Olatunji Ololade

 

THE coronavirus is real. News of a second wave of the pandemic sweeps through nations as you read, spooling a global contagion of fear. Despair is what is left when humanity mutates to viral nature and nations submit to disease.

We are lucky to have survived the first scourge of the coronavirus aka COVID-19 but who would be left after the plague is done with Nigeria?

Who would be left after the country’s ravage by her innate plague, the raptorial ruling class? Between the pandemic and the plague of corrupt leadership, whose voices and whose breath would rattle as the dry bones they picked over?

As the “second wave” seizes the nation, you can’t but wonder what is true and what isn’t true. It becomes more difficult to separate the truth from the lies, reality from empurpled fact.

Of course, COVID-19 is real but if the government claims to have spent over N30 billion in fighting the pandemic in four months, it’s their word against our fears.

The Federal Government disclosed that it “spent N30,540,563,571.09, representing 84% of the N36.3 billion public funds and donations received to respond to COVID-19 between April 1, 2020, and July 31, 2020.”

To avoid severe and persistent migraines, you learn to ignore the details of the spending. There is no gainsaying public officers and civil servants made a killing from the first wave of COVID-19 palliative funding.

In the wake of a “second wave,” their excitement is palpable and visibly etched in their faces and embellished ‘truths’ about the magnitude and consequences of the pandemic.

Very soon, they will institute another lockdown – deservedly perhaps given the citizenry’s disregard of hygiene and preventive measures.

President Muhammadu Buhari has reiterated the need for discipline and containment thus setting the tone for another confinement.

The lockdown symphony sounds another dirge of intricate threat and appeal: government will warn hungry citizenry to stay at home, claiming the imperative of fighting COVID-19 trumps every other consideration. The intent could hardly be faulted.

But the masses will protest; the lockdown will be flouted across state lines and status circuits. The consequences will be worse in public offices, where governors contract the real virus or pseudo-COVID-19, and attain specious recovery in a record three days, two days, and a day perhaps.

At the likelihood of another lockdown, Nigerians cringe in dread of forced restraint, job losses, heartbreaks, emotional trauma, and government looting of public coffers.

Still, nothing in Mr. President and the 36 state governors’ babble hint at a solution or purposive steps at finding a cure or collaboration with a more visionary partner to create one. That’s flawed leadership and worthy of rebuke.

The government depends on its affiliation with the Global Vaccine Alliance Initiative (Gavi) for access to vaccines. Health Minister, Osagie Ehanire, said the government has also registered for COVID-19 vaccines with the Global Access Program (COVAX) co-led by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Of course, this government like previous administrations has neither the vision nor initiative required to exit Nigeria from the league of global parasites cum spectators to the extraordinary league of global superpowers and doers.

Before the pandemic, Nigeria’s ministries of health, science, and technology had no strategic plans to add value to the country’s development. The status quo will persist till 2023. They can’t give what they do not have.

Health Minister Ehanire enthused about a committee set up to select the vaccine most suitable for the country against the virus. He is excited about getting 20 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine “at some cost” no doubt. His counterpart Ogbonnaya Onu, who presides over the ministry of science and technology must be psyched up too.

Ehanire and Onu must be ashamed that they both preside over dead ministries incapable of fostering the brilliance and enterprise required to produce a vaccine at the homefront, for the benefit of Nigerians and the rest of the world.

Perhaps the government should hand over both ministries to Chinese, American, or European scientists rather than afflict Nigerians with dormant health and science-tech ministries.

As the pandemic persists, the fabric of life is spun and torn by the talons of Nigeria’s vulturine leadership. Somewhere between their pretensions at curtailing the pandemic, a tragic lyre amplifies the horror of our rising funeral pyre. Their pleas and threats are crafty and fickle thus re-establishing their roles as misery merchants, malefic dealers, and undertakers.

To alleviate hardships imposed on impoverished and most vulnerable segments of the citizenry, federal and state governments will make another comic show of distributing food and money. In determining the vulnerable, they will resort to ill-informed and arbitrary categorizations thus rendering large segments of the citizenry disgruntled and hopeless.

The over-hyped palliatives will resound the parable of the sower in the sewer. In performing the roles for which they were elected and for which they claim outrageous compensations, public officers will demand a ceremony of appreciation and re-investiture, come 2023. It’s a classic tale of leaders as dealers: steamrollers masquerading as hope-runners.

