Category: Olatunji Ololade

Votes may always be sold and paid for in Nigeria. The motive for selling and the purchase of votes would, however, differ across political platforms, cultures, and climes. Nigerians would rationalise this to reinforce their vanities and fantasies of political correctness.

The chaos of artifice, clashing troops and dubious bromides, is purged and pervasive at the twilight of every administration. It becomes gross and easily accessible en route to the polls and the ushering in of a new dispensation.

Whatever the loathing and rationalisation of Ademola Adeleke’s emergence as Osun’s new governor-elect, for instance, pundits may rest assured that the people made their choice through their votes, and the wisdom or folly of their action would manifest over four years.

Politics will part you from your money and professed values as efficiently as the Yahoo Boy lurking at an atrocious click-bait away. It’s part of the culture. It is all about heightening your hopes to fleece you of money, values, and hope; when these run out, you might as well cease to exist.

Ask the casualties of ambition gone awry: the failed aspirants at the recently concluded presidential primaries across the All Progressives Congress (APC), People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Labour Party, and the African Democratic Congress (ADC),  among other platforms.

Yet each failed aspirant shied from brutal honesty about his role in our pervasive culture of exploitation. To deal with their loss, they resort to mischief, spreading falsehood and inciting loyalists to vapid protestation.

It gets grislier on social media, the virtual threshing floor of the ignorant from the wise, the cognizant from the uninformed. In this arena, the maladroit cancels out the reflective; everybody is a pundit. Thus to question a trending preoccupation of the herd has become even among the so-called liberal elite, an unforgivable heresy. Folks wield lavish contempt for any perspective that queries or opposes their preferred sentiments.

Such characters can only be confronted by an expansion in breadth of human reason, catholicity of will, and culture. The native aspiration of such a herd to covet and project candidates whose chief preoccupation is to loot our coffers and feed their greed, for instance, must not be encouraged any further. Nor should we persist in pitiful complacency and eagerness to acquiesce to their boorish enterprises, for the love of sentiment or token.

To stimulate the wildly weak and untamed mind is to ignite a ravenous and uncontrollable fire, and to impede our often rudderless enterprise is to incite the volatile minds to a harvest of violence and blood-letting, Du Bois would say. Politics must be rid of bitterness and cutthroat rivalry.

Political passivity bred by a culture of illusion is exploited by demagogues who present themselves as saviours to a submissive population. These pseudo revolutionaries are further validated by the robust toxicity of the marketplace of prejudice patronised by powerful elements among the political class and electorate.

Mob tyranny has steered us towards a radically dictatorial direction. This dictatorship cuts both ways, afflicting us with tyrant democrats among the political class and the electorate. The prevalent bullying between right-wing and left-wing political divides further highlights how feeble the commitment to democracy is in the Nigerian circumstance.

While the youth have been drawn appreciably towards politics, it is alarming to see the levels of ignorance and base sentimentality fostered amid rival political divides. “If you are not for my candidate, you are the enemy!” becomes their battle cry as they fight dirty online and offline.

Through it all, democracy plummets the steep slope of decline, beleaguered. The extent to which young people scorn truth and reason and embrace intolerance makes them vulnerable to the lying demagogue.

Partisan media frantically influence public debate about contesting candidates and alternative forms of power. Ultimately, they seek to determine who gets heard and who does not; each news medium seeks to malign every rival of its preferred candidate.

Like criminals forsworn against good nature, multimedia pundits discuss politics as a horse race. Rather than discuss the crucial issues and ideologies promising progressive reform, they obsess with the pseudo-events staged by rival candidates.

Such partisan press evolves like a bitch; a scrawny, docile mutt led only by wild instincts and subservience to crafty,  self-seeking characters. Media tyranny is bodacious and corruptive of intellect, yet the unstated ethic of partisan intelligentsia is to survive by justifying the dominance of sentiments or deep pockets.

