Category: Olatunji Ololade

En route to the 2023 polls, political discourse has become glyptic; it unfurls with an incised edge. Conversation flounders on the whetstone of courtiers and contours of media narratives.

The incised edge delineates political nature and culture. It is the steely autograph of the Nigerian core. Intellectuals, artists, revolutionaries, pacifists, economists, activists, sprout and flower astride the incised edge, like the mystical roses of the mire.

By their devices, our chaste, walled garden is made unchaste for brutes wielding unmerited power, like the plundered bower of the country brothel.

The truth unfurls in common and uncommon hours; it establishes why eggheads rarely become potentates. Perhaps the fault is in their stars. Most intellectuals parade flawed presence because they nurse dubious persona and amoral substance. Yet they’d rather be seen as idealists.

Radiant idealism without grit eventually dims to smut; flaming and curling, it sears with promise until it scalds the tongue of the idealist, leaving him with a charred heart. The best idealism is mined inside out, deep down in the trenches. It surpasses the splendour of pontification or a snobbish purge of the mind.

Thus to attain true relevance in the scheme of things, the Nigerian intellectual must descend his arrogant perch and hop in primeval mud. It is the surest path to felling the castle brace of bondage erected by predatory oligarchs.

Criminals win elections. The Nigerian public office is not for the faint-hearted; treasury looters, paedophiles, rapists, advance-fee fraudsters, ex-convicts, terrorists, and thugs vie for public office. Oftentimes they win.

In pursuit of power, politicians kill, steal, sponsor carnage, and hate-speech. At their victory, they recruit intellectuals to justify their acquisition of power, including the deviltry and bloodlust deployed in quest of it.

To validate power in such unworthy hands, eggheads create a pseudo-reality, plausible enough to distort facts and redefine truth. Plotting pseudo-events, they pretend to speak for the people and work for the country’s good but they are performers whose chief intent is to make money.

Conflict is their treasure trove. Call them political profiteers or misery merchants if you like. They are in the media, civil societies, and extractive industries. They are part of the presidential cabinet, state cabinets and local government.

They prowl the social media, parroting propaganda and outright lies, polluting public discourse with sycophancy, hate-speech, and other behavioural toxins.

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

When exposed as complicit in the misinformation and misrule of the nation, they swiftly claim innocence, stressing that they were simply working with the information made available to them, and justifying their pay cheques.

In truth, they are intellectual hooligans committing the violence of pretense against Nigeria and her people. There is little difference between them and the proverbial fawning page. They play smooth flatterer and thug to both the government and citizenry-herd, twisting and turning with changing circumstances.

They are deucedly reactive. Their words and deeds boom as cloying mime of irate mobs, corrupt politicians, and corporations’ reprobate wiles.

They are a spectacle of submission and ideological sodomy. Hence they could have no real access to power even as they make a public show of speaking truth to power.

Eitan Hersh, Associate professor of political science at Tufts University identify courtiers as “political hobbyists,” and highlights their perfect contrast in the person and politics of Querys Martias. The 63-year-old Dominican immigrant, resident in Haverhill, United States, presents a rare exemplar to supposedly educated eggheads.

For Matias, politics isn’t just a hobby. In her day job, she is a bus monitor for a special-needs school. In her evenings, she amasses power. By leading a group called the Latino Coalition (LC) in Haverhill, she unites the Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Central Americans who together make up about 20 percent of Haverhill. The coalition has met with the Haverhill representative in the Congress and asked for regular, Spanish-speaking office hours for its community. It advocates for immigration reform and federal assistance in affordable housing. The coalition has also met with the mayor, the school superintendent, and the police department requesting more Latinos in city jobs and on city boards.

Matias’ political participation is strategic; the 63-year-old influences governance to the benefit of her community. The coalition operates with discipline, combining electoral strategies with policy advocacy under her leadership.

Unlike Matias, most Nigerian college-educated intellectuals personify the political hobbyist stereotype. They espouse politics of the soapbox, a wanton game in which they debate Nigeria’s big issues on abstract merits – often mouthing off their “superior” logic or sounding off for clout in social space or on government-sponsored think-tanks.

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

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

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

They must seek to empower people. Elite fora like The Platform and showy townhall meetings – hastily conceived at election time – are futile against the scheming and might of predatory oligarchs.

For so long, Nigeria’s public intellectuals have united to market cunning and rhetoric, for and against selfish segments of the political class; it’s about time they united in the interest of the electorate.

Grassroots politics thrives on empowerment; helping imperiled peasant farming communities defeat insecurity, desert encroachment, and flooding; improving fringe communities’ access to health care, electricity, and good roads, and providing soft loans to unemployed youths, SMEs, and agricultural start-ups would foster societal progress in no small measure.

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

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

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

If they could humanely engage with the people, the public intellectuals may attain noble repute, unsullied and deeply rooted from the grassroots to the glitzy corridors of power. They may assume a prideful place in the pantheon of Nigeria’s finest patriots and statesmen.

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

They have used the soapbox and superior intellect as both a mirror and a lens to reflect society’s hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice.

It’s about time they walked their talk in the interest of Nigeria and the populace.

This minute presents with the umpteenth scare in Nigeria’s grisly drama perhaps. The recent being the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency’s (NDLEA)’s indictment of Nigeria’s embattled ‘super cop,’ suspended Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Abba Kyari, as a kingpin of an international drug ring operating the Brazil-Nigeria-Ethiopia route.

