The most egregious lie Nigerians may cuddle is that our collective fate as a nation is independent of the press. If journalism dies, Nigeria dies. Good journalism to be precise.
Now, you may define and paint ‘good journalism’ in whatever fancy hue appeals to you but if your definition perpetually highlights the press as a mongrel to your ogre, you are part of the elements whose deviousness has triggered a flurry of conflict and crime, death and disillusionment across the country.
Disenchantment with the status quo: economic depression, power failure, and persistent insecurity, to mention a few – all caused by a mediocre leadership, its criminal negligence, and corruption by its patron-oligarchs, has triggered dissent and revolutionary cries among political segments across the country.
As Nigeria dissembles civil society groups march in protest against the government’s perceived failures. Of course, the press takes sides. The ‘foremost’ media, mostly ‘owned’ by individuals understand the clamour as a necessary performance of will by the disgruntled citizenry. They also know that many dissenters will retire home to cuddle familiar grief while their leaders cut a deal with the ruling oligarchs – as usual.
In ideal circumstances, the press would side with the truth. But to do this, the journalist must emerge unsullied in practice and endowed with unimpeachable character. This is impossible where he is kept hungry and morally bankrupt.
The journalistic cult of poverty has a supreme theme: the morally deficient journalist. This theme is pitifully projected by government and big business, using ‘hungry,’ domesticated journalists as courtiers, within and outside the corridors of power.
Courtiers’ truths are always dubious and never heartfelt. They wander in logic and polemic, like untamed gypsies, burnishing a world they ought to serve as bastions of love with hate.
Of course, there are the ethicists who are never compromised by greed and lack of pride – they will not serve on any governor or president’s propaganda train. But they comprise a negligible few.
Nigeria devalues her press; in the eyes of big business and the ruling class, the journalist is the manipulable pawn, the necessary evil that must be courted, tamed, tolerated, or ‘put down.’
Media salaries are atrocious and this has led to the metamorphosis of the journalist into a sell-out and a courtier, that neither defies nor question the excesses of government and the corporate business sector.
The latter, in return, let him into their ‘inner circle.’ Even so, he would never amount to much; he dies in name and repute, several times before his actual death.
No class of courtiers, from the eunuchs behind the Manchus in the 19th century to the Baghdad caliphs of the Abbasid caliphate, has ever transformed itself into a responsible, socially productive class.
Courtiers are hedonists of power, argues Hedges. And this truth resonates jarringly with Nigerian journalists serving as courtiers to the ruling class. The manifestations are severe for the larger society.
Courtier journalism ennobles and protects mass murderers, treasury looters, armed robbers, warmongers, bigots comprising the incumbent oligarchs. It is understandable that the ramification of a looted public fund often manifests in mass deaths on a bad road to which the funding ought to have been committed or carnage between neighbouring villages duelling over communal wells or fast vanishing estuaries.
Thus courtiers, like their principals, are responsible for mass ‘murders.’ The menace extends beyond the newsroom on to the corridors of power; several governors, lawmakers, and even the president may pretend to serve the public while they are courtiers, serving the whims of tribal cabals, foreign governments, and corporations.
At the centre of the turmoil is the journalist whose fate is so intricately bound with the country’s but rather than pose a challenge to the system that domesticates and enslaves him, he chooses the easiest way out, and serves the corporate cabals and predatory oligarchs, for a token.
Occasionally, he assumes the role of a poseur and pretends to fight for the interest of the public. This sad charade is continually perpetuated across esteemed writers’ polemics in foremost newspaper columns.
The compromised journalist trades in all manners of truth, deploying sophistry and impressive fallacies in the interest of whatever social divide fulfills his lust for relevance and economic survival.
If Nigeria chooses to exist as a land of savages, it’s the press’s responsibility to nudge her back onto the path of humaneness and progress. Our failure as journalists indicates severance from a progressive, moral culture.
The traditional, conscientious journalist is going extinct today along with a dependable news culture because Nigeria embraces the pseudo-reality of the internet and reality shows. It is no doubt ironic that the masses would turn around to blame the press for not fulfilling its roles in society.
It’s about time we stopped narrowing the debates and spotlight to the shenanigans and petty differences of the ruling class and instead serve as a true voice of the voiceless.
Real progress will manifest in the country when we start demanding that the ruling class marches in virtual lock-step with promises they make. Whatever the tone and dialect of intellectualism that characterizes our news culture, posterity will judge us by how truthfully we fulfill our roles as the conscience and watchdog of the society.
For the traditional press, the goal must be to evolve a journalism business model sustainable via readership; this will be achieved through print unit sales, paid subscription, multimedia platforms, and ingenious forms of audience engagement.
‘Short, punchy and brief’ is hardly the future of journalism; oftentimes you will find that its chief advocates are quacks seeking the dumbing-down of journalism to cover their inadequacies.
Even the global press is aware that the problem is hardly the traditional press but the increasingly mindless, dumb, savage society that the press serves.
The Nigerian press must begin to stimulate radical, progressive debates about power structures, laws, privileges, industry, and justice, and thus signal the end of an outdated culture designed to serve corrupt sentimentality and power structures.
So doing, journalism may regain trust and Nigeria can see the overall story that is being told, the problems that are being highlighted, and the practical solutions to identified issues – while balancing the costs of such practice against the reality of new media and a severely commercialised media industry.
We have more questions to contend with as journalists: How can long-form journalism operate a business model attuned to the precepts of new media? Should the Nigerian newsroom be funded by non-profits?
Many have expressed fears over the downsides of NGO-funded journalism yet its beneficiaries have fulfilled crucial roles continually jettisoned by the traditional press – which is commendable.
Lest we forget those journalists, who, having reinvented themselves as online publishers and ‘journalist trainers’ continually badmouth their former platforms for sport and to score cheap points as new hippies on the block.
They must understand that the media’s fate is bound across all platforms and that neither journalism nor Nigeria’s future could be narrowed to ‘digital.’
If it doesn’t ennoble the citizenry; if it doesn’t expose the corrupt, and divest society of its plagues, it is not journalism.
The future isn’t digital. The future is humane. It is ethical.
This article was updated for World Press Freedom day
The frightful spurts of violence across the country intone a brazen incantation of bestiality over mankind. It exposes the scourge of our inner ugliness, and establishes citizenship as a barbaric ritual drama, where the performers periodically swap masks among government and the governed.
From Boko Haram’s terrorism, armed banditry, kidnap for ransom, to the killer herdsmen-farmer crisis, criminals and mass murderers actualise their fantasies of ill-bliss across the country.
Amid the mayhem, we embrace the cancer of forgetting, knowing our capacity to forget is ultimately therapeutic in our dysfunctional state of affairs. Hence it may be understandable that Nigerians have forgotten already, grievous incidents, like the tragic fate of Mallam Abubakar Yunus, who watched helplessly, as Boko Haram terrorists slaughtered his two sons, like rams, in his presence.
The Yunus were reportedly harvesting their rice in fields around Zabarmari, about 25 kilometres from Maiduguri, Borno’s capital, when the terrorists arrived decked in army camouflage. They tied up Yunus’ sons and slit their throats alongside other farmers. He could only watch and cry.
Official reports cited 43 dead in the wake of the terrorists’ attack even as Borno governor, Babagana Zulum, told journalists that at least 70 farmers were killed. Abubakar Shekau, leader of the terror group, subsequently stated that his group killed 78 farmers in the attack.
If the Zarbamari incident was as a rude jolt to the government’s ineffectual war against terrorism, the growth of kidnap for ransom portends more evil.
In Kaduna, the abductors of the Greenfield University undergrads recently murdered five of the students, to bully Governor Nasir El-Rufai into paying the N800 million ransom requested but the state governor wouldn’t budge thus arousing fears about the fate of the remaining hostages.
The funeral pyre mounts as kidnappers, armed bandits, and murderous herdsmen run riot across the country.
More worrisome is the Independent Peoples of Biafra (IPOB)’s posturing as Nigeria’s second insurgency. While the police and southeast governors trade invectives over the recent scourge of killings perpetrated by “hoodlums” against policemen in the region, police morale, which took a heavy hit during the #EndSARS murders of police officers, has taken a further dip.
Every fresh killing, occurs jarringly in the wild drama; the corpses manifest as a sick rose wrapped in menacing public thorns. Amid the mayhem, the governors look up to the federal government to rescue their states from the jaws of insecurity thus drawing speculations about what they do with the outrageous security votes they draw from the federal purse, monthly.
President Buhari and the governors’ occasional knee-jerk reactions to insecurity are ineffective and steeped in artifice. There is no gainsaying the incumbent administration has lost its grip of the nation’s security apparatus. It is, however, pointless rehashing calls for an overhaul of the security system. Nigeria needs a more drastic intervention.
This administration won’t defeat Boko Haram and armed bandits. Save occasional flashes of feeble resolve, it will keep urging the nation’s military on a glorified hide and seek from now till its expiration in 2023.
Whatever good the incumbent administration might have achieved is smothered by the miseries and death-cries of victims of insecurity, unemployment, and infrastructure lapse. On the watch of the All Progressives Congress (APC)’s President Buhari, Nigeria diminishes into a Darwinian spectacle of turbulent energies: terrorism, warmongering, buck-passing, corruption, and inefficiency – the same failings for which the party tirelessly chastised the former administration of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
At the moment, Boko Haram, killer-herdsmen and armed bandits have seized control of rural communities across the northeast and northwest; a colony of shady characters striving in twos and threes, fours and fives, have made it on to the boards of Nigeria’s most lucrative cash cows, the country’s public corporations.
