Category: Olatunji Ololade

By Olatunji Ololade

One of the most curious kinks of this generation is its worship and sustenance of the oligarchic enterprise. Some have called it the Stockholm Syndrome but I would say: we simply nurture existent symbols of our inner freaks.

In the wake of separatists Sunday Igboho and Nnamdi Kanu’s supposed rebellion against the incumbent political class, large segments of the populace hailed them as the long-awaited voices of freedom. But the duo simply railed as symptoms of our cancer.

What we must fight is the etiology of the disease; the strange tissues where the cancer cells bloom and open their capsules. For too long, we have watched them split apart and spit malignant pips into the lush green of our homeland. The consequences are discernible in real-time.

Yet this piece isn’t about the plots and counter-plots surrounding the emergence and containment of Kanu and Igboho; at the backdrop of extensive analysis of the duo’s romanticised victimhood and impendent crucifixion,  the Federal Government responds with characteristic insensitivity issuing careless ripostes to critics of its selective justice on the social conflicts that birthed the duo, the killer herdsmen-farmers crisis, for instance.

The debate intensifies in real-time about the predicament of Kanu and Igboho. Are they random casualties of their own hubris? Or are they victims of the frantic plots and ambitions of desperate governors and presidential aides en route the 2023 general elections? Has the Federal Government been fair in its handling of the crisis of confidence, depressive economies, and social conflict that transformed the duo from barely perceptible human elements to accidental revolutionaries?

How will the government contain the tide of explosive dissent of their apologists should the duo’s trial be bungled by a vindictive power elite?

Whatever the tenor of the unfolding narrative, it must never run repugnant of truth and the cardinal principles of citizenship and political discourse.

These are testy times and we must navigate through the turbulence on rafts of truth, unimpeachable prudence, and patriotism.

Nigeria’s revulsion from the political class is always an emotional swerve. A selfish, juvenile pirouette, where participants trade places to suit their random lusts and sentimentality. For instance, while President Muhammdu Buhari’s apologists consider him infallible and a victim of the plotting of covetous governors and a shady cabal, his virulent critics think otherwise; for all his touted honesty, Buhari’s ascetically transparent flesh appears coarsely louche and dormant to them.

A familiar decline from admiration to disillusionment occurs in the politics of nepotism, in Buhari’s stuporous response to intraparty bickering and the killer herdsmen-farmers crisis. But his greatest undoing would be his inability to douse the flames of bigotries and hatred incited by his actions and inaction.

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

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

Behind this dismal picture lurks a postscript, and predictably, regret. That emotive shingle often succeeds disreputable nature. Yet we stand ignorant and proud, like a half-conscious mutter of men, craving progress and freedom, only to forsake both for a token or fleeting sentiment at election time.

This is the tangle of witlessness and resignation that requires us all to become better patriots and rejuvenators of the Nigerian dream. If we look carefully inwards, we would find that beneath our passiveness and cowardice stirs a quest for self-preservation and gruesome airs.

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

The latter cannot be wished away or successfully weeded out by violence or bloodshed even if we tried. Yet they must not be allowed continual access to leadership and power even as we accept them as grotesque manifestations of the Nigerian factor – monstrosities standing in the way of civilization, progress, and common decency.

They can only be confronted by methodical ferocity, and eliminated by an expansion in breadth of human reason, catholicity of will, and culture. The native aspiration of such men to loot our coffers and feed their greed must not be encouraged any further nor should we persist in pitiful complacency and eagerness to acquiesce to their boorish enterprises, for the love of a token.

Does power truly repose in the electorate? How can we stage a peaceful but decisive revolt without blood-letting? Is the current electorate capable of such a challenging and fundamentally noble exploit?

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

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

The other fraction comprises of the young, upwardly mobile professionals: start-up millionaires, doctors, engineers, journalists, lawyers, teachers, the armed forces, civil servants, unemployed graduates.

Both divides are afflicted by bitter cynicism and despondency. Yet they betray the moral transgressions and base politics characteristic of the political class particularly in instances demanding inviolable tact, sensitivity, and maturity.

Their reactions to the arrest and subsequent trial of corrupt public officers, for instance, provide a worthy yardstick by which they might be judged. Many would adduce reasons bordering on ethnic and religious bigotries in decrying the “persecution” of alleged looters of public office even where the latter have issued confessions substantiating the charges against them.

Such characters are incapable of rational, cognitive, and affective sensitivities pivotal to nation-building. Their vituperation reveals, among other things, that, many of them are kindred spirits with the political class.

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

How could such vitally impaired characters be trusted with Nigeria’s future? Oftentimes, they have argued their eligibility for leadership on the basis of affluence and youth. Youth, however, is overrated and anyone could chance on money by merit or cheat.

Thus the imperative of a practical, ingenious process of human training in the struggle to build a truly progressive and formidable movement of the people, for the people, and by the people.

Nigeria will never become that model nation of our dreams until we evolve a social process that enables sufficient moral nurturing, the guidance of thought, and adroit coordination of deeds as catalysts of freedom, peace, equality, justice, and national rebirth.

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

By Olatunji Ololade

Amid COVID-19’s torment, terrorism, and armed banditry, Nigeria fosters her tradition of descent. This country has resorted to her old ways; like the androgynous drag queen, ‘she’ has gifted the rapt visionary at lust’s easel with the whistling bum on her girder.

“Come defile us!” Nigerians urge, even amid the threat of a supposedly deadlier variant of the coronavirus. This minute, Nigeria intones basement giggle, like the proverbial ghommid plundering beneath nationhood’s sandcastles.

Through rising insecurity and the government’s gift of misgovernance, industry breathes nationwide, clerics rejoice and chant preachment of relief. Freedom cheers in a blanket of extreme poses; like the proverbial paramour, she offers the worm with the apple and invites private glances to her public pleasures.

But while other states may consume the worm with the apple, Lagos eyeballs it as a false fruit of rebirth. The city fears becoming food for worms hence Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s decision to re-institute full compliance with all protective protocols; compulsory use of masks in all public places, social distancing, temperature checks, provisions for hand-washing and sanitisers, and a maximum of 50 percent occupancy in enclosed spaces.

Governor Sanwoolu has warned of a possible third wave of the coronavirus pandemic in the state, and Nigeria by extension, stressing that the number of confirmed cases, which had earlier reduced to one percent average as of the end of June, has suddenly increased to 6.6 percent rate as of Thursday, July 8.

While he did not say whether the new Delta variant, which has been described as the most transmissible, has been found in Lagos or not, it is noteworthy that how Lagos handles the situation may impact the fate of the country.

As Lagos grapples with the tally of the afflicted, Sanwo-Olu dreads COVID-19’s re-enactment of its Italian, American alchemy. Lagos must neither splay nor split to a merciless ravage of its innards lest it becomes yet another mutilated bower.