The NDLEA’s disclosure, though mired in melodrama, stunned widespread segments of the country. It is best appreciated by its import for the country’s anti-drug trafficking campaign.

A few weeks earlier,  in the first three weeks of last month (January) to be precise, at least 486 people, mostly unarmed civilians, were reportedly killed by terrorists across Nigeria – an average of 22 people a day, according to Premium Times.

Over 80 percent of the killings were carried out by terror groups in the North-west and North-central zones while about 50 percent of the total killings occurred in Niger State, North-central Nigeria.

The Niger State Governor, Sani Bello, announced that at least 220 people were killed in his state between January 1 and 17.

Thus January unfurled cloaked in blood and sadism of murderous characters. The terrorists maimed rural Nigeria, they murdered fathers, raped and abducted mothers and daughters, leaving Nigeria cringing in anticipation of the next grisly attack.

Thus at the start of the year, the dominance of despair seemed so complete and insurmountable, but the political class, split along party lines, issued habitual excuses and ripostes to criticism.

Through the carnage of the previous year, shady separatists emerged from the woodwork, killing unarmed civilians and law enforcers; they chanted bloody banality to the politicians’ insensate bromides. And Nigeria yielded to hysteria.

As 2022 records more funeral pyres, the political class hustle for spoils en route to the 2023 general elections. Politicians know the electorate through sadistic plowing; nailing them down by spikes of cash and bigotries, they catch their shrieks in a metaphoric calabash.

The vessel is chillingly archetypal. The gourd vine connotes pathologic self-preservation. The ruling class’ metaphoric calabash sheaths its exaggerated pride and self-idolatry. A poisoned chalice.

Like the Biblical bawds of Babylon, they hold their gourds scummy with lust and amorality. At a previous general election, one governor, at the end of his eight-year maladministration and impoverishment of the state, sought to install his son-in-law as his successor, to continue his pauperisation legacy. Another with a curious kink for risible caps fought to install his “chosen wiz kid” as his successor in a badly governed state, where the electorate fought to escape his asphyxiating tenure.

The insolence persists across political platforms; shady politicians pant to serpents interred in their possessed spirits. We have seen such individuals and their bungling parties sadistically maul tenet to wile and policies to streaming blood. Nonetheless, they reflect our degeneracy back to us. They actuate rather than constrain our perversions.

It’s about time the electorate divested the country of their cancerous forms. Lest we end up as tissues and blood in their gourds. Nonetheless, the ruling class reflects our degeneracy back to us. They actuate rather than constrain our perversions.

Boorstin would call this the mirror effect. The political class’ administrative hearse becomes the railcar of our death-tending impulses: terrorism, kidnap for ransom, and armed robbery flourishes. Fraud, embezzlement of public funds persist in public and private corporations.

The maladies persist through dispensations. In a few months, voters will once again, fall victim to their lusts and an ageless ruse repeatedly weaponised by the ruling class. Every politician seeking public office understands that the political arena is a theatre, where the most essential skill required is artifice.

But that is simply one way to look at it. The political arena equally unfurls like a red-light district, an expansive brothel, where electorate bodies are the stringed instruments hysterically plucked by politician-patrons.

In this decadent theatre, politicians emerge as master harpists, making dark melodies to the electorate’s torment. In anguish, the latter gains identity as faceless natives: bleeding sap condemned to infernal dystopia.

The discerning see through the artifice. They know the pleading candidate’s smile masks a scowl. They understand that the incumbent power divide and the opposition seeking to usurp power from it are birds of a feather, who use the media, among other tools of mass propaganda, to create faux intimacy with the citizenry.

Politicians know they do not need to be competent, sincere, or honest to win votes and elections, they only need to appear to have these qualities. More importantly, they know they must be adept at creating and establishing a false narrative of their sainthood and the opposition’s villainy. The consistency and emotionality of the story are paramount.

And the narrative must be entertaining and wildly infused with absurd drama. Thus such scandalous affairs involving the paedophile, bribe-taking, or machete-wielding governors were inconsequential in considerations of their suitability for re-election. Rather than make them pariahs, it earned them empathy and votes.

How do illiterate voters avoid the snare of such con men in 2023? The answer lies in the capacity of the politically literate to enlighten the ignorant masses. Yet the platforms for achieving such goals are non-existent.

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

But to achieve this, the Nigerian voter must learn to identify the false messiah from the true patriot, the self-seeking candidate from the altruist. As medieval royalty deployed court drama and conspiracies to divert the attention of their subjects from daily miseries, so do the ruling class divert attention from the real issues at the approach of the next general elections.

It’s about time the electorate devised the plot of Nigeria’s political theatre; the real issues aren’t what the ruling class narrates to us. The real narrative is in everything they would rather not discuss.

What is the nature of government expenditure on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the result of such spending? What is the real impact of the anti-corruption fight? Of government spending, how much is truly committed to education and health financing? Why does the government still pay itself outrageous salaries?

What has President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration done differently from its predecessors, beyond the bounds of its statutory responsibilities? Do Nigeria’s two most prominent parties deserve a single vote? Why?

The theme of the forthcoming elections, as advanced by contenders in previous ones, would be ‘salvation.’ Each candidate would profess to be the most competent and visionary of our world.

Yet there isn’t a candidate with a plan to commit, at least 40 percent, of Nigeria’s annual budget to health and education – split at 20 percent each. Can any of the candidates do that? Does any possess such courage and vision?