Through it all, you are forced to wonder: Does power truly repose in the electorate? How can we stage a peaceful but decisive revolt by our votes without malice and blood-letting? Is the current electorate capable of such a noble exploit?

To these bothersome questions and contradictory tributaries of thought, the potent and yet inadequately explored panacea of education towers above all others. We live in dire need of human training that will awaken our minds to the timeless knowledge inherent in the idealistic and the practical, the realistic and the fantastic, the permanent and the contingent, in a workable equilibrium.

The incumbent electorate comprises two fractions of radical beings: the cantankerous, irrational illiterate, and semi-literate constituted by street urchins, park thugs, petty traders, and criminals.

The other fraction consists of the methodically savage kind including the so-called articulate, cultured, progressive breed comprising young, upwardly mobile professionals: doctors, engineers, journalists, lawyers, teachers, the armed forces, civil servants, and unemployed graduates.

Both divides are afflicted by bitter cynicism and despondency. They betray as much bestiality as the political class particularly in instances demanding inviolable tact, sensitivity, and maturity.

Their reactions to the victory of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP)’s Ademola Adeleke at the recently concluded gubernatorial polls in Osun State, are also instructive. Irrespective of the dynamics that gifted Adeleke victory over the incumbent, All Progressives Congress (APC)’s Gboyega  Oyetola, virtual space pulsates with acrimony, name-calling, cursing, and hate-mongering even among spectators far removed from the politics of Osun State.

Previous reactions to the arrest and subsequent trial of corrupt public officers also provide a worthy yardstick by which the nature of partisanship may be judged across the country. Many would adduce reasons bordering on ethnic and religious bigotries in decrying the “persecution” of alleged looters of public office even where the latter have issued confessions substantiating the charges against them.

Such characters are incapable of rational, cognitive, and affective sensitivities pivotal to nation-building. Everyday encounters with gluttonous gangs of “struggling youth” reveal, among other things, that, many are the same social products as their peers across the political class and aristocratic divide.

A visit to any nightclub, party congress, or religious office attests to this fact. There, several youths engage in unjustifiable excesses, to the applause of mates yearning to be in their shoes; be they advance fee fraudsters, bankers, journalists, ‘prophets,’ accountants, secretaries, factory hands or ordinary clerks, youths, they engage in a bitter, desperate struggle to chance on sudden and stupendous wealth.

How could such vitally impaired characters be trusted to conduct their affairs appropriately? Thus the imperative of a practical, ingenious process of human training in the struggle to build a truly progressive and formidable movement of the people, for the people, and by the people.

Yet democracy is simply never enough. Nigeria will never become that model nation of our dreams until we evolve a social process that enables sufficient nurturing, the guidance of thought, and adroit coordination of deeds – sureties to freedom, peace, equality, justice, and rebirth.

This brings us back again to the issue of quality education.

 

 

 

 

Today, we relive the infernal crud of the Nigerian personae. The political animal, the apolitical pacifist, hyperbolic ‘influencer,’ and the data-fabulous millennial ‘netizen’ scud to shore national consciousness on the worldwide web, in support of one presidential candidate or the other.

Ultimately they cuddle one candidate and cringe from the other, as their vanities dictate. They’d call it value-based politics, however. Yet, this minute, cyberspace becomes a spectacle. In this virtual arena, citizens clash in defense and furtherance of random bigotries.

In this public space, everybody is a political wilding: folk trade bitter realism, infantile whim, pseudo idealism, rancid wit with alarming gusto. They claim to do this for the culture. If Nigerian politics had a culture.

The internet has become a monument to pseudo-realities and events. It is a place where stereotypes are propagated as reality. The guts and sinews of every pigeonhole, theme-park hatred, and sentimentality, however, hold the same as its professors seek validation in mind-numbing sloganeering, toxic bigotries, sophistry, and outright lies.

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

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

Here you encounter Nigerians of vast mental stripes: the BATIFIED, ATIKULATE, AND OBIDIENT. Once you get past the facade of slogans and artifice, it’s mostly the same defiant, virulent passion driving the mob.