From their vantage positions, it becomes easier to hike fuel charges, prevent stable electricity, dominate import-export business, steal public funds, weaponise financial crisis and influence election results.
Many Nigerians, the youth in particular, are probably living through the worst decade of their lives. They read of bloody genocides at dawn, poverty and strife in the next city while many more live through such. Add these to an economy patched with foreign loans and dubious tales of growth; if Nigeria is prospering, it hasn’t manifested in the lives of the citizenry.
It took a perfect assemblage of bad leadership to get to this moment. It would take an imperfect cannonball of a character to lead us through and survive it. Nigeria deserves a dependable President: a patriot of uncommon grit and fibre, whose discipline, humaneness and decisiveness would signal the end of Nigeria’s recurrent carnage and locust years.
As the country endures, the youth would do right to coalesce into a cohesive force, given their significance to the country’s impending doom or probable rebirth.
Come 2023, Nigeria should seek candidates capable of fostering policies that would revivify industries, generate employment, a functional health sector and quality educational system.
The search should start now for individuals endowed with the native intelligence, skilled manpower, astounding genius, streetsmarts and wisdom that Nigeria sorely needs to power her rebirth.
The prospective candidates must be convincingly detribalised and courageous enough to eliminate crime and power Nigeria’s comatose industry. Industry matters. If the youth are gainfully employed, they won’t be vulnerable to criminal masterminds.
It is always instructive to note that no former or incumbent president, governor, or legislator has descendants among the perpetrators and casualties of the widespread mayhem. Such homicidal groups are mobilised from the working class, the boondocks and other destitute divide.
Today is spitting out monsters, tomorrow portends the emergence of a million more ogres, if the cycle is not reversed.
What Nigeria needs at the moment is leadership driven by moral courage to change the status quo. While I wouldn’t root for a clueless gerontocracy or corrupt oligarchy, if Nigeria must elect a youthful leadership, it must comprise fully evolved, courageous, young men and women, capable of fostering change beneficial to all.
Moral courage encompasses the nerve to do the right thing and speak the truth always. It involves defying the mob as a solitary individual; spurning toxic comradeship and disobedience to a corrupt potentate, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle.
Its about time Nigeria rooted for a candidate identifiable as the window into the Nigerian psyche. The one who internalises the grief pulsing on the streets.
I speak of the candidate who could manifest as the blank screen on which people of vastly different stripes can rally to project their dreams and needs; the passive yet active instrument by which Nigeria may prosper and attain rebirth.
Failure to do so would manifest as yet another sociopathic confusion; a sign of the internal political and social divisions that make it difficult for Nigeria to bloom by her youth in monolithic terms.
The youth is crucial to Nigeria’s rebirth; knowing this, the incumbent ruling class silences them by an irresistible material caress. Think political appointments, unearned benefits, tokenism, violence, and intellectual thuggery for cash, and so on.
The youth must understand their role in this cosmic mess and avoid future rehash of the present lest Nigeria becomes one big cautionary tale.
Materialism has failed the world over. Compulsive philistines and prescient think-thanks attack grievous social problems – mostly self-inflicted – with paper bullets. They are peashooters trying to collapse Gibraltar.
In Nigeria, however, we see combustive ‘change’ pulse with lust and self-interest among political personae. But the electorate do not know better. They repeatedly fall for the same ruse.
Both politicians and electorates are, however, caught in a familiar cycle of cannibalism, often enacted by characters, who attack and retreat in obsessive rhythms of victory and defeat.
The electorate has caught Sappho’s fever; that is why voters recycle familiar tormentors via the ballot box. They have caught Olohun Iyo’s bug hence they sway to the melody of supernal choirs and vanish to the lure of infernal conductors – or deceptive politicians if you like.
The politics of domination by deceit, violence, and deep pockets is implicit in Nigerian culture, and this escalates at charged historical moments, like the present. Even in the throes of the coronavirus aka COVID-19, large segments of the electorate ignore the ravage of bad governance, and go to war, online and offline, to defend the honour of the presiding oligarchs.
Ultimately, they guard their tormentors’ right to keep exploiting and dominating them. We have seen this happen in successive ‘civilian’ governments from 1999 to date. Its a function of ignorance. I would call it the ritualisation of eye and mind to witlessness.
The bêtise of such heedlessness manifests around us in real-time. The eye and mind elect narcissistic, bigoted personae as galvanizing objects, and then formalise the relation via votes at election time.
Ignorance is the first rung of the ladder leading to death. It precedes the plunge to nothingness. Nigeria must be guided by this truth through the pandemic. Our increasing vulnerability to COVID-19, for instance, is yet another manifestation of our plummet down the steep vale of ignorance.
It was ignorance that drove state governors to acquire toxic chemicals to rid the public space of COVID-19 via fumigation. Against the rule of wisdom and uncommon sense, they dumped toxic chemicals on communities in their domain as a preventive measure and solution to COVID-19, while their aides cheered and polluted mediasphere with contrived photo ops.
Cleaning with simple disinfectants and providing sanitisation stations in public places were cheaper, more sensible alternatives but supposed state agents needed to flaunt fumigation gizmo in exaggerated onslaughts against COVID-19 in public space.
Disinfectants are ill-suited for dispersal via fogging machines, they are solvents applied to surfaces to kill microbes argues Paul Erubami. Rather than drown the citizenry in poisonous fumes, the governors should redirect their energies at more simplified testing, humane quarantine measures, contact-tracing, physical distancing awareness, and efficient distribution of palliatives.
Ignorance and greed stirred the initial reluctance of the health and science ministries, to explore opportunities presented in the nation’s herbal endowments at fighting COVID-19 and any homegrown palliative or vaccine by any other African country.
For instance, prominent public functionaries, revealed a source, wished that Madagascar’s herbal therapy, COVID-Organics, failed at clinical trials because they were wary of losing contingency funding and ‘lootable’ loans accessible via international lenders, she said.
A clinical evaluation of the spending of the contingency fund of NGN984 million ($2.7 million) reportedly released to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the additional NGN6.5 billion ($18 million) mooted afterward must be done by relevant state agencies, the media and civil societies.
Likewise, the expenditure of the N500bn COVID-19 Crisis Intervention Fund purportedly established for the upgrade of healthcare facilities at the national and state levels, must be done to ascertain if the fund administrators truly committed the funds to target projects.
Right now, there are no social safety measures and intervention schemes for society’s handicapped: the deaf, blind, homeless are left to the ravage of the elements. Leprosariums, orphanages, geriatric homes, to mention a few, are ignored in ongoing intervention efforts.
Before COVID-19, Nigeria grappled with terrorism, kidnap for ransom, child and sex trafficking, armed robbery, homelessness, mental health problems, divorce, collapse, and corruption of the family unit. These are social problems requiring sustainable welfare policies but the country’s lack of a visionary and humane leadership denied the citizenry such benefits.
There is currently no social welfare programme that offers health care assistance, non-discriminatory entrepreneurial loans, food stamps, and unemployment compensation, among others to deserving citizenry divides. The absence of such initiatives wreaked untold havoc on the citizenry at the outbreak of COVID-19, leading to increased crime, for instance.
While government intervention efforts focused on the poor citizenry, presumed middle-class segments have lost their jobs, suffered arbitrary salary cuts, and lack of access to welfare relief that could help them cope with the economic hardship foisted by COVID-19.
There are no housing subsidies, energy and utility subsidies, and assistance for other basic services to individuals that are most affected by the pandemic, notes Ozili.
At the backdrop of these challenges, the numbers of the unemployed sky-rockets. A 2019 World Bank report shows that Nigeria created about 450,000 new jobs in 2018, partially offsetting the loss of jobs in 2017. And while over five million Nigerians entered the labour market in 2018, the number of unemployed increased by 4.9 million in 2019.
More radical estimates indicate that over 18 million youths were unemployed by the end of 2019. Many more have lost their livelihoods in the wake of COVID-19.
Even the purported employment of 774, 000 youths by the federal government as part of a Special Public Works Programme aimed at cushioning the economic effects of COVID-19 has run into a gridlock. Of course, it was an ill-fated, knee-jerk reaction to rising unemployment and the pandemic.
Nonetheless Nigerians must use this crisis as an opportunity to reconstruct the power equation, redistribute social privileges, reinvigorate civil societies, and dormant economies.
The public healthcare system must be overhauled with better social safety nets and driven to earn foreign exchange. And this can never be achieved by recycling the incumbent ruling class in power, come 2023.
Something’s got to give. Renaissance hierarchies are dramatized in the noisy climax of gladiator politics. The average voter must re-emerge decisively as political personae of a renaissance Nigeria, come 2023.
He must re-emerge as the culture hero and worker of marvels: the farmer, painter, plumber, sculptor, street trader, student, unemployed graduate, and manual labourer must reprise their roles as fearless change-makers, irreconcilable to visions of them as pawns and inferior social elements.
In the ongoing duel with the pandemic, the ultimate purpose of families, states and nations, is to breathe. Its a sublime irony: man labours to breathe in an atmosphere corrupted by his labour for material wealth.
The relentless drive for profits birthed COVID-19, the nondescript virus that tamed the champions of industry, nuclear warlords, mortal destroyers of the ecosystem, political minions, and juggernauts.
To survive at a time like this, the Nigerian voter must quit participating in heavily choreographed elections, in which the demands of corporations, individuals, and banks are paramount.