Since government lifted the nationwide lockdown, a lot of Nigerians have barely managed to get by; many businesses have collapsed due to COVID-19 contractions; industry hasn’t fully resurrected and large segments of the citizenry struggle to reclaim all that was lost and stilled – even as armed bandits brazenly cash out via brazen kidnap for ransom plots.

While the government’s intervention efforts focused on the poor, presumed middle-class segments have lost their jobs, suffered arbitrary salary cuts, and lack of access to welfare relief and subsidies that could help them cope with the economic hardship foisted by the pandemic.

A 2019 World Bank report shows that Nigeria created about 450,000 new jobs in 2018, partially offsetting the loss of jobs in 2017 but more radical estimates indicate that over 18 million youths were unemployed by the end of 2019.

If COVID-19 has taught us anything, however, it is that faith may flourish amid private homesteads, far from the commercial offices and pulpits of merchant clerics.

There is no gainsaying Nigeria stirred with an impulse for commerce and drama, post-lockdown. As the country resumed to familiar bustle and grind, however, we forgot most of the lessons availed us through the lockdown.

There is no gainsaying COVID-19 has its benefits; aside from its merciless ravage and termination of livelihoods and lives, it taught families, societies, and nations to immerse and hover at the edge of a hitherto forbidden locus of experience. It taught us to read. It taught many to rediscover love for printed and digital literature. It taught us to hold our breath, and let words into our core, amid the rapid currents of life.

The virus is spellbinding. It affixed Nigeria to a seat. It hurled roving parents into a stagnant spell with their wards. It fixed a book in several hands and ignited a hankering for news among the old and the young.

The pandemic gave us order. Although the order was not necessarily just and kind, it taught individuals to seek knowledge at the core and periphery of civilization. It taught us to read to save ourselves and the collective. Every superficial and profound remark, article, or paragraph by a journalist, writer, reporter, and novelist, in traditional or new media, became food for thought.

Through the lockdown, many people rediscovered life’s essentials, far from the guttural cry and antics of the maddening herd. It taught many to remodel their lives around a new normal. For some, the new normal manifested as a routine walk in the park, in the company of loved ones; for some, it was family game time and movie hour. For some, the new normal unfurled in an intense love of books and visionary literature.

One would think that as the lockdown was lifted, development stakeholders, multinationals, the media, artistes, local and international NGOs, schools, and the manufacturing sector, to mention a few, would unite to give stimulus to society’s shrunken arteries. Wrong.

Freed from the lockdown, Nigeria stirred to the lure of pagan sex and violence (saddening, sensational murder-rape stories), decadence, and chaos. No sooner than the lockdown was lifted than the camera seduced society to more decadent faculties.

Faced with the threat of COVID-19’s new delta variant, Nigerians rush into the hovel of reality show drama, where plot and dialogue become insolent word-baggage. This minute, the most eye-intense of genres restores pagan antiquity’s cultic fanfare. If previous reality shows perpetuated fables of lust and disintegration, the ongoing edition commemorates the internment of the pre-adolescent mind in a grave of delusions.

More participants on the shows personify a deep cry for help; like Hoyle’s misdirected mortals, they will learn from avoidable mistakes, not from examples.

COVID-19 made humans of us all and the lockdown thrust in our faces, the stark imagery of our mortality. The grim truth leered at us from the pages of literature, newspapers, and the Holy Books. Yet Nigeria returns to its beaten path: reality shows, deathly politics, sponsored violence, and cutthroat commerce.

The average citizen re-emerges as a non-person, subject to mass cheering and shunning; like a participant in a reality show, he lives life like a lottery. In pursuit of the sweepstakes, his imagination is once again let loose to roam, uninhibited, but his body is bound in ritual restriction.

He becomes a daemonic tool, a sacrificial totem maddened by intoxicants: alcohol and human milk, fluid of slovenly genitals – the paraphernalia of shows like the BBN.

Would anybody read anymore? “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books,” Neil Postman wrote: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy.

As Huxley remarked in “Brave New World Revisited,” the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. Apology to Postman.

By Olatunji Ololade

Some have likened the incumbent dispensation to a dud joke – or a political jest gone awry if you like.

It is an anthem, both in social and political circuits, that, Muhammadu Buhari and Yemi Osinbajo weren’t reelected to redispense blame and give excuses. Rather, they were tasked to actualise their party, the All Progressives Congress (APC)’s gospel of ‘change.’ By enjoying the gift of a second term, they were expected to see to a fruitful end, the rite of riddance of our immeasurable miseries.

Yet some have argued that the presumed moral bent of both men hasn’t enough juice, to fuel their ‘change’ caravan – their most visible achievement being the neutering of the National Assembly and domestication of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). It’s a sight to see presumed PDP stalwarts renounce their membership and hop in bed with the ruling party.

Whatever the slant of disillusionment, however widespread, the fact remains that the incumbent administration was the best we could produce.

Of course, their job isn’t half done. Despite the dark pall cast on the administration by its selective justice, clannishness, nepotism, substandard healthcare plan, and inability to convincingly end insecurity among others, the administration has recorded a few glowing achievements and initiatives including the implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) and infrastructure development.

Nonetheless, these sparse attainments hardly institute dependable progressive indices, and they do not absolve their leadership of inadequacies. But then, is there ever a perfect government?

Many, however, still whine and insist that Nigeria should have cut her nose to spite her face, by choosing Atiku Abubakar and company. I would reiterate that Atiku was as much a frantic sentiment as Buhari.

Now that I have incited your wrath, what colour is your indignation? Is it “onion brown, hell-red, or currency-green? What’s the price tag? For you won’t be fulfilling that sublime quality of Nigerianness, if your choler isn’t paid for.

Apology to the elusive ‘patriot,’ whose outrage is unsullied by money and random bigotries but we are at that point when new expediences and indignation are manufactured in our volatile mills. Last general elections, religion, hard currencies, and tribalism were fed to our infernal factory thus turning many voters into insentient robots.

You see, indignation too could be paid for. It is often paid for. Hence as it was at previous polls, many a vote cast at the 2023 polls shall reassert our ethical bankruptcy and reduction of self.

As you read, career critics, political thugs, and trolls-for-hire are in bed with each other, in service of often shady aspirants. Arundhati Roy would call this a revolving bed in a cheap motel. Journalists, youth leaders, traditional rulers, women leaders, and civil societies are snuggled up under the sheets too.

It’s hard to keep track of the partners; they change so fast. Each new baby they produce strengthens the capacity to subjugate and further impoverish the hapless electorate, in flagrant Roy-speak.

Yet we must seek and choose candidates capable of guaranteeing us progressive change. Nigeria is in a dilemma, we are at the threshold of 2023 and we really must identify and empower with votes of confidence and decisive balloting, candidates endowed with ingenuity and promise of a truly humane leadership. So far, the few noisy aspirants in the arena have established their candidacy on a bedrock of sophistry, lip service, and blame-casting.

Indeed, the best role anyone could assume is that of a critic; the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT) fiasco, did reveal the moral and ideological inadequacies of Nigeria’s league of self-acclaimed messiahs.

