Olatunji Ololade

 

WE will remember #EndSARS for what it’s worth: its elegiac stanzas, propitious rage, and inauspicious demise. We will remember how hope charred with the cinders of tomorrow.

Nigeria will never forget how her youths marched on the streets to protest bad policing, leadership failure, atrocious governance, corruption in government circuits, and insensibility of the political class.

The tragedy borne by the #EndSARS protest is instructive; it bristles with leadership insensibility and imprudence of youths cut to size. No thanks to hubris.

The #EndSARS protest undoubtedly offered the youth a priceless opportunity to engage the political class in constructive dialogue and reassessment of governance and security structures as crucial facets of Nigeria’s political and socio-economic malaise.

But having identified the Nigeria Police Force (NPF)’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) as a colony of sentinels overrun by deathly tumours, the protests subsequently flared out, illumining the police unit, the political class and the military’s joint mutation, like a reptilian predator, preying on innocent citizenry, thus fulfilling the malevolence of Nigerianness.

The defunct SARS was meant to rid the streets of a serious crime but its operations dawned on the country with a deathly couvade. Its cultic maleficence projects the Nigerian psyche, thus the maxim: “There is a SARS in all of us” meaning: there is a savage (SARS) genome in every Nigerian.

Yet, for all its symbolism and professed grandeur, the drawn-out anti-SARS protest eventually manifested constraints emblematic of the herd feral.

At the eruption of mayhem, a popular comedian admonished protesters to avoid turning the protest into a tribal war, but in response, a certain Chief Ojukwu stated that celebrities are blameworthy for the mayhem incited by what was supposed to be a peaceful protest.

Ojukwu lampooned peers for turning the protest into a carnival featuring disc jockeys (DJs), free meals, wild cavorting, and the profane. According to him, the violent aftermath was predictable as livestock and vegetables coming in from northern Nigeria via trucks got stuck in the traffic as a result of road blockages caused by the protesters.

He argued that while the Mile-12-bound vegetables rotted the Kara cattle market at Ojodu Berger, allegedly responsible for about 90 percent of the meat supply in Lagos and environs, suffered a lull due to the protest.

Going by his analogy, over 1,000 meat sellers, traders, and menial workers, who source their livelihood from the affected markets were rendered jobless. Urchins attached to the market and similar markets across Lagos were also rendered jobless, all at once.

These are folk, who reportedly live from hand to mouth – surviving on meagre daily earnings.

Not minding the effects of the protests on these human segments, the protesters set up camps on Lagos streets “with music, free food, drinks, shisha, weed and all types of profanity. It was only a matter of time for the so-called touts/hoodlums/agberos to get drawn to another source of food!” argued Ojukwu.

Another curious development was the youth’s desperation – as ‘aggressively twitted’ online – to sustain the protest for 30 days, and so doing, incite armed invasion of the country by the United Nations (UN). How patriotic could this be?

To what end would a UN invasion serve the cause of the #EndSARS, I asked a vocal advocate of the initiative. But he simply railed in response, “Werey dey disguise!”

In the wake of carnage that erupted from the protests, claiming 73 lives including 22 policemen, according to the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Mohammed Adamu, the youth nervily projected the Youth Democratic Party (YDP) as a solution to Nigeria’s leadership and governance problems, stressing that the party’s membership is purely restricted to the young.

Many ignored the cheekiness and applauded the initiative that birthed such ambition. The worry lines were there, but we ignored it. The youth were finally coming into their own. They were becoming more politically conscious, in a constructive, progressive manner, it seemed.

People failed to look beneath the blankets of rage to see the true nature of dissent, its varied traceries of thought, action, and reaction.

While the tragic aftermath persists as a grisly narrative of Nigeria’s nationhood experience, its attendant pathos yields too easily to parody by fake news aficionados. Whatever the renditions of the Lekki Toll Gate shooting, for instance, and the virulent claims of it being a massacre and counter-claims of it not being a massacre, the pallid yarns of the incident resonate grotesquely, limiting and corrupting feelings, instead of freeing and deepening it.

Of course, one must have a heart of stone to consider the shooting at Lekki Toll Gate without flinching. The stark horror of watching men in Nigerian Army uniform fire live bullets at unarmed protesters cannot be forgotten in a hurry.

Yet social media reports border on the sincere and mischievous dramatization of excessive plaint and hatred, the pitfalls of cynical revolt. The exhumed and buried narratives of the protest hasten insolence and empathy into grief’s cottage. But can misery so evident be sustained against the onslaught of fake news and the political class’ stinky quest to constrain freedom via the social media bill? One could hardly fault the bill’s devious advocates, given the lies and ugliness that have become the rage on social media. Fake news, sophistry, and base sentimentality are disguised dramas of the masterminds’ treacherous self.

And despite the professed unity of the protesters, they eventually dispersed in segments and conflicting divides; their fraternal bond frayed to differences in citizenship and human experience.

Even among the protesters, there were the haves and have-nots. There were the poseurs, comprising celebrities and social influencers who seized the protests as platforms to pursue and attain clout.

