers-herders clashes over grazing pasture and arable land.

Yet Nigeria is lost to her silicon valley treats. What do we eat when the dazzle dims to a dwindle, as the oil boom did, and all innovations do, eventually? Like Cadmus sowing dragon’s teeth, shall we plant yesterday’s corpses and harvest them as fresh food for our bellies?

The first supermarket, Kingsway Stores, appeared in the Nigerian landscape in 1948. Since then Nigeria has showcased dazzling groceries across a burgeoning wholesale-retail complex.

Against the backdrop of it all, the old farm fades into patterns and cycles of strife. Remember when we grew food in our gardens, forests, and farm settlements? Remember when fresh harvest nestled in our pantries, the basement, and our backyards?

Today, it’s beyond the reach of everyone.

 

The Nigerian city achieves epic sweep. But it is superfluous to the country. That is why economic activities in most cities got grounded in the wake of COVID-19 as if industry and metropolis didn’t matter. Ask the Curmudgeon in his attic.

The same could hardly be said of the countryside; as pandemics and national emergencies persist, so does its rural economy. Yet cities parasitise the labour of the countryside. They sponge off rural sweat for ponds of sheen, and Nigerians wade through the lustre, bewitched. Cities charm residents. They turn citizens into metro pets and auspicious cash cows into silhouettes.

Cities deify sponge bobs but like Virgil would say, fortunate is the man who has come to know the gods of the countryside. Such a man, I would say, must have wandered its groves before its roads became too dangerous to traverse. Before cash crops and wildflowers were decimated by herdsmen and their ruck; before bucolic treasures frothed with pesticides and fishes floated belly-up in Ewekoro and the oil creeks.

Cities don’t produce food. They depend on the countryside to provide it. Save their food distribution systems, cities can quarantine, shut-in, and shut-down, so long as the countryside doesn’t.

True. A deeper look at our fate through the pandemic reveals how worthless the Nigerian city is, with its parade of glitz and chug-chug of industry. But for the country’s agricultural economy, Nigeria would starve.

Were he clairvoyant, President Muhammadu Buhari would commit even more vigorously to improving the agricultural economy. While his administration makes a great show of doing that, its federal pronouncements and gazetted schemes may become self-impeding calcification, in time.

The ongoing agricultural revitalisation, for instance, stifles by its magnification of tropes as truth, and slogans as change theory. Ask its touted and supposed beneficiaries. It’s all slick insentient theatre, majorly.

Perhaps the problem is not with the city; after all, what are cities but manufactured monoliths? City institutions, symbolized by government and industry, are built to serve individuals. Depending on the quality of leadership, however, their impersonal walls may deafen to the farmer’s cry and street sweeper’s sigh.

Of course, the Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP), the Presidential Fertiliser Initiative (PFI), shutting the land borders against import and smuggling, and other protectionist policies are admirable in their mixed blessings but the skyscraper, big business, drone technology, and glorified slums become Nigeria’s face: abstract, mechanical, lifeless.

It takes a tremendous degree of lifelessness for corporate and government-fabricated Edens to thrive amid hedges of state shanties cum low-cost housing schemes and countrified dystopia.

It will be said of this administration too, that it found Nigeria a land of promise and rendered her promiscuous, if President Buhari fails to curtail the countryside’s ravage by the city.

The city unfurls as a plague, its sensuality both morbid and commercial. It’s hidden graces unclad, like the proverbial harlot self-exiled from the village but always returning under the cover of night to stalk and prey the countryside.

Cities do little for the countryside. Knowing this, Buhari announced his decision to resurrect the country by endowing its peasant, agricultural economy with remarkable fillips. He proceeded to do this, forgetting that his team and tools, like Thel’s worms, are corrupt pathogen miming his change mantra.

Buhari must understand that his government cannot achieve agricultural boon simply by pronouncing passion to resources. He must thoroughly examine if resources are pronounced to his passion.

Agreed, the picture was grim pre-Buhari. At his arrival, he boosted productivity via such schemes as the PFI by which he supplied farmers with discounted fertilisers. At his intervention, fertilisers became available to farmers at ?5,500 per bag, a significant cut from the ?9,000 per bag initial regime. And to provide peasant farmers access to credit, the ABP was established. Between 2015 and 2018, ?174 billion was reportedly disbursed to about one million farmers. The total repayment as at the end of 2018 stood at ?21 billion. No thanks to corruption.

To truly improve the fortunes of the agricultural sector, government must eliminate the structural impediments of unreliable power supply, dilapidated irrigation systems, overcrowded ports, and poor roads. For example, it takes an average of six to eight days to move a truckload of tomatoes along the country’s main transport corridor, from Jibiya in the far north to Lagos in the southwest. Unless the cargo is refrigerated—and invariably it is not—it will perish before reaching Lagos port.