It’s about time we identified individuals invested with the decisiveness and courage required to implement a radical, progressive overhaul of the country’s sociopolitics and economy.

But we can’t achieve this without a politically conscious youth and the literate electorate. The incumbent administration, like its predecessors, has failed to constructively engage with the youths. What they have done so far, is to selectively distribute shady contracts and appointments to their children and stooges.

They have failed to initiate policies that would guarantee the reemergence and continuity of a spirited middle class. This is perhaps, deliberate. Marx and Engels correctly asserted, that, revolutions are unachievable by the poor because they provide the primary fodder for the goons, militias, and thugs employed by politicians to grab and retain power at all costs.

The breadlines thereby constitute a dangerous divide, whom impoverishment has reduced “to bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.” Thus the questions about the true nature of the Nigerian electorate: How politically literate are we? How amenable are voters to incitement, bribe, and wanton emotionality?

Poverty and illiteracy, no doubt, constitute social, psychological handicaps hobbling the electorate’s capacity to make informed choices at ballot time. Hence the preponderance of voters susceptible to dark propaganda, ethnoreligious bigotries, and violence – all crafted to actualise political aspirants’ inordinate ambitions.

The situation requires urgent intervention, lest the prevalent sense of entrapment and despair, drives the impoverished to stage more bloody revolts as we currently experience via armed banditry, terrorism, kidnap for ransom and the ongoing separatist crises.

Common causal factors of insurgencies include widening income gaps, and a leadership insensate to rising socioeconomic inequalities. Victims become generally tense and frustrated. Eventually, they become vulnerable to tensions created by their failure to gratify their economic needs, amid unstable social relationships.

Even so, deprived citizenry are unlikely to achieve a successful rebellion or revolution, by themselves. It is rather a disenfranchised middle class and alienated members of the ruling class who orchestrate and lead such a revolt, argues James Davies.

The middle class and youths, who should personify the Nigerian spring are, however, bristling with uninspiring badges, notably weaponised dissent, guns, cudgels, bribes, mindless bigotries, and shady political parties’ membership cards.

They are like bond slaves turned weapons of mass destruction: thugs, propagandists, urchins et al. For the assassinations, misinformation, arson, mugging, and other heinous tasks they perform, they aren’t interchangeable with the politicians’ wards; the latter are meant for nobler tasks and offices, like the governorship, senatorial, managerial, presidential seats.

Where children of the electorate serve as cannon fodder for political violence, the possibility of a peaceful revolt by balloting is forever muted. The citizenry is consequently eunuchised.

It is saddening to see Nigeria’s youth misappropriate dissent by demanding to succeed the incumbent ruling class, hoping power would be “shared” or served to them a la carte, or like benefits on a sweepstake.

Some, having realised their wrongness of approach, coalesced into movements, like the #NotTooYoungtoRunGroup (NTYTRG) and the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT), to choose a younger, consensus candidate within their ranks, and counter the influence and spending power of the big parties and oligarchs.

But alas! Their passion for power resonated in gibberish; since they could only muster sweetened banality against the predatory oligarchs’ washed-out bromides, they dissembled under an interpretative cloud.

Loss is what you experience after you trade the possibility of freedom for sound bites and a token.

The supposedly harmless vote flowers trauma, where citizenry angst suffers the leash of a price tag.

By Olatunji Ololade

“For the love of country” becomes our sexiest lie. The curvaceous plague of Nigerian politics. Everybody cops a feel.

Government and the governed; oppressor and the oppressed; oligarchs and long-suffering proletariat; the old and young: the gbenudake and soro soke generations, all partake in the morbid ritual.

However, politics fades to melodrama where the patriot in his youth, misappropriates the role of a revolutionary and considers himself greater than the state. In his struggle to usurp privileges and power, he inflicts misery on ordinary citizens, those whose predicament supposedly triggered his defiant ‘wokeness.’

“For the love of country” becomes his arrant lie, the falsity that becomes his slogan. Thus this minute, random youth pulses to duplicitous love.

Belligerent, cocksure, digitally-woke, social media is his brothel; the virtual bordello of his dreams, where pimps of strife and courtesans of the witless, caress his manifest and furtive lusts. Ultimately, they slake his unarticulated sinful thirsts.

If Facebook is his weakness, Twitter is his vice; a new breed of youth is prowling social media. They are less inhibited, less courteous, and inhumane. They do not understand what humaneness means thus toxic rant is fair game and as their rant spills from their soapboxes into the social space, it passes the stink that smelly suds make in an ocean of mental squalor.

It gets scarier where their ignorance, intemperance, and rage, enjoy the caress of a dubious demagogue. They launch like loose canons at the slightest provocation. Left to their devices, they are feckless and sterile. Armed with their digital devices, they pose anything to their homeland: motley blessings and applause in one minute and despicable threats in the next.

Nigeria won’t forget in a hurry, the #EndSARS protest; through the mayhem, nationhood careened at the crossroads where patriotic spunk jostles with ignorance, fake news, and mischief.

Chaos, prancing on the protesters’ digital phones, recited epitaphs across passion-planes and boundaries, spilling death on to the streets. Some have blamed the resultant carnage on infernal youth and conceit; many have flayed the police for insensitivity, and the protesters for lack of a clear plan and strategy for dealing with venomous leadership. They said they dared to duel with shayateen without a tough shield. Did they?

Nigeria had it coming perhaps; a protest that started as a supposedly peaceful movement got hijacked by mischief makers and death merchants. Shady clerics, political and business actors, failed aspirants, and criminal coalitions abroad, all having a score to settle and united in spite, couched venom in patriotic lingo and threw their weight behind the protest.

The police, lawmakers, and older Nigerians (gbenudake generation), became the butt of rancid jokes and attacks. Lest we forget President Muhammadu Buhari, the protesters’ ultimate whipping dog.

Of course, Buhari presents with shortcomings. He is not a perfect president. And his anti-corruption fight unfurls ethically-knocked. Yet he is everything we are and all that we aren’t: Baby Boomers, Millennials, Generations Y and Z, the gbenudake, sorosoke, netizens, digital natives et al.

Post #EndSARS, politicians still call the shots, career activists and secessionists feed fat using the youths as disposable pawns. The youths guzzle on spite and sound bites without recourse to reason. It would seem that the average youth simply adopts any movement that’s anti-government and anti-state.

Too much of duplicity is discernible in the exploits of many, whose ‘hardcore’ agitation had been seen to extinguish soon after they attained power, or got ‘settled’ by the ruling class or power brokers aligned to the former.

Ferocity manifests as crucial aspects of their passion; the clique culture, cancel culture, authoritarianism, and sense of entitlement characteristic of the ruling class actually manifest among the youth across class divides. It’s a precursor to rite of Nigeria’s rape cycle.

If the #EndSARS protest and the ongoing secessionist agenda have taught us anything, it is that the random patriot in his youth, is morally ambivalent. He pays lip-service to patriotism even as his provocative ‘purity’ incites filth in its wake. Stripped of his slogan, his passion betrays neither breadth nor depth. It is barely individuated from the insensitivity and grotesqueness resonant of the primeval gladiator arena.

