Category: Olatunji Ololade

By Olatunji Ololade

In The Emperor’s Tomb, Joseph Roth chronicles the decay of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, writing that at the very end of the empire, even the street-lights longed for dawn so that they could be extinguished.

The undercurrent of modern Nigeria, where people are reduced to objects, where values erode and nationhood dreams collapse, incites a similar yearning for annihilation and what Hedges calls a moral decline into hedonism and giddy, communal madness.

Understandably Nigerians seek escape from their daily miseries. They crave distraction from the narratives of pain and desolation. But rather than seize their destinies and change their stars through the ballot box at election time, they have embraced spectacle and pseudo-events.

They covet amusement like the ongoing big pervert reality show – I will not state the actual name of the muck-fest lest it resounds as yet another free advertorial for its dastardly plots.

For effect, the show constructs symbolic psychology that’s very much pedestrian yet perplexing to its host society. One of its basic patterns is to incite warring contraries among the citizenry thus stratifying them into an extreme left, a complacent middle, and immoderate right.

An overarching theme of the show, however, is its incitement of bitter confrontations and perverse bonding between male and female participants, ethicists, and corruptible divides among citizenry segments.

In the show, immoderate lust and sex are weaponised as themes of competitive power relations, towards which Nigeria takes a moralist stance yet responds impotently by patronising its torrid dross.

The country’s broadcast regulator, forever sterile in thought, and dubious in candour, issues cowardly ripostes to critics of the show’s insolent attacks on Nigeria’s cultural structures. To those who scoff, “What cultural structures?”, I say, “Don’t be silly.”

While it’s a given that the National Assembly is habitually toothless against the big pervert reality show, it was hitherto unthinkable that a government presided over by supposed moral exemplars, Muhammadu Buhari and Yemi Osinbajo, would leave Nigeria beholden to merchants of filth. But then they are only Nigeria’s President and Vice President, and they are powerless against rights arguments and the show’s decadent hordes.

To those claiming that it’s all in the interest of fostering a conducive business environment, China has outlawed the show alongside every TV programming that ridicules Chinese traditions and “defiles the classics” including those that promote “overnight fame, wealth parade or hedonism, selfishness, and intrigue.” Despite its media censorship, China appreciates in repute as a global super power and economic giant.

Yet morality and rights hypocrites would flay China for its media censorship and conveniently ignore Nigeria’s newfound love for Chinese loans, media, and economic imperialism.

The incumbent government is curiously beholden to the show’s producers thus its cowardly preachment that the muck-fest is restricted to a satellite TV channel, and that there is no compulsion to view it. This is a silly argument; for instance, the last time I viewed the show was at its maiden edition in 2005, while I reported for Tell Magazine. In subsequent years, I suffered exposure to its gist via unsolicited media reports.

The show desensitizes its teeming viewers to wanton amorality and psychological rape, even as it suits the government’s vampiric plots. Teenagers, young adults, and older persons are psychologically exploited and manipulated on one front by the show’s producers for profit; on another front, the show serves as a powerful distraction, diverting the citizenry’s attention from more crucial public concerns of comatose industry, treasury looting, non-existent infrastructure, terrorism, substandard schools, and health facilities.

A lesser fraction of the country’s productive labour force and the youthful electorate is currently concerned about the corruption allegation against the Interim Management Committee of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), and how the commission allegedly looted N81.5 billion within six months.

Many more would rather obsess over the shenanigans of the big pervert reality show’s lab rats than protest bad roads, the mismanagement of COVID-19 palliatives, and engage in more constructive quests at nation-building.

They are smitten with a show that 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.

In Nigeria, porn has won the culture war by fusing with the commercial mainstream. Nudity, promiscuity, and random sex are mainstream chic, no thanks to the big pervert reality show.

Nigerian fashion takes its cues from porn. Music videos mime porn scenes and present women as porn-rats, or video vixens if you like. Broadcast advertisements, traditional and new media exploit porn for shock value. Little wonder the big pervert reality show posits an entertainment culture that dignifies decadence and amoral seduction.

The show targets the youth, and successfully sever their audience’s mental connection with moral roots. The so-called leaders of tomorrow are thus lured backward, away from menarche into the womb of regression.

As I observed in a previous piece, the inmates are enclosed in a zone of morbid ecstasy. They are untouchable, carriers of charisma kept under quarantine, till they emerge as bearers of dirt.