There are hopes, however, that the ongoing rail transportation venture would eliminate the challenges associated with transportation.

At the moment, poverty has risen in Nigeria with almost 82.9 million people living on less than one United States dollar per day, according to a National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) May 2020 report. The figure represents 40.09 percent of the total population, excluding insurgency-ravaged Borno, and the bureau predicted that this rising trend is likely to continue.

According to the report, 52.10 per cent of rural dwellers are living in poverty while the poverty rate in urban centres is 18.04 per cent. But going by the UN’s definition of extreme poverty as a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education, and information, 82.9 million is a highly conservative estimate.

It was hay, however, that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York, writes Dyson.

Hay was responsible for Nigeria’s first brush with economic glory. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that between 1962 and 1968, Nigeria’s major foreign exchange earner was the agricultural sector. Palm oil and groundnut made up around 47% of the country’s exports. However, Nigeria’s position as an agricultural powerhouse declined through its oil boom.

Understandably, President Muhammadu Buhari sought to revivify the country’s agricultural economy at his assumption of office in 2015, and then, 2019.

Despite Buhari’s rural preachment, the country’s fixation with oil renders her a whited sepulchre sullied by wastefulness and vice, the soot that will not out.

Nigeria needs agriculture, and there are good reasons for the administration to focus on agriculture. Agriculture employs about 70 percent of the population thus it can be used to drive sustainable growth prospects via a value chain that turns raw commodities into processed goods for domestic consumption or export.

The government must seize the moment to fund diversification of agriculture to make it more appealing to a vast youth population that is spiritless about farming but might be attracted to processing, marketing, and other business opportunities along the value chain.

The food emergency in northeast Nigeria brought on by the Boko Haram insurgency, infrastructure deficits, and COVID-19, and the government’s response to them emphasises the need to expand the agricultural sector to guarantee food security and nutrition.

But while the rationale for prioritizing agriculture is sound, many reforms will have to be enacted if the sector is to flourish. These reforms must also include measures to save rural Nigeria by the sheen continually sponged off its greenery by the city.

In his literary classic, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Russian novelist, Vladimir Voinovich, intones:

‘I wonder what they teach them in the city.’

‘That’s easy,’ announced Chonkin, “To live off the fat of the countryside.”

 

The leader we seek must nurse towering pride in the Nigerian enterprise. He must have verve, cool, discipline, and panache—scarcely to be found in the innocuous social media demagogue and armchair Trotsky.

The ideal leader must inspire lyricism and hope. There must be intelligence, depth, spontaneity, something restrained yet vivacious, with a hint of the luminous and unflappable in his life and exploits.

He isn’t an incorrigible liar inordinately driven to entertain herd galleries. He is a realist. He walks his talk. And his achievements are visible for all to see. He isn’t the product of a juvenile sentiment or the unhallowed alliance between petulant losers and orphans of ill-fated electoral conventions.

He isn’t one to hide his family abroad, far from the wilderness Nigeria has become – no thanks to the selfish ruling class and an equally self-centered citizenry. He is a true patriot. And the true patriot, like the Delphic oracle, is maddened by vapours. Thus his ambition and passion are incensed by fertile consciousness; having fostered or experienced the towering injustice of the raptorial ruling class, he is ready to rebel.

His rebellion, however, is neither funded nor fathered by greed; like an androgynous earth mother, it self-fertilises without help from society’s captors and oppressors – the corrupt presidency, venal governors, legislators, and international NGOs with a bleeding heart. He understands that they are all spawns of the same ogress womb, carnivores of the same badlands.

Thus as he embarks on his electoral quest, he must never take umbrage as society and peers malign him. He’d never flinch even if mistaken as yet another vessel for our errant demons.

Like the unappreciated hero, he is periodically abandoned. He is constantly assaulted and stigmatised for lacking the bigoted’s essential traits: narrow-mindedness, base sentimentality, and hankering to traverse gloomy straits. He is maniacally haunted by purveyors of funded outrage, lust for sullied money, dubious fidelity, and expedient inertia.

The true patriot is maligned by Nigeria because the nation thrives on duplicity. Frantic obedience and base sentimentality, bred by a culture of illusion, is exploited by demagogues who present themselves as saviours to a grovelling citizenry.

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.

Eventually, the latter would discover that they had been conned. High-strung and embittered by the immateriality of their much coveted Eden, they’d become disillusioned, suicidal, and apathetic.