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

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

But our greatest undoing would be our inability to douse the flames of bigotries and hatred incited by our utterances and cutthroat politics.

As we approach the 2023 polls, for instance, our politics must be rid of rancour. There is no excuse for maligning an individual, group, or social divide for its political choices and preferred candidates.

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

Through the inferno and chaos, we seek a redefinition of the Nigerian patriot. Strikeout patriot; it’s about time we redefined the Nigerian. Nigerian – a clownish, simple creature, at times even enchanting within its limitations but ultimately foredoomed to fulfill a prophecy of blind pride, insatiable lust, and suicide?

It is never my wish to subject anyone to seemingly reckless deprecation but even as you read, the random ‘netizen’ perfects innumerable plots to self-destruct. Behind those suicidal plots lurks a postscript, and predictably, regret – that emotive shingle that often succeeds disreputable nature.

Yet we stand ignorant and proud, like a half-conscious mutter of men, craving the essence of humanity and freedom, only to forsake it for a token or fleeting sentiment at election time. Just like we did at the last general elections.

This is the tangle of witlessness and resignation that requires us all to become better patriots and rejuvenators of the Nigerian dream. 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 gangs of the predatory ruling class.

The latter cannot be wished away or successfully weeded out by violence or bloodshed even if we tried. Yet the surest way to deny them continual access to leadership and power is for us to engage constructively in the ongoing transition process.

We must shun the urge to emerge grisly manifestations of the Nigerian factor; we must quit personifying the monstrosities standing on our path to humane civilization, progress, and common decency.

It’s about time Nigeria’s youth stopped personifying such frantic manifestations and chart their path to freedom from toxic politicking.

Education is the key out of this mental and moral jail cell. A different kind of education borne of critical faculties and divorced from the high-priced occupational training by which the modern university turns several youths into mindless certificate-seeking machines.

While violence and terrorism are often part of revolutions, the fundamental tool of any successful revolt is the non-violent conversion of the forces deployed by the oppressors or the state to hoodwink and enforce dominance, on the side of the rebels. Most successful revolutions are, for this reason, fundamentally non-violent.

Revolutionary measures, however, fail in Nigeria, because the arrowheads of the movements continually cloak their measures and homilies in hostilities and platitudinous chant, that hackneyed dialect that is a barrier to development and communication.

It is the same dialect adopted by the political and corporate con-artists to bait the electorate and reel in their votes; only to hoodwink them afterward, and rig the political process and financial system in the obscure, cryptic language coined by their elite psyops and propaganda labs.

To strip the incumbent ruling class of power, 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.

This can’t be achieved via the 2023 elections. Now is a good time to start, however. We must begin to teach the Nigerian voter: graduate and undergrad, street urchin, trader, commercial transporter, the armed forces, and unemployed, the benefits of restraint and self-sacrifice, critical and realistic thinking.

We need not bury the lessons and the process in obscure or esoteric lingo. Teach them to scorn vote seekers who only visit the electorate to share corn meals and hold town-hall meetings at the dawn of general elections.

Teach them to scorn the presidential aspirant scudding to acclaim on a sea of lies, sophistry, and half-truths. Teach them to scorn the legislative representatives, who commit crumbs of their constituency allowances to empower their constituents with wheelbarrows, machetes, sachet water, and pepper grinding machines, among others.

Teach them to ask their elected representatives, why they must blindly support the latter’s battles with perceived political detractors or opposition. After all, we are one Nigeria. Teach them to scorn violence, vote-selling, and hooliganism.

Help them understand that a loss at the polls should never translate to bitterness and withdrawal from the Nigerian enterprise; political violence and hooliganism are never acceptable resorts in nation-building.

Better tomorrow can only be achieved via humane, visionary politics tailored for the collective good.