All of the show’s participants, irrespective of gender, are non-persons, subject to mass cheering and shunning. The eventual winner, like other participants in the show, emerges blinded by celebrity and severely crippled to function as a normal constituent of a humane society.

As participants in the show, their imagination is loosened, but their bodies are bound in ritual restriction. They are daemonic tools, sacrificial totems maddened by intoxicants: alcohol and human milk, fluid of slovenly genitals.

The heated debate over their sexual indulgences is familiarly rife with sentiments as societal segments engage in a clash of obscenities in defense or condemnation of goings-on, on the show.

The participants’ sexual indiscretions are untidy and shattering, according to media reports.

Viewers’ morality has been seduced and conquered as the producers render sensuality aglow in gothic gloom. The big pervert reality show thus legitimises carnal depravity and brokers pornography via its bedchamber of rank and malodorous sex.

Any critic of the show is, however, deemed ‘hypocrite,’ a disgruntled visionary who feels too deeply and sees too much and is tortured by his own vision.

Shall we seek import, still, in a social media post by a certain Shakeerah S. It goes thus: In 2018, the total number of votes on the show was 170 million. In sharp contrast, the total number of votes cast at the 2019 general election was 27 million.

Then she writes: “A practical reality of who we are as a people and where our priority lies as citizens. The funny side in all of these; we still go to bed, have a good sleep, and wake up with the hope to meet Nigeria we didn’t create.”

This brings us to the Nigeria of our dreams vs the Nigeria of our reality. Do we deserve Nigeria as it is? Yes, we do.

Nonetheless, the country’s youth clamour for change. They want a revolution and a radical improvement on the status quo. But how can they exact change while they are perceptually enslaved?

 

By Olatunji Ololade

The people’s patriot is often a victim of his own love. Love for others’ well-being. His body is sculpted tilth and his soul unfurls as a humid bower. He radically bleeds body and soul to seek and fulfill his people’s voiced wishes and unarticulated simple lusts. He studies communal silence in order to speak it.

Eventually, he finds that he had squandered rhetoric and spunk on the perfidious. He is hung out to dry by the populace whose interests he sought to protect. Never inclined to be apostate, his passion dries out. Where it doesn’t, he is dismissed as a ‘noise-maker’ as Nigeria’s political class, partisan press and treacherous segments of the citizenry eventually labelled foremost patriot, late Gani Fawehinmi.

In Fawehinmi’s wake, successive “patriots” have embraced the wisdom of keeping quiet. They scoff at the romanticized clamour to topple the oppressive oligarchs knowing Nigerians would yet sacrifice them and settle for an opportunistic contract between their exploiters (the government), and a part of the exploited (labour and youth leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin aptly identifies as “the original sweetheart agreement.”

Enter the chameleon patriot: having witnessed the tragedy of his martyred peer, he seeks self-preservation. Every thought and action of his, is a frantic swerve to advance personal interests. He is also a victim of his own lust; he feeds flesh and soul to the dark fangs of its vampirism. His obsessive lust steals his years and drains his lusts but he hardly cares as he laughs all the way to the bank.

The chameleon patriot is more delicately constituted than the people’s patriot. He is sensible to pain and pleasure but trades and profits on collective miseries. He is the gubernatorial or presidential Chief of Staff, the Presidential Adviser/Assistant on Media Affairs, Attorney-General. Sometimes, he is the Governor, the President, dishonest bank chief, or Chief Justice.

Of course, there are always a few men and women, who are heroic indeed and candour but they hardly survive power’s serpentine corridors.

Thus the chameleon patriot dissolves into multiple identities characterised by the political arena’s familiar bogeys. His transformation is akin to Fagunwa’s mythical forest ghommid’s. Other beings pass through him as if he were a wraith; he mutates into a creep, a scalawag, dream-killer, and intellectual thug. He is the menacing snake in Nigeria’s green pasture.

He is the product of a moral void; the casualty of a system that bullies the populace to pacify and please authority. For education, he is taught to cheat the system and applaud financial theft as a shrewd corporate strategy.

He is unaware, writes Deresiewicz, that, the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. During the lockdown, for instance, when panic and states’ defensives against the COVID-19 were intense, several youths posted on social media, pictures of their newly acquired certificates. So doing, they rebuked with glazed contempt, those who hadn’t seized the benefits of the “free time” and acquired one or two certificates courtesy the numerous free professional courses online.