He must vie to tilt power in Nigeria’s interest. It’s time to take back what’s ours. Yet slogans and scathing bromides are hardly the way to go in reclaiming Nigeria’s soul from the fangs and talons of raptorial oligarchs.
Capitalism is neither wicked nor cruel when the commodity is the ‘whore’ – blue-collar or brothel ‘whore.’ Nigeria is neither ‘doomed’ nor ‘forsaken’ when the ‘national cake’ is shared among the loudest activists, shady politicians and public officers.
Profit is neither vicious nor impure when victims of multinationals’ exploitation are voiceless, impoverished host communities, and the bleeding heart rights activist, ‘social influencer’ or crusader-journalist eventually earns courtship and seasonal inducements by the transnational culprits.
Government is neither tribal nor unjust when the Igbo, Hausa, Ibibio, Tiv, Jukun, Yoruba, Fulani groups, to mention a few, have their lands and treasures forcibly splayed for kindred “activists” and “saviours” to plunder.
Values are neither degenerate nor effete when its the ‘emancipated’ youth having sex in a public toilet of a unisex hostel on a ‘reality’ TV show; sexual slavery becomes hip when ‘future leaders’ are presented as meat and body parts on the ill-conceived ‘reality’ show.
When reality differs from our fantasies, let’s cut to the chase and blame government for everything. Right? While we do so, let us remember to blame Muhammadu Buhari and his “under-performing” cabinet and cliques for our elevation of fatuity as enchanted condition.
We should blame government for our smutty politics, the drab one too, while we conveniently forget that our erotica of the left-wing is the graveyard where our ‘woke’ clans slither to die in eternal wokeness.
Dworkin was wrong to imagine that the Left cannot have its politics and its whores. For some Nigerian Leftists, or progressives if you like, politics and whoredom unfurl in perfect sync.
Political whoredom thrives by enabling youth. The latter, having learnt to manipulate protest into performance, emerge as a rising political bloc. Dirty artifice, hitherto an exclusive preserve of questionable politicians, becomes the tool by which they renegotiate their claims to social spoils.
Yea, Buhari, no matter the frequency of his bursts of feeble ‘savvy’ and implied strength, will never curry the favour of his most virulent critics. This, unfortunately, shall be his lot until push gets to shove a la 2023 general elections.
Nonetheless, Nigeria has got you and I to save her from the ravage of familiar predators, plundering her treasure trove for sport. Who knew pillage could be so elevated as recreation, and that coffer rapists could attain the honour of national heroes?
The malady persists by our psychology of youth participation in politics, which highlights a lust for instant and unearned gratification. This explains why some youths, goaded by sycophants and a false sense of worth made frantic gestures to become Nigeria’s president at the last general elections.
Their ambition had little to do with being visionary and competent for the job. It was arrant narcissism.
A curious form of what clinical psychologists would call maladaptive self-love seem to have crept up on the Nigerian youth. Little wonder hordes of youths, unquestioningly, submit as tools and canon fodder for violence and destruction, for a fee, at election time.
It also explains, perhaps, why otherwise promising youth would scorn morals and intellect, and submit as lab rats in corporate sponsored experimental porn cum reality shows.
There is no gainsaying youth participation in politics thrives on the pursuit of material gain and status by circumventing the cycle of honest endeavour.
A recent study carried out to examine personality traits and narcissism as predictors of pathological selfie among undergraduates of a federal university establishes narcissism as a major driver of neurotic lust for selfies among students.
A similar lust sprouts by the notion that young presidential candidates at the 2019 elections were simply bidding for face-time. “They know they cannot win, they only wish to register their presence en route the 2023 elections,” argued their apologists.
The argument also persists that many contested in order to land plum compensations or jobs in the cabinet of the eventual winner from the big parties.
Several young candidates at the 2019 general elections, no doubt, emerged to take political selfies; and this portends the most dangerous case of self-love, given that thousands of voters hinged their destinies at the mercy of their aberrant lust.
Another study reveals narcissistic facets in narratives of Nigeria’s advance fee fraud letters. The paper analyses a sample of 100 advanced fee fraud letters or Nigerian scams by fraudsters otherwise known as Yahoo Boys. Analysis of the scams highlight a Machiavellian/narcissistic approach of human behaviour and morality.
It presents scams as narratives that give us various perceptions about the youth in the present era. It draws a set of moral principles and values that are explicitly declared by fraudsters similar to the young candidate’s platitudinous chant.
A similar approach is adopted by many a Nigerian revolutionary and woke youth. To them, political participation and protest are simply facets and scenes in their performance theatre. Their strategy involves starting a ruckus until government drags them by force or persuasion to the negotiation board.
As soon as favourable terms are reached, they withdraw to enjoy their loot and ‘elevated’ status in silence. When confronted on their sudden silence, they will brazenly say: “When you are eating, you don’t talk.” It’s called table manners.
Activism to them, is hardly about ideals. It’s an artificial construction, a performance to seduce fearsome power. To withstand providence’s scourge, they reinvent themselves as rights activists, advocacy-journalists, ‘social influencers, sociopreneurs, mediapreneurs’ – apology to such ‘practitioners’ plying honest endeavour.
Eventually, the shady among them, would get storm-tossed and drown in karma’s retributive deep.
The duplicity within is what we should fear. It is the root of our predicament. And it thrives on narcissism.
Vicelich writes, that, narcissists “behave like four-year-olds: it’s all about them.” They don’t recognise personal boundaries, they hog conversations, crave constant validation and take criticism extremely badly.
“They want your attention, they need things right now – it’s all about instant gratification – and they really have an undeveloped sense of self,” she says, thus diagnosing the tantrums and naivete of several Nigerian aspirants.
They can be charming, flirtatious company too, notes Hinsliff, but they see others largely as extensions of themselves and can be controlling, cruel or critical of anyone they feel reflects badly on them.
Honest criticism wounds their fragile egos and they may become violent, broken or commit to drugs. Some simply commit suicide. This is, however, not an attempt to make light of the disconcerting suicide culture or its triggers and dangerous manifestations.
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter supply them with oodles of their ‘fix’ as measurable ‘likes’ and ‘shares.’
In his Metamorphosis, Ovid narrates the story of Narcissus making it clear that he will live a long life “if he does not discover himself.”
Narcissus, it’s worth remembering, eventually died of loneliness and sorrow sprung from his distorted perception of self. He got destroyed by extreme self-love and maladjusted behaviour.
It’s about time we understood that the most underrated act of selflessness and progress even if sprung from self-love, is the ability, occasionally, to get over yourself.
There is a righteous delirium implicit in Kwara public schools’ anti-hijab sentiments. Ten schools’ administrators, waving the Christian flag, engage the government and Muslim students in a virulent struggle for the soul of their schools.
They seek to ban the hijab claiming the Muslim apparel is an affront to their Christian roots. Public commentators, Christian groups and the press subsequently denounce the state government’s outlawing of the schools’ agitation; all eager accessories to a righteous hoax.
The most righteous hoax, however, must submit to the Rule of Law. It is noteworthy that the Court of Appeal had ruled in compliance with Section 38 of the Constitution, which allows the Muslim girl’s right to freedom of religion and her freedom to manifest same by donning the hijab in Kwara’s public schools.
The Appeal Court ruled that the Christian names of the public schools – that had been operated as co-educational, multi-ethnic and co-religious institutions for over 40 years – do not suggest ownership but fond memories in humour of their founders. Thus they are public schools, disallowed from having discriminatory rules.
Their teachers are recruited, promoted, disciplined, and paid pensions and gratuities by the government. Yet these schools imposed rules that are inconsistent with the law, notes the court, in flagrant violation of students’ religious rights as provided by Section 42(1) and Section 38(2) of the constitution.
Even without the rebuke of the court rulings, the school have no justification for victimising Muslim students on their watch.
As minors growing up in an Islamophobic world, the affected students have to deal with misconceptions about their religion, their faith and identity; persistent hostility from their schools’ authorities, render them acutely confused about how they should navigate the world as Muslims.
They find out that their bodies and identities – in spite of the voguish gender rights dubiously touted for their sake – are restrained in the liminal world of religious intolerance and righteous ambiguity. It’s disconcerting that feminist and girls’ rights activists are conveniently quiet in the face of such premeditated acts of violence committed against innocent school girls.
The latter are expected to yield to persistent bullying, and stifle their individuality and faith to humour a highly toxic, politicized social space.
While they look up to their teachers and schools’ administrators for quality tuition, character and moral guidance, the latter see them as dreadful ogres that must be subdued and defeated.
Their fear of the hijab, however, reveals their spiritual and mental insecurities. Even as adults, they are so insecure in their own faith, that they twist their pants into knots over innocent school girls, young enough to be their daughters’ religious choices. Those who fall within such human bracket may seek urgent therapy – constructive psychotherapy to be precise.
In their crusader circuits, victory is the end game. But victory over who? Over underage school girls? If the scriptures preach love, tolerance, how come they recast it as a code book for eternal mayhem and intolerance? Even Jesus was so open-minded in his pursuit of knowledge that he schooled with the agnostic Essene sect in company of his friend, Barnabas.
The Jesus that the Muslim school girls accept as their Holy Prophet Isa, would never approve of their maltreatment. After all, when he said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven,” the children referenced weren’t Christians.
What are the anti-hijab crusaders’ fears? I would say, that most antagonists of the hijab are victims of chronic bias – something bordering on paranoia and misplaced aggression.
Religious war and intolerance is a disease of the poor. The political class looting our coffers do not engage in religious wars in their circuits of expediences. Rather they hobnob and marry off their children in oft arranged inter-ethnic and inter-religious marriages.