Patriotism thrives on cultural standards. The songs that every Nigerian knows by heart, the lore of nationhood, and the politics of suburban, boondocks poetry manifest the kernel of Nigeria’s culture and the substance of her 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 in the 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 and entrenching exotic 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 and development. We cannot dwell, for instance, like Americans or Brits in Nigeria. We can only assimilate aspects of their culture complimentary of ours. We must always synthesise from the most humane sociopolitical cultures around the world.

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 – journalists and so-called influencers – whose job is to 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 chthonic projection of Western depravities and virulent awareness 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 all it means to be Nigerian. Ultimately, they corrupt the artistic vocabulary of Nigeria’s literary arts, turning it into a meditation on society’s debauched nature as Nigeria’s secret truth. They celebrate degenerate spirit using aggressive cues of prurient art, promiscuity, gendered storms, and toxic sexuality.

While the consequences of such dross manifest in real-time, Nigeria welcomes from abroad, more insolent corruption of its media space by 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 the 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.

 

So, Bola Tinubu made history at the Eagle Square, in Abuja. Against all odds. Like a living time machine, bearing with him multitude of hopes through dimensions of intrigues and trials fostered by the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential race, he emerged victorious.

Victory sprouted in fields of tumult. Yet through his ordeal, his mettle reclaimed the radiance of rebirth, like the proverbial patriot’s, sculpted of spunk and spittle.

Ornamented in self-creation, he defied the muse of manic re-creators. Tinubu jolted dismaying detractors a conniving party leadership and perfidious proteges pitted against him with devastating might.

Through their severe plots, he marched in virtual lockstep with his dreams, undisguised in candour and integrity of intent. His consequent victory and emergence as APC’s candidate for the 2023 presidential elections commands elegant tributes to his politics and the legion of allies cutting across the Niger and transcending to the land of the rising sun in the East.

His victory reorders the chaos of the play. The old guards at the centre were right to be wary of him and his political army. His victory at the 2023 presidential polls will excite defiant idealism and command a new class of political patronage.

Tinubu will cancel them out. This Sphinx devices and answers his own riddle.

Against the shadowy cabal’s run of play, Tinubu manifests as both a titan and remarkable man of alchemy.

In the flora of imagination, he is a hero, a villain, a mentor, and a political godfather. He is a father, a husband, a brother, an uncle, and grandfather. He is also a patriot. A human.

In the estimation of friends and foes, the heart of his story is redacted and recast. Everybody defends or maligns Tinubu as politics and circumstances dictate – if this isn’t expedient belly magic, what is?

We have seen recipients of his benefactive politics hurl caution to the wind and pay it forward with malice. Some mutate as foes.

Amid the clashing contrarieties triggered by his presidential ambition, only Tinubu’s deeds could validate him or otherwise. En route to the 2023 elections, it fortified him against the wiles and conspiracies of established and hidden detractors – gifting him a convincing 1,271 votes in total to clinch the APC’s presidential ticket ahead of former minister of transportation Rotimi Amaechi’s 316 votes and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s 235 votes.

What does his victory portend for Nigerian politics? Does he command humbling idealism, purity of intent, and fidelity to growth required of a candidate of his stature? Is his materiality progressive and borne of pragmatism?

Facts don’t care about anyone’s feelings. The truth sprouts free of “stomach infrastructure.” Of the 2023 presidential aspirants, Asiwaju leads in stature and by his deeds. Nonetheless, he’s been frantically dismissed as infirm by parties threatened by his virtuosity and apparent bone strut.

There is no gainsaying the two-time Lagos governor vies for the Presidency in dire times. He must appreciate this moment for what it’s worth – when the neurotic tick-tock of midnight silences our whispers of dawn.

Few weeks after the Katari-Rijana train bombing by armed bandits, on Sunday, gunmen attacked the Catholic Diocese of Ondo, located on Owa-Luwa Street in Owo, the hometown of the State Governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, leaving about 38 parishioners dead and several others injured.