Oftentimes, such posts revealed the depth of the poster’s ignorance or the poverty of his or her mind. One such self-identified “over-achiever, sapiosexual and alpha-female” admonished her peers to quit reading “useless novels” and instead commit to more beneficial exploits, like earning a certificate in “coding” or “digital influencing.”

She shouldn’t be blamed for being so “practical” and “deliberate” to “make cheddar (money),” to borrow her words; many like her responded to her post, sharing pictures of their newly acquired certificates in fresh, tactual, vocational competencies that would supposedly improve their lot in the labour market for supposedly practical, futuristic jobs.

The poor missy and her ilk forget that even the fanciest certificates have expiration dates in the dynamic technological world. Only “useless novels” offer timeless nourishment of minds and souls.

The anomaly reflects a grievous affliction of Nigeria’s labour sector where individuals are propelled into trendy specialties. The frenzy to acquire fancy, professional certificates aids a retreat of supposedly productive segments into specialized ghettos spanning the range of vocational and academic disciplines.

Of course, there are gifted, evolved individuals who read to expand the life of the mind and ask the big questions but they are often a negligible minority.

Nigeria had brilliant geophysicists, accountants, and engineers working for multinationals and banks, but it was the Awolowos, Soyinkas, and Achebes that set Nigeria on the global map as a nation of genii and vast talents.

While the multinational staff clocked lucrative colossal hours and faithfully managed systems, it was the authors of what the misguided “alpha” missy called “useless literature” that inspired decisive national debates on crucial issues like the civil war, policy failure, foreign relations, political ethics, and the nationhood question.

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-hunting professional. This disconnect subsists across professions, government, and academia. Nigerian economists, for instance, chant elaborate theoretical models yet know little of how their fancy, soulless economics impacts on rural poetry and suburban lives.

The core of our education and politics is driven to replicate American values or secure a seat at Europe or Asia’s table. We must shun such colonial mentality and take visionary steps to build our own table and craft seats for our own table.

This would be asking too much, however, of the digital alpha breed, who see novels as “useless literature” ill-suited to nation-building and money-making ventures.

Their fancy certificates and futuristic competencies may earn them money in the short-run but they will lose it all in the long-run to the same system that taught them to be soulless savages.

Many of them study to obtain perfect grades in tedious economic classes and stirring literary lessons. But while they may know the plot and salient details of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, they are unable to tell why the story was revealing of colonial insolence or why Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was worthy as a bristling response.

Writers from Euripides to Banks, Soyinka, Achebe, and Fagunwa have used literature as both a mirror and a lens, to reflect society’s hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice.

It was Charles Dickens who directed the attention of middle-class readers to the slums and workhouses of London. Honors de Balzac ripped open France’s callous heart through the volumes of his Human Comedy.

And it was Fagunwa who took us all on a philosophical adventure through The Forest of a Thousand Daemons to uncover hard, immutable truths about life, spirituality, self, and wisdom. The messages resonate in the discerning heart and forelock, long after the last page has rustled shut.

Olatunji Ololade

 

THIS would be about Ibrahim Magu, embattled boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), had I a sore need to be trendy or lust for the applause of dedicated pundit circuits. It isn’t.

It would be about the plots and counter-plots within the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), had I the knack for “informed political analysis” if such a thing ever truly exists, especially in modern Nigeria, where politicians set the agenda for the media and not the other way round.

Yet the debate intensifies in real-time about the predicament of the EFCC boss and APC drama. Is Magu a random casualty of the frantic plots and ambition of governors and presidential aides en route the 2023 general elections? Is he guilty of the charges against him? To what quest would the EFCC be deployed en-route 2023, without Magu?

Whatever the tenor of your preferred narrative, is it repugnant of truth and the cardinal principles of citizenship and political discourse, or otherwise? Is your narrative objective or purely sentimental?

Nigeria’s revulsion from the political class is always an emotional swerve. A selfish, juvenile pirouette, where participants trade places to suit their random lusts.

For instance, pro-Buhari camp considers him infallible and a victim of the plotting of covetous governors and a shady cabal.

But his virulent critics think otherwise; for all his touted honesty, Buhari’s ascetically transparent flesh appears coarsely shady and dormant to them.