And of course, there were those who were truly pained and committed to the objectives of the cause.

But were the objectives of the cause of common knowledge to every protester?

There is no gainsaying the protesters lost public sympathy at some point – until the Lekki incident.

They accused the government of duplicity and refused its offer of an olive branch, chanting phrases like ‘We move!’ ‘Werey dey disguise!’ and so on.

They naively forgot that the political class they were dealing with comprises light and dark shades of the vicious and venomous.

This is the time to be humble, strategic, and constructively driven. It’s about time the youth tapped the wisdom of those they hitherto dismissed as the ‘Gbenudake generation.’ Their penchant to ‘Soro soke’ like ‘Werey’ hasn’t paid off. The YDP will persist as a juvenile rant; an online fantasy, useful only at dispensing pseudo-joy and cheap consolation to hundreds of disgruntled youths until it gets registered and presented with a more nationalistic bent to all classes of Nigerians.

It must be sanitised of the drug addicts, internet fraudsters (Yahoo Boys), and clout chasers, among other shady characters that were part of the #EndSARS protests.

He who preaches equity must come with clean hands, it is said; this brings to mind, the reality of the scruffy youth, who posted a video of himself smoking cannabis at the toll gate and enthusing, “Here I am o, smoking cannabis at the Lekki Tollgate. Indeed God works in mysterious ways; who would have thought that I would finally get high here. #EndSARS.”

 

Olatunji Ololade

 

GRIEF, prancing on our digital phones recite their epitaphs across passion-planes and boundaries, into the dark night.

One minute, they were alive, clear-eyed, and bubbling; next minute, they fell bejeweled in green white green, the colour of captives and bloodied patriots.

Karma awaits the ‘goons’ that mauled protesters and police into irregular postage stamps of death.

Some have blamed their fate on infernal youth and conceit; many have flayed the police for insensitivity, and the protesters for lack of a clear plan and strategy for dealing with venomous leadership. They said they dared to duel with shayateen without a tough shield. Did they?

Tuesday, October 20, 2020, Nigeria’s youth challenged the deviltry of wily oligarchs, manic thugs, and henchmen; policemen slaved to repel them. But none could tell the venomous wing of the infernal spring.

Hero or villain, they were citizens chanting bigotries, the language of slaves and raptorial rulers.

Protesters and police: expendable pawns and victims of a sinister agenda advanced by a coalition of dark minds.

But for all the flak they incite, they were not without love or beauty. Their passion pulsed with spokes of valour. Their clamour greased the wheels of hope even as they rallied and railed against the excesses of insolent leadership, bandit-SARS, and deadly thugs.

This minute, chaos and dust benumb their eyes, rendering them russet-grey, the colour of death and mud bed; 51 civilians, 11 policemen, and seven soldiers – and perhaps more – were hacked to death in the unrest following peaceful protests over police abuses.

They cannot halt the descent of leadership in our broken country. But we shan’t forget them. Hero and pawn. Villain and victim.

Nigeria will never forget, Tuesday, October 20, 2020, when irate youths marched together, eyes aflare, hearts afire, chanting “EndSARS!” until a volley of soldier bullets pierced their motley crew apart, in the name of leadership and state. Silence.

Nigeria must never forget, Tuesday, October 20, 2020, when police officers launched a hapless defensive, against an army of bloodthirsty youths. Silence.

Police and protesters, EndSARS and ProSARS, violent and peaceful, a baleful lyric succeeds their dissent. It pervades our social space.

President Muhammadu Buhari blamed hooliganism for the violence while asserting that security forces used “extreme restraint.” Silence.

The political class must explain why impassioned pleas registered as sin to their executive and legislative gangster-hood. They never saw it coming, that a generation hitherto written off as too bland, too self-indulgent and hobbled with the personality of a paper cup, could dare question their perilous class.

#EndSARS mutated to #Endbadgovernance, and #Reducepublicofficerssalaries among others. In their jazzy rage, the youths forgot how resonantly their threat pitched, in the deathly sanctums of gun-made gods.

Scared, the latter deployed the sickest tricks in their arsenal, sending goons and arsonists after the protesters’ rudderless hordes. Thus the conspiracy theories about an unholy union of government and goons, internal pawns and external masterminds – and frantic disavowals of them.

Yet nobody would explain the man in a black suit, transporting armed thugs on a black SUV, to attack harmless protesters in Abuja. Nobody would explain how 1,993 prisoners staged a jailbreak in Edo, in mufti.

Nobody could tell why there were no gunshots between prison security and jail-breakers, and the invaders breaking them free. While we savour the ill-plotted fiction of the Edo jailbreak, let us not forget the ‘celebrity’ jail-breaker who took his time to grant an interview.

Videos offer grotesque memories. In Lagos, police stations were set ablaze by hoodlums; in one of such attacks, they invaded the station and carted away rifles.

In Lagos, a police officer was stabbed in the eye and clubbed to death by an irate mob. In Ibadan, another was bludgeoned to death, doused with petrol and set on fire by maniacal youths. The murdered policemen were some children’s fathers, some wives’ husbands.