Of the contenders, would any agree to the surgical trimming of the National Assembly to a unicameral legislature, while legislative work is reduced to a part-time assignment?

And even if the politics of their preferred candidate, exude the stink of the night soil man, several voters would dance and sing, bicker and kill, to guarantee him or her easy access to public office.

So doing, the Nigerian voter creates a plenum from which he 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 to sober awareness.

There is an apocalyptic drift to the scourge of minors – mainly boys – who have laid siege to Nigeria’s suburbs and rural areas. They are not only looking to make a quick buck, many of them are seeking to become filthy rich, in the blink of an eye.

The viral video of three teenagers looking to learn internet fraud aka ‘Yahoo Yahoo’ in Edo State is the latest in a slew of horrors haunting the Nigerian landscape.

In the two-minute video, the boys, between ages 14 and 15, appeared stranded as they told an interrogator in pidgin: “We wan come hustle.” Their preferred hustle, they revealed, is the “Yahoo hustle…”

At further probe, they reaffirmed their initial claim, stressing, “…but not Yahoo plus.”

It’s only a matter of time before they prowled the bloodied boulevard of “Yahoo Plus,” like the quartet: Wariz Oladehinde, 17,  Majekodunmi Soliu, 18, Abdul Gafar Lukman 19, and Mustakeem Balogun 20, who were arrested in the early hours of Saturday, January 29 by men of Ogun State Police Command for allegedly killing a  girlfriend of their friend for money-making ritual.  The boys were arrested following a report at the Adatan divisional headquarters by a security guard, that the suspects were seen burning something suspected to be a human head in a clay pot.

On interrogation, the arrested suspects confessed that what they were burning in the clay pot is the severed head of the girlfriend of their accomplice.

Few days earlier, the Bayelsa trio: Emomotimi,15, Perebi, 15, and Eke, 15. The boys and natives of Sagbama in Bayelsa, allegedly accosted one 13-year-old, “hypnotized” her, and led her to Emomotimi’s apartment. There, they reportedly cut her finger and sprinkled her blood on a mirror for money-making ritual. But for vigilant village youths, Comfort would have been history, perhaps.

Charms were recovered from the teenagers, who confessed to the crime, according to the spokesman of the Bayelsa State Police Command, Superintendent Asinim Butswat.

The pagan dialectic of the teenagers’ ritual misadventure is sweepingly comprehensive and accurate about Nigerian mind and nature. The boys are the products of a culture and value system fostered by materialism, and lacking in compassion and model filial ties.

Nigeria’s intelligentsia, civil societies, and political class, however, perceive them as fractions of the country’s disposable human trash. They believe that there are more pressing political and economic problems to address. This is a mistake. A grievous one.

These boy ritualists, like the boy bandits and insurgents prowling Nigeria’s northeast and northwest, constitute our reality check; the frightful glimpse into our infernal core.

They are products of Nigeria’s dysfunctional system. Inured to mayhem, they are forbiddingly dangerous. Their personalities, shaved of compassion are sculpted to project strife by innate lust and their maleficent benefactors.

Brainwashed, they become puppet personae, stunted in growth, and unquestioning of their puppeteers’ malicious intent.

Amid their benefactors’ toxic patronage, they manifest like soulless dummies, casual workers in a Nigerian carnage factory.

s victims and villains, they are exposed and enclosed, behind their coarse faces and masks.

Each boy is naked yet armoured, premature yet ritually experient. They are impervious to morals because they have become soulless; their defiled innocence screams for urgent help and yet remains closed to redemption.

Their naivete is deceptive – not to be toyed with. Collectively, their fates resonate a tragedy so intense it manifests as a protracted wail. Before many of them fell in love with fast money, bullets, and guns, they probably had dreams, like any normal child their age. In Zamfara, 17-year-old Aliyu, told me that he dreamt of being “a very big rice farmer.”

But he embraced banditry and strife, and his life transformed into a constant blur of anti-bullet charms, AK-47s, mindless rape, and bloody raids on defenseless villages.

Lest we forget the teen gangs of Lagos, including the One Million Boys, Fadeyi Boys, Ereko Boys, Akala Boys, Awala Boys, Shitta Boys, No Salary Boys, No Mercy Boys, Aguda Boys, Black Scorpion, Red Scorpion, Akamo Boys, Omo Kasari Confraternity, Japa Boys, Koko Boys, and the much dreaded Awawa Boys.

What started innocently as groups of minors begging people for money eventually metamorphosed into gangs of fearsome teenage cultists, rapists, and armed robbers terrorising Agege,  Iyana-Ipaja, Sakamori, Ibari, Ashade, Dopemu, Ogba, Ifako-Ijaiye, Abule-Egba, Ifako-Ijaye, Agege, Isale Oja, Ibari, Akerele, Papa Ogba Ashade, Aluminium Village, Ibeju Lekki, Ajah and other parts of Lagos Island.

They rob with guns, machetes, daggers, and weaponised cutlery, forks in particular. They also rape young girls and women. Most of the gangs nurse a morbid fascination for raping women old enough to be their mothers and young girls.

Rape is a crucial part of their initiation rites. It helps to groom fearlessness in even the youngest member. Prospective initiates are ordered to rape a certain number of girls or a particular woman they intend to shame.