In Buhari and Magu’s travails, we see the humiliating changes that life and power exert on persons of authority and high glamour. The lambent complexion turns muddy; the aura vanishes.

Integrity is innately borne and espoused as a kernel of character but respect is a gift under no one’s control. It peaks and ebbs as spectator mood at a crunch soccer tie.

A familiar decline from admiration to disillusion occurs in the politics of nepotism, in Buhari’s lethargic response to intra-party bickering and the herdsmen’s bloodlust; but his greatest undoing would be his inability to douse the flames of bigotries and hatred incited by his actions and inactions.

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

Through the inferno and chaos, we seek a redefinition of the Nigerian patriot. Strikeout patriot; it’s about time we redefined the Nigerian.

Nigerian – a clownish, simple creature, at times even enchanting within its limitations but ultimately foredoomed to fulfill a prophecy of blind pride, insatiable lust, and suicide.

It is never my wish to subject our kind to seemingly reckless deprecation but even as you read, the average Nigerian perfects innumerable plots to self-destruct.

Behind those suicidal plots lurks a postscript, and predictably, regret – that emotive shingle that often succeeds disreputable nature.

Yet we stand ignorant and proud, like a half-conscious mutter of men, craving the essence of humanity and freedom, only to forsake it for a token or fleeting sentiment at election time. Just like we did last March.

This is the tangle of witlessness and resignation that requires us all to become better patriots and rejuvenators of the Nigerian dream.

If we look carefully inwards, we will find that beneath our passiveness and utter cowardice stirs a quest for self-preservation and gruesome airs.

Time and over again, a few critics and self-appointed leaders of thought have decried our ethical fraudulence and lack of guts; such curious kinks of the Nigerian mind, unfortunately, do exist at a grievous price and must be reckoned with.

Yet these shameful twists to our psyches make us even more vulnerable as fair game to gangs of the predatory ruling class.

The latter cannot be wished away or successfully weeded out by violence or bloodshed even if we tried.

They must not be allowed continual access to leadership and power even as we accept them as grotesque manifestations of the Nigerian factor; monstrosities standing in the way of civilization, progress, and common decency.

They can only be confronted by methodical savagery, and eliminated by an expansion in breadth of human reason, catholicity of will and culture.

The native aspiration of such men to loot our coffers and feed their greed must not be encouraged any further nor should we persist in pitiful complacency and eagerness to acquiesce to their boorish enterprises, for the love of a token.

To stimulate our wildly weak and untamed minds is to ignite a ravenous and uncontrollable fire; and to impede our often rudderless enterprise is to incite our volatile minds to a harvest of violence and blood-letting. Apology to Dubois.

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

To these bothersome questions and contradictory tributaries of thought, the potent and yet inadequately explored panacea of education towers above all others.

We live in dire need of human training that will awaken our minds to the timeless knowledge inherent in ideals and the practical, the realistic and the fantastic, the permanent and the contingent, in a workable equilibrium.

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

The other fraction consists of the methodically savage kind including the so-called articulate, cultured, progressive breed comprising young, upwardly mobile professionals: doctors, engineers, journalists, lawyers, teachers, the armed forces, civil servants, unemployed graduates.

Both divides are afflicted by bitter cynicism and despondency. They betray as much bestiality as the political class particularly in instances demanding inviolable tact, sensitivity, and maturity.

Their reactions to arrest and subsequent trial of corrupt public officers, for instance, provide a worthy yardstick by which they may be judged.

Many would adduce reasons bordering on ethnic and religious bigotries in decrying the “persecution” of alleged looters of public office even where the latter have issued confessions substantiating the charges against them.

Such characters are incapable of rational, cognitive, and affective sensitivities pivotal to nation-building.

Everyday encounters with gluttonous gangs of “struggling youth” reveal, among other things, that, many are the same social products as their peers among the political class.

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

How could such vitally impaired characters be trusted to conduct their affairs appropriately and judiciously? Thus the imperative of a practical, ingenious process of human training in the struggle to build a truly progressive and formidable movement of the people, for the people, and by the people.

Yet democracy is simply never enough. Nigeria will never become that model nation of our dreams until we learn to evolve a social process that enables sufficient nurturing, the guidance of thought, and adroit coordination of deeds – sureties to freedom, peace, equality, justice, and national rebirth.

