Category: Olatunji Ololade

Bestial Nigeria can only be cured by farming our loins for the hidden cowries of a nobler race.

The brothel prostitute, foul-mouthed roughneck, political assassin, ballot robber, kidnapper, rapist, and bestiality enthusiast are produced not by society’s savagery or sexism but by society’s absence.

There is no gainsaying the girls featured in the viral videos of bestial sex with dogs are consequences of the breakdown in Nigeria’s family unit.

Recently, social media has been agog with videos of Nigerian girls having sexual intercourse with dogs. Amid public criticism, another video of a girl having sexual intercourse with a dog has emerged.

The new footage is coming amid the trend of ladies sleeping with animals for N1.5m in Lekki area of Lagos. Previously, a teenager cum self-confessed bestiality enthusiast, Veegoddess, had come out to defend her action, insisting that she only slept with a dog and didn’t kill anybody.

The teenage TikTok user in Lagos went viral after claiming she slept with a dog for N1.7million, stressing that she did not think it was a big deal to have sexual relations with a dog.

“What is the big deal there? 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.

The video post incited harsh criticism from the public, she recanted in another video. She said, “Guys I was just catching a cruise. I didn’t sleep with any dog. My boyfriend just broke up with me; help me to beg my boyfriend. I’m sorry for the video I made, it was purely cruise. (sic) “I don’t advise someone to be with animals. It was just a prank video, just cruise; you guys know Nigerians and cruise. I apologise to the public, please take my apology.” she said.

Subsequently, the Nigeria Police Force has launched a manhunt for the lady seen having a sexual romp with a dog in the viral TikTok video.

The Force Public Relations Officer, Muyiwa Adejobi, said posting videos of bestial sex online won’t be tolerated and vowed that the police would apprehend the lady in the viral video.

The situation requires more drastic action than threats of punitive measures from law enforcers.

The family is the building block of society and civilisation. But in the wake of its dissembling, the responsibilities of raising a child are borne by a single parent, often times, the mother.

There is no disputing the sacrifices borne by a woman for the sake of her loved ones. In many instances, she is a worker of marvels. She is a peasant farmer and market woman of the sidewalk. She is a maternal hero and guardian of fruits from errant male loins. She is the spangled artisan mining the dreams of those that would put her in fetters.

A woman is, then she must be free. Her total freedom, she would tell you, isn’t in the hands of any man. Nor is it some grant to be enjoyed from an abusive patriarchy.

But is sleeping with a dog for money another vista of freedom? Is it another manifestation of woke womanhood or fiery feminism?

Freedom without responsibility, corrupts, and a corrupt female in her youth, like her male peer, often manifests dangerously. For instance, she would never become into a model citizen of the society. She would never raise a proper family. She would most probably scoff at established norms of marriage and societal continuity. She would probably end up as a single mother. She would always be the defective parent raising a damaged child.

Sometimes, she is a victim of circumstance: rape, child marriage, errant hormones and what social media warriors now call ‘dead beat father or husband.’ Sometimes, she is a victim of her own demons; like the young ladies seen having sex with dogs in the vulgar videos.

Of course, there is nothing wrong in being strong and emancipated, whatever that intones; it’s the tenor of brute strength and infernal freedom that’s often cringe-worthy. If she chooses to be a brute, sex becomes a weapon to her, a frantic means to her ends. Where she misappropriates the ‘freedom’ of being ‘woke,’ feminism becomes an itch and a fetish to her, like bestial porn. She dulls down to an artificial set of sexual-political sensibilities to satisfy her lust for self-actualization in one breadth and her claims to being perpetually ‘oppressed.’

Like porn addicts, paedophiles, rapists, and racists, such a female is an emotion junkie, infinitely handicapped yet propelled by her lust for unearned benefits. And when she seems truly deserving of sought benefits, gluttony and wile pervert her claims until her agitation attains the tenor of a ruckus, much like the ghastly cries of feral cats jostling for the largest chunk of carrion flesh.

In the wake of her failed marriage or romance, she celebrates on Facebook, her exit from what she terms the concentration camp of wedlock, and goes on to groom her daughters and sons to live in her jailhouse of notions.

If money isn’t her problem, she makes sure her wards lack nothing. Eventually, she raises them as glamour pets, ensuring her son grows up to become “nothing like his father.” So doing, she infects him with gall and womanly fits. She overcompensates and splurges to make them miss nothing about their ‘deadbeat father.’ That is hardly child-grooming, its called child maintenance; keeping a child like an expensive pet.

To the feminazis already wailing, yes, orthodox families may occasionally fail in child grooming; and this is not about the ‘prominent’ or ‘successful’ few, who “made it” despite being raised by a single mother. It’s about the many who grew up broken, partially or completely damaged, because they were denied a father – be it their mother or the absentee father’s doing.

It’s about the ‘woke,’ street-smart females sleeping with dogs for money within and outside the country. It is about the monsters of men and women, paying them to engage in bestial porn.

The creepy men and women holding the recording devices must be acknowledged for what they are: the greatest affliction to modern Nigeria.

The girls sleeping with dogs for money are products of dysfunctional families. Dysfunctional families result from an accentuation of poverty and the gender wars. Call it a manifestation of flawed choice, an ultimate human dilemma, precipitated by survival instinct in a blemished system. The gravest challenge to our hopes and dreams as a nation, beyond the messy political transactions prevalent at the grassroots and party arena, every minute and hour of every day, are the scandalous male vs female high dramas rocking the boats of Nigerian families and ravenous relationships.

More women suffer the scourge of tarnished awareness in a political high drama that renders their conscience, a pitiful hostage of its flesh envelope; “whose surges and secret murmurings they cannot stay or speed,” says Paglia.