Several women have been raped on their way to and from work by those boys in parts of Pen Cinema in Agege, but victims have learnt to keep quiet, hiding their pain for fear of being stigmatised by their communities and loved ones.

Though predominantly a cult of boys, females including prepubescent girls are recruited into these gangs too. They move in pretty large squads and pride themselves in their numbers. Often times they operate as a flash mob of close between 100 and 150 but for smaller missions, they move in squads of between 20 and 50 boys and girls. Sometimes, they operate in rag-tag squads of four, five, seven, 10 to 15 boys bearing deadly arms including baseball bats, clubs, meat cleavers, daggers, crude metal bars, ‘two by two’ (wooden planks with nails), and forks.

Members of the cult are drug dependent. They binge on psychotropic substances including omi gota (gutter juice), colorado, pamilerin, codeine, cannabis, rohypnol, and tramadol.

Just recently rival gangs terrorised Agege in a protracted turf war that lasted almost one week. After establishing their dominance in any neighbourhood, they engage in a peculiar brand of hustle by which they perpetrate scams, bullying, political violence, and armed robberies.

Several gangs are linked to criminal operations across Lagos. They commit house burglaries and armed robberies and the stolen valuables are often sold at ridiculous prices.

These gangs are composed of mainly young males, aged seven to 25 years. Despite their dangerous proclivities, they provide young people with a sense of belonging and social identity, and as they operate in shadow economies, they make up for the lack of educational and job opportunities afflicting young boys.

Within gangs, young boys have found camaraderie and a way to make a living. Many of them commit serious crimes such as robbery and burglary with the intention of exchanging stolen goods for cash. The money earned from such crimes is invested in hard drugs, commercial sex workers, gambling, and other guilty pleasures.

In Lagos, many gang members and area boys act as violent brokers in parallel structures, having created an income for themselves via forced extortion and narcotics peddling, playing guard of individual property, or public space in situations of inadequate or ineffective police presence.

Over time, they have become an accepted part of the urban landscape even as they become mercenaries for various forms of political, ethnic, and religious criminal contracts in the process.

A more worrisome reality, however, is the increasing fascination among gang members with the ‘money ritual.’

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

In the fracas of faith and filth, the negligible attains significance while the essential gets consigned to the fringes of awareness.

Had I the garb and lyricism of Sam Omatseye or the suave, gentle reproach of Segun Ayobolu, I’d school the situational activists and dubious ethicists chanting toxic rant about which candidate should contest or not.

But the tantrums of social media cynics and “attack dogs” hardly determine the fate of any candidate or the outcome of an election. Most of them don’t get to vote. They are passion herdsmen and activists of dubious intent.

There is no gainsaying many have joyously committed to the carnage of truth in pursuit of their selfish interests. In the fray, we experience the blooming of  fishy equivocation and crass sentimentality.

This tragic sense of things, is a response to the Nigerian experience. This manifests in the electorate’s detachment from patriotic endeavour. Most guilty is the Nigerian in his youth, who samples dissent but will not commit to progressive intent. Rustling ‘wokeness’ out of tired bromides, his sterile passion stifles patriotic fervour.

It was the reflex of youth resistance to and misapprehension of political nature, that led most EndSARS activists to shun more constructive engagement in politics and thus rigged themselves out of the ongoing transition process. Many of them won’t get to vote because they do not have a voter’s card.

Even so, they hurl the label, old cargo, at the country’s oligarchs. This writer too, had severally dismissed the latter as the predatory bunch in whose vice grip Nigeria asphyxiates and suffers a carnage of growth.

Sadly, the youths have done too little to merit the upset they seek. Political power is never dished out  a la carte. It is not something you request and receive on a silver platter in some fancy restaurant.

It is a few months to the 2023 general elections and Nigeria pulses with partisan spirit. Rather than validate the shenanigans of the herd, the electorate should focus on the crucial questions.

Of the prospective candidates, whose politics echo our heartbeats? To what do they owe our reverence of them? By their citizenship, do they furnish pathways to empower disillusioned, jobless youths of Umukegwu, Akokwa, Urualla, Borno, Apongbon, Idumota, Agege, Agbor, Sango Ota, Sankwala, to mention a few?

Do they teach the youth to abhor greed, selfishness, god complex? Do they impress that, in the end, only Nigerians get to choose what becomes of Nigeria, not  a coalition of shady friends from abroad and black ops-activated humanitarian agencies?

The answer resonates in each candidate’s utterances and deeds. Transcendent moments and deeds are manifestations of an exalted intelligence. Who among the candidates possesses the  loftiest acumen? Whose antecedents in private or public office – or both – elicits the passionate tribute of a cheer? Whose past and present exploits incite the passing tribute of a sigh?

Despite the youths’ dissatisfaction with the status quo, do they project the moral character, strength, political literacy and intelligence required to make the right choice?

The ongoing jostle for political spoils is incantatory of Nigerian mind and nature. It is overtly ritualistic. Duplicitous analysts and oligarchs, comprising governors, lawmakers, and members of the presidential cabinet relentlessly pursue their selfish interests amid widespread suffering and bloodshed.

Even the self-appointed progressives have shunned the lilies and languors of virtue for the raptures and roses of vice, as Dolores would say. Amid our suffering, they reconstruct Nigeria into a narrow commune, beholden to their selfish interpretations of power and political office.