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

 

• To be continued…

 

By Olatunji Ololade

Toxic masculinity’ is the new rage. It connotes everything supposedly wrong with Nigeria’s male folk. Coined in supposedly feminist circuits, an obsession with it at the homefront highlights the workings of the misandrist mind. Yea, most of Nigeria’s self-confessed feminists are misandrists or closet man-haters.

Shall we apologise to ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative feminists?’ It’s only fair that they answer for society’s affliction by Feminazis just as the latter tars every male with the sins of misogyny.

Man hating feminists are done playing catch-up ball. Like tyrant nature, they are making up the rules and redefining the parameters of gender relations in their onslaught against man and society.

They hope that by recasting man’s identity in the furnace of their torrid intellect, the patriarchy would be cowed and defeated. As far as utopian fantasies go, that is achievable only in misandrist dystopia.

By chanting the sins of toxic maleness, they seek to force men on a defensive swerve. With delusional certitude, they aim to usurp the patriarchy and seize control of society. But like all things novel, they will enjoy their seasons of anomie and pretension to sentience. They will seem to ‘run things,’ until their sandcastles come tumbling down.

The Nigerian man must, however, live to thwart the onset of misandrist dystopia. Right now, he manifests as a lost cause. Having strayed in the maze of perverse feminist plots and literature, he navigates manhood, answering to name-plates forged by his nemesis.

By remoulding him into a demon, a doormat and social affliction, feral misandrists, or Feminazis, if you like, gain an edge over him. The exploitative nature of rapists, murderers, looters, assassins, paedophiles, and tyrants among men further affirms misandrist claims against the Nigerian man.

They argue, “Since man is a beast and affliction to women and the girl-child, he must be inconsequential in the scheme of things.” In truth, he is.

Misandry and demonisation of men have devalued male worth to the extent that society is blasé about the predicament of men and the boy-child. This is responsible for the shocking bias in the lack of attention to men’s and boys’ health in general, for instance, while the mass media and health advocacy groups perpetually obsess about women’s health and the girl-child’s.

The absurdity of this mindset is that while girls are badgered with crucial health information even before puberty, boys, with whom they engage in random acts of sexual misdemeanour and experimentation are virtually ignored.

The cultural and institutional misandry perpetuated by misguided ‘feminists’ aggravate the destruction of the family system and deny the boychild the boon of an external role model especially when he must seek outside his family for heroes.

Boys are in trouble; due to the lack of positive male role models in their lives, they get what they can from TV, anti-male films, and video games. All they need is someone whose exemplary footsteps they could follow but the society provides them only men they could dumb down to.

A recent analysis of 2, 000 mass media portrayals of men and male identities, found that men were depicted mostly as villains, aggressors, perverts, and philanderers. From this stock-pile of anti-heroes, the boy-child is expected to navigate for a good male identity.

Promoting the image of men as juvenile, mean, and stupid is cynical and exploitative, which makes the tide of inverse sexism that has swamped out television screens even more appalling.

In modern Nigeria, boys and young men suffer a dire lack of role models, especially if they are raised in a single-parent home, as one in eight children now are. The situation is worsened by the lack of positive role models in government and the perpetuation of overwhelmingly negative images of men by the media and feminist scholarly research.

Ultimately such portrayals lead to negative social costs for society in areas such as male health, rising suicide rates, and family disintegration. This is a precarious age for the boychild. He is taught to repudiate patriarchal notions of manhood and imbibe effeminacy as the cornerstone of his becoming.

If you are a father reading this, it is not too late to teach your son to be a man. Teach him to dismiss aggressive and perverse conditioning hurled at him in the classroom, in the worship houses, by the mainstream and new media.

Teach him to be proud of the patriarchy, and contribute to its ontology by his blooming as an evolved man. Teach him to be pitiless with odds but gentle and firm with feral females. Teach him to be just and humane, impartial, and kind, in his dealings with both genders. Do not ever, ever go out of your way to raise him as a feminist. Instead, teach him to be human. It’s enough to raise him on a gruelling diet of tough love, humaneness, godliness, compassion, and honest industry.

Do not raise your son to be gender-neutral. Teach him that gender is never entirely a social construct and that the ‘nature vs nurture’ dichotomy is a farce. Cultures build on biological foundation. Hence biologic determinism precedes socially learnt roles. It’s nature and nurture engaged in complex interactions.