Such jadedness becomes a powerful element in ushering the electorate’s submission to mob tyranny. It rids democracy of vibrancy, leaving it beleaguered. It afflicts a nation with a spiritless but spiteful electorate.

Where youths participate actively, too many are unperturbed by pressing social concerns. Where they exhibit concern, they display mindless but scripted outrage. Their lack of political literacy makes them susceptible to a pitiful range of diversions, like demagoguery and platitudinous chant.

Wolin would call them victims of imperial politics but I would call them unbidden offerings on an altar of vultures. Their predicament worsens by the government’s willful suppression of progressive education. Where education festers as an affliction, scholarship and enlightenment become empty phrases, foisting on Nigeria, an illiterate, violent youth.

The government equally does its part in keeping the youth desperate and deployable towards violence, and innumerable selfish ends. How? By destroying Nigeria’s educational foundation and its possibility of rebirth.

A foundering educational system accentuates ignorance and apathy, particularly among the youths whose inherited task includes the fosterage and sustenance of democratic consciousness for national rebirth.

An educated mind is a questioning mind, which conflicts with the whims of Nigeria’s oppressors. Public officers, irrespective of party affiliation, would rather see the citizenry stew in ignorance than enjoy quality education and attain true enlightenment, lest they begin to pulse with discontent over the status quo.

The lingering strike action by university lecturers is simply one of the manifestations of our insensitive leadership and educational systems.

Even as the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) sticks to its guns and indefinitely extends the already six-month industrial action, its position has been weakened by more state-owned universities pulling out of the strike and calling staff and students back to school.

Aspects of government policies and spending render the average youth poorly educated; our yearly education allocation, hardly exceeds seven percent of the national budget – it’s habitually lower than the 20 percent recommended by UNESCO for developing countries.

Nigeria deserves, at least, an 18 percent allocation to the education sector. This, our ideal leader must acknowledge and implement in future education budgeting. He must be immune to the ‘highly informed, expert opinions’ that counsel an expedient, radical recourse to the policies foisted on us when ‘structural adjustment’ forced Nigeria to reduce spending on education, health, and infrastructure, among others.

There is no way a team of government apologists comprising ex-journalists, politicians, lobbyists, and party loyalists can effectively spin the lingering ASUU strike and precarious education budget. No degree of righteous umbrage and frosted psycho-babble could manage the lecturers’ defiance of the government’s ill-advised posturing.

The bankruptcy of Nigeria’s economic and political systems is attributable to her comatose education sector, and an elite given free rein to organise education and society around “predetermined answers to predetermined questions.”

The current system has been effectively rigged to produce what many corporate hierarchies persistently cite as “unemployable graduates.” The few “employable” ones are mostly scions of Nigeria’s leadership, and they are recruited from Ivy League and mushroom universities abroad, where they have been schooled only to fulfill responsibilities and find solutions that will preserve the status quo.

They are incapable of asking the broad, universal questions – staples of a deeply grounded, socially conscious educational process. Both “employable” and “unemployable” graduates were hardly equipped to challenge the superficial and deepest assumptions of Nigeria’s decadent economic and political culture.

They can neither discern nor convincingly evaluate, superficial aspects of popular culture vis-a-vis the harsh realities of political and economic mismanagement.

They are ignorant because they had never been taught to condemn mortal propensity for moral grayness, especially when confronted with a choice between good and evil.

Lacking a contemplative spirit, they do not understand why Socrates identified all virtues as forms of knowledge and why such knowledge may foster privileged civilisation.

To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs or PriceWater HouseCoopers, argues Hedges, “is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate experiential, systemic, and humanist ways of grappling with reality, however, is to educate them in values and morals.”

Indeed, a culture that mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the true measure of a civilisation is its compassion, not its speed at conquest and consumption, spiritedly condemns itself to death.

Humane governance, he argues, is a product of enlightenment, a comprehensive, adequately funded, supervised educational process. But our leaders scoff at such civilisation because they are products of society’s moral void.

Blinded by greed and bigotries, Nigeria neglects the gaping inadequacies of her educational policies and spending, and services instead, institutionalised corruption spanning outrageous executive, legislative, judicial salaries, and medical tourism, among others.

The leader we seek must be capable of spurring constructive civilisation by treading the path less taken by his predecessors. An 18 percent budgetary allocation, or thereabouts, to the education sector – on his watch – followed by eagle-eyed monitoring of ‘projects’ could trigger Nigeria’s renascence beyond 2023.

 

En route to the 2023 elections, some presidential aspirants have presented with their manhood in flight; flaunting a juvenile skittishness, they leapfrog from mood to mood, from cloying fib to the ugliest lie, seeking to enchant dubious galleries.