His passion connotes moral emptiness. What Paglia would liken to the still heart of a geode, rimmed with crystalline teeth. His platitudinous chant is disguised as a series of soothing gestures, like rubbing a lantern to make a genie appear.

In truth, he weaponises a dark sentiment, luring the masses into a dark cycle of sadism. His exaggerated gestures and confessions of love are an assertion of savage lust. He moots no selflessness or sacrifice, only refinements of domination.

Beneath the glitter and ire of his platitudinous chants subsist a frantic hankering for privileges and spoils of power. For instance, some of the celebrities that led the #EndSARS protests: musicians, religious leaders, motivational speakers, social influencers hardly represent the country’s finest moral compass despite their declarations otherwise. It was ironic though that they became faces of the protests.

Some have been described as “monsters” by their aides, who alleged that they have to endure unprecedented savagery to earn their keep. Yet these ‘superstars’ barged on to the political stage through the trapdoor, flaunting a poker face and chanting for the underdog.

Some made videos; that was their in into the fast-galvanising protests. They saw a window of opportunity as the protests dragged on. Of course, they latched on to the flailing bandwagon, chanting creeds and popular slogans as a necessary performance of will.

Their intent was to align with the movement just before it overwhelmed the incumbent ruling class. Afterwards, they hoped to get invited and “wooed” to seek public office by an army of concerned youth-patriots who would identify them as the real leadership material that Nigeria deserves. Of course, the ill-fated end of the protests put paid to their fantasies.

The movement failed because the agitation was mostly of a visceral type reminiscent of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s idealised revolt. Most defiant youths share kindred spirits with the incumbent oligarchs from whose oppressive leadership they seek freedom.

It’s commendable, however, that they summoned courage to march on the streets to demand better leadership and a higher quality of governance until constraints of savage origins hatched into their midst courtesy of the demons outside and within.

They seized in a revolutionary moment, an ideal that was often more emotional than beneficial because it allowed them to defy established power. This misappropriated sentiment is currently being weaponised by separatists from Nigeria’s southeast and southwest, inciting carnage and shrill whispers of another civil war.

Through the mayhem, the privileged are perfecting their ‘Plan B’ cum relocation abroad. This message is for the millions without the luxury of an overseas refuge: it is about time we cautioned our youth to desist from inflaming the polity be it as internet warmongers or cannon fodder for physical carnage.

We need a peaceful country to successfully fight and defeat corruption, governance failure, power outage, infrastructure collapse, substandard health and education among others.

If the youths truly seek change, they must achieve a unity of minds and common purpose by constructive participation in the political process. The ballot box is definitely sexier than bullets.

By Olatunji Ololade

The blood-thirsty squad that invaded the Federal Government College in Buni Yadi, Yobe State, comprised adolescent boys. Moving in deathly herds, they invaded the high school on February 25, 2014, like a storm cloud split by snaky thunderbolts. They stabbed through the night with a huge spear of mayhem and pumped hot bullets into the students while they slept, killing 59 boys.

Eyewitnesses said they threw explosives into dorms as they sprayed the rooms with gunfire. Some of the students who tried to escape through the windows landed right before the terrorists, who slit their throats. Save a few survivors, the rest were burnt to death.

There was no outrage in the wake of the massacre. Just silence. Convenient disconcerting quiet.

Two months later, on April 14 – 15 to be precise, another batch of terrorists stormed the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State, and abducted 276 female students aged 16 to 18. And all hell was let loose as women’s rights activists, international and local NGOs started a campaign to free the girls. The movement gained global appeal as prominent figures identified with hashtags in the interest of the girls.

Through the hubbub, nobody paid a good mind to a curious development concerning both attacks, and several other terrorist attacks afterward: the majority of the perpetrators were boys at the cusp of adolescence. Some of the survivors of the attacks attested to this fact.

Joseph David aka Ibrahim Al-Hajjar, a Boko Haram commander, would subsequently reveal to me in an exclusive interview that he led a troop of at least 150 teenagers and underage boys in Sambisa forest.

David also forcibly married two of the Chibok girls: Precious a.k.a Faridah and Elizabeth a.k.a Amina, as co-wives to his first wife, Faridah, who he abducted from Madagali, in Borno State.

A dangerous storm is brewing as you read. The boys we ignored have learnt the ropes of savage being yet nobody gives a hoot. At least, we would worry what becomes of us when they set our neigbourhoods on fire in a manic search for the warmth and attention we denied them.

There is the argument that these boys are results of polygyny-gone-wrong in the Islamic north; self-styled intellectuals and critics are quick to point out that Islamic polygyny is a problem that afflicts the north with hordes of almajiri, who are oft recruited as cannon fodder for ethno-religious crisis and terrorism. They recommend monogamy as a better alternative. This is a cheeky and self-serving argument.

Islam and its precepts of polygyny cannot be blamed for the protracted violence in the north. The violence was borne of extreme politics and governance failure and must be blamed on the politicians, groups, and individuals who are abusing the system in pursuit of selfish political, ethnoreligious, coital, emotional lusts.

How do we explain the thousands of children birthed outside wedlock in the southern parts of the country? Many of them are products of broken marriages and serial monogamy. There are several cases in which children are sired by a parent across successive monogamous marriages and informal cohabitation; one marriage breaks down, and the parent moves on to another partner, and so on. Lest we forget the ubiquitous ‘love-child’ and products of high school teen lust.

Children sired via such arrangements are often sent to live with their grannies or forced to live as house helps in the homes of close and distant relatives. Where they stay with an apathetic or extremely busy parent or guardian, they are condemned to the gruesome life of a latchkey child.

Amid the sullied wave of awareness blowing through the country, these children learn assertiveness the way of the streets; some eventually flee the cold comfort of their parents’ or guardians’ abode – such children are called: ‘Awon omo o sanle.’ They constitute the rippling muscles of teen gangs and cult groups haunting Lagos, Oyo, and other parts of the southwest. While their peers in the northeast and northwest are forcibly recruited by bandits, Boko Haram and ISWAP death squads, they assume a different kind of terror to families, neighbourhoods, and States in the southern parts of the country.

Hundreds of children are dumped in refuse, school, and public latrines; and subsequently condemned to shady orphanages and remand homes. If they are female, they become easy marks for sex traffickers and drug barons. If male, they end up as political thugs, drug mules, armed robbers, assassins, kidnappers, and gangbangers.

In Osun, teenagers and young adults fleeing EFCC arrest in Lagos reassembled to practice internet fraud; recently, they rioted against frequent arrests and investigation by the police and EFCC. Many shamelessly identified themselves as ‘Game boys’ (internet fraudsters or Yahoo boys).