Their virtues are short, and their vices extensive and implacable. Their lips, full of lust and laughter, attach to the country’s bosom like curled serpents that are fed from the breast. Every dispensation, they press with fanged lips where their reptilian predecessors have suckled.

Nigeria thus becomes the doomed Cleopatra giving suck to their asps. When kicked out of office, they grudgingly recoil – but never quitting the corridors of power – to accord Nigeria the affliction of deadlier asps in the successive administration.

It hardly matters whether we denounce them on the pages of newspapers, in the studios of popular TV, or the highly virulent comment threads of online media, Nigeria would never be rid of them until we set our grief’s needlepoint astride the prick of pain en  route to the 2023 general elections.

Of the candidates, I see a true progressive, a patriot, and misunderstood titan. I see men enslaved to power and god complex. I see voyagers hampered by baggage from a past and present that would forever haunt them. Even the ‘new kids on the block’ come forged as minnows and bathetic ogres.

I see a colossus whose handlers paint a ravishing portrait of him even as critics dismiss him as yet another genome of leadership, dastardly and base like the Casanova lost in the folds of the bearded meat.

I see an electorate wrought of two extremes: cynical and apathetic. Very few candidates excite passion and hope, save the dangerous fits thrown by their pawns and puppets on the social media.

It’s about time we identified the contender jostling to handle our heartfelt yearnings as his tuberous burden. The one who would cradle our dreams like eggs hatched by a tired fowl in the throes of twilight.

Who among the candidates is best suited to handle and resolve the issues that embitter you and I? Who could tackle convincingly, beyond theory, the fundamental issues he would eventually grapple with as President?

Many Nigerians are probably living through one of the worst decade of their lives. They read of bloody genocides at dawn, poverty and strife in the next city – many more live through such. And as usual, an economy patched with foreign loans, exaggerated growth and duplicity.

It took a perfect gathering of bad leadership to get to this moment. It would take an imperfect cannonball of a man to brave through and survive it. Who, among the candidates is wrought of such fibre?

What we should be interested in is a President-Elect capable of fostering the type of education and skilled force Nigeria needs to power her industry. We have no need of a big and egocentric President in hard times; what we need is a humble man of great depth.

We need a President who would be forever indebted to Nigerians, for giving him the opportunity to serve. We need one now as today is spitting out monsters and tomorrow portends the birth of a thousand trolls.

We are done believing in the dignified duplicity of treacherous men. We need a President who acknowledges that today, everything is broken, and that the very system that produced him needs to be fixed in a way that wouldn’t make deity of him and sacrificial lambs of the Nigerian people.

We need a President capable of speaking gently and intelligently too. A President who listens. Nigeria deserves a man who internalises the citizenry’s griefs in order to end them.

We may identify such a leader by his antecedents and present conduct.

Let us seek the candidate who would become the blank screen, on which Nigerians of vastly different stripes may rally and project their agonies and wants. And he wouldn’t lose his head.

Filial love is ambivalent, to be precise. It is neither here nor there. Art may run riot with romantic projections of its aspects but reality presents the push and pull of its perverse fascination – often uncensored.

Consider for instance, 32-year-old Afeez Olalere’s confession to operatives of the Lagos State Police Command that his mother encouraged him to kill his younger brother for money rituals.

Olalere revealed that his mother took him to a witch-doctor, who told him that if he wanted to be successful as an internet fraudster, he would have to sacrifice his blood sibling.

The witch-doctor said he would prepare a concoction with the severed thumbs, hair, fingers and passport photograph of Olalere’s sibling. “So, we went back home and thought about it; then my mother suggested that we used my younger brother since he was just 21 years old. She also brought the poison which we gave him to eat. He died within 20 minutes after consuming the food. I was the one who cut out the body parts needed. We then wrapped his dead body and headed to the mortuary,” said Olalere.

The duo were eventually arrested by the police along Itamaga, Ikorodu Road in Lagos.

The pursuit of money and self-actualisation fosters a deceptive labour and happiness ethic; assertions of selfhood simply release the amoral chaos of lust and materialism.

There is little difference between the Olaleres and the Bayelsa boys: Emomotimi,15, Perebi, 15, and Eke, 15, who plotted to “hypnotise”13-year-old Comfort, for a similar money ritual. At their arrest, last week, the boys revealed that they hypnotised Comfort and led her to Emomotimi’s apartment, where they cut her finger and sprinkled her blood on a mirror for ritual purposes.

The Olaleres and Bayelsa boys, like Boko Haram and armed bandits, are kindred spirits with public officers looting the treasury to gratify private lusts. The latter’s brazen embezzlement of state funds often manifests in citizenry deaths on bad roads, substandard public hospitals, and rising insecurity.

They are all failures of the Nigerian family as a social unit on one hand and the vagaries of the new socioeconomic order on the other hand.

Toxic families produce toxic citizens. Toxic citizenry becomes poisonous to nationhood in the long run. The interplay of toxic materialism, misandrist-feminism and the absence of an exemplary father figure has foisted upon us a generation of ill-nurtured boys.

Economic forces aggravate their sense of disenchantment and futility and changing gender roles and the denouement of masculinity afflict them with greater confusion.

Masculinity flows from nature as an aspect of the birth mother, no doubt, but it is sculpted by society and a father figure into humane and effective manhood. The boy-child learns by instruction, counselling, and imitation. In an ideal setting, the father moulds his character by careful nurturing, awarding punishment for vice and reward for virtue. So doing, he teaches him to be a man within acceptable precepts of culture and society.