Others have flaunted the privilege of incumbency, frantically playing to more sterile herds.

But the one Nigeria needs as her leader 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 in the tension between the politician and 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 this year as all others, Nigeria reels at the borderline between republic and empire. The electorate’s bent, however, will determine if the country would re-emerge as a republic of free people, from the 2023 elections.

At the moment, the indices are clear, and all the aspects manifest the actuality of the country as an oligarchic empire. The oligarchy that corrupted Nigeria’s politics, has been on song and its manipulative best en route to the 2023 elections.

The most affluent of the coven assign public offices by whim and lottery thus affirming the grim unreality of the electoral process.

In a bid to perpetuate themselves in power, formidable oligarchs assign national tracts and public offices to their children and political godsons – quoting phantom egalitarianism.

To their stooges, they assign power, lucrative contracts, and public offices with cautious benevolence and a disdainful smile.

They expect their child and protégé to enter the power elite, infinitely beholden to them – often through a rigged process. Of course, the recipients of such tarnished benevolence accept to play ball.

On assumption of office, they attempt a perfect interpretation of the script handed out to them, in a political high drama, in which they alternate the roles of deity and minion as the circumstances dictate.

They will scorn the poesies of democracy, likewise the humaneness and progress they hitherto promised the electorate en route to the polls.

They will embrace moral nihilism and so doing, perpetuate a radical evil sustainable by the collaboration of a timid, confused electorate, a system of propaganda and mass media that offers strictly spectacle and amusement in lieu of news, and an educational system incapable of transmitting transcendent values and nurturing the capacity for individual conscience.

If the electorate ignores the societal play of forces operating beneath current political platforms, Nigeria will once again, bear the curse of pitiless forms of governance through all tiers of government.

It doesn’t matter who wins the election, the political complex, established and presided over by predators, will subsist but the electorate would remain compliant and endure the bestial system foisted on them, often turning impatiently, to seek a cosy place within its crannies.

The prospective ruling class, like its predecessors, will set out to diminish the individual and crush his or her capacity for moral resistance thus ushering him into a seemingly harmonious collective.

This warped realism has previously manifested through spells of bad governance and tokenism inflicted on long-suffering communities across the country.

Each human fragment of the electorate knows what issues and inadequacies require urgent resolution as it relates to him and his community but most would rather stay quiet irrespective of their afflictions.

The persistent lack of electricity supply, bad roads, substandard health care, insecurity, unfavourable business clime, and an economy rigged in the interest of thievish bank chiefs, giant corporate thieves, and political class, remain the bane of Nigeria’s micro and macro development since independence.

The victors at the 2023 polls mustn’t maintain the status quo. Unlike previous governments, they must shun lifeboat solutions as responses to the country’s towering adversities.

Politicians take but statesmen give. The latter actualise good governance and progressive rebirth to earn honour. Politicians, however, fight and grab their way to identity and power, amassing fortune to leave to their heirs, and their repute.

The heir inherits by default hence he has no value to transact for worth, except the name, exploits, and privileges of his father, which are sooner squandered and declined.

Reality, however, reveals many an heir of a famous father as an alcoholic, drug addict, sexuality mutant, and dilettante, among others.

It is not by accident but just desserts that several heirs to Nigeria’s greatest political dynasties incandescence, albeit briefly in their fathers’ infamy or repute before they burn out.

But Nigeria’s ruling class forever takes care of its own thus the preponderance of political heirs foisted across the country’s civil service and corridors of power.

We need leaders with a practicable plan to end the charade and discourage pilferage of the federal and states’ treasuries. Come 2023, Nigeria must elect men and women incapable of stealing money meant to build schools, hospitals, and rehabilitate crucial infrastructure into their private accounts at home and abroad.

The resistance to predatory oligarchs is, however, impossible because large segments of the electorate lack the enlightenment and introspection required to articulate dissent at ballot time.

This minute, frantic idealists and erratic pundits are ornamenting politics and the media space with unrealistic fantasies of progress via monetised columns, television, and internet soapboxes.

Call them journalists, if you like. In truth, they are out to further confuse an already confounded electorate, and so doing, persuade all to reason and speak as a harmonious herd.

The actual controllers of the herd, however, are the political and business classes in the shades: those who own and control the press. The press is relegated to the lower rung, where it plays herdsman, driving the citizenry, like cattle, through thickets of sentiments and outrageous bigotries, onto their principals’ preferred paths.