Then, Lekki; where several youths fell pierced, chanting the national anthem, waving the Nigerian flag futilely, against a hail of bullets by uniformed men. They were some parents’ wards, some partners’ spouses. Silence.

Picture what it felt like for bullets to clash against their skin. I would neither mention nor unearth their fatal grief. But Nigeria will live for the moments when their motley crowd mended and mounted the soapbox to spiritedly spout and be seen.

And since government won’t recall how their little moments became our big moments, shall we recall those fleeting hours they spent rousing our impatience with sleaze, that we might march in spirit and virtual lock-step with their impassioned feet?

Will the mother to some murdered child step up? Will the wife, husband to some murdered spouse emerge to demand justice for the savage attack against citizenry and state?

But while we debate and spar over the miscarriage of power and privilege at the Lekki massacre or not-massacre, let Nigeria remember the pierced and fallen, mitred as martyrs.

Let no one exploit their living and dying for rancid benefits. Let no one plunder their memories for frantic frills. After all, it was just their life in parts, substantially mingled with ours. Shall they end up as random punchlines in our book of deeds?

Memories of their rage intrude our lives in fervent bursts, haunting us all, riding our moonlit dawns roughshod; they have left behind unfinished dreams for us to cradle. Shall we actualise them or continue to spout, just to be seen? Shall we tease our practiced tremble into a punch?

The youths have had their say. They have enjoyed their day in the arena, chanting slogans, trading contempt, and juvenile angst. “Soro soke! Werey!” they railed. Now, that they are done fiddling with rage, it’s about time they learned to articulate dissent beyond the racket that approximates silence.

The #EndSARS movement is pointless if every Nigerian youth – including the protesters – do not get to vote at the 2023 elections.

Had they quit the streets for the negotiation table, immediately the government accepted their five-point demand, disbanded SARS, and mandated all the states to set-up judicial panels, to investigate past and present cases of police brutality, they would retain their vantage ground.

They could, for instance, request that the government normalises the BVN for electronic voting, come 2023, and the international passport, driver’s license, and national identity card as acceptable means of voting at the general elections.

Now, they must duel with the political class to obtain the ever-elusive voter’s card from their predatory grasps.

There is no need for sadness now if the echoes of fake news and our lies, diminish our killing fields, hallowed like a parliament, where patriots aspired to something great, against the bullets and blades of random malefactors.

For the sake of the fallen, shall irate youth embrace peace and relearn tact? Shall we relearn the fate of the father who slaves for a pittance in deathly factories to sustain his family, the housewife who starves that her children may not go hungry, and the student who pawns her chastity to put herself through school?

Shall we unlearn the lure of lawmakers and governors, who burned our prospects to a white skull, that they might attain glory out of our pain?

Shall we choose ballot over bullets, and boot out the villains dosing our maladies with hate?

 

 

 

By Olatunji Ololade

The joys of the electorate are like dewdrops, they vanish at the first stroke of sunlight; for the disenchanted citizenry of Ogun State, the emergence of Dapo Abiodun spelled new dawn of sunshine and good tidings but the governor’s conduct scalds their promised joys, like the blistering sunbeams of dystopia.

Abiodun’s PR misadventure with Laycon, the recent winner of the Big Brother Naija ‘reality’ show was ill-advised no doubt but it could also be seen as a blessing in disguise.

It earned the governor a deserved rebuke among concerned citizens of Ogun and neighbouring states and a passionate nudge to his actual responsibilities in the statehouse.

Subsequently, the governor may cuddle panegyrics showered on him by bootlickers and sycophantic aides, and dismiss this article too as a negligible reproach of his conduct. Or he could tow the path of honour and humility and truly commit to serving the citizenry of Ogun State.

He could start by hosting Aishat Kareem and her quartet of genii and give each child N5 million and a three-bedroom bungalow like he gave Laycon. Abiodun must establish the teenagers as greater role models for generations of Ogun youths.

He should consider, for instance, how inspiring it would be to youths in the state if he could institute such a culture of recognition and reward for Ogun’s accomplished youth.

By hosting Laycon and plying him with gifts, he brazenly endorsed a dangerous, irresponsible culture of living life on the sweepstakes, and unwittingly endorsed a TV show that promotes debauchery and lures young people to bend and distort into hideous forms, in pursuit of injudicious prize money.

A participant cum winner of such filth-fest isn’t worth glorification by the governor of a state reputable for producing several of Nigeria’s cultural icons and national treasures. At a time when Ogun State and Nigeria seek young men and women of unimpeachable character to inherit the task of nation-building, Abiodun must jettison acts tantamount to the perversion of civilisation.

Going forward, he must curtail his lust for applause on social media; lest it afflicts him with pseudo-repute and a penchant for cradling bogus bliss and honour.

As he aspires to competence, Abiodun must stop ignoring the death traps on Ijoko, Agoro, Ijako, Iyana-Ilogbo, Ilepa, Lafenwa, and Itele roads. He should move to repair the bloody ravines dotting Alade, Elekunmefa, Imise, Onihale, Singer, Iju, Lusada, Atan-Ota, and Igbesa to mention a few.