About 800 choice assets bought in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), by looted funds, have been traced to some ex-governors, ministers, senators, and military officers in Nigeria.
Such loot would serve better purpose if committed to youth empowerment and infrastructure development. Yet most of the looters are self-confessed Christians and Muslims, and they co-exist as landlords and neighbours in Dubai, a Sharia province, without incident.
Indeed, religious intolerance is the plague of Nigerian segments rendered bitter and disillusioned by poverty and bad governance. It’s an avenue for them to let loose their frustrations and reenact against each other, the oppression they suffer at the hands of the ruling class.
When presumed intellectuals jump in the furore, they often do so as a necessary performance of prejudice. They are never found at the crossroads, where ‘righteous souls’ clash and maim their reckless spirits. Theirs is to incite the world into a needless war in fulfillment of their treasonous pieties and questionable allegiances.
There is a paranoiac neuron characteristic of the Christian and Muslim bigot; it is resident in the terrorists that abducted Leah Sharibu and subjected her to sexual captivity and premature motherhood. It is resident in every Nigerian, who sees something horrid in a harmless school girl donning the hijab.
The migration to Abyssinia, also known as the First Hijah, offers timeless lessons in tolerance among early Christians and Muslims.
At the height of the Muslims’ persecution by the Quraysh of Makkah, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) advised Uthman bin Maz’oon, one of his trusted companions, to lead a group of Muslims (83 men and 18 women) to seek refuge in Abyssinia, which was ruled by the Negus, a Christian King, who had a reputation for justice.
When their Quraysh persecutors realised that the Muslim exiles could safely practice their religion in Abyssinia, they sent emissaries to the Negus with fine gifts of leather, to demand their repatriation.
Although the Abyssinian king granted them audience, he refused to eject the Muslims without a fair hearing. He summoned the Muslims in the presence of his bishops, and Ja‘far ibn Abi Talib, who acted as the refugees’ spokesman, narrated to the king how they lived before Islam, Prophet Muhammad (SAW)’s prophetic mission, and the persecution they had suffered from the Quraysh.
The king requested divine evidence of their faith and Ja‘far recited a passage from Surah Maryam (Chapter of Mary). When the king heard it, he reportedly wept and exclaimed: “Verily, this and what Jesus brought (Gospel) has come from the same source of light (miškat).” Then he vowed never to give up the Muslims.
Exasperated, one of the Quraysh envoys, ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, maliciously suggested to the Negus that the Muslims are spreading dreadful notions about Jesus. The king summoned the Muslims again, and Ja’far held Jesus to be “God’s servant, His prophet, His spirit, and His word which He cast upon the virgin Mary.”
Upon hearing these words, the Negus declared that Jesus was indeed no more than what he had said. He turned to the Muslims and told them: “Go, for you are safe in my country.”
He then returned the gifts of the Quraysh envoys and dismissed them.
There is a lot to learn by the Christian king’s compassion for the Muslim exiles.
The Kwara schools are wrong to deny the Muslim students use of their hijab.
If I see something better, I will quit police work
October 21, 2020; Jola Edewor wore his uniform with a frantic earnestness unlike the passion that drove him to enlist with the police. Few minutes before he gets to work, he would rip it off and renounce his calling. But he did not know that. The previous day, Edewor retired in bed with a heavy heart, having discovered that his salary had been short of N50, 000 for two years (about N1.2m). The following day, the 41-year-old set out for the force headquarters, eager to get to the root of his hardship.
• Sgt. Maina urging Babatunde to get off the street in order to feed him
But that fateful morning, he wouldn’t get to work. About 15 minutes after he left the barracks for his rendezvous with colleagues at Meiran, he beat a hasty retreat.
It was the 12th day of the #EndSARS protest and the streets pulsed with mayhem as irate youth ran it amok baying for blood of uniformed men. Few paces from his rendezvous, a riotous mob chased after a policeman until he tripped over a boulder and they pounced on him. They ripped his shirt off and rained punches on him, chanting “#EndSARS! #EndSARS!” said Edewor.
“From the distance, they didn’t look like protesters. They looked like hired killers out for blood. One of them railed that they would kill any police officer that they see and set him ablaze” he said.
Instantly, he retreated behind an empty food kiosk. From his hiding, he watched the mob batter his colleague till he was drenched in blood.
Fearfully, he tore his shirt off his body, ripping the buttons as he did, and he slipped out of his trouser. He would be naked, but for his improvised undies comprising a t-shirt and cycling short. He balled his left hand into a fist and rolled the uniform around it. Then he tucked it in a refuse bin behind the kiosk and walked away, coolly, in brisk, urgent strides.
Several metres ahead, he turned to look at the scene. He could not make out his colleague in the distance but he felt contrite leaving him to the mob. He was equally ashamed for discarding his uniform.
“I knew I could purchase another uniform. They sell everything to us anyway. But that officer (his lynched colleague). Till date, I don’t know what became of him. I never bothered to ask,” he said, arguing that even if he did, there was nothing he could do.
Still, he rued his helplessness leaving his uniform in the bin and watching his colleague fall to a lawless horde.
The melee resulted from the demonstrations triggered on Thursday, October 8, 2020 by videos circulated on social media, showing the highhandedness and extrajudicial killing by officers of the disbanded Special Anti-Robbery (SARS) Squad.
For the next two weeks, protests were held in various states across the country and by Nigerians in the diaspora calling for police reforms and an end to brutality. But before long, groups of hoodlums seized the opportunity to unleash staggering violence on members of the police force.
Still smarting from his close shave with death, Edewor set back hurriedly for his barracks in Agege, chanting “#EndSARS! #EndSARS!”in solidarity with hoodlums prowling the streets in search of policemen.
Eventually, he ran into a group of teenagers wielding battle axes, machetes and clubs at the Oja Oba and Abule Egba junction.
While some of them kept watch for policemen and smashed empty beer and soda bottles on the street, others huddled in clusters around mobile phones, chatting animatedly about a trending video.
Intrigued, Edewor asked one of the horde what they were excited about. “He told me to switch on my Bluetooth device and shared the video with me,” Edewor said.
The video showed a police officer being clobbered by a mob in front of a burning police station at Orile, Lagos. The officer reportedly jumped the fence in order to escape being caught in flames as the mob set fire to the station, in protest against the alleged high handedness of the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) heading the station.
Unfortunately for him, he leapt into the hands of the mob. They pounced on him and beat him to a pulp. Amid the mayhem, a thickset youth stabbed him in the eye. The officer careened with the dagger stuck in his eye, bleeding profusely. As he reeled blindly, his assailants took turns hacking into his already bloodied frame with machetes. Eventually, he keeled over and the mob descended on him maniacally, finishing him off.
Edewor swallowed hard. He cringed, watching the mob hack the policeman to death. At that moment he wished to abdicate his position as a Police Inspector. An axe-wielding boy in his early teens railed that he was looking for a policeman to hack to death.
“How could I serve and protect members of a public that wants me dead?” thought Edewor. Suddenly, he felt vulnerable, exposed. “I feared one of the hoodlums might recognise me,” he said.
Thus he retreated cautiously, in anxious steps. Soon, he was dashing down the bypass behind Oja Oba market, en route Agege; an inexplicable yearning to live urging on his desperate feet.
“I was in survival mode,” he said, stressing that he thought nothing of his oath to protect and serve in that moment.
“I have no passion for this police work again. I just wish to make ends meet and care for my family. What kind of work is this, that your employer would steal N50, 000 from your salary for over two years and the public you serve seek to kill you,” he said, adding that were it not for a colleague who alerted him, he would continue living from hands to mouth.
Edewor was supposed to earn N130, 000 monthly but instead, he received N80, 000 for two years. Having spent over two decades on the job, he felt cheated.
He wondered how much had been stolen from my salary in the course of his 20-year-career as a police officer. He said, “When I approached people in the cash office, they told me point-blank that I must pay a bribe of N50, 000 to them, if I was serious about receiving my full salary.”
Faced with no choice, Edewor paid the bribe of N50, 000 and instantly, his salary was regularised. On next pay day, his account was credited with N130, 000.
His stolen salary and the events of Wednesday, October 21, 2020 shook him to the bones. They were ingenuously haunting episodes that rendered his heart a soiled, grey carapace for police work.
Recalling his travails with the police accounts department and the #EndSARS mob, his face darkened and crimped with furrows. His eyes eddied from white-black to a muddy capitulation, his lips parted and closed, forming an incongruous angle with his words. Softly, slightly distended, as if he would break into tears or start bawling.
“If I see something better, I will quit police work,” he said with submissive sternness.
Yet Edewor was lucky to escape with no physical hurt, unlike Sergeant Ajibola Adegoke and Corporal Rotimi Oladele. They were among the police officers killed in the wake of the #EndSARS protests that rocked Ibadan, Oyo State.
The duo, who were attached to the ‘B’ Operations office at the headquarters of the state police command at Eleyele, Ibadan were attacked and set ablaze while going on special duty to a fish depot at New Gbagi area with a superior, Inspector Osho Ojo, on Thursday, October 22, 2021.
To guarantee their safety, they reportedly wore mufti and rode in an unmarked vehicle; but for a minor accident with a motorcyclist, the team would have gone about its duty without incident.
A heated argument ensued with the motorcyclist, attracting hoodlums to the scene. Immediately they discovered that they were police officers, the hoodlums reportedly pounced on them.
Although they fled for safety, Adegoke and Oladele were eventually apprehended and the thugs descended on them with various weapons.