The consequence is that instead of enjoying life naturally and as each situation peculiarly demands, the new Nigerian female reduces her own quality of life by seeing the world through an opportunistic and sexist filter, and not as it truly is.

This goads her to pursue, passionately, the perversion of certain established social and universal absolutes that had at one time or the other served as their moral and psychological compasses and comfort zones.

To be continued…

The thing about a gun: it’s easy for a child to get trapped in the sickle curve of its blind trigger. Yakubu, 10, is a testament. Since he learned to squeeze his first trigger, he’s been enamoured with the gun. His weapon of choice, the Russian Kalashnikov, AK-47 rifle. It didn’t matter that it was the deadliest gun in the world. He was only too ecstatic to wield it. Armed with the gun, he hushed boys to sleep with bullets in Sambisa. He shot hot lead into their parents in Baga. He watched blood drip through their perforated innards to soak the bleached sands of Kalabalge. He abducted peasant girls and housewives too. The 10-year-old dispersed corpses into Borno’s scorched earth. But he “did it all to survive.”

“If I didn’t do those things, they would have killed me,” he said, explaining his ordeal as a former captive and combatant of the Boko Haram (BH) terrorist group. Now 16, Yakubu regrets his membership in Boko Haram.

His life would probably pan out differently had he escaped the clutches of the insurgents, when they laid siege to his village, in Gwoza, in July 2016. That sad incident put paid to his childhood and his dreams of attaining soccer renown.

Growing up, Yakubu dreamed of playing professional soccer. He yearned to play for El Kanemi Warriors of Borno, and afterward, English Premiership’s Chelsea FC. He clung to his dreams even when quick with monsters.

At school and on the sandy pitches of Gwoza, he was fondly admired as a ‘standing 10,’ a skillful midfielder, who teased the passion and shrieks of many a soccer lover with his aplomb.

The future seemed rosy, gilt-edged, until the sad incidence of his abduction.

On that fateful day, the boy died in Yakubu, so did his spunk and promise as a soccer maestro.

Boko Haram stormed his village and burned his home. They shot his parents in the head and stabbed his brother in the neck killing them. Then they whisked him, his brother’s wife, and six of his childhood friends to their enclave in Sambisa forest, he said.

There, they forcibly conscripted him and his friends as child combatants. He said, “Few days later, they transferred us to Shababu Ummah, in the Chikungudu forest, in Kalabalge. There, we spent four months learning to use daggers, swords, and machine guns.”

And Yakubu knows his guns. He knows when and how to shoot to merely wound flesh and bone. He knows when to crack the cranium, and go for the kill, delivering the headshot.

Sometimes, the casualty hits too close to home, like when he aimed his rifle at his best friends, Idrissu, 11, and Ilyasu, 13.

“They stole dried fish and tried to escape. They were my childhood friends but I was their leader. I was told to punish them. So, I shot them in the head,” he said.

Aside from the two that he shot in the head, four of his remaining friends, Abdullahi, 10, Bashir, 12, Salihu, nine, and Hassan, 13, were killed during encounters with the Nigerian Army.

Shooting his childhood friends in the head; hardly anyone ever gets past that, let alone a child. But Yakubu shrugged off the incident, describing it as two out of his 22 kills.

 

Beyond the applause

The above excerpt from my story, “The boy who swapped football for bullets,” highlights the fate of the boy insurgent; like his bandit counterpart he constitutes a national eyesore.

Child insurgents like Yakubu have become Nigeria’s worst nightmare. He is the shaft of comeuppance impaled in the heart of the country’s northeast-northwest regions, and our national psyche. Variants of his stock are bred nationwide, from southwest’s Awawa, Osanle Boys, and One Million Boys to mention a few.

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

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

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

It was no doubt cathartic for me to have won journalism’s biggest prize, the Fetisov Journalism Awards (FJA)’s Outstanding Contribution to Peace category with my story on Yakubu, Damina, and fellow child insurgents.

But it is by no means a drop in an ocean of the much-needed intervention required to salvage the country from the onslaught of underage boys bred into gunfighters and cold-blooded killers by teen and adult handlers within Boko Haram and among armed bandits.

I dedicate my win to The Nation newspaper and its team of brilliant, resourceful journalists and media managers. Aside from The Nation’s team, Nigeria flaunts some of the finest journalists and a great deal of humane journalism spanning multimedia platforms; still, there is so much left to be done.

In our part of the world, news stories generally focus on the point at which something has happened, such as breaking news or a planned event. That point in the arc of a story is like the peak of a mountain.

We should rather practice journalism that focuses on the entire arc, which means paying attention to the up-slope when people are wondering what will happen, how it will happen, why it will happen, and the down-slope when people want to understand the significance of the event.

We must aspire to a journalism practice that forewarns and resolves issues, the type that explores the genesis of a conflict or situation, its immediate and future impact on the subjects or characters involved, and the possible solutions to it.

We must avoid the pitfalls of bias that goads journalists to take sides even before ascertaining the truth of the matter. Journalists ought to highlight the fate of the Yakubus of our world as victims rather than sensationalise their misfortune, treating them as villains and freaks of nature.

Those who make it out of the terror camps are ostracised by their families and neighbours, who recoil from them calling them ‘Serpents.’

Yet there is a reason Boko Haram and armed bandits’ creed of violence and wanton genocide is resonant among brainwashed minors. The compelling nature of the grievances articulated, and the pervasiveness of poverty justify the boys’ rationale for embracing a creed of carnage.

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

These sentiments thrive in greater depths and concentration in the north, where armed bandits, insurgents, and their sponsors, cash in on the situation. Boko Haram offers them a passport to paradise, telling them that their religion is under threat; together, with bandits, they manipulate the sentiments of little boys and teenagers, luring them with food, money, freedom to abduct and rape girls of their choice and women old enough to be their mothers.