Tinubu must fashion a convincing and fail-safe plan to improve security in the country, no doubt. He vies for the presidency amid terrorism, comatose oil refineries, substandard health and education, corporate banditry, and Yahoo Plus pandemic, to mention a few.

Despite his experience, critics of his ambition angrily crucify apologists of his candidacy irrespective of his merits. It’s that delicate. Many tales about him suffer enormous exclusions. In the foundry of political imagery, so much is excluded from Tinubu’s bust that we can feel his silhouette straining against the charged atmosphere, in combat with arbitrary sculpting.

Having bestrode the political scene, like a colossus for three decades, grooming leaders, his politics culminate in pursuit of his presidential ambition. Tinubu banks on his experience as Managing Auditor and Treasurer at Mobil, the oil company where he made his fortune, his professional training at American based-accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, then ‘Deloitte Haskins and Sells,’  General Motors, First National Bank of Chicago, Procter and Gamble, among others,

His re-engineering of Lagos’ fiscal regime, as the state governor, from a paltry monthly internally generated revenue (IGR) of N700m to over N30 billion as at today; and his exploits as a fiery warhorse, member, and financier of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), that fought the military to a standstill following the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election, are appreciable.

He has subsequently proved himself politically savvy and consistent as a  Senator on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the aborted Third Republic, the Alliance for Democracy (AD), the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and the merger that resulted in the All Progressives Congress (APC).

In politics, Tinubu flaunts a quintessential stone architecture, but the random troll wanted him to give it up for the use of a wily, lesser protege – even as the latter presented as less-than, initially playing ‘hide and seek’ with his presidential hope while sponsoring a flurry of attacks against his former benefactor.

So doing, he and his team,  lionised Tinubu thus projecting himself as earthen ovule, and his manhood as quivering scorched egg.

Tinubu’s politics, honed through his lieutenants’ hostilities and betrayal, assumes tactical elegance – his principles of political sportsmanship are made more concrete. They serve him as you read. Ultimately, he is elevated or “reduced” to his essence. He is a blessing to those who truly know him and a role model to his closet and open detractors.

At 70, everyone wants a piece of Tinubu. Perhaps because he is the politician to beat despite the clamour for a younger candidate by segments of Nigeria’s youths. None of the whispered alternatives, however, is in his youth. Those who are could never win the 2023 elections.

None has shown the intellectual rigour, emotional maturity, stamina, discipline, native intelligence, and character displayed by Asiwaju.

Tinubu is ritualized personality, a streamlined pond, and a totem for sloganeering. He is detestable to his foes yet excitingly speckless to loyalists. The former squander expensive time maligning him, perhaps because their preferred candidate’s perfection is chiefly for display, not exploitable. He can only tickle their fancy from his social media balcony – his window of appearance.

If all politics thrive by a window of appearance, Tinubu’s face is the sun of consciousness rising over his professed horizon. To his rivals and detractors, Tinubu is both exposed and enclosed, a torment and an idol. He is naked yet armoured, vilified yet ritually adored. Thus he must understand if, for instance, his democratic credentials are radically questioned by cutthroat rivals and embittered segments of the partisan electorate.

He must appreciate too why he must soak it all in like a garbage dump, knowing it’s a prerequisite for a patriot seeking to serve Nigerians of vast bigotries, intellect, and stripes. He must respond in truth, patience, competence, understanding, and love.

He must understand that his most bitter critics are essential to his pirouette to greater significance. If the presidency is divinely penned in his Qadar, no force in the world could thwart him.

Of all his names, I am in love with his oriki, Akanbi, manifestly because I answer to it. An Akanbi is an Akanda Eda – inured to the odds, forged to triumph through tumult.

Nigeria is in a state of war, a frigid blank zone under siege. It might take an Akanbi to liberate her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It took a great deal of courage for Muhammadu Buhari to assert the legend of his integrity. It’d be inordinately easy for him to trash it, and all of his associated mystique.