At Toll-gate junction, Joju, Temidire and environ, mucky pools still stagnate in perilous craters along the bypasses because these scenes of deadly accidents are inconsequential to Governor Abiodun.

While his approval of ongoing road projects may depict some smidgen of promise by his leadership, it must be acknowledged that he has done nothing special. He is simply doing the job for which he was elected, and he is being handsomely rewarded with outrageous salaries and allowances.

Governor Abiodun is about 16 months into what’s supposed to be a 48-month tenure; he could still establish himself as the best man for the job. However, he would never win the hearts of the citizenry on the pages of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Neither could he earn their trust via crafty interviews in traditional and new media.

He will earn applause when he begins to march in virtual lock-step with the citizenry’s hopes, and the promises he made while soliciting their votes.

On Governor Abiodun’s watch, Ogun State must experience development and sustainable progress. Good governance does not jostle to be seen. A serious governor spends less time on frivolities; whatever his team of aides tells him, no degree of good press or ‘hip acclaim’ could launder the grime of mediocrity and tarnished leadership.

Before he ends up as another pitiful hostage to power, it’s about time he understood that his current stint as governor could be his passport to a more purposeful, luscious life, spent in pursuit of humane exploits, and actualisation of noble dreams that could further his name and his clan beyond the transience of power and deceptive affluence.

#EndSARS: ‘The monsters you made’

Nigeria’s youth grew up watching their parents bemoan their fate and curse the times, in response to the ghastly government. Unlike their parents, they would not stand on barrel-heads just to spout and be seen.

A few months ago, a frustrated, jobless youth, in answer to a leading question posed to him by an online news medium, said, “Let us give our leaders a mass burial.”

His thought process, while condemnable, was indicative of brewing dissent and disillusionment among the youth. But the government failed to pay heed.

Several months later, the youths are marching on the streets, in protest against excessive use of force, unfair profiling, and extra-judicial killings allegedly committed by men of the ‘defunct’ Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (FSARS).

The protests, initially dismissed by the political class as the juvenile bombast of idle youths, have metamorphosed with more decisive manifestations.

This has incited jitters among the ruling class. President Muhammadu Buhari, in what has been deemed a remarkable first, in the timing of his response to national conflict, promptly approved the proscription of FSARS and accepted the protesters’ initial demands – apparently to pacify and neuter the fast galvanising movement.

The Inspector General (IG) of Police, Mohammed Adamu, subsequently announced the establishment of a Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT) but the protesters have dismissed it as a ruse, and persisted in protest, while widening the parameters of their demands to include an end to outrageous earnings of public officers, poor police salaries, power failure, and nepotism, to mention a few.

Some have argued that the opposition is funding and inciting the protests but the youths have emphatically disowned any protester whose presence on the street is funded by some anonymous puppeteer. Twitter pulses with their disavowal of such elements.

Of course, their measures may be worrisome, and their rant paced with venom and expletives earnestly directed at the political class but it would be foolhardy to dismiss their intent and rage.

While the protesters must eschew violence and the inclinations for hate-speech, the government must be tactful and modest in defusing the tension lest it degenerates into all-out carnage and an unwieldy crisis in the long-run.

Let the government be guided by the synergies of the protesters at adapting and mutating through an ad hoc coordination in repelling armed goons sent to disrupt their rallies in Lagos and Abuja, handling logistics, dealing with tribal toxins, fake news, and reassembling with gusto.

Severally, I had warned that the selfishness and insensitivity of the political class will birth revolt and problems beyond its middling abilities. Well, their sins have incited the rant and rage of young Nigerians.

“We are the monsters you made,” claims the protesters. From #EndSARS, #EndSWAT, their cacophonous chant spiritedly segues to the formation of a Youth Democratic Party (YDP).

Is YDP a momentary whim mooted in the rhapsody of bromidic bliss? Will the protests peter out as the government hazards a hasty resolution of the universities’ strike with the academic union?

What is the impact of the lingering protest on pop culture, rural poesy, and the youth’s political awareness? These are worthy of discourse next week.

Olatunji Ololade

 

CELEBRITY lust plunges Dapo Abiodun into a moral void. For the ‘culture,’ he blessed the winner of the 2020 Big Brother Naija ‘reality TV’ show, Olamilekan Agbelesebioba, (aka Laycon) with N5 million and a three-bedroom bungalow.

Governor Abiodun, however, forgot to reward Miss Aishat Kareem, a Senior Secondary School Two (SSS 2) student at Aminat International College, Osara Road, Abeokuta, and her three teammates, for earning Ogun State the first position and grand prize, at the just-concluded National Junior Engineers Technicians and Scientists (JETS) competition, organised by the Federal Ministry of Education, in March 2020, in Lagos.

Although Kareem and her team scaled through the zonal and state levels to emerge overall winners in the country, they weren’t deemed worthy of three-bedroom flats and N5 million each by Governor Abiodun.

Their achievement wasn’t deemed worthy of celebration nor was it canonised as the best form of elevated culture. For emphasis, Kareem and her team led Ogun State to clinch the first position at the nationwide JETS competition, beating contestants from all over the country.