As the anti-terrorism war intensifies in Nigeria’s northeast and northwest regions, Boko Haram, despite massive surrenders by insurgents to military forces, replenishes its ranks with a steady stream of boy combatants, moving child abductees cum combatants through neighbourhoods and forests, using military trucks and passenger vans, to boot camps holding thousands of boys on the watch of adolescent trainers.

This is how fragile the situation is.

The Chrisland School child porn is a reality check; another frightful glimpse into our infernal core. The school’s underage sex debacle is a spear of consequence impaled into Nigeria’s sanctimonious psyche. It spools the mathematical grid of our defeat by chthonic lust and Nigeria’s retreat into bestial nature.

Nigeria stirred to a rude shock as the video hit cyberspace soon after the mother of a supposed rape victim, aged 10,  posted a video accusing the school of a cover-up. The video of the distraught mother claiming her daughter was raped during a school trip to Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

In the video shared by one Ubi Franklin, she claimed that Chrisland had sought to cover up the matter, lamenting that the school suspended her daughter once it found out that she was aware of the gravity of the alleged abuse.

In an indefinite suspension letter signed by Chrisland’s Head Teacher, G.I. Azike, the school said the alleged victim “with a few of her counterparts willfully participated in a game they called ‘Truth or Dare,’ a game which led her and a few other co-learners to carry out the immoral act after the lights out instruction was given.”

But soon after the mother of the alleged rape victim posted her complaint, a video of her 10-year-old child materialised in cyberspace. In the said video, the minor reportedly ‘rode’ another minor, a boy, in an adult sexual act that has been widely described as ‘Cowgirl.’

Many were quick to blame it on failed parenting even as they excitedly shared the video. Soon after the clip went viral, the Lagos State Government warned that sharing or receiving images depicting child pornography is an offense under its laws that can attract a sentence of up to 14 years.

Unbelievably, more videos of the Chrisland School 10-year-old girl have emerged online. The child who reportedly posts her self-recorded videos on an app called Likee, titled her page “madness and cringe.”

Her handle called “bhadgurl4k (bad girl fuck) already has over 24,000 likes. She has posted over 526 videos with 4,134 followers as of Easter Monday.

Investigation revealed that the videos were recorded in her home with an iPhone with the aid of a ring light. She tries to show off dance moves with erotic mannerisms in her posted videos.

Greater tragedy subsists in the adult public’s morbid fascination with the Chrisland students’ sex video and the 10-year-old girl’s subsequent clips. On the pretext of condemning the kids’ sexual misadventure, several adults have shared the video with undisguised enthusiasm, drooling over the reportedly sordid imagery of the 10-year-old performing a sex act on her 13-year-old mate.

If the participants happened to be the children of each sharer of the disturbing video, would they excitedly share it across social media platforms?

Sadism manifests in the wanton sexualization of Nigerian society. More worrisome is the fate of the country’s children: adolescent girls are abducted, bought, and tortured in slave camps; it manifests in how little girls are forcibly recruited and sexually violated, often by numerous men on the watch of vicious madams, in sex camps cum baby factories where underage girls are groomed for rape, impregnation, and sale of their babies.

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

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

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

While it’s starkly convenient and arbitrary to blame the BBN producers for normalising filth as media fare, however, it must be acknowledged that greater fault lies with Nigerian parents who manifestly fail their wards every time they sit with them to watch and obsess about the sordid TV programme.

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

Not a few kids were part of the obsession with the sex video of the singer, Tiwa Savage, which was supposedly leaked online in controversial circumstances. These children witnessed how the public hailed and commended the singer for being so “courageous” and representative of elevated feminism. Ultimately she was celebrated as a “superwoman.”

Nobody imagined the scarring such perverse sentimentality could inflict on teenagers and minors who look up to Savage as their favourite diva and role model.

And just recently, the sex video and nude photos of a fast-rising Nigerian singer, Ikuforiji Olaitan aka Oxlade, were also supposedly leaked accidentally on the internet.

Such morbid fare and their attendant celebration by the public have continually misled teenagers and minors like the Chrisland students to embrace sexual misadventure.

The Chrisland students, like most of their peers, suffer a delusive edge to their growth, a supposed sense of worth and ardour for maturation that defies convention. They are miners and hawkers of the perverse however fickle the depth and resonance. There is very little difference between them and the hordes of youths that make it into the fetishized brothel cum tabernacle of the BBN show.

Like porn performers, they are victims of perverse pop culture and sex trafficking, who are forced to create sex scenes by abusers adept at mental and economic exploitation while using slovenly psychological tools to break down the inhibitions of the unsuspecting victims.

There is no one to protect such minors from the aggressive cues and wild decadence insinuated into their psyches by the highly sexualised content to which they are exposed. The fault is with their parents who leave purveyors of filth like the BBN producers and venal celebrities to the task of raising their wards.

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

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

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

Not a few minors are incurably smitten with the filth pervasive in modern entertainment and pop culture. They are fascinated by the core message, an innate claim that we’d all like to be porn stars at one point in our life or another.

In Nigeria, porn has won the culture war by fusing with the commercial mainstream. Nudity, promiscuity, and random sex are mainstream chic.

Modern Nigerian fashion takes its cues from porn. Music videos mime porn scenes, presenting females as porn-rats, or video vixens if you like. Everybody exploits porn for shock value including the producers of the BBN show.

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

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

The 2023 general elections will be contested by deceptive personae, among others. Some of the aspirants are driven by delusions of sainthood and an inflamed ego.