At the backdrop of these, we face a far more difficult problem: the affliction of youths nurtured on bigotries and savage materialism. The youths, emerging from two societal extremes: the haves and have-nots, coalesce in ghastly pursuits inimical to the Nigeria project.

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

 

The Nigeria Police Force (NPF) morphs to our public spirit; the random policeman on the street is a fragment of society’s freckled personae – he is symptom and disease, predator and prey to Nigeria’s cult of self. He reflects our private instincts and void of citizenship.

Deep down, society knows this, but like the proverbial bride flaunting dubious innocence, she makes a vulgar show of recalling and canceling him at will.

Think of society as the flawed mother, whose fertile womb sprouts with the corrupt policeman, doctor, accountant, journalist, banker, politician, soldier, street urchin, political thug, terrorist, and unemployed youth, to mention a few.

Apology to the incorrupt, but motherhood blankets existence. Thus the police constable, sergeant, and inspector are spawns of our social conscience.

The most lurid portrait of Nigeria’s engagement with her police is discernible in the 2020 #EndSARS protest. On the 12th day of the protest, while the streets pulsed with mayhem as irate youths bayed for the blood of uniformed men, a riotous mob chased after a police officer until he tripped over a boulder and they pounced on him.

They ripped his shirt off and rained blows on him, chanting “#EndSARS! #EndSARS!” Recounting the grisly experience, an eyewitness, who is also a policeman, held that from a distance, those who attacked his colleague didn’t look like protesters.

Fearfully, he retreated behind an empty food kiosk and watched the mob batter his colleague till he was drenched in blood. Instantly, he tore his shirt off his body, ripping the buttons as he did, and he slipped out of his trouser. He would be naked but for his improvised undies comprising a t-shirt and cycling shorts. He balled his left hand into a fist and rolled the uniform around it. Then he tucked it in a refuse bin behind the kiosk and walked away, coolly, in brisk, urgent strides.

Several metres ahead, he turned to look at the scene. He could not make out his colleague in the distance but he felt contrite leaving him to the mob. He was equally ashamed for discarding his uniform. He knew he could “purchase” another uniform. To date, he doesn’t know what became of his lynched colleague. He never bothered to ask.

Even if he knew, there was nothing he could do. Still, he rued his helplessness and his inelegant resort to dump his uniform in the bin. He regretted fleeing while his colleague fell to the lawless horde.

The melee resulted from the demonstrations triggered on Thursday, October 8, 2020, by videos circulated on social media, showing highhandedness and extrajudicial killing by officers of the disbanded Special Anti-Robbery (SARS) Squad.

Over the next two weeks, protests were held in various states across the country, and by Nigerians in the diaspora, calling for reform and an end to police brutality. Eventually, groups of hoodlums seized the opportunity to unleash staggering violence on police personnel. This was widely celebrated by segments of Nigeria’s presumed intelligentsia, criminal and righteous divides.

Few people would forget in a hurry, the viral but cringe-worthy video of a police officer getting clobbered by a mob, in front of a burning police station at Orile, Lagos. The officer reportedly jumped the fence in order to escape being caught in flames as the mob set fire to the station, in protest against the alleged high-handedness of the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) heading the station.

Unfortunately for him, he leapt into the hands of the mob. They pounced on him and beat him to a pulp. Amid the mayhem, a thickset youth stabbed him in the eye. The officer careened with the dagger stuck in his eye, bleeding profusely. As he reeled blindly, his assailants took turns hacking into his already bloodied frame with machetes. Eventually, he keeled over and the mob descended on him maniacally, finishing him off.

“Policemen deserve worse,” many would say. Yet to recall the police killings in the wake of the #EndSARS protests is to explore a dark facet of Nigerian life. Pundits argued that the police had it coming even as the latter, admitted disillusionment, affirming that the incident has made them apathetic to their work ethics.

With a staff strength below 400,000, the police, as the primary law enforcer and security agency in Nigeria, is expected to protect about 200 million Nigerians via 36 state commands grouped into 12 zones, and seven administrative organs including special units like the disbanded SARS and newly constituted SWAT.

Over time, policemen have become predators in impoverished communities.

They indiscriminately extort the innocent and criminals – often colluding with the latter against the former.

The random policeman gleefully weaponises the law to detain people and seize property, unlawfully. Traffic violations attract extremely twisted penalties and extortion across the cities; such extortionate schemes fund police trucks and flesh the pockets of corrupt officers.

The latter would cheekily tell you that they are doing the bidding of their DPOs and Commissioners of Police. Everyone’s in on the scam, they would claim.