Teach him that it is never manly to hit a woman whatever the magnitude of her toxicity. Teach him to understand, that, if feminism for all its double standard and monstrosities is declared a movement for women’s emancipation and equality with men, chauvinism too may pass as both his rampart and riposte to the toxic feminist’s gendered storms.

Teach him to redefine chauvinism as a movement for family, nationalism, and human rights. Teach him to avoid living to stereotypes and the entrapment of what the Yoruba proverbially dissects as ‘Iku ti npa ni.’

Teach him to deal with his woman with caution; even while loving her deeply, protecting her and providing all of her needs, he must never forget to preserve self and family.

Teach him to honour women of all shades and temperament. Even the most toxic feminist deserves his respect and gift of subtle re-enlightenment. If her temper gets too ugly like a wilding’s, teach him the wisdom of keeping the distance and self-preservation.

The Nigerian boychild needs worthy role models unlike the sex-crazed, drug addicts parading as hip hop artistes, industry titans, and politicians among others. Teach him to understand that not all men would attain the height and billions of Aliko Dangote and that success is never always determined by his fellowship of Tony Elumelu’s Heirs’ network.

Help him understand that it is sickly to claim that as a millennial, he has no time to read. He hasn’t the attention span of a dimwit, does he? Teach him to appreciate literature’s long reads and journalism’s long forms as the best of mankind’s intellectual gifts.

And above all, give him the gift of vision and higher learning. Teach him to understand that progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the Olympian, and the lifting of his weaker peers, irrespective of gender, slowly and painfully to his vantage ground, as Du Bois would say.

Let this be part of your gift of manhood to the boy-child. He needs not alms, but a teacher; not rage, but character.

 

• This piece was published last year but edited and reproduced in commemoration of the recent Fathers’ Day celebration.

Olatunji Ololade

 

Nigeria suffers a crisis of the male gender. The lobotomised male was manhood’s dirty secret. It’s not much of a secret anymore, however.

Culturally benumbed to maleness, he loiters at ethical crossroads. He struggles “to be a man” while juggling traditional and liberal precepts of his becoming.

Essentially, he must unlearn norms and notions of manhood. To unlearn what makes him man, however, is to fall, fatally. His fatal fall is a consequence of losing his role as the lead, in the gendered mating dance.

But he can blame no one for falling for female belly magic. It’s a consequence of being smitten by woman’s uncanny being.

Picture, for instance, the pathetic case of a southwest governor whose masculinity was challenged and cancelled out by his wife, in their youth.

The wife, to the chagrin of the governor’s relatives, claimed to have lobotomised him. State House legend contends that Madam First Lady continually boasts to aides and peers that she is the de facto governor of the state.

Her husband, His Excellency, reportedly found in her, a mentor and sex vixen in their youth. Consequently, she placed him on a leash of cash, connections, and sexuality grooming, she bragged.

Now, stunted in full bloom, His Excellency is being kept as a parlour pet by his wife. The consequences of his failing, however, manifest dangerously on their ward(s) and poor citizenry of the state, who are forced to endure his effeminacy and inefficiency. Growing up, Mr. Governor lacked the presence of a worthy father-figure, it would seem.

Masculinity flows from nature as an aspect of the birth mother, no doubt, but it is sculpted by society and a father figure into effective manhood.

The boy-child learns by instruction, counselling, and imitation. The father moulds his character by careful nurturing, awarding punishment for vice, and reward for virtue. So doing, he teaches him to be a man within acceptable precepts of culture and society.

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

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

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

Manhood, encumbered by their debt to a physical mother through birth, and to the significant female other through romance, procreation and uxorial labour, created an alternate reality in which they could repay their debts by protecting women and fending for their needs.

Woman, at first placid in man’s protections but now inflamed via feminist-misandry with desire for her own illusory freedom, invades man’s systems and corrupts them by starting a gender war and rewriting man’s origins.

Thus the corruption of Gender Studies and its fallacy that gender is a social construct. Overdosing on theoretical dope, the feminist-misandrist channels juvenile rage to usurp man’s roles at home and in the society.

The manifestations are all around us as subtle and aggressive messages of misandrist campaigns at work, in the arts, literature, and media. Consider too, the periodic conferences of Nigerian and African women on professional and sociopolitical platforms.