Where the father is absent, or feckless, the boychild suffers exposure to degenerate blooming, like Olalere, who was encouraged to use his younger brother for money ritual by his mother – to encourage him, she fed poison to the said brother (her younger son) and watched him die.

The lust for money has become endemic; fostered across societal divides, it is symptomatic of boondocks rebellion against bourgeois society and aspiration to it in the same breadth. It is the ultimate resort of increasing hordes of teenagers “hustling” as Yahoo Boys, gang-bangers, or masquerading as musicians, bitcoin traders, to mention a few. Beneath their pretensions to honest labour or the “hustle”, if you like, many of them are murderous felons.

Fetish diabolism, comprising the ubiquitous money ritual has become one of their vehicles of offensive against the odds. These boys are done doing hard, honest work; they have become estranged from the universe’s romanticised culture of industry and rewards.

More worrisome is society’s tacit approval and brazen celebration of their exploits. Musicians, public officers, prominent politicians, business leaders and law enforcers have been seen to hobnob with them and patronise them, as indicated by international fraudster, Ramon Abbas aka Hush Puppy’s patronage by prominent Nigerian politicians and crime-fighters.

We must acknowledge the amoral cleavage of outlaws and supposed custodians of the law, like the wedlock of light and darkness, and the resultant eclipse of catholic morality by chthonic lust.

Savage Nigeria,  can only be cured by farming our loins for the hidden cowries of a nobler race, no doubt. The absence of a father figure in a child’s life is often problematic. If a boychild, the consequences could be intense. The family is the building block of society and civilisation. When it disintegrates, the responsibilities of raising a child are borne by a single parent, oftentimes, the mother. Where the woman is left with the sole responsibility of raising a boy, shades of dysfunction manifest in the boy’s blooming.

If money is her problem, she may encourage her child to use a sibling for money ritual. If money isn’t her problem, she makes sure her ward lacks nothing. If care is not taken, she would raise a child as a glamour pet, ensuring, for instance, that her son grows up to become “nothing like his father.” So doing, she may infect him with gall and virulent fits. She overcompensates and splurges to make her child miss nothing about his “deadbeat father.”

That is hardly child-grooming, it’s called child maintenance; keeping a child, like an expensive pet. Yes, orthodox families may fail at 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.

The dominant role of fathers in preventing delinquency is well-established. Over fifty years ago, this phenomenon was highlighted in the classic studies of the causes of delinquency by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck of Harvard University. They described in academic terms, what many children hear their mothers so often say: “Wait till your father gets home!”

The benefits a child receives from his relationship with his father are notably different from those derived from his relationship with his mother. While the mother nurtures and provides emotional healing, the father contributes a sense of paternal authority and discipline which is conveyed through his involved presence.

The additional benefits of his affection and attachment add to this primary benefit. Albert Bandura, professor of psychology at Stanford University, observed as early as 1959 that delinquents suffer from an absence of the father’s affection.

In recent years, there has been a sudden rise in the phenomenon of single mothers, mostly depicted by misandrists as ‘victims of deadbeat fathers.’ While some are, in truth, victims of scorching romance and irresponsible male partners, some naively got pregnant after orchestrating a one-night stand with the random ‘superstar’ or criminal, most especially Yahoo Boys, hoping to get pregnant and the baby would be their anchor into their target’s world of opulence.

The situation is aggravated by modern society’s commodification of love, and consumer culture’s inflation of our expectations of relationships to an unmanageable degree. Many consider partners as wish-list fulfillers and when they fail to do so, as disposable.

The toleration of uncertainty and compromise necessary for sustaining intimacy and providing a platform for parenthood has become inconsequential – often to the detriment of the child.

January 2022 dawned with a chill. Police Superintendent Asinim Butswat, spokesperson of the Bayelsa State Command’s confirmation of the arrest of three teenagers for attempted ritual killing knelled a jarring note.

Butswat, on Friday, identified the suspects (surnames withheld) as Emomotimi,15 years, Perebi, 15 years, and Eke, 15 years. They are all boys and natives of Sagbama in Bayelsa.

The trio allegedly accosted one Comfort, 13, “hypnotized” her, and afterwards led her to Emomotimi’s apartment. There, they reportedly cut her finger and sprinkled her blood on a mirror for ritual purposes. The ritual was supposed to make them rich. But for vigilant village youths, Comfort would have been history, perhaps.

The vigilant youths noticed the suspicious movements of the suspects and raised alarm, said Butswat. “The suspects were subsequently arrested and some substances suspected to be charms were recovered from them. The suspects have confessed to the crime,” he said.

The pagan dialectic of the teenagers’ ritual misadventure is sweepingly comprehensive and accurate about Nigerian mind and nature. The boys are the products of a culture and value system fostered by materialism, and lacking in compassion and model filial ties.

Their actions aren’t accidental; from plotting to execution, a hideous smattering of bestiality manifests as the teen girl’s misfortune and society’s just deserts. Yet the boys are neither freaks nor social accidents, they are simply karma coming home to roost.

Emomotimi,15, Perebi, 15, and Eke, 15, are some of the monsters we made. They are casualties of our toxic materialism, cutthroat gender politics, and treacherous celebrity culture. They are what we get from society’s virulent remoulding of gender, and the precepts of becoming, of the sexes.