This perverse culture has turned every commuter into a perpetual victim or prey to the predatory police. More worrisome is the lack of effective checks and interventions by the state. Alex S. Vitale writes in his book, “The End of Policing,” that “Criminal policy is structured around the use of punishment to manage the ‘dangerous classes,’ masquerading as a system of justice.”

But who belongs to the dangerous classes? Perhaps the incumbent oligarchs? The oppressed, impoverished majority? Or is it the criminal cabal comprising corporations, banks, government, and their enablers in the judiciary?

Who are those weaponising the police against us? The oligarchs, the deceptive demagogue, social influencers, entertainers – most of your favourite celebrities to be precise.

It is instructive that despite the hue and tenor of celebrity rants via #EndSARS, all the celebrities that mounted the soapbox to grandstand and earn cheap appeal, retreated behind their heavily gated communities, under the protection of the police as the protest degenerated to a bloodbath.

While policemen and protesters were hacked to death across the country, these celebrity entertainers, like the business and political class, enjoyed the protection of the police in their private quarters.

 

Memories of the #EndSARS killings continually trigger hostility, soul searching, and a measure of despair among affected parties. For many citizens, particularly bereaved families of slain policemen and victims of extrajudicial killings by the police, the memories are too ghastly for comfort.

The resonance becomes even more chilling as partisan zealots spoil for a showdown at the Lekki Tollgate (the symbolic ground of #EndSARS) next month, amid security reports of impending terror attacks in Lagos, Abuja, and other parts of the country.

Through our apprehension, have we a police force that would passionately protect public lives and property? Has Nigeria done enough to excite patriotic service from her police?

Poverty, unemployment, inflation, and insecurity aren’t enough reasons to smash our fragile peace to smithereens. Partisan zealots must desist from any rally that could turn our fertile streets to scorched earth and pit the citizenry against the police.

Through the mire of misgovernance and dehumanising service, the police are faced daily with the grisly choice to protect a cabal of political, business, and entertainment elite that treat them as dispensable dogs of prey, or a citizenry that persistently treat them as wildlings that must be cursed and killed.

Their answer is predictable.

The cult of self commands our politics. It thrives on the sinister quirks of sociopaths: superficial charm, grandiloquence, and conceitedness; a need for constant adulation, a penchant for violence, crass sentimentality, sophistry, the inability to feel guilt or remorse, and the inclination to kill.

This is, of course, the ethic promoted by our dysfunctional social complex. It is deeply cultural and hardwired into the Nigerian psyche.

It is the ethic of unfettered fanaticism, the principle of partisan zealots. Ask Sam Omatseye. For the umpteenth time perhaps, the celebrated lyricist, journalist, and chairman of The Nation’s editorial board, has received death threats; this time from the murderous mob rooting for a presidential aspirant.

This is our reality. A society in which the social space inhibits the growth of diverse, independent voices; a space where citizens foster a vicious, poisonous echo chamber that reinforces selfish whims and doctored truths.

Any truth that conflicts with our views of ourselves is deemed maleficent, unfair and untrue. Any perspective that bashes our bigotries and imparts unpleasant truths to us, is deemed abhorrent.

The death threats to Omatseye and the subsequent threats issued by his aggressors to citizenry holding uncomplimentary views of their preferred candidate, among other things, reveal us to ourselves.

Nigeria thrives on the cult of self hence our affliction by murderous citizenship and mob tyranny. The cult of self would be our greatest undoing. Already, its manifestations are rife. It is the misguided belief that one is always right and everyone else got it wrong; it is the conviction that homicidal bias and personal interest, mistaken for individualism, are the same as patriotism and democratic rights.

In fact, homicidal bias, discernible in our distaste for the view of others, has become the highlight of our perverse citizenship and inclination to stifle others.

 

The cult of self, wielded by mob tyrants, foster their desire to impose their views and vanities on others. It enhances their threats to unleash death and mayhem on anyone or any group courageous enough to campaign for and vote for any other presidential aspirant aside from their preferred candidate.

Violence and angst, a sense of victimhood and monopoly of protest, become their justification for threatening and inflicting chaos on anyone whose opinion challenges theirs.

It is this perverse culture – accentuated by material impoverishment and poverty of the mind – that birthed us terrorism, armed banditry, and the highly lucrative kidnap for ransom sub economy. The cult of self afflicted us with the triggers of these monstrosities, that is, the soulless leadership and business class who mindlessly looted the nation’s treasury, trashed the economy and masterminded nationwide mayhem in furtherance of their selfish interests.

There is little difference between the cyber-terrorists running our political space amok, and the bloodthirsty hordes of Boko Haram or the armed bandits quietly laying siege to our hitherto peaceful communities.