The greatest virus is Nigeria’s leadership, many of whom have learned to feign compassion that they do not feel. It is an open secret that the reigning oligarchs are committed to the anti-COVID-19 campaign because the storms stirred by the virus tears at their gated paradise.

In the race for solutions to the pandemic, Senegal developed a test kit at $1 each. Even more amazing is the fact that these test kits could have results ready within 10 minutes, in an easily readable format; probably something like the line that appears in a pregnancy test kit.

At the backdrop of Senegal’s initiative, Madagascar flaunted a herbal cure named COVID-Organics. Despite condemnations and disclaimers of the country’s traditional cure, the government showed sterling initiative and resolve, unlike the Nigerian leadership, who waited for a vaccine from “colonial overlords” while obsessing about rising figures of the infected, the deceased, and cured.

The country’s leadership has, so far, re-established its perverse fetish for control and refinements of domination amid fears that public officers may be exploiting the pandemic to steal public funds.

At this juncture, it is pertinent to ask: To what end are the millions of naira committed to health funding and scientific research? How valuable is the role and establishment of the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR)? How proactive is the institute in networking with sister institutes on the African continent, to conduct ground-breaking studies and find a cure to Africa’s most pressing health challenges?

A corrupt political class, a dysfunctional health system, and a disillusioned citizenry aggravate Nigeria’s anti-COVID-19 campaign.

The crisis demanded a swift, lucid, response but the government reacted with institutionalised lethargy and pitilessness; cruelly leaving the borders open like a leadership deadened to the finer aspects of tact, vision and reason.

As we go into 2021, the unfolding dystopia demands urgent intervention by well-meaning Nigerians and civil societies in the interest of the collective. The presiding oligarchs lack the brilliance, native intelligence, and wisdom to curtail the spread of COVID-19.

They lack the foresight required to drive Nigeria up the path of progress and rebirth. The search for their replacement, come 2023, must begin in earnest.

 

Olatunji Ololade

 

IT’S still the wrong season to be a Nigerian boychild. From infancy through adulthood he is methodically ignored. Childhood is his crystal cabinet, the window into his carefree beginning when he dwelt in the body without ambivalence or fear. But puberty ends his trusting view of nature, triggering the ritual riddance of his innocence. And so begins his passage into savagery and containment.

Fate, dancing like a maiden, entices him by its pirouettes; trapping him like a bird, she keeps him in her museum of mortal specimens. She is Omphale with her male domestics or Iwapele seducing Akara Ogun with her garland of goodies and the forbidden room. But unlike Akara Ogun, puberty ushers the Nigerian male into her forbidden chamber too early. He wouldn’t abstain until her demise. Consequently, he suffers the blistering baptism of burning truth. Growing up is never easy. Puberty is his savage space thus this minute, he is the minor suffering sexual assault from paedophile mother, father, sister, teacher, and guardian.

He is the abducted schoolboy of Kankara, Katsina State, grabbed alongside 343 others and hurled through the valley of death until his rescue by shady actors in the deathly arena of Nigerian politics.

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

He is the 14-year-old victim of Kabiru Abdullahi, 40, who sodomised him to fulfill an urge. He is 16-year-old Anthony, sexual assault victim of Jesus Intervention Household Ministry’s General Overseer (GO), Reverend Ezuma Chizemdere, who reportedly raped him and 14 other teenage boys until he (Anthony) tested positive for HIV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

His life unfurls to shadowy inference. Traditional manhood rites are picaresque, feel-good narratives of his becoming, he would find. In contrast, a man’s life is fraught with challenges. There is neither certainty nor sense of an ending.

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

This year, he is the President who couldn’t divest his soul of the bitterness of nepotism and arrogance, the crookedness of ethnicity and clannishness. Heck, he couldn’t even control his flippant aides and handlers.

He is the governor whose definition of service translates to tyranny over the citizenry and plunder of our commonwealth. He was the occult lawmaker extending his ‘reign’ by setting sail on an ocean of electorate blood.

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

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

Like Castiglione’s courtier, he wears face powder to deceive us as a currency-activated journalist and columnist. He is the slick disputant and sophist who masks brilliantly, the evils of corporate state in a garland of lies of beautiful English.

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

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

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

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

He enters the magic castle of his Nigerian nightmare the same way the hunter enters the forest in Fagunwa’s literary masterpiece, Ogboju ode ninu igbo irunmale, and emerges from its eerie iridescence, only to re-enter it as a disgruntled senior citizen for whom twilight dawns unpromisingly.