Hitherto unacknowledged, today, they manifest as society’s dirty secret. Some would call them the shame of the male gender. The misandrist-feminist would label them as sick manifestations of “toxic masculinity” and the “very evil patriarchy.”

Now, running loose and untethered, characters like the trio are not much of a secret anymore; like their kindred spirits among child bandits and Boko Haram’s child soldiers, they are wildly miseducated and fair game in a smorgasbord of spurious labelling.

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

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

The situation is aggravated by the frantic fostering and cues from mainstream and new media. For instance, several editions of scripted “reality shows” celebrate the pre-adolescent mind mired in a grave of delusions.

Musicians, actors, cross-dressers, and the now ubiquitous “social influencers”

Participants in such shows personify a deep cry for help, like Hoyle’s misdirected mortals, they will learn from avoidable mistakes, not from example.

But why would 15-year-old boys engage in diabolical money-making rituals? What would they do with stupendous wealth if they had it? It is an open secret that the self-identified “Game Boy” (internet fraudster or Yahoo Boy) – be he a young adult or in his teens – oft acquires “a beast of a car,” pays for expensive sex with often older females, and lodges in the presidential suites of five-star hotels until he exhausts his ill-acquired fortune. When he goes broke, he simply recommits to the hustle, hoping that “Maga will always pay.”

The former Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu, lamented in 2019 that mothers of cyber fraudsters, popularly known as Yahoo boys, are now organising themselves into an association.

Several mothers, in truth, claim to give their sons moral and “spiritual” aid with the intent to protect them from getting caught by the EFCC and the police. Where the father disapproves, he gets sidelined.

The irony is that such boys are expected to fulfill the role of Nigeria’s future leaders. Woe betides such future.

As you read, the Nigerian youth regresses into a fleeting fracture of the hope he ought to represent. Asides from engaging in fraud and “money ritual,” several youths seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis 40 or 50 years before they get the physical kind from chain-smoking, binge drinking, gluttony, and mental indolence.

Even teenage boys have learned to perpetuate that sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes as “street smarts” in social parlance. They have no patience for the vagaries of honest industry.

Too many live and thrive on a perversion hence amid the clamour for a progressive, youth-friendly nation, they dream of a more permissive and corrupt society that will aid their frantic dash for unearned wealth or what they deem to be their share of the Nigerian dream.

This is their Nigerian dream: a lush, breathtaking future that de-emphasizes honest toil and accords their vanities a caressing glance. They dream of strings of bank accounts at home and abroad; they hope to drive the best cars, live in palatial mansions in highbrow areas, and enjoy the most lucrative contracts and job offers even when they do nothing to deserve such.

If prosperity gospel, reality television, and motivational literature won’t make them instant celebrities, then crime and “money ritual” will as reflected in the case of the Bayelsa teens.

Their vanity cramps the growth of the human spirit: it restricts the resuscitation and positive engagement of their productive faculties. Thus their inability to subscribe to the hard-earned perks of education and honest toil.

A societal pandemic has begun to occur: lost souls, mostly boys, wandering the streets of Nigeria’s major cities, day and night, like loose molecules in an unstable social fluid have begun to ignite. Thus our cities have become covens of immense cruelty where teen boys are taking desperate steps to become rich.

The interplay of toxic materialism, misandrist-feminism, and the absence of an exemplary father figure has foisted upon us a generation of ill-nurtured boys.

Economic forces aggravate the sense of disenchantment and futility among them, changing gender roles and the denouement of maleness afflict them with greater confusion.

Masculinity flows from nature as an aspect of the birth mother, no doubt, but it is sculpted by society and a father figure into effective manhood. The boy-child learns by instruction, counselling, and imitation. The father moulds his character by careful nurturing, awarding punishment for vice and reward for virtue. So doing, he teaches him to be a man within acceptable precepts of culture and society.

Whatever the bent of the boychild’s evolution, his resultant blooming reflects the quality of guidance he received as a child and his experiences through adolescence. Thus the maxim: The child is the father of the man.

Of course, there would be no man without the pivotal nurturing from the womb through lactation by the priceless sacrifice of a birth mother.

Hence the boy child is caught in a swirl of historical indebtedness to his mother. Fathers earn such allegiance by the magnitude of their immersion into the role of father, breadwinner, protector, provider, and hero, in ideal circumstances.

Dateline 2021. The sun still rose and set over Nigeria’s blinders and ruined stones. Above the rubble, visages of the world we dream resurrected and faded, but we have perfected our romp over the corpses we make.

Friday, January 1, dawned in carnage as the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) destroyed a Boko Haram settlement at Mana Waji in Borno State, killing dozens.

Many would call it a fitting response to the massacre of citizens in the previous calendar year, 2020, when Boko Haram carved bullets and axes from acid fury and for the sport of mayhem, increased the number of the dead.

Such barbarity became a pedestrian fact of our daily life through the year’s troubled stretch; it disinterred the bloody pagan spectacle of our supposedly “god-fearing” hordes: armed bandits and their victims, terrorists, and their informants in besieged communities.

Amid the carnage, we bellowed just to hear our voices return from the hills. We watched our lives cascade bloodied ravines, sprawled and littering, where everything morphs to nothing.

What did we seek? To shriek our fears hoarse or inter them beneath our tragic capers and open secrets? Perhaps we simply needed the landscape to repeat us and replenish every rind of logic that absolves our fanged tribes, families, religious groups of blame.