The career aspirants declare their right to Nigeria’s most coveted seat citing everything but merit. Some new kids on the block, however, seek to illustrate a dubious fable; chanting the ‘nottooyoungtorun’ mantra, they wear their naivete like a badge and brandish ebullience in replacement of substance.

Together, they fulfill the purpose of a taxidermic decoy, like Spenser’s False Florimell.

More old and young aspirants are out to incite and exploit the electorate’s frantic hopes in order to dash them. Like changelings of fickle principles, passion and integrity are changeful in their wake.

The electorate must make its way past the fraud and extortion of such seasoned con men, who are out to lure the psyche into committing political capital (that is, electoral votes) to unsound judgments and investments.

But to achieve this, the Nigerian voter must learn to identify the false messiahs and con men among the aspirants. These range from the stark pretenders to the supposedly powerful contenders.

The most prominent among them justify their claim to power touting paper qualification, ill-gotten wealth, an army of thugs, assassins, and unparalleled deviousness.

How do illiterate voters avoid the snare of such con men? The answer lies in the capacity of the politically literate amid the ranks of the country’s electorate – comprising the impoverished breadline and the middle class – to sensitise their kind, to repel the scourge of predatory politicians.

But that is in the long run; no degree of push-back could work against such political elements at the moment. Like every other constituent of the country’s electorate, the true patriot and politically literate will watch helplessly as familiar tricksters scuttle the electoral process via vote-buying, filthy propaganda, hooliganism, and character assassination.

Whoever wins the 2023 elections, across all levels of government, the flawed systems will remain in place; the patrons of the systemic anomalies are too powerful to be challenged – at least for the moment.

It’s time to look beyond the 2023 elections. This is the time for the politically savvy to join or create a dependable platform and start conversations to educate and reorientate illiterate segments of the electorate.

The average voter must be taught to understand, that, Nigeria’s most dangerous enemies are not Boko Haram, thieving bank chiefs, armed robbers, industrial monopolists, corrupt security operatives, and government puppeteers in the corporate business sector, but the criminal masterminds responsible for these maladies and the illiterate voter who would gladly pawn his vote for a token and ethnoreligious bigotries.

The voter’s card thus becomes a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of such a voter. Knowing this, the fraudulent aspirant plies prospective voters with inducements, bigotries, and outright lies.

The big truth, however, subsists in the buried narratives: that fictions of growth have a hollow underside; that Nigeria and constituent states must ultimately learn to live within their means; that regional claims of marginalisation have undertones of lies; that terrorism has its patrons in government and among the governed; that government size and spending has to be surgically pruned; that Nigeria has to move from a consumer economy to a producer economy; that power is finite and voter apathy and ignorance keep predators in public office, indefinitely.

The theme of the forthcoming elections, as advanced by the contenders, is that of salvation. A few aspirants present themselves the virtuous of our world, by whose virtues Nigeria may attain salvation.

Too little supports their messianic posturing. For instance, their platitudes fail to practically address the abysmal states of the economy, health, education, and transportation sectors. This is more pronounced in the case of the aspirants holding public offices. They fail to justify why they’ve been unable to assert the positive change and progress they promised throughout the two terms cum eight years of their incumbency.

There is no aspirant with a heartfelt plan to commit at least 30 percent of Nigeria’s annual budget to health and education – split at 15 percent each. No president-elect has ever done that. No aspirant has ever promised that. None may do that. Those who pay lip service to such often do so to amass political capital and ultimately, win votes.

Of all the aspirants, none would agree to the surgical trimming of the nation’s legislature, while legislative work is reduced to a part-time assignment. Yet several voters would dance and maim, bicker and kill, to guarantee their easy access to the nation’s public offices.

The Nigerian voter thus creates a plenum, from which he/she would not escape for another four years. This would be blamed on ‘voter illiteracy’ at crunch time when reality bites harder, and the frenzied, ignorant voter of today relapses in sober awareness tomorrow.

At the moment, there is fierce jostling for the presidential ticket within the country’s two major political parties. The cutthroat rivalry, dirty dealings, and betrayals highlight the importance of the stakes. Even so, it must be acknowledged that more aspirants fulfill the role of a spoiler, and some, a placebo, presenting as false contrary to the prospects of the aspirants with real substance and the capacity to truly improve the fortunes of the country.

This minute, the press has been contracted to clothe dross as gold and ornament misgovernance as quintessential brass. This reinforces the failure of the media: more journalists have become praise-singers of the failed political class and common carriers of its propaganda. We’ve sort of given up being independent on our own, in order to survive.

Through these maladies, Nigeria’s incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari, is expected to lead Nigeria to the execution of a flawless transition by the forthcoming elections. In his two terms of office, he was expected to conjure a magic formula to turn Nigeria’s fortune around. The jury bickers, in real-time, on the depth of his success or failure at this task.

President Buhari was expected to channel dignified statesmanship and the latent strength to facilitate the emergence of Nigeria’s extraordinary league of detribalised, patriot leaders, within and outside the folds of the prominent parties.

The latter would reinvigorate Nigeria’s comatose industries, eliminate terrorism, achieve a 24-hour electricity supply, revivify substandard health and education sectors, and truly fight corruption.

But it was foolhardy to leave the task of finding them to Buhari alone; he hadn’t the facilities to actualise their emergence. He was too preoccupied fighting our home made fires perhaps.

Again, we find ourselves at the desert end of our green pasture. There is no one left to lead the charge for our world’s lost splendours. For eight years, Nigeria entrusted Buhari with this task because he seemed our best hope of snatching Nigeria from the jaws of decline and devastation. He did his bit.

But he won’t save Nigeria. Someone else will.