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

This year is far spent and he approaches 2021 trying to unravel and understand, the interminable woes that make Nigeria uninhabitable for him.

Scorned, villified, neglected, he becomes the reason for the failure of every social, political, and economic redemption programme.

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

He is the performer in the period of youth, the star that got dimmed in the middle of his scene because he failed to leave while the ovation was loudest.

 

Olatunji Ololade

 

BETWEEN the Katsina governor, Aminu Bello Masari, and President Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria suffers a wild encounter with recurring grief. On their watch, over 300 teenagers and high school boys were abducted from Katsina by the Boko Haram terrorist sect.

The kidnappings occurred on Friday, December 14, in Kankara, hours after President Muhammadu Buhari landed in his home state, Katsina, for a week-long visit, forcing state authorities to immediately shut all schools.

On that fateful day, the people of Kankara startled by a vicious evil. Around 10 p.m.  Boko Haram terrorists swooped on the town shooting sporadically in the air and afterward the Government Science Secondary (GSS) school, where they abducted students,

It’s the worst siege since Boko Haram terrorists stormed Chibok town in 2014 and abducted 276 school girls. About 112 of the captives are still missing and believed to be held by the terrorists.

The recent abduction has, however, ignited worry over the country’s security situation. If the terrorists could so brazenly operate in President Buhari’s backyard, kidnapping over 300 boys right under his nose, then Nigeria has great reason to worry.

There are fears concerning what devilry the terrorists would subject the abducted boys to, if they are not rescued fast; there is the danger that many of them would end up as child soldiers, suicide bombers, drug addicts, and terror mules, at the behest of Boko Haram.

My encounter with a Boko Haram commander, Joseph David aka Ibrahim Al-Hajar, revealed that several young boys are forcibly conscripted into the terrorist group’s bloodthirsty squads. Of course, this isn’t a subtle jab at Christendom given David’s Christian roots. As Boko Haram is in no way representative of about a billion Muslims around the globe, so also is David not representative of Christians worldwide.

In an exclusive interview, David disclosed to me that his abductors indoctrinated him with spiritual texts regarded as Boko Haram’s holy grail. This was the prerequisite for training him to use guns and other weaponry. Thus after three months of brainwashing, David was renamed Ibrahim Al Hajar.

Afterward, he was transferred to Shababu Ummah. “That is where they train people to use guns. I spent almost four months there, learning to use machine guns and other weapons of war. After that, I passed out (graduated),” he said.

Subsequently, he was transferred to “Shababu Ummah,” where Boko Haram trains its soldiers to use guns. David spent almost four months there, learning to use machine guns and other weapons of war. After that, he “passed out” (graduated).

For his first assignment, he was given a Hilux truck with an Antiaircraft (AA) machine gun. He was assigned to lead ambushes against Nigeria’s Military Joint Task Force (MJTF). He led his squad of mostly underage boys, “on several successful missions” ambushing the Joint Task Force (JTF) and halting military onslaught against Boko Haram in Sambisa.

Today, David has renounced his membership in Boko Haram, claiming that he lives haunted by his past actions, he admitted that most of the child soldiers in his squad haven’t been so lucky. Many have suffered gruesome deaths during anti-terrorism military operations. Many more are still prowling the hills and border towns of the northeast in unflinching commitment to their handlers and commanders.

My encounter with the ex-Boko Haram commander revealed that disaffection is often the most feasible rationalisation for Boko Haram’s appeal; the foot soldiers and commanders of the terrorist group are drawn mostly from male segments of the population with little formal education, captives turned soldiers and of course, unemployed northern youth like David.

For instance, David, “an undergraduate of the State Polytechnic Yola (SPY),” was wooed by the promise of earning about N250, 000 monthly as an insurgent. However, he got lucky; due to his fearlessness and dexterity at mowing down Nigerian troops, he enjoyed rapid promotion and became a commander about five months into his conscription.

Among other perks, he led a troop of 150 to 250 boys and earned over N500, 000 per month as a Commander. The money was disbursed to him and fellow senior officers in Nigerian currency and sometimes, in foreign currencies: Euro, Dollars, or Riyal.

With such liquid cash at his disposal, he was influential enough to “marry” three wives. In one year, he forcibly married three abducted teenagers; his first wife, Faridah, was kidnapped from Madagali and the other two, Precious a.k.a Faridah and Elizabeth a.k.a Amina, were abducted from Chibok.