If he listens to Nigeria’s enemies, and goes ahead to truncate the All Progressives Congress (APC)’s presidential primaries with the dirty lance of a consensus candidate, he’d be denying the country the emergence of a truly popular presidential candidate, produced through an untainted, democratic process.

No matter how adroitly he fumbles and feigns altruism as a necessary rite of perfidy, he’d fall splat in the court of posterity. But I trust him never to cartwheel and keel on moral fibre. President Buhari must shun such recreant retreat. If not, he’d be forging bad karma.

Man’s karma travels with him, like his shadow. But karma is on nobody’s leash. The universe’s agent of cause and effect, deterrence, and retributive justice can neither be owned nor tethered. Unlike life, it doesn’t suffer the affliction of man’s dubious acquiescence to daunting, baleful bestiality oft summed up by the terse, intense statement: ‘Life’s a bitch.”

Karma is our open secret. In Nigeria, it is our sacred, secret space, ignored in plain sight. It becomes temenos, our ritual precinct of reward and just desserts. In this divine, marked-off terrain, the moral code of the universe operates at its darkest and most mechanical – there are no emotive shingles of pardon or persuasion, just causes, and effects, actions, and consequences.

In 1932, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget found that by the age of 6, children begin to believe, that, bad things that happen to them are punishments for bad things they had done. The Nigerian society, however, fights to subvert the karmic laws of cause and effect, and thus insulate individuals from the injurious effects of their vices and poor judgment.

Politics is equally rigged to reward greed, savagery, indolence, illegitimacy, and so on. For instance, en route 2023 polls, Bola Tinubu’s ordeal in the hands of perfidious proteges and their lackeys is quite instructive.

Lest we forget the pervasive political and economic crisis bedeviling the country. The nation’s woes originate from her moral lapses. Endemic poverty, substandard healthcare and education, ethnic and religious bigotry, bribery, and other forms of corruption manifested by the society’s poverty of morals and humane ethics.

Hence those guilty of corruption escape the consequences of their wrongdoing in connivance with a bland, treacherous government. The consequences of this anomaly are, of course, better imagined – think Dasukigate, Mainagate, and so on.

The frightful blooming of the Nigerian karma is a brazen incantation of debauchery’s triumph over morals. Desire trumps ethics on the watch of supposedly invincible oligarchs.

The latter espouse raptorial power in rebuttal of patriot magic. Their awful energy incites the eerie flurry of Medusa’s reptilian hair locks, entangling everyone and everything. From treasury looting, sponsorship of terrorism, to the elevation of random bigotries, the incumbent ruling class manifests as Nigeria’s worst comeuppance.

Until recently, there was no punishment for the wicked and no deterrence for the corrupt. On President Goodluck Jonathan’s watch, Nigeria was pilfered silly. The country was persistently debauched by cliques and individuals.

There was no good or evil. The cult of moral grayness bloomed on Jonathan’s watch. Thus our reality of chronic indebtedness and bankruptcy.

Enter Muhammadu Buhari, incumbent President and leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Buhari suffers the flipside of karma – from his ascension to power and ouster by military coup in the 1980s, to his re-emergence as democratic President, the retired General from Daura, is widely appreciated and denounced along bigoted shoals of ethnic and religious extremism.

In his first term, base sentimentality and impoverished logic of entitlement fostered by the ruling class and segments of the citizenry afflicted Buhari with a clumsy cabinet; subtle cues abound therein, establishing incompetence and workings of unforgiving karma.

Thus we have ministers whose appointments were hotly debated and questioned on basis of their shameful antecedents either as governors, commissioners, and other capacities in public and private sectors.

Seven years after their appointment, these ministers can only manage a hobble along the clogged, swampy corridors of the APC’s castle of “Change.” Such individuals weren’t replaced with competent hands. Buhari’s cabinet mustn’t bloom as yet another bower of ill-bliss.