These fora have become a thing, mostly tailored to improve the lot of the female from high school students, undergrads, boardroom titans to housewives. This deserves applause.

It may be decently inferred too, that Nigeria’s female folk deservedly dominate literary publishing as writers, critics, readers, and publishers. The genres of literary fiction and chick-lit are particularly dominated by female narratives.

Where the writer isn’t female, he must present a female protagonist and patronise feminist or misandrist perspectives to enjoy acceptance and literary acclaim, oftentimes.

Of course, there is nothing wrong if the protagonist is female, its the tenor and intent of the narrative that becomes cringe-worthy. Yet art must mirror reality, some would argue.

How real and didactic are the narratives? Consequence-free promiscuity, lesbianism, transgenderism, misogamy, and outright misandry are common themes.

Even the brilliant motifs of self-actualisation and financial independence of the woman are often weaponised and tailored for the random sex, lesbianism, misandrist wonderland.

The movies are a different kettle of fish entirely as the highlighted themes are aggressively cued into plots of numerous ‘blockbusters’ and social dramas.

Kudos, however, to Stephanie Okereke, whose movie, Dry, addresses the challenges of child marriage in progressive, resonant reels.

While it is inspiring to see the Nigerian woman assert herself and take the lead in the gender politics and plots of her becoming, it is saddening to see our males stew in criminality and ignorance.

Little wonder that misandry, masquerading as feminism, has gained a monopoly of Gender Studies. Men don’t have a gender identity anymore, only women have a gender identity and an intrinsic value to society, and this sentiment is scripted to carefully articulated propaganda.

The concept of authoritative, strong, independent, passionate, and intelligent manhood is persistently repudiated except it serves the misandrist cause.

So when a young boy reaches the age where it’s appropriate for him to be initiated into manhood, we find the whole idea of “reaching manhood” laughable.

Yet while the successful woman mentors protégées and aids their growth, her male peer, in contrast, breeds protégés as thugs, treasury looters, assassins, terrorists, arsonists, internet hooligans, to mention a few.No man should blame the woman for stealing his thunder.

The modern woman asserts her dominion in culture, sex, and gender politics, and her campaign is heavily funded too, by international NGOs seeking to destabilise the African family and social space.

Of course, the Nigerian woman is game, craftily straddling the politics of influence, while decisively tossing the man in his place. But what really is the Nigerian man’s place? Confusion leads to grave consequences.

Confusions about masculinity have led to a situation whereby Nigeria is afflicted by men who do not know how to be men.

The predominantly male political and business classes, for instance, comprise amoral men, and weaklings, whose claim to renown subsists in predatory policies and transactions; then perverse sexuality and whoredom. This shady manhood persists in the shadowy middle class to the boondocks.

Their vulturine disposition to governance, citizenship and family afflicts Nigeria with an army of young, virile males who are condemned to survive, daily, as maddened Marlians, treasury looters, school drop-outs, assassins, Yahoo-boys, kidnappers, terrorists, armed robbers, political thugs, ethnic warlords, land-grabbers, prostitutes and rapists to mention a few.

Many among these grew up without appropriate father figures and male guardians. They grew up without the nurturing of appropriate mother-figures too.

There are very few models of fatherhood in the country at the moment. Many men have ceded their roles to their wives, who in turn, have ceded motherhood and their inherited roles as fathers, to their wards’ teachers, pastors, neighbours, house-helps, and extended family members.

 

To be continued…

This piece was published last year but edited and reproduced in commemoration of the recent Fathers’ Day celebration.

Olatunji Ololade

Politicians boast of turning scorched earth to gold but all they do is dull precious metal to dross. They promise to turn the underdog to overlord, but all they do is make street-sweepers of the strapping and sewage cleaners of the literate.

More impatient youth get by in the shadowy political economy as goons, assassins, career protesters, and internet hooligans. Those who fall outside the bracket of patronage end up as armed robbers, kidnappers, drug mules, and human traffickers.

Thus is the fate of the jobless, the burly segment comprising Nigeria’s 23.1 per cent unemployed and 16.6 per cent underemployed youth, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. With over 20 million jobless youths, the catacombs of Nigeria’s unemployment maze are infinitely dilated for the incumbent administration’s gothic drama.