But could Buhari prepare us for the one who would lead the charge for Nigeria’s lost splendours? The retired General from Daura couldn’t tease our practiced tremble to affect the bounteous tumult. This was because he lost too much ground to the elements he swore to neuter.

This minute, Nigeria seeks for the umpteenth time, our romanticised revolutionary who would unburden our lives of rottenness and excess baggage.

Nigeria seeks the one capable of standing like a man; the man whose current stoop and future sway perpetually stifles the prance of the predatory political class.

 

 

EN route to the 2023 general elections, the cult of digital citizenship fosters a supreme theme: that of the maleficently-woke youth. Social media expanded to fill the space life provides, substitutes Nigeria’s bleak moon for digitized dawn.

Call it science’s dark revenge or technology’s defiant stand against conservative norms. In the mix, Nigeria incinerates by the speed of blistering terabytes. Two planes of reality collide a la traditional versus new media; conservative ethicist versus deviant liberal. Nigeria erupts in primeval chaos, cyber-activated.

The intelligible persistently loses to the unintelligible and citizenship gets redefined as malevolent youths vengefully debase and defy society’s conservative and arrogant hierarchs.

The digitally-woke youth is technology’s heroic personae and his cult runs where dissent rebounds. He has a fearless disposition but is afflicted by dewy cowardice. In the cyberspace he inhabits, he personifies spirited narcissism, unfurling wildly to his articulated and unarticulated sinful lusts.

The joke persists in contemporary circuits that the battle for Nigeria’s freedom would be fought and won in social space and by the cudgels and blades of such ‘woke’ youth. This notion sprouts from ideological fields at home and abroad, where pasture, copse, and tributary of thought, flourish from sickly seeds of violence and death.

Being ‘woke’ is next to being a deity in contemporary youth circuits. It confers on the ‘woke’ a colossal ego, an exaggerated sense of awareness, and idolatry of fawning peers. To such youth, social media becomes theatre, a public agon. Every issue from policy failure, inefficient leadership, distressed economy, electoral fraud, and insecurity, to failing public institutions offer him an opportunity to vent.

Unlike the conventional patriot for whom protest functions as a catalyst for positive change, the digitally-woke youth protests for ego, anarchy, and applause.

In his element, he courts the admiration of the strolling spectator; he forgets that he is neither king nor god but a manipulable pawn. He is a victim of ignorance’s tyranny over intellect thus his susceptibility to being used by shady, criminally-minded others.

He is arsonist, assassin and mugger at election time; he is canon-fodder for disrupting the state, in time of peace. He is the random cyber-rat with multiple monikers, preaching bigotries and a gospel of hate across several social media platforms and news sites as you read.

Beneath his radical chants, however, subsists an immoderate hankering for money and safety. Some have traced this hankering to greed, cowardice, and a predilection for slumber. But he is ‘woke’ and ‘woke’ youth mustn’t snooze.

Money, fast cars, and dubious acclaim are, however, a deal-breaker hence the morbid race against time to acquire wealth by ‘woke’ young assassins, internet scammers (Yahoo Boys), and prostitutes. Lest we forget the gangs of ‘woke’ political thugs, human rights activists, ‘youth leaders,’ public officers, pen robbers, armed robbers, and thieves comprising the nation’s youth.

Due to the perceived trashiness and philosophical harlotry of the journalist, this band of youths would not leave the battle for their freedom from Nigeria’s predatory ruling class to the press.

Cowardice is what we should conquer. Cowardice enslaves all to mean and homicidal politicians. It cripples the rage of impoverished youths and binds all to the wiles of dubious political parties and public officers.

It takes courage to evolve a humane ideology and sustain it. As Nigerians, in our youth, we haven’t the courage and the will, and this interferes with our ability to accomplish progressive change.

More worrisome is our violent attempt to be radical; eventually it resonates too feebly, like a kind of rudderless activism. This was reflective in the attitude of certain youth segments during previous general elections and the  #EndARS protest.

Mistaking hooliganism for “higher political awareness” or “being woke,” they harassed their peers and the elderly who voted for President Muhammadu Buhari, among others.

They frantically sought for votes for their self-styled messiahs, whose unique selling point (USP) was an exaggerated sense of self-worth. Extravagant sections of the press called the latter, titans. But they were no titans. They were simply merchants of rot, who emerged to clothe dross as gold and filth in newer, fanciful packs.

Leading a motley pack of rabid followers, they condemned the incumbent ruling class to frantic applause. But soon after they spoke in brilliant, rousing cadences, their platitudes started to trail off in confusion.

Today, their language echoes like the battle cries of four-year-olds playing war Generals against an army of hostile corn stalks. Having provoked the citizenry’s dormant passion with deceptive dialectics, as the elections wore on, their passion was shown for what it was, the spunk of beetles kindling wet wood.

Most youth candidates failed to shine at the last general elections because their gospel of hope was untranslatable by realistic yardsticks. They spoke the same gibberish as the oligarchs they sought to unseat.

Ultimately, they brought nothing new to the table, save a slew of platitudes and tiresome rhetoric. For instance, some dizzy candidate promised to turn marijuana into a national revenue earner and establish an N100, 000 national minimum wage package for the country in a manner reminiscent of the prominent parties’ lifeboat solutions.

Another promised to rescue the Chibok girls, eradicate terrorism and entrench gender equality without a practical blueprint for achieving such.

Eventually, their desperate rants and promises established them as dangerous daydreamers, who could and would rip apart a nation already fragmented and ruined by bigotries, maladministration, and plunder.

Such is the quality of the ‘politically woke” youth. They identify all that is wrong with Nigeria but they are never specific about what must be done to correct them.

It is relatively easy to join a picket line and tirelessly castigate our elders and ruling class for everything that is wrong with our lives, but these actions, while they demonstrate frustration, and in some instances, even heroism, deal generally with symptoms of· our problems and not the solutions.