Contemporary legend contends that some of the outgoing ministers are victims of hubris and retribution trailing their emergence through vile, subterranean tactics. Such characters constitute an impediment to national progress and his presidency – his personal inadequacies notwithstanding, if Buhari had a formidable team, his shortcomings as an administrator and leader wouldn’t be so bothersome.

Lest we forget the country’s outgoing National Assembly. While it has shown better character, the legislative chambers still fall within public expectations. But groupies of the ruling class would have none of that. Left to them, their cronies and benefactors in the current administration can do no wrong.

In the scheme of things, not only are the corrupt saved from their just desserts, the worthy and true are punished for their uprightness and industry via burdensome levels of maladministration, taxation, and bureaucratic ineptitude.

In the ensuing moral sepsis, the ruling class treats equality as an ethical baseline even as it establishes prosperity and poverty as fortunate and unfortunate draws in Nigeria’s cosmic lottery. Thus public office metamorphoses to moral insult and government officials make concerted efforts, daily, to subvert progress.

The most prescient portrait of the Nigerian character and our ultimate fate as a nation, however, resonates with Hedges’ apt commentary on Herman Melville’s allegorical portrayal of the American character in his literary classic, “Moby Dick.”

Melville makes our murderous obsessions, hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness, and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia, argues Hedges.

In truth, Nigeria is likable to the fictional ship, the Pequod. The ship’s crew is a mixture of races and creeds which is reflective of Nigeria’s heterogeneous society. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like the Nigerian society’s inordinate dash for wealth, assures Pequod’s destruction.

While Ahab and his crew eventually gained awareness of their imminent doom, very few Nigerians appreciate from experience that our prevalent culture of acquisition, fostered by insatiable greed and based on cutthroat politics, extreme corporate profit, and devastation of farmlands by oil exploration accelerates doom.

Nigeria, like the Pequod’s crew, rationalises insanity, scorns prudence, and bows slavishly before hedonism and greed. Society yields to the seductive illusion of unbounded luxury, wanton idolatry, limitless power, and acclaim. Thus we unfurl to degenerate forces and systems of death.

Those who foresee the impending doom lack the fortitude to rebel. Thus moral cowardice makes hostage all. This shouldn’t encourage Buhari and his ruling class to scorn the subtle nudge of tact.

The movement towards the illicit, as Camille would say, produces a violent movement outward in desolation. We see the same pattern in the finale of Moby Dick, where Ahab’s attempt to pierce the heart of nature by harpooning the whale ends in tragedy and vast, empty silence.

Moby Dick eventually rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one.

Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.

 

 

 

Veegoddess’ grin is “expensive.” For the right price, it will slink into a sneer, while she receives pounding from a dog.

The teenage TikTok user in Lagos, who went viral after claiming she slept with a dog for N1.7million, is simply one of the teenagers and young ladies who think it isn’t a big deal to have sexual relations with a dog.

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

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

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

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

Money teases off her inhibitions. Hard drugs too. She’d do anything to feed her drug dependence hence at age 17, she let two married neighbours sleep with her in the backseat of a car, while her boyfriend, Azuka, secretly filmed them.

Now 22, she has become a prominent feature in porn movies. Angela’s role models in the industry are Ajibola Elizabeth aka Maami Igbagbo and Tobiloba Jolaoso, popularly known as Kingtblakhoc. It would be recalled that Jolaoso was arrested for allegedly recording a pornographic movie at the Osun Osogbo sacred grove on the outskirts of Osogbo, the Osun state capital, and a UN-designated World Heritage Site.

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

Nigeria has a thriving, underground porn industry but both the government and citizenry are living in denial of it.  Astonishingly, for a country, that’s deeply religious, and prominently split along Muslim, Christian faiths,  Nigeria has never outlawed pornography, not even in the 1999 Constitution.

While the country’s criminal code slackly defines “obscenity” as any article whose effect, “taken as a whole is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt,” those exposed to it, Lagos State has, however, outlawed the public display of graphic sexual material.