The teenager’s win bears no significance to the sage in Abiodun. The governor would rather celebrate Laycon and his win; so doing, he redefines Ogun as the ‘Gateway State’ where pagan illusion triumphs over the moral eye and mind.

In Abiodun’s peculiar Eden, one must thrive in debauchery and jostle in dystopic filth, like the BBNaija ‘reality show’ to matter.

Giving an update on his social media handle, Abiodun said: “We have appointed the winner of the Big Brother Naija Lockdown, @itslaycon Youth Ambassador of Ogun State in addition to house and cash gifts. I relayed this development today when I played host to Olamilekan Moshood Agbelesebioba, AKA Laycon in my Oke-Mosan office in Abeokuta.

Ogun indigenes and Nigerians in general, are displeased with Abiodun; in a manner akin to what the Yoruba would term, “spooning water from the clay trough into the Atlantic,” Abiodun gave Laycon gifts he could easily acquire by his grand prize of N85million courtesy BBNaija’s filth show.

The governor’s desperate spin on his ill-advised action was as disastrous as his intent. It was so painful to read his feeble excuse cum justification for his action. “The appointment and gifts,” he stated, “are a celebration of Laycon’s good character, intellect, and virtues which were proven to the whole world on live TV as better choices than vices.

“A proud son of Ogun State, Laycon displayed the essence of focus in the face of temptations and provocations. This is the true Ogun State spirit,” he said.

The frantic rationalisation of his gifts to Laycon elicits mourning and intense hair-splitting among the concerned citizenry of Ogun State.

Where did Ogun State get it wrong? How did a state notable for blessing Nigeria with a formidable league of literary greats, multiple-award-winning journalists, eminent lawyers, actuarians, soldiers, academics – all nation builders – plummet so fast in value and ethics?

Senator Ibikunle Amosun must be chuffed with righteous ridicule; the successor he warned Ogun State about has dipped the state several depths beneath the abyss of his tenure as governor.

In Amosun’s time, the citizenry only had to contend with Ogun’s deathly roads, porous borders, and insecurity. On Abiodun’s watch, they have to contend with more sinister versions of the aforementioned, and something scarier, the mind of its leadership.

Even though Abiodun celebrates heathen idolatry, it’s not for a lack of absence of national heroes and heroines in Ogun State. The state is known for its copious endowments of brilliant minds and role models across all spheres of human endeavour.

The governor simply chose to defy the tenor of lore and wisdom indigenous to Ogun State by ditching national idols like Aishat Kareem and her team, to deify Laycon and his ilk. By his action, Governor Abiodun establishes Ogun as a state that promotes degradation as entertainment and the squalid underside of celebrity culture.

“If that were me,” sighed thousands of Ogun youths, perhaps, as they watched Laycon savour photo ops with Governor Abiodun.

It was hardly surprising that the governor came under heavy criticisms for hosting Laycon at the government house in Oke Mosan, Abeokuta, on Tuesday, where he offered him the gift of N5million and a three-bedroom bungalow.

The shrill tenor of Abiodun’s Public Relations (PR) fiasco is resonant even in the coolness of his eyes, and casualness of his detached act; Abiodun treats decadence as art, something to be proud of.

In a nutshell, he projects Ogun, the Gateway State, as a portal to monolithic filth.

He congratulates Laycon for ‘representing’ Ogun State really well, in a show that celebrates pornography, debauchery, and folly as ritualised perceptions of reality and modern cinema.

“This is the true Ogun State spirit,” he enthused. We feel Abiodun’s own connoisseurship in his action and desperate rationalisation of it.

It was, however, ennobling to read the prompt condemnation of his action by concerned citizens of Ogun State and neighbouring domains. All hope is not lost, it would seem.

Governor Abiodun’s action was meant to be a PR stunt but it falls flat on the face and intent. It projects disturbing imagery of the workings of his mind and the nature of his cabinet. His government values muck over brilliance and canonises it as its filth attic.

In the curious workings of his mind, Abiodun wished that his gift to Laycon would draw applause from Ogun youths; it was meant to project him as a hip, noble governor. But an action meant for the gallery could resonate in a tenor contrary to the intent, he would learn.

The governor’s house and cash gifts to Laycon manifest as vaunting totems of hostility and egotism. Hostility to Ogun’s unappreciated and under-served true heroes and heroines. The harsh clangour of his intent resonates as his government’s native lyric – it pitches insolently.

Abiodun glorifies filth, and his action dissembles like a peat bog in which humaneness is lost. The governor has ruined Ogun State’s repute, and no degree of PR spin could launder it clean.

Of course, his media team has sprung to action, doing “damage control.” They will issue statements and a flurry of reports to saturate the media sphere hoping to displace trending vitriol incurred by Governor Abiodun’s ill-advised PR stunt.

It’s too late for all that now. Let Abiodun man up and devote precious time to the task for which he was elected.

Life in Ogun townships is still in very grave decline. The neglected tracts constitute an ambiguous ‘sick rose’ accentuating the state’s deterioration into food for worms. Abiodun’s N5 million handout to Laycon plus the cost of the three-bedroom gift could repair the dangerous craters under the Sango bridge and the Toll Gate region for instance.