The war up north has finally found its way to our doorsteps down south. We can no longer embrace aloofness as our armour against the fierce winds of chaos.

The fragile peace of the south that we once coveted and celebrated with a smirk was after all, an illusion. It diminishes against pervasive terror.

But how have we responded to this looming apocalypse? By gas lighting it and immersing in morbid rites of escape, like the cult worship of a political idol and his totems of dubious rhetoric.

“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition,” wrote C. Wright Mills.

In Nigeria, the political celebrity, among others, is the major beneficiary of our dysfunctional social complex.

Yet millions of Nigerians embrace ignorance even as the toxic underbelly of their political celebrities cum the oligarchic enterprise is hurled in our face; just recently, a viral video of two new governor-elects of rival political parties doing a celebratory dance in a shared private jet made the rounds. It was apparent that the duo shared a tight bond immune to the ravage of acrimony and toxic partisanship pervasive of their neighbouring political spaces.

Reality asserts the political class’ clinical approach to politics and their commitment to it as a game, where you either win or lose – only to retreat, realign and try another day.

Little wonder that supposedly sworn political enemies have been seen to unite by their children’s marriage, or betrothal to each other’s daughters. Outside the circuits of their gated commune, ignorant electorate clash and bawl, maim and kill each other in a manic fit to further the interests of their respective political messiah.

This malady is borne to the point where a man who couldn’t muster a convincing explanation of his ambition to lead, let alone a visionary manifesto, is maliciously shoved to our consciousness as the best President Nigeria could ever have.

The malaise aggravates whereby a man or woman gets celebrated as a national treasure due to his or her ability to loot public office and deceive us. Then there are those we celebrate for their ability to dribble and score goals on the football pitch, or breast the tape faster than others in a track and field event. Of course, the latter in particular shouldn’t be faulted for exciting a cult following among mostly superficial beings addicted to entertainment as escape from our self-inflicted woes.

On the flipside, however, the teachers responsible for furnishing Nigeria with all manners of genii, visionaries, technocrats, sports champions, and nation builders, and the security operatives responsible for protecting our lives and property, are treated with disdain by the citizenry and the state.

The policemen, soldiers and the press, who are burdened with the task of protecting us from the worst from abroad and among us, are persistently humiliated and tortured by the Nigerian collective.

The institutionalised degradation of our teachers, security operatives and the press offers public spectacle until their humiliation and debasement hits too close to home and our comfort zones.

The lingering ASUU strike that has rendered several youths “useless” and frustrated, the humiliation and debasement of the striking lecturers; death threats to journalists amid institutionalised harassment of the press; and the disdainful treatment of the nation’s armed forces currently hit too close to home.

Recent intelligence reports suggesting that the federal seat of power in Aso Rock, Abuja, and Lagos State among others, are on the radar of some persons planning terror attacks across the country and the widespread apprehension of the citizenry and political class are instructive.

At this crucial period, who are those we look to for solace and security? Is it our celebrity politician, reality show vixen, pornstar, sports star, actress, musician or social influencer?

Who are those we look to for direction and reassurance that all would be well? From whom do we seek conviction and extract a promise that we’d be safe? Is it the menacing herd prowling the social media and public space, hurling invective and death threats at anyone with differing political views? Is it the virulent horde wishing anarchy on Nigeria from home and abroad?

The chaos of naira decline, looming food crisis, and the threat of cyber-bullies rarely prick the illusions that warp our consciousness like the incumbent threat of nationwide terror attacks.

To deal with the latter, we look to the police. This is quite instructive.

 

 

The 2023 elections incite the Nigerian cult of infantilism. It accentuates disparate voter divides, our fear of growing up, and inclination to soak in the lagoon of misbehaviour.

Public discourse segues to rant and rascality, en route to the polls – online and offline – thus validating Marc Cooper’s pungent portrayal of the television-marinated society, in which the boundaries between childhood and adulthood blur, and completely get erased, in the glitz of pseudo realities.

The Nigerian political arena, extends beyond the political parties, to the platforms of public discourse and channels of communication, especially social media, where children and adults trade tantrums, and hurl juvenile rant and rage in protest against everything Nigerian.

The political landscape has deteriorated on the watch of predatory oligarchs, no doubt. The latter displays, to date, willful incompetence and inexplicable disdain for the electorate. The citizenry, in time, developed deep-rooted loathing for their pretensions, coldheartedness, and abuse of authority.

The next few months, however, offer the electorate yet another opportunity to stand on the bight of history and salvage or waste opportunities for change, again.