A viral video posted by one of the hoodlums showed the gory scene as the policemen were beaten to death and set ablaze on a heap of used tyres.
Not done, the hoodlums allegedly cut chunks from the burnt corpses and devoured them with chilled drinks.
Fortunately for Inspector Ojo, he was rescued by operatives of Operation Burst, while they recovered the pistols of his burnt colleagues.
Unnerved by the fate of the murdered officers, the Oyo State police authorities launched a manhunt for their assailants. The police subsequently arrested two men identified as Aliu Mubarak, 24, and Adewale Abiodun, 17, in connection with the killing, dismemberment and selling of decapitated heads of the policemen for N1,000.
The suspects were arrested after one Oladipupo Ifakorede, 45, confessed to buying the policemen’s heads from the duo for money-making ritual.
Recounting how he got the heads from Mubarak and Abiodun, Ifakorede said;
“I want to use them to prepare ritual to make money. It is for myself. They (other suspects) did not let me know where they saw the two heads. I did not ask them where they saw them.”
Five persons were arrested in connection with the crime. The police had earlier arrested Kemi Adeyemo and Saheed Oyedepo and they were both transferred to Abuja for further investigation.
Abiodun equally confessed that he and Mubarak sold the two heads to Ifakorede, stressing that they saw the two heads “while coming from Egbeda area of Ibadan.”
In Rivers State, three policemen also lost their lives to angry mobs. Police authorities in the state, however, accused members of the pro-Biafra group, Indigenous People of Biafra, (IPOB), of hiding under the #EndSARS protests to kill the three police officers.
The State Commissioner of Police (CP) Joseph Mukan, while briefing the press in Port Harcourt, gave the identity of the slain officers as: Sunday Dubon, an Inspector attached to the anti-kidnapping unit, whose corpse was said to have been burnt; Swawale Ornan, a Sergeant attached to the 19 Police Mobile Force on Special Duty at Oyigbo, whose corpse was also burnt; and Umunna Uchechukwu, a sergeant with Afam police station, whose legs and hands were cut off before he was burnt to ashes.
Uchechukwu was butchered, his legs and hands cut off, and his body was eventually burnt to ashes. Emotionally stricken by the presence of the grieving wives and children of the murdered policemen, the Governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike, decided to pay a N20 million compensation to each of the families of those killed by hoodlums in Oyigbo.
The Inspector General of Police (IGP) Mohammed Adamu, speaking through the Police Spokesman, Frank Mba, stated that, “available reports show that twenty-two (22) police personnel were extra-judicially killed by some rampaging protesters and scores injured during the protests. Many of the injured personnel are in life threatening conditions at the hospitals.”
He added that “two hundred and five (205) police stations and formations, including other critical private and public infrastructure, were also damaged by a section of the protesters.
“Despite these unprovoked attacks, our police officers never resorted to use of unlawful force or shooting at the protesters,” Mba said, even as civil society chide the police for excessive display of aggression and use of force on the #EndSARS protesters.
Human rights organizations blame the police for escalating the protests soon after it was hijacked by armed thugs, leading to the deaths of at least 51 civilians.
Our morale is low – Police
There is no gainsaying the #EndSARS protest and the mayhem triggered in its wake has strained relations between the police and the public. Speaking with The Nation, several officers – who pleaded anonymity – admitted that they have become less passionate about their work.
“Our morale is very low. Extremely low. Nobody bothered to ask of our own side to the story. Yes, there are bad eggs in the police but don’t we have bad eggs in every profession? We have bad doctors, teachers, engineers, accountants, civil servants, journalists and even our religious men…Every day, we deal with dangerous criminals among the public. But na police be everybody’s problem. Now, that they have killed policemen. Let them begin to protect themselves,” he said.
‘Now the police know how we feel’
While offering condolences to bereaved families of police officers, Kunle Atanda, a retired civil servant stated that, “Now, they feel our agony. Their wives and children know how we feel when their husbands torture and kill innocent members of the public. They understand the severity of the losses suffered by members of the public who have lost their loved ones to extrajudicial killing by policemen. An eye for an eye is never a welcome option but our social and security system is truly deserving of a corrective purge and I think the tragedies of the #EndSARS killings should guide us towards urgent solutions.”
Policing in squalor
Nationwide, policemen live in squalor within and outside the barracks. They patrol in rickety vehicles, often extorting commercial transporters and motorists for fuel money.
A combination of poor training, poor remuneration – recruits earn N9, 000 and less than N120, 000 annually – and a culture of corruption and impunity has allowed torture and other ill-treatment to become routine in criminal investigations by the police.
Suspects are tortured to extract confessions as the police are under pressure to solve serious crimes without adequate resources and specialised skills. With little investment in fingerprint databases, ballistics and other forensic expertise, investigations often rely on confessional statements not brilliant police work to solve cases.
Several policemen also complained of deplorable housing; some residents of the Agege and Pedro police barracks, for instance, lamented their squalid living conditions.
“The barracks are overcrowded. I live in a single room with my family of seven. There is too much heat, the septic tank is filled up and it really stinks. Cockroaches crawl all over our apartment, even our beds, and the whole place is rat-infested,” said a Police Sergeant, who lives at the barracks in Agege, Lagos.
Patricia Udom, 36, also complained of overcrowding, unsanitary toilets and surroundings. “The whole place smells like a toilet. It smells of human sweat, over-filled septic tanks,” said the Lance Corporal.
The Centre for Anti-Corruption and Open Leadership (CACOL) recently took the National Assembly and the executive arm of government in charge of the Police Trust Fund (PTF) to task on the present state of police barracks across the country, lamenting that police barracks could pass for rat holes and slums.
The Executive Chairman of the Centre, Debo Adeniran, stated that, for this reason, the Nigerian police was rated among the top five worst police organizations in the world in 2016 by the World Internal Security and Police Index.
Police barracks in Lagos are an eyesore. Most of the structures are collapsing, yet the barracks and accommodation department of the force has done nothing to rectify the situation.
“All they do is deduct N7, 000 or more from your salary as lodging allowance. The rooms are very bad, and you only get one room and parlour, no matter the size of your family and you are forced to share toilets and bath,” said a Sergeant at the Agege barracks. He lamented that police families struggle to construct and maintain septic tanks and drainage.
Plans have, however, been concluded to demolish all dilapidated and rebuild them for policemen and their families. This was disclosed recently by the Chairman, Nigeria Police Trust Fund (NPTF), Suleiman Abba, during his visit to the Ijeh Barracks, Obalende Barracks, MOPOL 20 Barracks and the Police College, Ikeja.
Abba, a former IGP, who was accompanied by the Lagos State Commissioner of Police (CP) Hakeem Odumosu, and other senior officers said, “We are going to demolish dilapidated barracks and renovate those that are still good to human habitable status, with the provision of modern toilets, flowing water, safe roofs where water will no longer leak into rooms as well as safe electricity. That is what policemen deserve.”
Travails of a failing force
With a staff strength of almost 400,000, the police is the primary law enforcer and security agency in the country consisting of 36 state commands grouped into 12 zones and seven administrative organs including special units such as the disbanded SARS and newly constituted SWAT.
Yet salaries of Nigerian policemen are abysmally poor with a recruit earning as low as N9, 000 monthly and N110, 000 annually. Jocelyn Nwiti, a Corporal said she earns N42, 200 per month, Niyi Orunkoyi, an Inspector, said his take-home salary is N78, 478 per month.
A 2008 Presidential Committee on Police Reform headed by Muhammed Yusuf recommended an estimated N2.8 trillion – or N560 billion annually – to effectively reform the police in five years.
The Parry Osayande Committee, constituted in 2012 by former President Goodluck Jonathan regime, made similar recommendation, and called for a special fund to transform the NPF which he described as the worst paid in the West African sub-region.
In November 2018, President Muhammadu Buhari approved an enhanced salary structure for the NPF but more than three years after the approval, police officers say they are yet to receive a pay rise.
Hostility begets hostility
The deplorable working conditions have been blamed for police officers’ poor attitude to the job. “Hostile work conditions breed hostile personnel. The slogan, ‘Police is your friend’ is very wrong. How can we be your friend when we are underpaid and our children play and sleep in filth? Many of our children have fewer choices to succeed; they either turn criminals or do police work. Many choose the former and become Yahoo Boys. It’s easier to be a Yahoo Boy (internet fraudster) these days. Many police officers even support their children to do internet fraud. Yes, its as bad as that,” said Nonso Michael, a Lance Corporal.
According to him, the many policemen resume their shift everyday, very angry, hungry and agitated. “That is why some get trigger happy when provoked. It’s not that they mean to kill but they are not in the right state of mind…And things have worsened since the #EndSARS. Many of us watched our colleagues get slaughtered for no just cause. We are not happy about it,” he said.
To watch the viral videos of police killings in the wake of the #EndSARS protests was to suddenly explore a dark facet of Nigerian life. Pundits argued that the development was a fallout of the persistent highhandedness and extrajudicial killings of innocent members of the public by the now defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the police.
Police officers, however, admit disillusionment at the backdrop of fears that the incident could make them apathetic on the job and undermine their work ethics.
Memories of the #EndSARS killings and police impunity dating farther, continually trigger hostility and despair among affected parties.
For many citizens, particularly bereaved families of slain policemen and victims of extrajudicial killings carried out by the police, the memories are too grisly for comfort, even as some victims receive compensation for their losses.
The Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu recently compensated the families of six police officers lynched in Lagos State, in the wake of the violence that trailed the #EndSARS protests, with N10 million each, totaling N60 million. Sanwo-Olu also announced scholarship awards to the children of the deceased officers up to the university level.
The slain officers include Yaro Edward, an Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP), Inspector Ayodeji Erinfolami, Inspector Aderibigbe Adegbenro, Inspector Samsom Ehibor, Sergeant Bejide Abiodun and Inspector Igoche Cornelius. Sanwo-Olu described the slain officers as “heroes,” saying the deceased sacrificed their lives to secure lives and properties in the State.
The Lagos State judicial panel hearing cases of police brutality and SARS-related abuses also awarded N10 million each to two victims of police misconduct. Adebayo Abayomi — who received the compensation on behalf of Kudirat, his late mother, who was hit on April 4, 2017, as SARS officers raided the Onipanu area of Lagos.
Hannah Olugbodi was equally awarded N10 million for being hit by a stray bullet from a SARS officer’s rifle while police unit raided an Ijesha hotel shooting sporadically in the air; the bullet shattered Olugbodi’s left leg and left her in crutches. The duo received their cheques from Doris Okuwobi, chairperson of the panel, who presented the cheques to them on behalf of the Lagos State government.
Marc Chidiebere Nwadi was also awarded N7.5 million by the panel for his brutalisation by the Nigerian police in 1999. Nwadi first appeared before the panel on Saturday, November 28, 2020, where he testified, without legal counsel, that he was arrested by the police in 1999. He had just arrived in Lagos and he could not find his relative.
The 39-year-old told the judicial panel how he was detained and tortured, and later remanded at Kirikiri prison for six years, awaiting trial. This put paid to his dream of becoming a journalist, he said.
Memories of the #EndSARS killings and police impunity dating farther, continually trigger hostility and despair among affected parties.
Inspector Edewor brusquely recalled the chain of incidents as a monumental tragedy, stressing that the impact will live with us for a long while.
The police Inspector is still traumatised by the incident. These days, he drinks “to forget” because the remembrance unnerves him. Edewor may have escaped with no physical hurt but he is undoubtedly one of the several victims of the #EndSARS protest, argued Bisi Ade-Iluyomade, a social psychologist.
She said, “Most people are battling Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) inflicted by their gruesome experiences in the hands of lawless police officers. On the flipside, we have a very traumatised police force whose orientation to the job has suffered a terrible mutation to an ‘us versus them,’ and ‘we against the world’ mentality. This is very bad for future relations between the police and the public that they were employed to serve.”
Notwithstanding the hideous work conditions, Sergeant Bulus Maina would never ‘betray’ his uniform and his oath to protect and serve the Nigerian public.
Just recently, The Nation encountered Maina working against the tide of bad blood and apprehensions about the police. On a Saturday afternoon in Ahmadiyya, Ijaiye, Lagos, Maina moved to save a destitute man sprawled in the middle of the road, in a puddle of spittle and pee.
From dawn through noon, flies hovered around him, darting back and forth his soiled pants and begrimed face. His soft breath chirred against the hard tarmac, like a dirge of dying locusts.
But while pedestrians and commuter traffic took great care to avoid him, Maina ventured closer. Good news: he wasn’t dead. But he had neither the strength nor the will to state his own name. He looked starved and spent as if life could depart him any minute.
Seeing his piteous state, Maina who was attached to the unit manning a roadblock along the bypass hurried to get him a rice meal. But the homeless man was too weak to feed.
He lifted his hand from its perch in the puddle of urine and proceeded to dip it in the food but Sergeant Maina prevented him from doing so, and instantly crouched to feed him.
With his belly full, a semblance of spunk spread through his hitherto lifeless body and he identified himself as Johnson Babatunde. Maina went on to get him off the street to the consternation of his colleagues who felt he was exposing himself, recklessly, to possible infection by COVID-19.
To some, Babatunde was a ticking time-bomb, a deadly pathogen in human form. Others saw him as a “junkie” and “drunk.” Ultimately, he was the creature that must be avoided by the sidewalk, the irritant laying supine, hugging the tarmac as his bed, his urine as bedsheet, and pedestrian scorn as blanket.
To Maina, however, Babatunde was simply a Nigerian in need, a “deserted husband, a forlorn father, and bankrupt carpenter.” He was a destitute Nigerian in need of help, and Maina endeavoured to feed him, wash him, and get him off the street.
Now, that is an image of the police we hardly see.
Some names have been changed to protect interviewees.
Religion is the highland to viral nature, the fabled staircase to the Christian Paradise and the Muslim’s Al Jannah Firdaus. Its sacred rungs, however, descend to the filth of faith amid conflicting creeds’ earthly bowels – oftentimes. To ascend mystic nirvana, Nigerians will maul earth into a grisly hell.
In Nigeria, religion is glyptic; faith is carved with incised edge astride mystic culture and human nature. The steely autograph of the Nigerian faithful is seen in his inclination to do right or wrong, in God’s name.
Consider the Kwara debacle, for instance. For the second time in seven days, Muslims and Christians in the state hopped in the trenches to battle over the rights of Muslim girls to wear hijab in secondary schools. In bid to forestall total anarchy, the state government shut down 10 schools that were at the centre of the controversy after anti-and pro-hijab groups attacked each other with stones and steel chairs among other weapons.
The incident which occurred at the Sabo-Oke parish of the Cherubim and Seraphim School was contained by the combined efforts of the Kwara State Police command, Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) and the Nigeria Army.
Children, mostly minors, are the major casualties of this pious recklessness. The Kwara debacle confirms Nigeria’s penchant for religious hypocrisy and mayhem: from Boko Haram’s terrorism in the northeast, Kaduna’s religious wars to Plateau’s sacred scuffles, children get orphaned, displaced and sexually molested.
Yet the Nigerian faithful celebrates treasonous pieties while afflicting our families, workplaces, and schools, among other social institutions with bigots. Little wonder we sire children into unregenerate nature.
If there is any lesson to be learnt from Kwara’s hijab fiasco, it is that we have forgotten our duty as teachers and parents. The Nigerian adult, be he a teacher, clergyman, mullah or parent has forgotten his mission to children; that is, to teach them humaneness and help them understand that the essence of education and religion is to make them more tolerant, more compassionate, more forgiving and humane.
Ignoring these facts, the controversial Kwara schools are saying that: “There are no warm womb-spaces within our walls for Muslim students.” By offering no safe space for compassionate nurturing and religious freedom, they maul scholarship into chaos and faith into shafts of infernal devilment.
The schools claim that they are “mission schools” and that government merely offers them support in grants. They claim absolute right to ban the hijab and run their schools as they deem fit.
On the flipside, government quotes a 2006 education law that allows Muslim students to exercise religious freedom in public schools including the use of hijab. All the affected schools are public schools and there are several justifications for categorising them so – these will be dealt with subsequently.
This minute, Kwara dissembles into a war zone as its adult citizens engage in battle frenzy; like medieval crusaders in visceral herds, they mentalise war and seek to actualise it.
Predictably, media platforms offer fosterage of dubious sophistry in patronage of the warring herds.
Most commentators are not saying anything new, however. Like spectres of battle sound, they amplify prejudice and slaughter jazz. Ultimately, they refasten the religious war harness and enable Pyrrhic claims to victory of their favoured divides. Shame.
As clergymen, journalists, teachers, school administrators dissociate faith from compassion and pure thought, the brilliant sheen of bias in Nigeria’s popular religions makes the eye “glide” along its shiny surface. The hardness repels vision, like medieval savagery cast unto humane civilisation.
Beyond the arguments and counter-arguments, ‘gospel’ truths and relative truths, sophistry and arrant bigotry, a bitter truth subsists about Kwara’s hijab debacle: that several faithful practice faith without compassion, salvation without spirit.
Does using a hijab prevent other children from effective assimilation in class? No. Does it distract the teacher and school authority from serving the interest of the children to whom they owe the duty of unsullied tutelage and care? No.
While the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), journalists” and public commentators weaponise gall and casuistry, to justify the victimization of the hijab-loving high school girl, in more cultured, tolerant clime, the hijab is allowed in humane and mutually beneficial circumstances.
At the Cheetham Church of England Academy in the United Kingdom, for instance, Muslim students are allowed to don the hijab without incident.
And even though Australia, like several nations in Europe and America, flaunts her share of Islamophobia, a Baptist college in the country recently did the ‘unthinkable’ for its first hijabi Singaporean student, Sumaiyah Rahmad. Syahrom, her father, enthused that the principal of the college painstakingly prepared a praying area for Sumaiyah. And after discussing with the girl’s mother, the principal proposed to the school’s board that hijab and clothing that cover aurat (private parts) be included as part of the school uniform.
Recognising that Islam considers hijab as an obligatory clothing and spiritual code, not a mere religious symbol. The board members agreed on the proposal and starting 2020, modest clothing like black leggings, white long sleeve tops, and white or black hijab were included as part of the school’s uniform.
Ironically, a Nigerian Baptist school is in the trenches fighting dirty against the use of the hijab by its female students. The womb-like walls of the high school are too tender for such acrid drama. Schools are meant to foster in the student, a sterling character, appreciable sophistication and individuality but at Kwara’s controversial high schools, the notion is unseemly.
Several chapters in the Muslim Holy Quran prescribe the hijab of the eyes for the Muslim male, and the use of the hijab, khimur and jilibab for the Muslim female. This connotes Islam’s culture of modesty, purity, pride and tact in clothing and deportment.