It could furnish unemployed graduates with soft SME loans. But Governor Abiodun would rather dole it out to N85 million-richer Laycon thus eliciting the dangerous rhetoric: At the last elections, did Ogun State elect a knight in shinning armour or did it suffer the affliction of a tarnished knight?

 

 

Olatunji Ololade

 

IN “The Two April Mornings” and its accompanying poem, “The Fountain,” a 72-year-old schoolmaster recalls his youth as an energetic man, Wordsworth recalls. Virility is canonized only when lost.

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

In “The Last of the Flock,” we meet a full-grown, healthy man. But he is weeping in the road. Once rich, he has sold his fifty sheep to buy food for his children. Wordsworth turns the flock’s diminishing into a litany of dwindling manhood: fifty, ten, five, three, two, one, none. The poet’s arithmetic charts the shrinking of patriarchal domain and masculinity’s supple patch. As his property shrivels to the borders of his body, the protagonist, like Odysseus or Lear, diminishes to nobody.

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

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

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

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

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

Far from the personal, what calibre of men steer the ship of the Nigerian state? Beyond our elevated treatises, political, economic, and sociological theories, who is the Nigerian male? What’s his value to the Nigerian state?

Who are we stripped of the veneer of randomly professed spirituality, feminism, chauvinism, masculinity, masochism, intellectualism, and every other ism or schism that serves and afflicts us?

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

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

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

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

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

Such comical jaunts have attained a pedestrian taste of the splattering kind. It’s gross buffoonery, and yet a rite of pagan worship in Nigeria’s sorely spiritualised and bigoted political space – some rogue pastor or alfa, religious and ethnic group eventually issues subtle or brazen threat to perceived detractors of their favoured son or daughter. Thus any blockhead or egghead may attain public office, loot the coffers, and collapse during a public inquiry or arrive on a stretcher. It never gets old. Its pure radical evil that eroticises the horror banished by norms.

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

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

Like the feminist, I would blame it all on the man. The modern male displays an incapacity for moral choice thus retreating into an ostensibly ferocious collective that must be led and vilified. But I am no feminist yet I blame the male, in particular, for the tragic turn of the Nigerian enterprise.

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

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

The importance of women empowerment, their presence in leadership roles, and their representation in government would improve governance and reduce corruption perhaps because they implement policies differently from men.

I am a man with flaws but my daughters think I am the best man in the world. That’s understandable. It will stay that way until they attain full bloom as women and start meeting other men perhaps, an epoch I ardently dread.

I hope they end up with more honourable, manly, and God-fearing men. I hope my son becomes a poster icon of humane, quintessential manhood. I hope to be that man who inspires family, friends, and the random reader, and even my most virulent antagonists to the best of manhood.

I choose to aspire as Nigeria’s finest, holding a torch for deserving women. You should too.

Olatunji Ololade

 

WE belabour the ‘Nigerian dream.’ We abuse the idea that life will get better, that progress is assured if we keep faith, obey the rules and work hard, that prosperity is guaranteed if we continue to tread the slow, steady path to progress and a prosperous future.

And in pursuit of these lofty ideals, we pervert the steady, measured course of the universe; hacking pliant paths to our dreams at the crossroads where gluttony fosters depravity and vice.

Eventually, we awaken to a cold, bitter truth: We are being sacrificed. The Nigerian dream we were sold is not worth our sacrifice. And the individual dreams we pursue, aren’t worth a smidgen of what we imagine them to be.

By the time we all struggle to achieve our dreams; Nigeria will be finished. The swollen belly of our pride shall become visible to us, and it will dawn on us, that, all along, we had been blindly acting a script prepared by career predators from Western nations of Europe, America and our ruling class.

The truth will become clearer to us and we shall realise that we have been sacrificed. We may all be sacrificed; some of us much quicker than others.

But until then, we shall squander the present on the altar of bigotry and greed. The decline of Nigeria is a story of gross injustices by the ruling class to the citizenry. But that is only an aspect of it, the greatest injustice is that meted out by individual citizen to self – the youth particularly.

Today, we suffer devastation by Boko Haram, corruption in government circuits, declining standards of living, stagnant and falling wages that are hardly paid at the due time; we suffer curtailment and absolute denial of our basic wages, long-term unemployment, slave labour, escalating crime wave, among other ills.

Together, we perpetuate gruesome realities of the weakest being crushed decisively and maniacally by the affluent and strong. An unbridled sectarian, ethnic, and corporate power has taken our government hostage while overseeing the dismantling of our cultural heritage, societal, and entrepreneurial values.

But the youth, are responsible for even worse atrocities as they are the tools by which the ruling class and cohorts overseas plunder and destroy Nigeria. The virus of political corruption, the perverted belief that only political and material profit matters, has spread to distort our thoughts and understanding of right and wrong. Today, it manifests in endemic proportions plaguing our communities with religious and political terrorism, economic and cyber-terrorism to mention a few.