Several northern youths would kill for such perks. Many of them live in straitened circumstances, surviving by menial jobs on the fringes of the urban and rustic north.

Oftentimes, they are scorned and treated like vermin; many believe that they are lazy and hindered by a lack of ambition. You see them smiling and pleading for alms but deep down, they are very angry.

And Boko Haram offers them a corrupted creed and platform to vent their angst. Boko Haram makes them feel loved. Eventually, they are goaded to believe that they are a crucial part of a great cause. A worthy movement geared to topple the “government of the infidels.”

“They misinterpret the Holy Quran and use it to justify the senseless murders they commit. Shaytan has whispered into their hearts,” argued Sheikh Mahmud Abdullah, an Islamic scholar, and cleric.

Sheikh Abdullah, however, forgot to add that the greatest repositories of Shaytan’s whispers are the hearts and souls of the Nigerian ruling class. Terrorism festered on their watch due to their insensitivity to the people’s needs, abject greed, remorseless corruption, and failure at governance.

The northern youth embraces terrorism and kidnap for ransom, having lost hope in their governors’ capacity to lead and foster remarkable progress in their region – a similar situation subsists across the country but the north presents the ugliest conundrum being the hotspot of terrorist activities.

Boko Haram’s dogma, like similar groups worldwide, plays a central role in its survival. Its creed of violence and wanton genocide is primed to achieve resonance. And it’s success and appeal among the northern youth is largely based on a combination of persuasive communicators, the compelling nature of the grievances articulated, and the pervasiveness of local conditions that seem to justify the terrorist group’s rationale for deploying violence.

Boko Haram and its sponsors, of course, cash in on the situation; they manipulate the impoverishment and sentiments of gullible youth in recruiting them as soldiers. They lure them with food, money, and a passport to paradise; they tell them that their religion is under threat.

And in some cases, they simply storm secondary schools and abduct over 300 teenagers and underage boys. The latter’s fate could only be better imagined. It is about time President Buhari tweaked the nation’s defense machinery to contain Nigeria’s security challenges.

Until then, Boko Haram will continue to prowl the villages and suburbs of northern Nigeria to abduct school girls and boys. Its teenage “warriors” will hush boys to sleep with bullets in Sambisa, after shooting hot lead into their parents in Baga, Zarbamari, and even Mr. President’s backyard in Kankara.

 

 

 

Olatunji Ololade

 

THIS minute, Nigeria’s youths enjoy patronage by external forces, who see us as pliant objects, sad wrecks of civilization modifiable by buffeting nature.

In truth, many among us carry on like survivors of dystopia, whose ethical thinning manifests by pitiless experience. We seem weathered like driftwood yet helpless amid familiar and unfamiliar storms.

Consequently, predatory forces from abroad comprising shady media, political and non-governmental organisations have emerged to “help” us. As a necessary ruse of rescue, they have sunk their fangs into the flesh of Nigeria’s youth via poisonous patronage.

These external actors wield toxic news agenda, diplomatic intervention and dark psyops streamlined to foster bigotries and rage of disgruntled, impoverished segments of Nigeria’s youth divide.

They will keep desensitising the youth to guiltless rage and incendiary politics as long as it fulfills their preferred narratives about Nigeria – a hideous agenda to accelerate the country’s self-destruct.

The ill-fated Arab springs must, however, serve as a reproach to the country’s youth. Nobody could love Nigeria more than Nigerians hence our need for caution in accepting and celebrating help from abroad.

Libya, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, would tow a different path today, had they a second chance. They would shun their western patrons’ gift of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedoms’ if they could turn back the hands of time.

Basking in the attention and patronage by external forces from Europe and America, the nation’s youth currently feel dignified, but in truth, they are being paralysed.

They are being goaded into a melancholy state of contraction from which there is no escape through action. Every action they had been incited to take against their oppressors in the ruling class, for instance, has manifested as actions against self, the collective good, and the future of the Nigerian State. Think #EndSARS.

Now that the consequences of their previous actions and rage have begun to manifest, they retreat into the wormhole of fear. However, they have taken the battle to social media: the threshing ground of separatists, hoodlums, maniacs, cowards, and all shades of patriot.

In the physical public arena, the youth has been reduced to only passive responses: fortitude and endurance. But in their new-found battle zones on social media, they parade as warriors and fearless patriots.