All the picket lines in the world would not resolve the maladies of corruption, fraudulent and impatient youth, greed, racism, disillusionment with learning, and substandard education.

Yeah, bad news is in the air. We worry and gripe about it. Bloggers and columnists rant about it. We have even learnt to joke about it. But it’s time we do something about it.

It is instructive that the Katari-Rijana train bombing was carried out by armed bandits “between 18 and 20” years old, according to the survivors’ accounts.

It takes so much effort to be cynical and vengeful, let us channel such efforts into a more profitable enterprise, like visionary politics, honest labour, and reorientation.

It’s about time we projected more progressive views of our world. Let us begin to seek the upright amongst us. They are the negligible few we love to haze and deride for being too ‘conservative,’ ‘boring’ and ‘pretentious.’

They believe in justice, equality and the rule of law. They are pious without being self-righteous. They are responsible, tolerant, and in many ways, more evolved.

We need such a breed of Nigerians to drive a practicable and all-inclusive plan; a proposal of shared targets and intentions with broad-based support and the moral and political will to implement its mechanisms and ends, with a profound understanding of the law, governance methods, economics and social organisation of humane statehood.

Without these, we will continue to flounder in the sea of well-meaning but ineffective good intentions.

These are dark days for Nigeria. We are going through a particularly unpleasant form of hell but it’s a hell that we have made for ourselves.

 

 

 

At 70, twilight deepens on Bola Ahmed Akanbi Tinubu but his mettle attains the radiance of rebirth, like the proverbial patriot sculpted of spunk and spittle. Ornamented in self-creation, he suffers the muse of manic re-creators.

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. “This must be witchcraft if not juju,” the acerbic millennial prowling Twitter would say.

Amid the clashing contrarieties triggered by his presidential ambition, only Tinubu’s deeds could validate him or otherwise. En route to the 2023 elections, many would rather see him decline in the shadows. Thus their wailing: “He mustn’t contest for the presidency;” “He should remain a kingmaker;” “What does he want again? He is too desperate;” “We need a youthful president;” “Is Tinubu what we need at this period?”

Such is the tenor of argument against Tinubu aka Asiwaju, and Jagaban Borgu. But while a handful of internet trolls caw and nibble to impair his worth,  many more are rooting – online and offline. Through their clapperclaw, Tinubu will become whatever was penned in his Qadar. If this includes “Mr. President,” so be it.

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 Tinubu 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.

His cancellation of his annual colloquium to mourn victims of the Katari-Rijana train bombing by armed bandits suggests this much. About nine persons were reportedly killed by the terrorists on Monday night, while 25 others suffered gunshot wounds. More passengers have been declared missing.

Tinubu vies for the presidency amid our self-inflicted tragedies: terrorism, comatose oil refineries, substandard health and education, corporate banditry, and Yahoo Plus pandemic, to mention a few.

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 monthly internally generated revenue (IGR) of N600m to about N10 billion; 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 consistent as a  Senator on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the aborted Third Republic, the Alliance for Democracy (AD), and Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN).

The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) was another attestation to his political savvy. He wooed the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) led by Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, the Congress for Political Change (CPC) led by Muhammadu Buhari, and his ACN, to form the APC thus thwarting the PDP’s boast to stay in power for at least 60 years.

In politics, Tinubu flaunts a quintessential stone architecture, but the random troll wants him to give it up for the use of a wily, lesser protege. Even if the latter suggests he isn’t man enough, playing ‘hide and seek’ with his presidential fantasy – thus lionising Tinubu and projecting himself as earthen ovule, 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 their whispered alternatives, however, is in his youth. Those who are could never win the 2023 elections.

None have 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 committed to thwarting his ambition – why not project the glories of their super candidate rather than squander expensive time maligning Tinubu? 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. The unrestrained malice of the anti-Tinubu campaigners, however, thrives by theft of morality. The same herd that condemned national heroes and ex-Super Eagles stars for celebrating with him has turned a blind eye to Timi Dakolo’s performance at serial presidential aspirant, Atiku Abubakar’s declaration launch- for the umpteenth time.

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 a news medium notorious for its tyrant disposition to staff, institutionalized bigotry, and double standards.

He’d appreciate why a TV station may hawk magazine slots, at millions of bribe naira, for anyone seeking to malign him; he’d appreciate why a Yahoo Boy (advance fee fraudster), a bitter rival, and the most acerbic cynic may write him off as anathema.

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.

Happy 70th anniversary to Asiwaju Tinubu.

In “The Two April Mornings” by Williams Wordsworth, and its companion poem, “The Fountain,” a 72-year-old schoolmaster bemoans his youth as an energetic man. Virility is canonised only when lost.

Youth is documented as distant narrative removes, nostalgia within memory: the first poem ends with Wordsworth recalling the schoolmaster’s memories. Masculinity is contemplated through the bleared lens of age. Apology to Paglia.

In “The Last of the Flock,” we meet a full-grown, healthy man. But he is weeping in the road. Once rich, he has sold his fifty sheep to buy food for his children. Wordsworth turns the flock’s diminishing into a litany of dwindling manhood: fifty, ten, five, three, two, one, none.

The poet’s arithmetic charts the shrinking of patriarchal domain and masculinity’s supple patch. As his property shrivels to the borders of his body, the protagonist, like Akara Oogun, Odysseus and Lear, diminishes to nobody.

Are we prepared for that dreaded epoch when we may become nobodies? Are we prepared for that period when our shiny glories in the time of youth may command only a terse applause, a perfunctory nod, or the crisp tribute of a grudging hand clap?