How can anyone rebel against such, especially in an era when secondary school girls are ditching their panties and brasserie on the way to school, screaming “Marlians don’t wear undies!” in homage to a local musician’s salacious lyricism.
Religion, as H. Richard Niebuhr said, is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people. And the faith has long been used in the wrong hands—such as Boko Haram and their sponsors hiding under the guise of Islam to perpetrate mayhem.
In Kwara, religion is currently being used to foment trouble. The situation worsens as warring Christians stew in an Armageddon complex and their Muslim rivals declare the situation a Jihad.
Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the controversial schools will have “absolute control of their schools and place a total ban on the hijab perhaps. But what happens after that?
Do they run Muslim students out of the educational system or completely stamp out their right to identity and religious freedom?
This is not about the warring adult faithful hugging marketable rage with entitlement syndrome. It is about the Muslim girl-child’s right to individuality, justice and religious freedom.
What is faith to the administrators of Kwara’s controversial public ‘mission’ schools? What is faith to the victimised hijabi and her Christian mate? What is faith to the Nigerian bigot?
In an ideal universe, the Nigerian patriot could pass for an ascetic. Like the religious mystic, he would preach revolution as a moral imperative, in the tenor of progress and the Delphic oracle.
While projecting his vision for all to see, he would understand the citizenry’s silences in order to speak them. He accepts deprivation and failure in his pursuit of the collective good; he is never daunted by defeat and his protests are never fashioned for photo ops or the TV cameras alone.
He is driven by an intense empathy, even love, for the defenseless, the persecuted, and the weak, far from media lens and the perimeters of political correctness.
His compassion is neither funded nor godfathered, and his dissent is incensed by fertile consciousness; like the androgynous earth mother, it self-fertilises without help from society’s captors and oppressors: the corrupt presidency, venal governors, legislators, and international NGOs with a vampiric soul and a bleeding heart. He identifies them as spawns of the same ogress womb, carnivores of the same badlands.
Having experienced or witnessed from the sidelines, the injustices of the raptorial ruling class, he chooses to rebel. Yet he understands that revolutions are like a long distance relay; they are often begun by one generation and completed by the next.
“Those who give the first check to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin,” writes Michel de Montaigne in 1580, adding that the fruits of a revolution are seldom enjoyed by its pioneers.
Yet revolutions can be crushed by force or hijacked by individuals as was the case of the #EndSARS protest. The movement eventually dissembled as a faux revolution; no thanks to the dubious sponsorship of ‘sexuality’ perverts at home and abroad, and the manipulation of counterrevolutionary forces who chanted ‘reform’ while working for the restoration of oppressive power structures.
More worrisome was the quality of youth co-opted to power the movement; the #EndSARS protester paraded conscious youth in a careless style. He was the plebeian statue sculpted of spunk and spittle. Governors, lawmakers, and the presidency considered him to be a dangerous cuss. But he saw himself otherwise.
In truth, he was the proverbial yowl who plundered rage slipshod, a revolutionary of dubious grace. His flashing eyes, vagrant rage, combined insolent swag with gruff panache. Flashing eyes may command and pierce but they can also incinerate from within as established by the #EndSARS.
Violence was a mutation of the protest. When it broke, it was uninformed, primitive, and vast, like the chaos of savage night before the dawn of blossoms. Dawn erupted with sickly carnations; despite the flowery fantasies of the protesters, their clamoured dawn illumines with moonshine.
The insinuations of fraud at handling funding for the #EndSARS protest, in its aftermath, further establishes the duplicity of intent of the arrow heads. Yet the fruits of the protests are negative for the same reason that they are positive for the youth; the resultant mayhem and betrayal counsels caution, tact and masterful self-containment.
One positive takeaway from the protests is the timeless opportunity it offers to the youth to regroup and restrategise. Come 2023, they won’t seize power from the incumbent political class. That is a tall dream. This minute, they could set about reordering in numbers and might to renegotiate the nature and extent of their participation in the political process.
Only an assemblage of true patriots could see this through. To rebuild Nigeria, the youth must seek legitimate means of participation in the political process. The window for establishing and registering a neutral or third force political party swung shut while they bickered and fought to validate a fictive massacre at Lekki Tollgate.
But it is never too late to regroup and adopt a viable political party, and resensitise it to humane principles of nationhood, citizenship, and thought.
The youth must forget the fiction of an almighty revolution by which they could gift Nigeria with a ‘young’ President, governors and lawmakers, come 2023. They have lost the only chance they had to achieve that in the wake of the #EndSARS protest.
It is about time self-confessed youth leaders and closet patriots united in commitment to more progressive endeavours, like the sensitization of youthful and elderly electorate against the dominance and designs of the oppressive power elite.
Too many times, Nigeria’s youth and electorate have been hobbled by carefully orchestrated and bloody distractions, like the ethnicization of the killer herdsmen-farmer conflict; the hijab wars; intra and inter-party violence.
Pro-nomadic herding and open grazing advocates, for instance, insist that it is wrong for any government, person or group from any part of the country to outlaw open grazing and the atrocities committed by criminals among herdsmen. So doing, they deploy political muscles masquerading as ethnic interest groups to weaponise debates and pockets of skirmishes nationwide.
They argue that child and adult herders must allowed to roam freely, and condemn attempts to restrict them to an organised ranching system, claiming it negates the culture of nomadic herding, and amounts to an infringement on their fundamental human rights.
Such characters must be told the truth; if they truly wish to preserve such nostalgic, problematic herding culture, let them let loose their own children to roam free with cows.
A new breed of patriots must emerge to initiate debates and deliberations spanning various fora nationwide, whereby they would honestly thrash out crucial issues that aid the reduction of Nigeria’s youth to nomadic herders, disposable social elements and cannon fodder for political violence.
They must eschew inclinations for hate-speech, and their synergies must be guided through an ad hoc and premeditated coordination in repelling moles, armed goons, and saboteurs, who would be sent to disrupt their rallies with tribal toxins, fake news, religious venom, and filthy lucre.
If they truly wish to assert themselves progressively at the forthcoming elections, they must begin to woo societal segments they have hitherto ignored and dismissed as too violent, too dumb, too compromised, and too wild.
If they are truly keen on establishing a third force political party, they must learn to accommodate the random hooligan, herdsman, policeman, street urchin, among others, as co-travellers in the march towards the Nigeria of our dreams.
To rebel against insurmountable odds requires courage and faith, without which the rebel is doomed. He risks being despised as the vessel of an errant demon. Yet he must stick to his vision.
Negative emasculated passivity flourishes when the patriot acquiesces, unquestioningly, to the designs and patronage of the power elite. Playing passive requires extreme sacrifice; the docile character, in fulfilling his role as gelded, amoral being, must silence his mind.
The true patriot, on the other hand, must vie to expand the life of the mind; he must develop a knack for asking the difficult, ugly questions at the risk of becoming a social pariah.
Protest, to him, is always a means to fight for the good of all. He never resorts to deception. Demagogues promise glory without sweat, success without sudor, and get significant segments of the citizenry, mostly youth, hung up on the fantasy of a world without hardship.
But the true patriot preaches the attainment of glory through sweat, and power through humaneness, and as a product of enlightenment. He is the plug to society’s moral void.
The path to dystopia unfurls, in the end, as a hypnotic daydream. In Nigeria, it is the hovels we run into, to escape reality’s tedious pangs. We covet the distractions. We need them to mask our lives’ dissembling. Thus our retreat into a world of magic – the type celebrated by musical, sexual reality shows.
We live for illusions. We covet the spectacle of shadows cast on the walls of our minds, like the cave dwellers of Plato’s The Republic. In The Republic, Socrates explains that the cave represents the world, the region of life which is revealed to us only through the sense of sight. The ascent out of the cave is the journey of the soul into the region of the intelligible, and it requires, writes Plato, that the enlightened mind endures four stages of transformation.
The first, notes N.S Gill, is his imprisonment in the cave; that is our fascination with materialism and our world of illusions. The second involves his release from chains; that is, our contact with the real, sensual world. Third, he makes his ascent out of the cave; that is, our flirtation with knowledge and the world of ideas. Fourth, he finds his way back into the cave to help his fellows but while wrapped in a beam of light.
But what if the supposedly enlightened mind could only deign his fellow cave dwellers shiny, gray beams resonant of darkness? What if, like the sullied press, the shady revolutionary and corrupt oligarchs, he comes shining brilliant spokes of ambiguity?
The process of progressing out of the cave is about getting educated and it is a difficult process requiring assistance and sometimes, force. This encapsulates the struggle involved in acquiring beneficial education or ridding a country of dark tyranny. The allegory of the cave intones our struggle to see the truth, to be critical thinkers, argues Anam Lodhi.
Millions of Nigerian youths would love to resist the tyranny of the incumbent ruling class if they didn’t covet too much, the bliss of ignorance. The struggle for freedom is often a painful experience. Dreams die and lives get lost as our heavily policed state, goes after perceived critics of the government. Hence many find it easier to embrace ignorance or silence.
The person who is leaving the cave is questioning his beliefs, whereas the people in the cave simply accept what they are shown. They do not think about or question the veracity of doctored reality.
The allegory of the cave shows us the relation between education and truth, bondage and freedom.
The battle for freedom and its sustenance is, however, best prosecuted by men and women of catholicity of will, higher learning and culture. I speak of true patriots and statesmen, ambassadors of Nigerianness and native intelligence. Have we such patriots? Have we such men and women of deep culture?
The most pernicious aspect of our quandary is the disintegration of our cultural, moral complex. A land without both is dead to feeling; it becomes prone to rape and colonisation by cultural sovereigns.