At the root of all these subsists an inordinate hankering for money. Theatrical mutation, excessive self-love, and materialism, seductive principles of modern youth, can never be reconciled with growth and morality. Contemporary performances of the youth in social and political theatres emphasise Nigeria’s descent from a moral cloud into dissolute fenland.

Freedom of persona is magical but often destabilising. If married to an excessive lust for money, it becomes very frightening and overwhelming. Ultimately it destroys.

A spectre haunts Nigeria’s youths. Having entered an unholy alliance with their oppressors, the youths do not constitute formidable opposition to scare corrupt leadership aright. Negative, emasculated passivity flourishes when the youth subordinate themselves, unquestioningly, to the ruling class.

Playing passive requires extreme sacrifice; the docile youth, in fulfilling his role as gelded, amoral being, must silence his mind.

His predicament worsens by the government’s willful perversion of pedagogy. Where education festers as an affliction, scholarship and enlightenment become empty phrases, foisting on Nigeria, an illiterate, passive youth.

The government equally does its part in keeping the youth docile and deployable towards selfish ends. How? By destroying Nigeria’s educational foundation as well as the possibility of its rebirth.

An educated mind is a questioning mind, which conflicts with the whims of Nigeria’s oppressors. Public officers, irrespective of party affiliation, would rather see the citizenry stew in ignorance than enjoy quality education and attain true enlightenment.

Aspects of government policies and spending render the average youth poorly educated. This year’s education allocation, like previous years’ may not enjoy a rare boost beyond seven per cent of the national budget. Not with the COVID-19 crisis.

President Muhammadu Buhari allocated a paltry 6.7% of his initial N10.33 trillion national budget to the education sector, lower than the 20 percent recommended by UNESCO as education budget for developing countries.

Nigeria deserves, at least, an 18 per cent allocation to the education sector. This, President Buhari must acknowledge in future allocations to the sector. He should make the best use of his second term, and scorn the ‘highly informed, expert opinions’ that counsel an ‘expedient’ and ‘radical’ recourse to the policies foisted on us when ‘structural adjustment’ forced Nigeria to reduce spending on education, health, and infrastructure, among others.

The bankruptcy of Nigeria’s economic and political systems are attributable to her comatose education sector, and an elite given free rein to organise education and society around “predetermined answers to predetermined questions.”

The current system has been effectively rigged to produce what many corporate hierarchies persistently cite as “unemployable graduates.” The few “employable” ones are mostly scions of Nigeria’s leadership, and they are recruited from Ivy League and mushroom universities abroad, where they have been schooled only to fulfil responsibilities and find solutions that will preserve the status quo.

They are incapable of asking the broad, universal questions – staples of a deeply grounded, socially conscious educational process. Both “employable” and “unemployable” graduates were never equipped to challenge the superficial and deepest assumptions of Nigeria’s decadent economic and political culture.

They can neither discern nor convincingly evaluate, superficial aspects of popular culture vis-a-vis the harsh realities of political and economic mismanagement.

They are ignorant because they had never been taught to condemn and scorn human nature’s propensity for moral greyness when confronted with a choice between good and evil.

Lacking a contemplative spirit, they do not understand why Socrates identified all virtues as forms of knowledge and why such knowledge may foster privileged civilisation.

To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs or PriceWater HouseCoopers, argues Hedges, “is to educate him or her in skill. To train them to debate experiential, systemic, and humanist ways of grappling with reality, however, is to educate them in values and morals.”

Indeed, a culture that mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the true measure of a civilisation is its compassion, not its speed at conquest and consumption, spiritedly condemns itself to death.

In true Hedges-speak, humaneness is the product of the enlightenment, a comprehensive, adequately funded, and supervised educational process, but Nigeria’s leadership is ignorant of such civilisation. It is a product of society’s moral void.

Blinded by greed and bigotries, they neglect the gaping inadequacies of the country’s educational policies and spending, to service enduring, institutionalised corruption, like outrageous executive, legislative and judicial salaries.

Buhari could yet midwife a constructive civilisation by treading the path less taken. An 18 per cent budgetary allocation, or thereabouts, to the education sector, followed by eagle-eyed monitoring of “projects,” could trigger Nigeria’s renascence.

 

Olatunji Ololade

Porn has evolved from the airbrushed glossy spreads and smut-prints of “Better Lover,” “Dauda the sexy guy” to amateur flicks hawked on seedy websites. It is now trendy and easily accessible. Porn is political, as the pageantry of curvaceous ladies or BBWs if you like, contracted to enliven the campaign of a legislative hopeful with raunchy “twerks” and hip-rolls at the 2019 general elections.

Porn has evolved from presenting humans as sexual commodities to corporate, political pop culture. In Nigeria, it fuses with the commercial mainstream to win the culture war. Hence exhibitionism, promiscuity, and outright porn are mainstream chic, no thanks to ‘emancipated’ thinking and muck-fests, like the big pervert reality show.

The show glorifies as its core message, an innate claim that we’d all like to be porn stars at one point in our life or another. Predictably this narrative runs the gamut of modern Nigerian life; fashion takes lessons from porn. Movie and music video directors, artistes, and the chain of backroom production staff vie to fulfill a morbid stereotype that ‘enlivens’ music and movies with porn scenes.