The failure of the #EndSARS protest and its inability to birth a political movement anchored on the progressive dreams of youth, public service and patriotism, stemmed from its protagonists’ directionless and acquiescence to the dystopic visions of their sponsors at home and abroad.

Eventually, they built what was supposed to be a liberating movement into a national threat; they turned the protest arenas into forbidden open spaces, an agoraphobic wasteland.

As the protests snowballed into chaos, the world waited with bated breath, the usual culprits especially – known for marketing arms and ammunition to warring factions in exchange for plundering the affected countries’ natural resources, among other crimes.

This minute, external predators offer to help tell our story and protect us from the oppressive oligarchs. The youth mistake this for love. But it’s a love that would goad them to untimely death and desiccate their flesh; a love that would raise their hopes only to crush them to skeletal deficiency of being.

At the backdrop of this plot, it is scary to see the tenor of rage being hurled about on social media, mostly by the youths. Many profess love for country but in truth, their passions manifest crude iniquities, distressing orientations, negative energy clusters, and abraded grief, all fostered by loss, poverty, and unbearable gloom.

The contemporary youth manifest as Nigeria’s secret fear. They are what is left when the oppressive oligarchs are done devouring Nigeria, the dry bones they picked over after they looted and wolfed down our collective harvest.

Of course, nationalist consciousness still thrives, but images of the self and the collective good have gotten smaller; corrupted to be precise. Yet our youthful patriots preach and provide healing but with palsied hands.

Their versions of love and healing fail to fill the space vacated by leadership, religion, and society because they are products of a dysfunctional social unit, the Nigerian family. The family despite its historical repute and value as the core and most significant social unit is under severe attack in Nigeria – as in all climes. But this is a discussion for another day.

If there is a revolutionary dialectic in Nigeria, it is in the tension between individual and self. But this is often mistaken for tension between individual and state, individual and groups, individual and the system, individual and the almighty Nigerian factor.

The real battle is between individual and self. The dutiful patriot must discipline and restrain himself. Seasoned with miseries and deathly solemnities foisted upon him by governance failure and an oppressive political class, he mistakes his battle with external elements and forces of oppression as his life’s purpose.

In tackling them, he yields to that innate lust that ignites the heart towards selfish pursuits. He scoffs at posterity and ancestral dreams. Private lust wins over the public good, flaming up in Nigeria’s funeral pyre.

To attain true progress, the youth must free themselves from innate and external shackles of thought and action. They must understand that the oligarchs make the compromised youth leader their consort, that the latter might, in turn, mislead the youths to sabotage self and state.

To rebuild Nigeria, I reiterate, that the youth must seek legitimate participation in the political process. They must seize the moment to regroup, adopt or establish a viable political party, duly registered, and founded on humane principles of nationhood, citizenship, and thought.

They must present through legitimate means, to the National Assembly, a request to normalise the use of the international passport, driver’s licence, national identity card, and BVN (for electronic ballot) as acceptable means of voting at the 2023 elections.

Of course, the political class will object to this given their penchant for hoarding voter’s cards to fulfill their election-rigging master-plans, but I reiterate that it’s worth starting the debate over that.

They must unite with societal segments they hitherto ignored and dismissed as too violent, too dumb, too compromised, and too wild, like the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), the trade unions, among others.

They must move to quash the oligarchic caste system that reduces several youths to political hooligans, arsonists, and assassins. They must 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 disposable social elements and cannon fodder for political violence.

They must eschew violence and the inclinations for hate-speech, and their synergies must be guided and adapted 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.

Then they must scorn poisonous interventions by countries whose major interest is to abolish our sovereignty, plunder our resources, and lay us bare.

We mustn’t forget how foreign media, governments, NGOs goaded Arabians to a scalding spring, only to desert them afterward. The same voices that incited them to carnage shut their borders against them claiming they were toxic refugees.

 

Olatunji Ololade

 

The #ENdSARS protester paraded beautiful 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 plundering 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. Ever wonder why the protests imploded and died?

Violence was a mutation of the #EndSARS protest. When it broke, it was uninformed, primitive, and vast, like the chaos of savage night before the dawn of blossoms. Yet dawn erupts with sickly carnations. Despite the flowery fantasies of the protesters, their clamoured dawn illumines with moonshine.