Cut to Lagos, the melting pot of turf battles and teenage gang wars. The city grapples with the menace of teen cults including the Awawa Boys, One Million Boys, Fadeyi Boys, Ereko Boys, Akala Boys, Ijesha Boys, Awala Boys, Shitta Boys, Nokia Boys, No Salary Boys, One Hour Boys, Oshodi Boys, No Mercy Boys, Aguda Boys, Night Cadet, Black Scorpion, Red Scorpion, Akamo Boys, Omo Kasari Confraternity, Para Gang Confraternity (mainly teenage girls), Japa Boys and Koko Boys, among many others.

What started innocently as a group of minors begging people for money eventually metamorphosed into a gang of fearsome underage and teen cultists and armed robbers of ages 6 to 19.

More worrisome is Awawa’s incursion into primary schools. Just recently, 12 pupils of the Egan Community School, between the ages of 6 and 16, were reportedly caught after their initiation into Awawa, in Alimoso area of Lagos. But for a Guidance and Counselling teacher at the school, their initiation would have taken place undetected.

The pupils were allegedly recruited by a 16-year-old girl, who attends a sister school, Egan Senior Grammar in Igando, Lagos, and were undergoing training in order to become future hitmen of the cult.

The Awawa Boys 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. For large missions, they operate as flash mobs of 100 to 150 boys.

They terrorise Agege,  Iyana-Ipaja, Ibari, Ashade, Dopemu, Ogba, Ifako-Ijaiye, Abule-Egba, Ifako-Ijaye, Agege, Isale Oja, Ogba Ashade, Aluminium Village, and other parts of Lagos mainland and island.

Though predominantly a cult of boys, females including prepubescent girls are recruited into the gang. An Awawa Boy can be identified by a drippy teardrop tattoo beside the left eye.

Members of the cult are drug dependent. They binge on psychotropic substances including omi gota (gutter juice), colorado, pamilerin, codeine, cannabis, rohypnol and tramadol. And members nurse a morbid fascination for raping older women and also young girls.

These are the monsters we created. Growing up, all they needed were exemplary masculine role models to emulate but what society offered them was an ethos of manhood that they could dumb down to.

Nigeria treats the boy-child as an affliction to society and females, in particular; he is cast as inconsequential in the scheme of things. In truth, he is.

This minute, he is marching as a terrorist or armed bandit, to abduct, to rape, and kill perhaps, the daughters we frantically empower and protect.

This is the world we built; a cosmos of ‘strong women’ reliant on Atlas’ strength, yet imperiled by his shrug.

By Olatunji Ololade

In Amotekun we entered animal aura. It promised magic, white and tame, black and wild. Enchantment corrupted psychic space and made it temenos. In this ritual precinct, the security outfit manifested as a sacred creed of mind; a political logic of space, nature and expediences.

Yet this minute, it unfurls to dominance and defilement. But who domineers? Who is defiled?

Recently, the police in Oyo State confirmed the death of 11 people in an alleged herdsmen attack on Igangan community in Ibarapa area of the state. Gunmen suspected to be herdsmen, allegedly stormed Igangan with about 25 motorcycles on Sunday morning and torched buildings including the king’s palace. Gory videos and pictures of human casualties have since been shared on several social media channels, inciting outrage and inflaming the social space.

Reacting to the attack, Ondo governor and chairman of the Southwest Governors Forum, Rotimi Akeredolu, in a statement on behalf of the forum, condemned the killings stressing that, “certain elements are bent on causing friction among the peoples of this country with the sole aim of achieving a pernicious end. We on our part are resolved to defend our people, their property, and all legitimate means of livelihood against both internal and external aggression. On this, there will be no compromise. We cannot afford to fail.”

The attack on Igangan comes months after the head of the Fulani community in the town, Salihu Abdulkadir, was ejected by self-acclaimed activist, Sunday Adeyemo aka Sunday Igboho, who accused him of complicity in the murders and abductions of farmers and residents of the community by criminal herdsmen. Although Abdulkadir denied the allegation, he was forcibly ejected from the community.

In the wake of the recent killings, pundits accuse Oyo governor, Seyi Makinde, his SGF peers and the state security agencies for failing to preempt the attack.

Again, the debate segues to the efficacy of the Western Nigeria Security Network (WNSN) code-named: Operation Amotekun as well as the politics of power and self-preservation that informed its establishment. Apologists of the vigilance group enthused that it would protect lives and property of Yorubaland. The group was expected to work with the police and other security agencies to protect the region from killer herdsmen, robbers and kidnappers among other terrors, claimed the southwest governors.

“Whoever comes to Yorubaland to kill are known. Amotekun has 10,000-year-old technology that nobody knows. Amotekun must stand, it is a protective force for Yorubaland,” said an apologist.

It’s easy to get smitten by the romanticism and rage of it all. The politicised arguments, seasoned justifications, foxy upbraids and catlike ripostes attained harmony in the jarring snarl of the southwest’s feline sentinel.

The drama intensifies but the effort has, so far, been unproductive. In the wake of the Igangan killings and similar attacks in Papalanto and Sagamu in Ogun State, many have questioned the relevance of the security group.

While shared militia, driven by an autonomous but integrated command structure founded on superior, native intelligence seemed a worthy and commendable response to the forays of murderous herdsmen, armed bandits and kidnappers tormenting the southwest’s outliers, the success of the venture depends on the quality of commitment vested in it by the SGF and other stakeholders.

The falsehood of bromides and artifice disinters to sinister truths; for instance, the politics and drama of Amotekun was predetermined along the rigid straits of the southwest regions socioeconomic and political realities which like previous initiatives of similar nature, fulfilled Orwell’s Animal Farm stereotype.

While career courtiers and so-called “social media influencers” donned face powder and powered the governors’ raucous orchestra, none acknowledged that we are at this sorry pass because the SGF and their peers across the country failed the electorate.

The southwest needed an Amotekun because the governors had over time, failed to commit state resources to actualise development plans and policy objectives.

If they had spent judiciously on education, health, economy, and infrastructure, the region may have appreciated in scholarship, medical services, security and industry. The region, would thereby enjoy improved quality of youth and living standards, and an army of builders and progressives undeserving of enlistment as members of Amotekun, or the rampaging hordes of “real” and “fake” killer herdsmen, bandits and kidnappers.

The spectre of social unrest pervading the southwest, like neighbouring regions, feeds off the greed and ambition of inefficient leaders. While the region’s vulnerability to attack manifests as a consequence of the unforeseen economic collapse, civil disobedience and widespread violence wracking neighbouring states, it’s noisy plummet down the steep slope of anarchy is attributable to inefficient leadership.

While we applaud Amotekun as a worthy response to the southwest’s insecurity problem, the governors must facilitate seamless cooperation between Amotekun and state security outfits. They address, for instance, police contempt for the vigilance scheme. Several police officers have scoffed at the idea, lamenting that funding committed to Amotekun could serve better purpose if funnelled to improve police operations.

The governors must also seek the cooperation of their northern and southern peers, who have so far done little or nothing to improve cross-border security operations.