Characterisation re-imagines men as disposable tools while portraying girls and women as sex machines, porn-rats, or video vixens if you like.

The language and moral bankruptcy of porn mould and redefine popular culture; ditto the sex games at popular night clubs, and the after-parties of major entertainment awards where revellers get plastered, and randomly have sex as a frantic mime of western notions of celebrity and hipness.

Producers of the big pervert reality show have told Nigeria that her women are sexual commodities and porn assets. Every year, they teach Nigeria to redefine and accept her daughters as whores: docile whores, opinionated whores, while reinforcing narratives of the Nigerian male as brute chauvinists, and numbskulls with ripped torsos. But all is fair game as long as parties profit from the whorish enterprise.

So, the show’s producers, while ‘enabling’ Nigeria’s youth to seize supposedly grand opportunities to acclaim, state emphatically, that, the Nigerian daughter is a whore, and the Nigerian son is a whore-monger. And whores deserve to be dominated and abused hence the pornographic shower hours, sex in the house’s public toilet, frantic fondling, and intercourse. Once the live-in whore-mongers have had their way with the whores, or vice versa, they are discarded or ‘evicted’ – except the one that emerges winner.

The show manifests a more dangerous pandemic; it glorifies the illimitability of lust. Its a disease that thrives on the ability to wield money and fame to induce others to fulfill random, subhuman sensuality.

Very soon, the show’s producers will include same-sex intercourse in its offerings. It will broadcast in the near future, an edition featuring more children of influential public officers engaged in same-sex unions. It’s a sure-fire path to desensitising Nigeria to homosexuality and further brainwash an amoral youth population to embrace filth as civilisation. After all, they got away with featuring foremost statesman, Obafemi Awolowo’s descendant in their muck-fest.

The show’s audiences should also look out for that edition featuring their favourite celebrity artistes, authors, on-air personalities, journalists, public officers, and corporate titans – they will legitimise the show’s decadent jousts with morality and make pornography even more mainstream.

The best way to destroy the system is to debauch its major currency: fear. Fear is responsible for society’s amoral swerve to the decadent. Fear has become a legal tender shadowing more informal fears. Politicians prey on fear. They know the citizenry lives under a slew of fears. The fear of poverty; fear of the police; fear of COVID-19; fear of soldiers, shylock landlords, and ill-health. As COVID-19 wreaks greater havoc, more businesses and homes slip into financial crisis and the Naira unravels becoming worthless on the watch of a leadership desperate to borrow and squander its way out of a pandemic and deepening recession.

Dystopia dawns, and the citizenry, continually robbed of hope and socialised to scavenge the dump of the national sweepstakes, frantically seek escape. So doing, they embrace and celebrate filth like the big pervert reality show. They confuse pornography with diligence and celebrate it as a higher industry.

The illusion deepens when they enjoy the rare fortune of being selected as participants, after committing to several days of prayer and dry-fast, as revealed by a three-time applicant to the  reality show.

The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered Nigeria wants to confront it thus the citizenry’s recourse to manufactured illusions and pseudo-realities of TV shows, celebrity trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying civilisation.

The severe economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has no doubt, reordered society, inducing calls for social discipline and a new moral code. Any new revolutionary movement may topple the political system only by entrenching a new moral code.

In The Republic, Plato imagines human beings chained for the duration of their lives in an underground cave, knowing nothing but darkness. Their gaze is confined to the cave wall, upon which shadows of the world above are thrown. They believe these flickering silhouettes are reality.

If, Plato writes, one of these prisoners is freed and brought into the sunlight, he will suffer temporary blindness but eventually, his eyes will adjust to the light. The illusion of the tiny shadows on the cave wall is decisively obliterated.

But he is despised when he returns to the cave as he is unable to see in the dark as he used to. Those who never left the cave ridicule him and swear never to go into the light lest they are blinded as well.

Plato feared the power of entertainment, the power of the senses to overthrow the mind thus his admonition that the enlightened or elite had a duty to educate those bewitched by the shadows on the cave wall, a position that led Socrates to quip: “As for the man who tried to free them and leads them upward if they could somehow lay their hands on him and kill him, they would do so.”

The more we sever ourselves from reality and embrace illusions, the more we are destined to implode. The earth is strewn with the ruins of powerful civilizations that decayed—Egypt, Persia, the Mayan empires, Rome, among others. Not all died for the same reasons but they all suffered affliction by a bankrupt, corrupt elite.

The latter squandered resources and pillaged the state, and became unable to muster internal allegiance and cohesiveness. These empires collapsed structurally in the wake of their moral demise. The leaders, in the final period of decay, increasingly had to deploy state law enforcers like armed mercenaries until they lost control of the latter. The citizenry descended into orgies of violence and self-indulgence. They surrendered their civic and emotional lives to the spectacle and violence of the political and social arena.

This depicts the state of modern Nigeria, where the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical, as Boorstin writes, have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous until reality itself has been converted into stagecraft.