Are Olusegun Obasanjo, Muhammadu Buhari, Yakubu Gowon, Abdulsalam Abubakar, living that epoch? How does a man welcome the frightening reality outside the corridors of power, when the unforgiving measure of his deeds as a public officer and private citizen determines the tenor of his twilight?

Forget public officers, are you, dear reader, prepared for that direful eventuality? The Wordsworthian male decline, like Sango’s domestication by Oya and Kleist’s male mastectomy in Penthesilea, is a surgical reduction of self that beggars reflection and urgent intervention among Nigeria’s male-folk.

Wordsworth empathizes with the virile male of “The Last of the Flock” because he is suffering, and because his masculine identity is fast approaching vanishing point. For Wordsworth, a man becomes greater as he becomes less. Self-sacrifice and public martyrdom canonise him in the cult of female nature.

As a man, do you attain greatness as you become less? Have you made any sacrifice worth canonisation by the cult of female nature? Would your name enliven high society and suburban poetry long after you return to dust? What quality of manhood do you pose to your wife (wives) and the Nigerian female? Would you wish your kind upon your daughter as a husband?

What calibre of men steer the ship of the Nigerian state? Beyond dubious feminist treatises on men? Beyond our politicised, economic, sociological theories, who is the Nigerian male? What’s his value to the Nigerian state?

Who are we, stripped of the veneer of professed spiritualism, feminism, chauvinism, masochism, intellectualism, among other isms and schisms that define us?

The moral nihilism espoused by the misled male would terrify shayateen. It terrified Adorno thus his contention that radical evil was possible only by the presence of sinister men and the collaboration of a timid, cowed, and confused population; a system of propaganda and mass media that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment, and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for individual conscience.

He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hypermasculinity. Such hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Boko Haram, armed banditry, herder-farmer carnage, kidnap for ransom. It manifests in our lack of compassion for the homeless, the impoverished, the unemployed, and the sick. It seethes in our lack of respect for our wives, our sons, our daughters, and our persistent fear of being neutered by rebellious femininity.

Resistance to these realities cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection. We have to name these acts and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place, notes Giroux.

But contemporary youths accept the system they inherited and find a comfortable place within it, biding their time to subvert and cheat it. Thus we shut our eyes to the venomous superstructure foisted on us – fuelled by insentient politics, retained by toxic economy, all borne of savage manhood, and sensationalised femaleness.

In the system that we have created, treasury looters feign sickness, a handicap, and faint outright, in frantic bid to avoid public inquiry or any attempt to make them answer for their misdeeds.

Such comical jaunts have attained a pedestrian taste of the splattering kind. It’s gross buffoonery, and yet a rite of pagan worship in Nigeria’s sorely spiritualised and bigoted political space – some rogue pastor or alfa, religious and ethnic group eventually threatens perceived detractors of their favoured son or daughter.

Thus any blockhead or egghead may attain public office, loot the coffers, and collapse during a public inquiry or arrive on a stretcher. It never gets old. It’s pure radical evil that eroticises the horror banished by norms.

Feminists blame the patriarchy but our problem isn’t the patriarchy but the trans-generational ideal of callousness. A matriarchy wouldn’t fare better in a society built on the belief that virility consists of the maximum capacity to circumvent and cheat the system. This has foisted upon us generations of savage citizenry.

Savagery dominates our culture. It runs like an electric current, powering our politics, short-circuiting morals, and our comatose economy. It activates our reality television and trash-talks radio programmes while superintending a bigoted, pliant collective.

Society blames it all on the man and the feminist-misandrist blames it on the “evil patriarchy.” Several males display an incapacity for moral choice thus retreating into an ostensibly ferocious collective that must be led and vilified, they argue. Heck! Let’s all blame the male for the tragic turn of the Nigerian enterprise.

Grammy award-winning artiste, James Brown, released the album in 1966, “It’s a man’s world, but not without adding “But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl.”

A man must live wary of the woman and vice versa. That’s tact. But to stew in such fear is to be inimical to self and society. The North American myth of the toothed genitalia gruesomely connotes such female power and male fear. Metaphorically, the female genitalia has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered, according to lore. Yet it takes a woman to make a man.

The importance of women empowerment, their presence in leadership roles, and their representation in government could improve governance and reduce corruption only if they commit to the task shorn of corruption.

The gravest challenge to our hopes and dreams as a nation are the messy political transactions prevalent at the grassroots and party arena. We can no longer shut our eyes to the venomous superstructure foisted on us, fuelled by insentient politics, retained by toxic social economy.

More women suffer the scourge of tarnished awareness in this political high drama that renders their conscience, a pitiful hostage of its flesh envelope; “whose surges and secret murmurings they cannot stay or speed,” says Paglia.

If the woman’s body is truly a labyrinth in which the man is lost, the Nigerian woman should loom formidably before him as negotiations intensify on the country’s next social, political hierarchies.

The conflict of economies and social ironies notwithstanding, a new class of womanhood must emerge not as a corpse in future argument with itself, but as a heroic shiner of light and hope on Nigeria’s dark aspects.

This cosmos of ‘strong women’ are reliant on Atlas’ strength yet imperiled by his shrug. More is the pity.

 

 

 

THE 2023 election offers a highland to viral nature, the fabled staircase to the Nigerian paradise, as espoused by new kids on the block, The National Movement (TNM), and National Consultative Front (NCF).

The emergence of both parties wildly projected as a mythical ‘third force’ meant to thwart and grab power from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and a weak opposition, People’s Democratic Party (PDP), however, flies in the face of reason.