More importantly, they must rapidly re-enfranchise unemployed youths into legitimate, mainstream economy, and tear down the frames of the highly politicised, exclusive socioeconomic circuits to accommodate the impoverished divide. At the moment, the region suffers a dislocation between the short-term interests of the ruling class and the longer-term interests of the electorate.

The southwest governors must work against the notion that they haven’t been able to resolve the region’s security and development challenges because they are rich. Wealth and privilege insulates them from the major afflictions of the poor electorate; these include bad roads, substandard healthcare and education, and comatose infrastructure. Affluence permits them to turn those around them into compliant and expendable workers, hangers-on, sycophants, and candidates for lifeboat palliatives, like Amotekun.

Wealth, argues Fitzgerald, breeds a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities.

Although the governors affect a protective mien, their actions resonate as chilling neglect of the miseries of the impoverished outliers.

Sadly, the citizenry’s inability to grasp the pathology of their leaders as members of an oligarchic corporate elite makes it difficult to organise a resounding change in their fate via the ballot box.

Politics looms entwined with money and power across the region, two cuffs of its shackled-lyre.

Armed with the cuffs, the governors turn the electorate into docile subjects of their godlike delectation; there is a vast disconnect between what they say and what they do. Sadly, the masses are blinded and enchanted by their illusions. No thanks to a fawning press and civil societies.

While hope may yet flourish in its presence, this minute, Amotekun subsists as a frantic mental caress that induces weeping instead of applause. The masterminds (governors) grope and stroke their beloved (electorate) with calloused palms, violating the latter’s psychic spaces even as you read.

Until they match in virtual lock-step with their campaign promises, the governors will loom as marketers of illusion, skittish shamans channelling deceit to trade in confusion. They would be continually seen as crafty fabricators of mood and gesture, prowling the edges of duty cloaked in deceit. These are truths that can’t be ignored.

By OIatunji Ololade

Our collective personae as a nation is reflective in the governor who stole $4.2 million from his state’s coffers and stashed it to fund his vanities abroad, not minding what good such loot could do in resolving the educational, healthcare, and infrastructure woes of his state.

It is reflective in the shenanigans of the female minister of petroleum, who raped Nigeria silly until she suffered the industrial strokes of scarcity and recession. Yet she frantically fights to walk free and her cronies in government are eager to let her off with a pat on the back – thus the protracted drama of her prosecution at home and abroad.

Cut to a hodgepodge of governors looting billions of naira via “security votes and hyperbolic capital projects, outrageous life pensions, among other frills,  even as poverty, policy failure, and insecurity devastate the electorate and crucial social institutions on their watch.

Our collective personae flourish in youth feverishly flying ethnic flags in support of their ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ lawmaker, minister, governor, and even president irrespective of the atrocities committed by the former, and criminal charges levelled against them.

The Nigerian government, from the Presidency, the National Assembly, to the state governors and their pet legislatures and local councils embody our frantic culture of dubious citizenship. They legitimise our culture of being, which enables and justifies a public officer’s immediate descent into a basement of opportunism right after emerging as an elected representative.

The latter locks himself (or herself) in that amoral cellar, against the ethical rungs and wise counsel of sterling statesmanship. As the citizenry sinks in wretchedness, he embarks on a quest of inordinate acquisition and counts his spoils in material possessions.

He is, however, a mere fragment of our bigger cultural dilemma. Think of him as the pointed end of the spear of our culture of greed, administrative rapscallionery feverish pillaging, and criminality, in whom the triggers of consequence-free theft, sponsored violence, ethnoreligious carnage, gender, and sexualised menace are fused.

In concert with fellow wild personae prowling Nigeria’s corridors of power, he reinvents, with creative malice, the penetrative outcrops of our national maelstrom. Optimists would call them salvageable ogres from our dark, primal aspects but their cruelty attains deeper resonance in their manifestation as poster icons of our corrupted personae.

They are our decadence. Our disease. Like the millions of citizenry they supposedly represent, they are products of our moral void; the sickly stems bearing our poisonous petals. Little wonder we suffer a carnage of incarnations.

Yet even as we have rightly identified their emergence as an affliction of the eye and disease of the mind, our chances at healing are hindered by chinks in our surgical armour: the fissures of ethnoreligious bias, illiteracy, willful degeneracy, greed, poverty, savage ego, and sheer malevolence.

These constitute severe impediments to our healing. Thus as usual the political class have corrupted the debate on our parlous situation; we should be discussing and taking decisive steps to rid governance of their savage afflictions but they have hoodwinked Nigerians into yet another emotional fog by making an issue of the southwest governors’ ban on open grazing and the calls for true federalism. The latter engage their northern rivals in intense bickering, presumably in defense of their people. Of course, the people have fallen for their gimmick, threatening war and secession from the Nigerian enterprise in solidarity with their dubious representatives.

It’s a familiar scene, a Nigerian reality that often resounds like the fable of doomed Odysseus and the labouring ships.

In the backdrop of these shameful proceedings, the argument persists in academia, social and political circuits, that the future is blurry and bleak due to youth absence in politics. But the youth had been in politics as armed thugs, assassins, arsonists, and internet trolls for several years.

Lest we forget our more ‘youthful men and women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s control the country’s ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and major opposition platform, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

To sustain their legacies, their clannish pride bequeath the country’s leadership to their wards even as they draft boondocks young as cannon fodder and enforcers of their never-ending cycle of sleaze and mayhem. But the youth are hardly the preys they are thought to be. They are often willing participants in a dehumanising ritual of violence and bloodshed.

This minute, the image persists of the nation’s youth as human assertions imagined in degenerate stillness, by specific and random politicians. Unlike the artist’s immobile masterpiece, sculpted in bronze and stone, the youth evolve like plasticine, easily malleable and amenable to devious plots.

Some have attributed the youth’s afflictions to structural banes and the perverse culture of citizenship by which they are weaned and ushered into adulthood.

In the wake of plausible and often far-fetched analyses, too many ‘patriots’ conveniently absolve themselves of blame. Some propound the tragic theory of Nigerians as being innately incapable of self-determination and self-governance.

These arguments have over time attained a language of their own and thus evolved as a dialect of dissent and exaggerated self-abnegation. The nation’s elite frequently marshals clashing precepts as solutions and in condemnation of the status quo according to their biases.

A more damning view identifies the electorate’s persistent claims to victimhood and sense of entitlement as whiny and symptomatic of a dense and irresponsible citizenry. Between the conflict of hyperbole and informed sophistry, Nigeria suffers the affliction of intellectual miscreants and promising youth-turned-fetal-adults.

The coordinated tragedies afflicting our consciousness daily, append the only real structure to our lives as impoverished Nigerians. From burdensome realities of fast slipping youth, recurrent rites of bigotry to the ethical quandary of coping with strict moral codes of adulthood and ideal society, our lives obscure in purpose and meaning.

Thus the scorning of ethics by the youth for fast, illicit riches even as ripples of their actions keep hundreds of millions more in binds of despair.