But due to a lack of federal law against public broadcast of smut movies, pornographic content can be accessed online at any time by anyone including teenagers and minors.

Until recently, all domestic porn was heterosexual but there has been increasing production of same-sex porn. While homosexual activity attracts a 14-year sentence in the country, a couple of actresses have engaged in lesbian porn to wide acclaim. More worrisome is the teenage girls’ enthrallment with bestial sex; more girls would sleep with a dog or a horse for “as little as N250, 000,” said a porn producer.

Desperate actor-producers seeking to make a name and overnight renown, employ commercial sex workers, teenagers, and the underage as performers.

Male performers make about a third of the money paid to their female colleagues. Their fee stagnates around N15, 000 to N20, 000 for a 5-10 minute feature.

And the average porn actor must struggle to sustain the singular talent of keeping an erection for long periods of time. Consequently, some actors inject Alprostadil or Caverject into an open vein in their penis. The average cost of the drug is N15, 000 for a single chamber dose and N30, 000 for a dual-chamber dose. It used to be N28, 000. Not many actors can afford that.

So, they resort to taking Viagra and local alcoholic beverages mixed with cannabis and other psychotropic substances; anything to get them high and hard, very fast.

Some actors who inject, keep an open wound at the base of their penis through which they inject the stimulant into their organ. They do this to maintain a single needlepoint on the penis. The downside of this is that they bleed on their onscreen female partners thus increasing their chances of contracting Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs).

Auditions comprise another crisis point in the porn business. The glut of aspiring porn actors furnishes smut filmmakers with a vast array of easy girls for the picking.

Performers in pornographic material are often female victims of sex trafficking. They are often forced to recreate pornographic scenes by abusers adept at mental and economic exploitation.

My investigations within and outside Nigeria, from the streets of Lagos to the shanties and underground brothels of Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, revealed how Nigerian sex traffickers use pornography to groom the victims of sex trafficking.

Despite its apparent dangers, porn addiction has become pop culture, cutting through swathes of conservative norms. As it knifes through the country, cyberspace becomes a garish, raunchy boulevard; a theatre of libertine delight, fetishes, and rendezvous for voyeurs and porn stars. It also offers a negotiation point for the addicted desiring real physical action. The social space thus unfurls as an esplanade of taboos and fetishes that expands and contracts to temptation and patronage.

Although porn producers talk shop about running tests on actors to prevent STDs spread, there have been cases of infections in major studios. Notwithstanding, porn allows the youth, safely removed from the traditional norms and social etiquette, to be voyeurs of a frighteningly prejudiced world of taboos and sexual stereotypes, where all the conventions of civilized society cease to exist. And viewers are invited to slum in this world of debauchery.

On the flip side, most Nigerian porn is digitally airbrushed to hide the squalor beneath. Competition is fierce. Girls bring their friends and earn kick-back. So, a lot of girls are desperate to do anything. The lighting in most films is coarse. Pubic hair is shaved off to give the actresses the look of supple divas – warts and all. Yet the staple is often poor acting. The plastered bodies, exaggerated moans and facial contortions, the erections that never go down, and the evidently limp male organs been forcibly put to work, heighten porn’s unreality.

Then, there is the dank smell of human bodies, the thump of studio filth, and the indelicate tenderness of onscreen partners. But despite an upbeat campaign to wean the addicted off porn, such homily hardly serves the interest of porn artistes like Jika.

The 22-year-old has done a lot of gang-bang and “taken it up the arse.” She recently acted as a slave in a Bondage, Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadomasochism (BDSM) movie.

She was tied up and gang-raped, severely beaten, and penetrated in every orifice. “Viewers would love it,” she enthused.

Yet through her enthusiasm, she slunk into a flat, numbing monotone, like a victim of trauma; a cottony shriek drifted across her coarse, heavily made-up face, and for a moment, unmasked the scarred youngster cringing beneath the icon of the sultry siren.

“What you just described, was it painful?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered quietly.