Fifteen days after the NAF offensive against Boko Haram in Mana Waji, fighters from another terrorist group, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), armed with machine guns, overran a military base in Marte, also in Borno, killing seven and abducting one.

On January 25, the police commenced an investigation of the kidnapping of seven boys and girls, aged 10–13, and an adult male from an orphanage in Abuja. The carnage persisted through 2021.

Who do we blame for our insecurity? Some have fingered the oligarchs, claiming they do not believe in patriotism and the common good. Of course, they hardly do. But are you patriotic? Are we patriots?

Dystopia is assured in our collective plotting and ornamentation of tragedy in colourful lingo, it subsists by our joint ownership and abuse of the agencies of government, the economy, and local media.

There is the argument in public circuits that the ruling class controls the legislature, executive, and judiciary, wielding power as a sharp instrument for personal enrichment and domination.

On the flipside, I would say we are active partakers in the culture of pillage; for several years, the proverbial “commoner” and “average Nigerian” have contributed our downward spiral in several capacities as political thugs, arsonists, ethno-religious warlords, apologists for terrorists and armed bandits, separatists, corrupt civil servants aiding and abetting treasury looters to mention a few.

Together we farmed our fallowing lands into killing fields and our tepid fury into a storm. Nonetheless, we attacked our oceaned chaos with catapults, slinging pebbles of rage to repel our bandit storms. The Nigerian crisis is a human crisis thus the failure of the law, precepts, and structures at resolving the country’s major afflictions.

The foundation for progress is non-existent and that is because the human elements that are meant to erect such monuments are spiritless and corrupt. Consequently, we suffer the affliction of a predatory ruling class and a citizenry inclined to fulfill the role of unforgivably docile, corrupt, self-flagellating lower elements.

The imprudence of the latter reasserts the upward mobility of certain crucial members of the divide across class boundaries. Access to increasing wealth, higher status, and social affiliations often alienate this band of circumstantial leaders from the self-confessed values and politics that stood them out as vanguards of rights of the under-privileged. This is accentuated by the toxic tokenism extended to them by the ruling class – something Noel Ignatin rightly couched as the original sweetheart agreement.

Through the chaos, however, the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT), a coalition of supposedly youthful revolutionaries emerged to challenge the dominance of the ruling party, the fast-dissembling All Progressives Congress (APC) and its clownish rival, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) at the 2019 general elections.

Sadly, these new kids on the block failed to earn Nigerians’ popular mandate in 2019 due to their banal theory of rage and aggression. Embittered, they bore their dissent into 2021. Having failed to connect with the grassroots, they embarked on a fool’s gambit, seeking to match the predatory oligarchs, filth for

filth, rhetoric for rhetoric, while belting righteous indignation.

To establish and sustain its putative integrity, the PACT assemblage, for instance, suspended itself in ideological voyeurism and fault-finding, a tactic of assault and defence that eventually became its crucifix and tomb.

The EndSARS revolutionaries, for all their vaunted promise in 2020, towed a similar path and even resorted to physical and emotional violence, thus quickening its self-destruct.

Such pitiful waste of potential leaders should never be overlooked. Their failure is blamable on the shady characters among them who used the platforms to shop for political capital, in order to be seen as the smarty pants who dared the system and acquired the title of “Former Presidential Aspirant.” Many more were fortune hunters, who traded in dissent, for a profit.

Money changes everything. An obsession with it corrupts the elderly and youth alike. For the love of money, several armed robbers, kidnappers, and terrorists, in their youth, have wasted innocent lives. Many “woke” youths and misguided Millenials have equally justified taking bribes, and playing ruinous muscle to the ruling class, claiming it’s their “share of the collective wealth that they steal from us.”

The folly of our ways has dawned on us. The men and women we enabled with power have evolved some of the worst tyrannies across the federation. Sadly, in the corrupted currents of our world, such characters are making frantic gestures to perpetuate themselves in power beyond 2023.

From the beginning of 2021 to its end, some governors spent more time in Abuja than in their domains, hatching desperate plots to remain in power beyond 2023 even as they failed to fulfill the duties of their incumbent offices.

The ongoing political liaisons enable a system in which the youth are psychologically confined and broken by inducements, dubious segregation, and manipulative politics.

It is about time we actualised a culture of true ideals against petty passions and sordid objectives. Let us begin to build that proverbial bulwark of citizenship whose ideal of patriotism is held untainted by wantonness, ill-bliss, and the temptations of power.

Let us begin from the grassroots. Let us desensitize ourselves of toxic prejudices and conceit. Let us begin to court and patronise the usual objects of our apathy and disdain – like the “inconsequential” park urchin, “hooligan” and muscles for hire in the boondocks, university campuses, the media, and law enforcement agencies.

It is time to connect with the park urchin, neighbourhood thug, and militia to channel the inestimable benefits attainable by identifying with them in psyche, electoral will, and numbers.

From 2019 through 2021, youthful Nigerians thrashed blindly about the nation’s political swamp, inciting rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. Eventually, their language did not make sense.

They could begin to make sense by speaking truths amenable to the miseries of the electorate outside the perimeters of the general elections. For the latter, better tomorrow has passed, today is stricken and yesterday has withered with her ridged fundaments at last.

Now that fractured ‘change’ in which they trusted, has drifted into the darkest deep, let the political “disrupters” strap torn will to broken resolve and furiously row before we sink.