For the umpteenth time, Nigeria fields contenders, some of whom may be out to excite the electorate’s frantic hopes simply to dash them. Like a changeling of fickle principles, passion and integrity are changeful in their wake.

The electorate must make its way past the fraud and extortion of these seasoned politicians and younger aspirants, who are out to lure the psyche into committing political capital (that is, electoral votes) to unsound judgment and investments.

But to achieve this, the Nigerian voter must learn to discern the likely messiah from false patriots and conmen.  It’s about time we exercised tact and meticulousness, in casting our vote at the forthcoming general elections.

I ask that we be wary of everybody and everything. I ask that we watch out for certain questions which we will frequently hear and certain apologies that may resound as philosophical queries or rhetoric. They are in truth, psychological confessions and expositions of the treachery and chaos constituted by our preferred candidates and their apologists.

If we pay good mind to their politics, we just might find that every touted good by some candidates, masks a damning evil, like the extent to which altruism erodes a man’s capacity to grasp the concept of rights, or the actual value of human life. And the extent to which his conscience and humaneness has being wiped out.

I urge that we be wary of the extremely platitudinous and patronising candidate, who is desperate to serve as the means to the end of others; such a character will ultimately regard others as disposable means to achieve his ends, often at very expensive cost.

The more neurotic and ‘conscientious’ he gets in his practice of altruism, the more colourful schemes he devises “for the love of the collective good,” “for the love of the common man,” or “posterity” and “leaders of tomorrow.”

Every effort of such a candidate will be geared at reinforcing all manners of sentiments and sound bites – he would claim to seek the fulfillment of “the people’s needs” except the actual needs of the electorate, like you and me.

Among other measures, shall we institutionalise the debate as a platform for scrutinising our candidates? I moot a discuss, where the crucial, dreaded questions get asked.

Let us wield it as a looking glass by which we view and analyse the politics, antecedents, and soul of each candidate. Let us not be deceived by their politics of unblemished altruism.

The advocates of such selflessness often promise automatic and wholly magical solutions to problems of poverty, security, sub-standard education, and healthcare to mention a few.

They promise success and survival to everyone but what they offer, ultimately, are what Rand calls “life-boat” solutions – fleeting lifelines by which short-term benefits are derived. Such a philosophy of governance conflicts with our social realities. It’s akin to applying menthol on a bullet wound.

Let us not be deceived by the promises of restructuring, modern and affordable housing, true federalism, fiscal prudence, quality education, and so on regurgitated by our preferred candidates.

Let us begin to ask, in Rand-speak, how they would pay for these things and at what cost to you and me. Let us make each candidate define his philosophy of social reform, welfare governance, and the psychology of his noble experiments in the interest of our most basic necessities and his antecedents in public or private office.

The appalling recklessness by which some candidates propose, justify and project “government with a human face” may be discernible, measured, and disclaimed through the looking-glass of their antecedents in public office, well-organised political debates, interviews, pseudo-events, and frank talk.

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.

Healthcare appropriately illustrates a modicum of the random aspirant’s lifeboat ventures. “Isn’t it desirable that the government subsidises treatment of compatriots living with HIV/AIDS?” clamours an average citizen. The preferable answer would be “Yes, it is desirable.”

It is at this point that both the mental and moral processes of a collectivised brain are wholly cut off. The rest is fog. Only the desire remains in sight of our “altruistic” candidate.

“It’s for the greater good. It’s hardly in my interest but in the interest of others. It’s for the public, a helpless, ailing public,” rants the familiar candidate. Consequently, the fog hides such facts as the embezzlement of public funds, unbridled looting of the public till, compromise and sacrifice of medical science, professional integrity, and the careers and happiness of those who are to administer such care, the nurses and medical doctors; and those who are to enjoy it, the patients.

The examples of such projects are innumerable as daily, our favoured candidates, whip up more slogans to bait and confuse us. Therefore, be wary of the candidate promising to clean up our slums while avoiding questions about what happens to the victims of such cleansing and those in the next income bracket.

Be wary of the candidate who seeks to “educate the shanty kid” while avoiding crucial issues such as the quality and welfare of staff to anchor such educational projects. What will be taught, and what back-up measures are to be adopted in the event that the initiative fails?

Be wary of the candidate who seeks that Nigeria too gets to do the moonwalk and conquer space even as he avoids the crucial issues of government and private sector neglect, Nigeria’s white elephant space technology, and discrimination against the nation’s polytechnics and technical training schools.

Be conscious of their unreality – their blind, savage, ghastly fantasies that inspire them to prevaricate and if possible, avoid the usually unanswered and unanswerable question to all their “popular” and “altruistic” goals: “Who really gets to enjoy the benefits?”