Consequently, the revolutionary dissent that sprouts from oppression is pitiless and unbending. It radically splits our world into ‘insensitive ruling class’ and ‘clueless lower class,’ ‘elite’ and ‘downtrodden,’ ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ It fosters even more fragmented discord that continually pits Nigerian Christians against Muslims, Hausa against Igbo, Igbo against Yoruba, Yoruba against Ijaw.

While this piece too may resound as hackneyed howl and lamentation, a regurgitation of towering monstrosities we have become, it need be said that our ultimate solution lies in our will to effect true change.

None of the existing parties can foster a progressive nation. They are programmed to a recurring cycle of rebirth and self-destruct. In the vortex, they show occasional flashes of brilliance and daring against familiar odds. But it’s all smoke and mirrors.

It’s about time the youth united progressively and adopted a party of true patriots, driven by men and women of unimpeachable character. The change Nigeria deserves is anathema to the prominent parties and the political class. Real change requires neutering them in capacity and real-time.

To the youth, I would say: “Failure to do this will sustain your status quo as slaves and your children as slaves to your oppressors’ children.”

But could the youth save Nigeria if gifted with power?

From infancy through adulthood, the Nigerian boychild needs saving but he is repeatedly ignored. Childhood was his crystal cabinet, the window into his carefree beginning when he dwelt in the body without ambivalence or fear. But puberty ends his trusting view of nature, triggering the ritual riddance of his innocence. And so begins his passage into savagery and containment.

Fate, dancing like a maiden, entices him by its pirouettes; trapping him like a bird, she keeps him in her museum of mortal specimens. She is Omphale with her male domestics or Iwapele seducing Akara Ogun with her garland of goodies and the forbidden room. But unlike Akara Ogun, puberty ushers the boychild into her forbidden chamber too early. He wouldn’t abstain until her demise. Consequently, he suffers the blistering baptism of burning truth.

Growing up is never easy. Puberty is his savage space thus this minute, he is the minor suffering sexual assault from paedophile parents, teachers, and guardians.

He is the 11-year-old victim of Abigail Okwe, a 37-year-old single mother of one, who started raping him since he clocked eight. He is the journalist and media consultant, who suffered serial rape from his 34-year-old maternal aunt from age 10 through 12. “Looking back now, I realised she was abusing me. I couldn’t tell anyone. She told me I was very lucky to be enjoying her,” said the Abuja-based father of four.

He is the two-year-old victim of Mohammed Ibrahim, a 67-year-old father of four, who sodomised him to fulfill an urge. He is the nine-year-old victim of Nonso Onyeje, 42, who subjected him to anal rape on the altar of God Delight City Church, in Achali Ibusa, Delta State.

He is 16-year-old Anthony, a sexual assault victim of Jesus Intervention Household Ministry’s General Overseer (GO), Reverend Ezuma Chizemdere, who reportedly raped him and 14 other teenage boys until he (Anthony) tested positive for HIV.

Sexual initiation thus becomes his razed temple of sex, from which the faithful disperse into the gendered wilderness. Having been repeatedly ignored by the slew of NGO-sponsored sexual awareness education and messages, he emerges from puberty’s temple with strange notions of sex and gender relations. A product of violent sexual abuse and corruption by random sources, he emerges as a rapist, a paedophile, a sexual aggressor driven on diets of victimhood.

Growing up, he feels a strange sense of emptiness: his life begins to feel like a fictional theme park. He dreams of bliss by imitating the lives of others, precisely more privileged peers. So doing, he models his existence like a theme park built around facets of the lives of others. How can he attain a wholesome life?

Slugging it through awareness, his life assumes the flurry of a caricature; its lucid dreamscapes and obscure vistas force him to question what being a man really is – or, more precisely, what it is worth.

From childhood through adulthood, he learns to buy his way into security, into value, into innocence, and the highly expensive gated simplicity denied millions of Nigerians.

While the odds favour him, he must learn to display unconscionable apathy towards the fate of the people trapped outside, thinking they were not smart enough and thus undeserving of his gated paradise.

Adulthood beckons with curious entrapment: money, work, power, acclaim, carnal lust, love, and renown. It seldom ends well when he yields to temptations of the modern world. His tragedy subsists in the male paradigm of rise and fall, affluence and poverty, power and weakness, health and sickness, love and hate, life and death.

His life unfurls as a shadowy analogy. Traditional manhood stories are picaresque, feel-good narratives of his becoming, he eventually finds. In contrast, a man’s life is fraught with challenges. There is neither certainty nor a sense of an ending.

His narrative is borne of pain and detection and his life, a perpetual struggle to hide what he cannot control. Ultimately, he struggles to ignore his mistakes in plain sight.

Eventually, he becomes the President who wouldn’t divest his soul of the bitterness of nepotism, basement arrogance, ethnic bigotry, frantic animosity, and clannishness.

He is the governor whose definition of service translates to administrative tyranny and embezzlement of public funds. He is the occult lawmaker extending his ‘reign’ by setting sail on an ocean of sacrificial electorate blood.

He is the courtier flaunting nimbleness and eloquence to entertain and goad all into complacence. A persuasive actor, he makes large deposits of religious and ethnic bigotries into our emotional bank accounts. When he withdraws, he does so to our disadvantage and the advantage of his ‘principals’ and ‘clients.’

He is the smiley face of the corporate state that has hijacked the government. He is the lobbyist, social and political influencer by whose antics bad leadership and corporations realise their callous plots.

He is the journalist, who wears face powder to deceive us, like Castiglione’s courtier; he is the columnist, slick disputant, and sophist, who masks brilliantly, the evils of the corporate state in bouquets of lies and beautiful English.

He is the elite technocrat, politician, and academic manipulating information and statistics to project illusions of growth and prosperity. He is the intellectual thug, who weaponises the government instrument of consumer price index (CPI) into persuasive propaganda.

He is the revered economist whose ‘genius’ keeps the official inflation rates low and substitutes on behalf of the government, basic products we once tracked to check for inflation, with ones that do not rise very much in price while keeping the cost-of-living increases tied to the CPI artificially low. Thus the disconnect between reality and what we are told.

In his search for a more promising future, he has grown from the 10-year-old wielding a plastic rifle and sword to mow armies of imaginary monsters and hostile cornstalks, into the smart-aleck intolerant of his spitting child image.

Finally, he understands, that the sword in his hands was never real and if he could go back in time, he would escape the wilderness of manhood.

In the same way, the hunter enters the forest in D.O. Fagunwa’s  Ogboju ode ninu igbo irunmale, he enters the magic castle of his childhood and emerges from its eerie iridescence only to re-enter the nightmare as a senior citizen for whom twilight dawns inauspiciously.

Eventually, the magic wears off and he finds that the life he dreamed as a 10-year-old is unattainable by unimaginable leaps. Ultimately, he would find that it’s the same grind through various stages of manhood.

This year is far spent and he approaches 2022 trying to unravel and understand the interminable woes that make Nigeria and global earth uninhabitable for him.