The history of the world pulses with subtle and bodacious seizures of sovereignty by global ‘super powers.’ The latter maintain dominance over the so-called ‘third world’ via cultural and political imperialism. The latter oft succeeds the former, where they aren’t launched from twin barrels of an imperialist shotgun.
While it is fool-hardy to categorise the world into first, second and third worlds, such specious and flawed taxonomy of nations – perpetuated by the media, INGOs and the academia – facilitates easier recolonisation of poorly governed, impoverished nations of Africa and the Middle East, by failing states spuriously depicted as shining lights of the ‘First World.’
The latter are nothing but varnished tombs of the imperial greatness they hitherto symbolised; scared by their imminent collapse, they craftily recolonise Africa, in particular – plundering her bowels to sustain their fading economies and social systems.
Having reclassified Africa as the ‘third world,’ they lay siege to the continent, plundering her resources; it’s a familiar plot in which Africans’ greed and ignorance lay the continent open to pillage and trans-generational slavery.
Nigeria’s lack of a humane, visionary leadership, for instance, makes her unbidden offering on an altar of imperialist vultures.
If truly we seek freedom, we must take purposive steps to unshackle ourselves from the leash of predatory oligarchs within, and the carnivore nations and international money lenders plundering our bowels from abroad.
Nigeria must rejig her cultural foundations and rebuild her moral complex. She must rise from her knees, and quit sucking the rusted end of the wrong spigot. The result of such endeavour would excite a social re-engineering built upon character mending, social and economic restoration in consonance with our peculiar strengths and weaknesses.
The result would be felt across several spheres of our existence. Restoring our cultural dominance in our own land would facilitate easier salvaging of our society, particularly the engine and wheels of our industrial complex.
China, Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Sweden, among others, attained shades of equilibrium and progress across crucial facets of their national lives by basing their governance styles on personalised pivots cum foundations of culture and traditions.
Nigeria, however, encounters her nemesis in materialism; the wild pursuit of status and money has destroyed our souls and our economy. The business and political elite comprising our bourgeois divide live on ill-gotten wealth. Their survival, continued relevance – amid the chaos that our lives have become – is funded by stolen money and beastly monopolies facilitated by heinous social and political contracts.
The middle class fades into oblivion as boondocks families and the working class fight to maintain membership of informal social castes imposed upon them by a predatory political class.
But rather than see the latter for the monstrosities they truly personify, the citizenry embrace ignorance.
The general run of the masses supposedly think and speak; but many do so without any real awareness of the actuality of forms that define their existence. Plato’s allegory of the cave was meant to explain this. In the allegory, he likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. Plato’s allegory speaks to our individual and collective fate as a nation.
For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge thus to train someone to manage a business account for PWC is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate the ethics of a business venture is to educate them on values and morals. A culture that disregards the vital interplay between morality and power writes Hedges, condemns itself to death.
Such existential truths are scorned by the modern fortune-hunter. This disconnect subsists across professions. Nigerian economists, for instance, chant elaborate theoretical models yet know little of how their fancy, soulless economics impacts on rural poetry and suburban lives.
Our education and social systems must quit churning out such products of a cultural void, casualties of a system that produces graduates to serve the corrupted incumbent system; individuals who have been taught to cheat the system and applaud financial theft as a shrewd corporate strategy.
The true purpose of education must be to make minds, not social cannibals. It must be far removed from a system that bullies the populace to pacify and please authority.
Muhammadu Buhari’s Nigeria is a brazen incantation of wile over forms. On his watch, the lilies and langours of virtue are sacrificed for the raptures and roses of vice as Swinburne may say.
Patriotism is not pleasure but torment; good, public-spirited citizenry are vilified, and terrorists and armed bandits are patronised. But the problem is vaster in scale than government grudgingly admits.
In handling banditry and the killer herdsmen-farmers crisis, for instance, public officers and politicians have successfully weaponized the crisis into an ethnic war.
While urging the citizenry to desist from ethnic profiling, government ennobles the murderers deliberately or by sheer ignorance. Buhari’s recent ‘warning’ to bandits imparts a sour mite in the psyche.
“They shouldn’t mistake our restraint for the humanitarian goals of protecting innocent lives as a weakness or a sign of fear or irresolution,” he said, in the wake of the February 26 mass abduction of no less than 279 female students from the Government Girls Secondary School (GGSS), Jangebe, in Talata-Mafara local government area of Zamfara.
With such feeble response from the Commander-in-Chief of Nigeria’s Armed Forces, the bandits of course, could only commit to more dastardly acts.
Although the abductees have since been released following government negotiation with the bandits, the latest incident increased the tally of abducted school kids to about 1,100 students, over the course of seven years, in northern parts of Nigeria, according to The Nation estimates.
From Chibok (276 students), Borno State, to Dapchi (113 students) in Yobe, Kankara (344- students) in Katsina, Kagara (27 students and 15 others) in Niger State and Jangebe, Zamfara, mass school abductions have become worrisome.
The jury is still out on the trending video in which a herdsman claims that people in government recruit and arm killer-herdsmen and bandits.
Just recently, the Federal Government slammed the “no fly” order on Zamfara, after the National Security Council meeting. Speaking with journalists, the National Security Adviser (NSA), Babagana Monguno, disclosed that President Buhari declared Zamfara a “No-fly” zone and suspended mining activities in the state as a means of curbing terrorism and banditry.
The pronouncement was made on discovery that helicopters were been used for aerial supply of weaponry and food to bandits in the state. The aircraft is also used to smuggle out gold illicitly mined in the state.
Pundits commend the government for taking the decision as well as the “shoot on sight” order against carriers of AK-47 assault rifles in the forests; arguing that such measures may end insecurity soon.
Yet the presidency must explain why it took it several months to arrive at the decision. It would be recalled that the presidency ignored outcry by residents of Arimogija, in Ose council area of Ondo State, in the first week of April 2020, over alleged supply of weapons by a helicopter to killer herdsmen terrorising residents of the community.
The incident occurred soon after a rice farmer, Jacob Oduche, his son, Adura and one Victor Ejeh were murdered in their farm by killer herdsmen in the state.
Eleven months after the incident made news, the government has suddenly deemed it fit to address a similar situation in Zamfara. But this is not the hour to contend the government’s lethargic response to insecurity and selective sensitivity. There are more dangerous truths about the incumbent government that we must acknowledge, such as its scary lack of direction and tenacity in fighting terrorism, banditry among other crimes.
The government seems overwhelmed but rather than commit passion and resources to resolve the country’s security problems, public officers resort to artifice. For instance, the president has ordered the nation’s service chiefs to end banditry before the rainy season. At the backdrop of this unrealistic order, a presidential aide launched into a tiresome drivel, highlighting how helicopters are used to smuggle artisanally-mined gold from Zamfara to Dubai. Reuters and The Nation have reported this curious development even as the government feigned ignorance.
Earlier, Governor Matawalle claimed the abduction of the Jangebe schoolgirls was politically motivated. “While the state was in negotiation with the abductors for the release of the schoolgirls, other persons offered money to the armed bandits to keep the girls in captivity,” the governor said, drawing flak from various quarters.
The more you look, the less you see; between Matawalle and his critics the truth subsists in relative swirls as the political class diverts the citizenry’s attention away from the real cause of insecurity.
Using cohorts in the media, NGOs, and across party lines, they have successfully steered the discussion away from their failures at governance while inciting the citizenry to needless tribal wars.
Their subtle admonitions and tough talk must be dismissed as shabby artifice. Their ‘truths’ and ‘solutions’ to the crisis are products and vectors of toxic altruism, a system of thought that cloaks cunning and subterfuge under the thick veil of patriotism, in a cutthroat jostle for political and socioeconomic spoils.
While Boko Haram, armed bandits and the killer herdsmen intensify their onslaughts against the populace, the truth is underrated and lives are brutally cut short as Nigerians knock heads in a fierce, relentless push towards civil war.
The recent food blockade by some northern elements and the promised retaliation by from the south further highlight the magnitude of intolerance fostered by the current administration.
The president’s handlers and apologists, however, defend his foggy interventions, claiming that is his style. They would rather bereaved, impoverished Nigerians vie through losses and misery to study and appreciate Mr. President’s body language.
The political class thrives by the masses ignorance. Widespread insecurity, poverty, ethnicism have, so far, served as powerful distractions and means of diverting public thought away from their shortcomings and excesses.
On their watch, Nigerians could be likened to the prisoners in Plato’s The Republic.
Socrates, the main character, tells the allegory of the cave to Glaucon, who is his interlocutor, urging him to imagine a group of prisoners who have been chained since they were children in an underground cave.
Their hands, feet, and necks are chained so that they are unable to move. All they can see in front of them, for their entire lives, is the back wall of the cave.
Their gaze is confined to the cave wall, upon which shadows of the world above are thrown. They believe these flickering shadows are reality.
Behind them burns a fire. Behind the prisoners, there is a parapet, along which puppeteers can walk and hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave.
The prisoners are unable to see these puppets, the real objects, that pass behind them. What the prisoners see and hear are shadows and echoes cast by objects that they do not see.
If, Plato writes, one of the prisoners is freed and dragged out into the sun, he will be painfully dazzled by the brightness, and stunned by the beauty of the skies. But as his eyes adjust to the brightness, he would want to stay above and remain in the light, but, he must not, argues Socrates. For true enlightenment, and in the spirit of goodness and justice, he must descend back into the darkness, join the men chained to the wall, and share that knowledge with them.