Yet the fruits of the protests are negative for the same reason that they are positive for the youth; the resultant mayhem counsels the need for 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 class. That is a tall dream. But this minute, they could set about reordering in numbers and might to renegotiate the nature and extent of their participation in the political process.

Their inability to truly unite for the good of all and their incapacity for a decent connection with the public and rational engagement with the government manifested as a desperate defect. The most sublime act they could have aspired to was the renegotiation of their terms of political engagement en route the 2023 general elections and further.

But they blew it. And it is quite saddening that many would rather seek cheap consolation and play to the gallery by romanticising the Lekki Tollgate shooting as a massacre. There was a shooting there quite alright and it was in bad taste, but there was no massacre.

Of course, several writers, presumed and self-appointed leaders of thought, celebrities, and fame junkies would rail and declare it politically-incorrect, their frantic grief is understandable. I accord them their right to it. “We move,” to echo one of #EndSARS purgative slogans.

With #EndSARS, the youth seemed to speak with one voice but all they did was weaponise dissent and angst into a shrill orchestra. For a generation that prides itself on its disruptive capacities, their response to disruption was frantic, juvenile, and predictable – which further affirms the pointlessness of their rudderless protests.

Contempt was a black hole of the protests; the disdain for constructive criticism, and a spiralling convolution of psyche. Little wonder the movement unfurled ethically-knocked.

There is no gainsaying many of the protesters have learnt that you don’t cherry-pick aspects of a revolution to fulfill your narrative of hope; life happens through revolt. And you deal with the results of your action and inaction through the storms.

Its inspiring that the youth have finally woken up. They have realised that our expectations for a better future have been obliterated on the watch of a selfish political class thus the urgent need for an overhaul of the status quo.

I moot no violence. Nigeria’s youth must strive through their loss of faith in the corrupted power system, to whittle down the oppressive oligarchs’ asphyxiating grasp on Nigeria.

A curious development through the protest was the fear pervasive of the corridors of power. There was a weakening among the political class of the will to engage with the youth.

None of the state governors, save Babajide Sanwoolu, whose Lagos was the epicentre of the crisis – could confidently engage with the youths. They were scared of being scoffed at, knowing it would rid them of clout and almighty “political capital.” Such fear is a good thing.

Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, subsequently warned his political class, to productively engage with the youths to forestall the resurgence of an #EndSARS-like carnage. Lawan no doubt dreads an uglier revolt even as the youth romanticises its eventuality, in time.

Vladimir Lenin’s homily of a successful revolt benchmarks all three Russian revolutions in the 20th century; he said, it is not enough for a revolution that the exploited and oppressed masses should understand the impossibility of living in the old way and demand changes, what is required for revolution is that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way.

Only when the “lower classes” do not want the old way, and when the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way—only then can revolution win.

Youthful Nigeria dabbled with such reality until the ruling class hatched venom into their ranks. The youth were wooing the police. Videos of protesters sharing sumptuous meals and drinks with police patrol teams went viral and raised eyebrows among the ruling class. It scared them silly.

Like all despotic regimes, the ruling class understood the import of events. They dreaded what the endgame of such camaraderie of protesters and the police could manifest.

They understood that once the foot soldiers of the elite – the policemen, soldiers, party hooligans and random street urchin, the civil servants, the courts, the press and academia, and finally the army – no longer have the will to defend the regime, the regime is finished. When these societal elements shun the whims of an oppressive regime, it crumbles.

To rebuild Nigeria, the youth must seek legitimate means of participation in the political process.

They must seize the moment to regroup, adopt or establish a viable political party, duly registered, and founded on humane principles of nationhood, citizenship, and thought. They must present through legitimate means, to the parliament, a heartfelt wish to participate in the forthcoming elections.

To achieve this, they must urge the National Assembly to normalise the use of the international passport, driver’s licence, national identity card, and BVN (for electronic ballot) as acceptable means of voting at the 2023 elections. Of course, the political class will object to this given their penchant for hoarding voter’s cards to fulfill their rigging master-plans, but it’s worth starting the debate over that.

And if the youths truly intend 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, street urchin, among others, as co-travellers in the march towards the Nigeria of our dreams.

Nobody was born to serve as a hooligan, arsonist, assassin; the youth must 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 disposable social elements and cannon fodder for political violence.

They must eschew violence and the inclinations for hate-speech, and their synergies must be guided and adapted 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.

None of these is achievable where the youths remain faceless and buried in herd feral.