Scorned, villified, neglected, he becomes the reason for the failure of every marriage, social, political, and economic redemption programme, according to the misandrist-feminist.

He is the thinker, the planner, and executor, the pathologist and undertaker of every progressive, inspiring social panacea. He is the theorist and pragmatist; the seed, the shoot, and the weed. He is the fig that lets down the leaf; the hand that nurtures and smothers.

He is the performer in the period of youth, the star that got dimmed in the middle of his scene because he failed to leave while the ovation was loudest. He is the rapist born of rape. The villain and the victim.

• This updated piece is published in commemoration of Children’s Day.

By Olatunji Ololade

Good banking grows dreams, businesses, countries. It nurtures individuals and families. Ultimately, it suckles the future from the tits of the present. But bad banking manifests gruesomely, like a viral disease. Sometimes, it strikes like a pandemic, as was the case with modern Greece.

Oftentimes, it sprouts as inflamed tumours, much like the infestation of the First Bank of Nigeria (FBN), among others.

That First Bank got hijacked by a privileged elite is an open secret; that the latter misgoverned the bank and depleted it’s fortunes in pursuit of private interests is reprehensible. And that to forestall punitive checks, they embarked on an egocentric power trip, resounds the lore of a Grade B movie noir.

The plot and counter-plot got to a head on April 29; barely 24 hours after the FBN board of directors theatrically sacked Adesola Adeduntan, the bank’s Managing Director (MD), and named his deputy, Gbenga Shobo, as his replacement, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, reinstated Adeduntan and sacked the boards of both the First Bank Limited and FBN Holding Plc.

If you ask Emefiele, he would tell you that FBN’s sacked board had it coming given the bank’s poor corporate governance, credit maladministration and risk management malpractices, on its watch.

Speaking to journalists, he disclosed that the CBN had previously granted “regulatory forbearances (pardon) to enable the bank work out its non-performing loans through provision for write off of at least N150 billion from its earning for four consecutive years.”

According to data from Nairalytics, First Bank had recorded a total loan impairment of over N565 billion between 2016 and 2020; and about N376.4 billion, more than half the total loans impaired, were provided for in 2016 and 2017 alone.

At the FBN, for instance, Emefiele revealed that the insiders who took loans from the bank, with controlling influence on its board of directors, failed to abide by the terms restructuring their credit facilities; the CBN’s inspection of the bank’s books in December 31, 2020 revealed that such insider loans had been materially non-compliant for over three years, he stressed.

Thus the CBN intervened to prevent Adeduntan from being consumed by corporate highjinks over his insistence on best corporate governance.

For “a bank where depositors’ fund is almost 10 times shareholders fund,” the CBN’s interest, said Emefiele, is “to protect depositors and minority shareholders who have no voice in this business.”

First Bank’s duplicitous strut is no doubt evocative of the 2008/2009 banking crisis caused by a fraudulent number of banks and bank chiefs. The CBN took over affected banks and spent billions of tax payers’ money to cushion the ripple-effects and save the banking sector from collapse.

Even so, the five major culprits cum bank chiefs got off with a gloved slap on the wrist despite the criminal charges against them which included fraud, market manipulation, concealment and grant of credit facilities without adequate security.

Apparently, Nigeria’s most dangerous enemies are not Boko Haram or the thousands of youths being recruited as armed bandits, drug mules and political thugs but those who afflict Nigeria with corrupt leadership, poor corporate governance, incendiary capitalism and louche globalisation.

This self-seeking elite have dynamited the foundations of society. By their designs, shades of corporate malfeasance subsist across the boards of several Nigerian companies, banks in particular.

In the absence of effective regulatory mechanisms, Nigerians depend on the media to sound the alarm lest corrupt bank chiefs and their associates in public office plunge the country into another financial crisis.

But even the media is handicapped. The corporate power that holds the government hostage has recruited a severely malnourished press to normalise its misappropriation of depositors’ funds even as it hijacks the potent symbols, language, and culture of corporate citizenship.

Recall that it took successive CBN interventions to reveal that Nigeria’s supposedly ‘big banks’ had  sold us all on an illusion of contrived growth, at least until their sand castles collapsed, and government intervened to save them with ‘bail outs’ or tax payers’ money if you like.

First Bank’s managerial crisis affirms, among other truths, that banking has a devious underside; that businesses, individuals and households must ultimately learn to live within their means. And that the incumbent government’s mantra of frantic borrowing and taxation as means of providing affordable health care, vibrant industry, mean nothing in a nation caught in the asphyxiating grip of a crafty, self-seeking elite.

The malfeasance of several banks’ board of directors manifests jarringly outside their charmed business circuits and ‘high society’, where struggling SMEs and entrepreneurs are stifled of crucial funding.

Through the pillage, cub bankers and the general public covet mindlessly the illusion of genius brandished by bubble celebrities on the banks’ executive boards.

Graduate schools appoint them as guest lecturers and mentors; state governments recruit them into economic think-tanks; local NGOs and INGOs, student bodies and so on, scramble to feature them as board members, mentors, panelists and doyens of enterprise and financial intelligence in hurriedly scripted reality shows.

Amid the melodrama, students, aspiring bankers and magnates choose them as role models, thinking they would enjoy an easy ride to prosperity and Nigeria’s high society.

Many must be stunned to find out that they had set themselves up for disappointment. They had dreamed and planned their path to success on the befogged path of frost personae and specters, whose exploits are likeable to the ravages of enterprise carnivores even as their attainments resonate like the legend of the Himalayan Yeti, or the mystical Pamola, if you like.

Stripped of sugarcoating, the First Bank management has displayed financial recklessness, lack of fiscal intelligence and humaneness – like most bank executive boards.

Hence the urgent need for the CBN and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to pay good mind to goings-on in local banks’ boardrooms. Among other measures, they should jointly institute a rigorous vetting process of aspiring board directors of banks.

Successful candidates must be made to participate in a mandatory six-month boot camp for prospective bank directors, where participants would be vigorously scrutinized and re-orientated about humane fiscal intelligence, sterling corporate governance and citizenship. Licenses must be issued to successful graduates. Licensees involved in corporate misdemeanour including fraud,  must be registered in a register of financial offenders and must be denied subsequent  membership of executive boards.

There must be no sacred cows, given the penchant of prospective candidates to flaunt their oft over-hyped stature and experience to intimidate critics and regulatory bodies.

If bankers were so smart and savvy, they wouldn’t have bankrupted about 52 Nigerian banks while cashing out on government interventions. Some would call it being smart but I would call it sheer fraud. We must call criminality by its hideous names.

An Ivy League education, fancy certificates, donkey years of experience and often sexed-up ‘war stories’ are no excuse to defraud the indigent, working class depositors and a nation.

Yet this minute, they are weaponised by desperate bankers dipping into struggling depositors’ meagre accounts, using the latter’s hard-earned money to finance the private interests and guilty pleasures of a questionable upper crust.