While The Nation’s erudite columnist, Olakunle Abimbola, aptly dissects the emergence of the so-called third force as a farce, a previous report by the newspaper listed likely partners of the group, ahead of a formal launch in Abuja on March 8 to include:  People’s Redemption Party (PRP: Nigeria’s current oldest party, founded by the late Mallam Aminu Kano, pre-Second Republic, 1979-1983), African Democratic Congress, National Rescue Movement (NRM) and Zenith Labour Party (ZLP).

Thus this minute, the political space pulses with the usual theatrics. A cursory glance at the characters constituting the farce of a group reveals familiar faces – self-confessed patriots and “thought leaders” who pride themselves as Nigeria’s saviours.

As we approach the elections, they present themselves as the nation’s most dependable compass for navigating a brighter future. They will claim that they’d do a better job projecting a positive image for the country on the global scene by their exploits in academia, politics, entertainment, literature, and digital technology.

This supposedly pro-youth group would argue that the incumbent leadership has failed, citing its perceived inefficiencies and contempt for the youth. They would claim that poor leadership pushed the youths to the extreme hence the high rate of crime and terrorism.

But even amid their storm of spunk and slogans, Nigeria will thirst for a liberating elixir. Rarely have we seen or read, an instructive and realistic strategy at reclaiming the country from the vulturine political class – to which most of their members belong.

They would argue that their boutique or Ivy League education, international exposure, and friends in high places affirm their sagacity and depth in local politics. It’s all part of their hustle.

When the hustle pits them on the side of the oppressive oligarchs, they arrogate to themselves a false sense of worth and significance in national affairs. They jostle to be part of the government’s ‘think tanks,’ they lobby to become political aides, playing Goebbel to Nigeria’s Hitlers.

When the hustle pits them on the side of the ‘masses’ or youth divide, they think they are deeply engaged in politics by debating the latest developments on social media. They might sign an online petition or start a #Hashtag for or against anything and everything.

They follow the news presenting sexy realism and varnished perspectives on local and international politics – often rehashing other people’s views. This breed of the intelligentsia will reel by rote why the Arab Spring’s failure must be seen as inversely successful.

Groups like the so-called third force, are part of the afflictions of political Nigeria. Nigerians must learn to scorn such platforms that only emerge a few months to the polls. Most of the group’s members are often led by desperation and grudges against a system that rendered them irrelevant or “short-changed” by their initial platforms.

Nigeria is in dire need of a new class of political leadership, but the people must seek first mental freedom; a new class of citizenship must emerge to actualize this.

Frantic movements like the TNM are built to fail. Its immediate past predecessor, the defunct Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT) initially showed promise, until its members began to speak in a selfish, private dialect that obscured meaningful communication with the citizenry segments whose votes and support they needed to upset the status quo and gain a foothold.

Greed and covetousness stifled rationality and judgment among their elitist divide. Eventually, they failed to convince the people, let alone inspire their mandates.

To rescue Nigeria back from the vice-grip of its plunderers and oppressors, a new class of political leadership must insert itself in the lives of the ordinary people, including street urchins, commercial transporters, the armed forces, students, shanty communities, and the unemployed, whose votes and base sentimentality the ruling class consistently exploits at election time.

In the wake of the 2019 elections, these characters constituting the “third force” could have gone to work. They had ample opportunities to woo the people, the voter segment, in particular, but as usual, they retreated into their fancy fortresses, deigning contemptuous glances at the boondocks.

How visionary it would have been of the PACT collective, for instance, to remain intact while launching a humanitarian effort to distribute justifiable palliatives directly to the citizenry segments impoverished by the pandemic, among other efforts. This, of course, could be misconstrued as a variant of the manipulative character often deployed as part of the political class’s artifice but it would be of a disarmingly milder tenor.

There was ample time for the self-styled “disrupters” and “people’s liberators” to upset and re-order the political space. Most successful revolutions are fundamentally non-violent. The Russian Revolution was victorious once the Cossacks refused to fire on the protesters in Petrograd in 1917 and joined the crowds. And the clerics who overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979 won once the Shah’s military abandoned the collapsing regime.

The superior force of despotic leadership is disarmed not through violence but through conversion. The electoral ideal by which many vote for a candidate without reflecting over the import of their votes, is utterly wrong and must be repudiated. In Nigeria’s case, the revolution must be achieved via the ballot box.

There must be a renegotiation of norms and concessions around Nigeria’s nationhood. In the new deliberations, negotiating parties must come to the table as equals. Those human segments usually exploited as pawns by the incumbent political class must be wooed by offering them more dignified and pivotal positions at the table. This would excite their confidence in the hypothesized epoch where the government is humane and leaders truly serve the interests of the citizenry.

The TNM would make no impact on the forthcoming elections. And like their kindred spirits in the defunct PACT collective, they would fail to rise from the ashes of electoral defeat and their dormant platforms, to re-engage with the citizenry, after the elections.

Beyond their hastily-convened townhall meetings, corny platitudes, and revolutionary chants at election time, the aftermath would offer them wonderful opportunities to reconnect with the grassroots, the youths, academia, pensioners, and market women of the sidewalk, among other broad segments of the electorate in realistic terms. But they would eagerly pass.

After their ill-fated outing in 2023, the TNM and cohorts must stop trumpeting off the perceived failings of the electoral process; they must avoid obsessive preoccupation with anticipated failures of the victors.

If they are truly broadly cultured patriots driven by love to nurse and rebuild Nigeria into a prosperous nation, they’d actively collaborate with the new government in addressing our social crisis, outside the toxic perimeters of thought.

Currently, we suffer the lack of honest and broadly cultured men endowed with patience, humility, good breeding, and taste. It’s about time we practiced truly progressive politics and espouse it as a culture beneficial to all.

Until we attain a broad, busy abundance of such understanding, not all the finest crumbs of the proverbial national cake can dull the affliction of the predatory political class.