On President Muhammadu Buhari’s watch, you win some, you lose more. But while his lackeys preach sacrifice as a necessary ritual of riddance of the afflictions wrought by previous administrations’ corrupt leadership, let them desist from making his government food for worms – that we might know if Buhari is truly in charge and he means well.

Presidency groupies, waving a flag of integrity, highlight “change” and the “order of sacrifice” as infinitely matchless and preferable to the previous administration’s “transformation agenda.” But how do they define sacrifice?

Does their definition address the legislative, executive, and judicial officers receiving outrageous salaries and illicit benefits even as the nation cowers in depression? Does it ignore and downplay troublesome political and ethical ambiguities of Buhari’s leadership?

Is their demand for maximal sacrifice from the country’s working class, the unemployed and underprivileged divides matched with commensurate sacrifice by the nation’s ruling class?

On Buhari’s watch, governance dissolves into a Darwinian spectacle, a cycle of turbulent energies: giving, denying, hindering, cherry-picking, name-calling, scaremongering, cajoling, looting, devouring.

Yet public officers, party chieftains, and career rodents of the corridors of power cheekily request “sacrifice” in a tenor that would resonate, weary generations later as deceptive, sycophantic, and naive.

How much was anticipated from the current leadership? How much has it delivered? Consider, for instance, President Buhari’s recent approval of the temporary employment of 774, 000 unemployed youths to sweep the streets and markets, and clear sewers for three months.

The initiative, labelled the Special Public Works Programme (SPW) in the Rural Areas, will be funded from the N60 billion COVID-19 Intervention Fund and will last from October to December 2020, according to the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed.

No skills or formal education are required for the SPW programme. The target areas are rural communities, and beneficiaries would earn N20, 000 monthly.

Enthusing about its benefits, the Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo (SAN), said the scheme targeted 1,000 youths each from the 774 local governments across the country, calling it one of the biggest social intervention schemes to be carried out within a short period of time by any government in the history of Nigeria.

In a nutshell, the government has legitimised “innovative corruption,” as most of the beneficiaries would be ghost workers created by shady elements within its ranks and file. The scheme is yet another crafty means to swindle Nigeria of funding meant to tackle the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The initiative is condemnable; going by Mr. Truth’s simple arithmetic: 774 local governments multiplied by 1, 000 youths multiplied by N20, 000 = N15,480,000,000 billion monthly, from borrowed money, “to clean gutters in a country without road and gutters but political gutters.”

By Mr. Truth’s narrative, if the government spends N15,480,000,000 billion on healthcare every month, foreigners will troop to the country on health tourism and bring us revenue. If the government spends N15,480,000,000 billion on agriculture, monthly, for two years, Nigeria will undoubtedly emerge as the food basket of Africa and the nation’s jobless youth will be gainfully employed.

The borrowed money that is about to be squandered by the Buhari administration could be put to better use developing essential infrastructure and the nation’s agriculture economy. Such money could be used to eliminate structural impediments of unreliable power supply, non-existent and dilapidated irrigation systems, overcrowded ports, and bad roads. For example, it takes an average of six to eight days to move a truckload of tomatoes from Jibiya in the far north to Lagos in the southwest. Unless the cargo is refrigerated—and invariably it is not—it will perish before reaching Lagos port.

At the moment, poverty has risen in Nigeria with almost 82.9 million people living on less than one United States dollar per day, according to a National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) May 2020 report.

According to the report, 52.10 per cent of rural dwellers are living in poverty; little wonder many youths are deserting farming to seek menial work in the cities. Many become commercial motorcyclists and several others simply take to crime.

They know that as farmers, they would not have access to a market for their goods due to underdeveloped value chains. The absence of adequate storage facilities means many farmers must sell immediately after harvest when prices are at their lowest or allow their produce to rot.

For instance, Nigeria’s estimated demand for tomatoes is 2.2 million tons per year, notes the CSIS/APP, while annual production is 1.5 million tons; almost half—that is 0.7 million tons—is lost post-harvest, due to poor storage.

The head of a U.S. social enterprise working to boost agriculture in Nigeria notes Richard Downie, rightly observed that “when it comes to food, Nigeria doesn’t have a production problem, it has a processing problem.”

Rather than make jobless youth sweep the streets and clean sewers during off-farming seasons, the government could engage them productively in processing, marketing, and construction along the value chain of the agricultural economy.

To make agriculture very attractive to the youth, the government should go beyond increasing farmer access to credit via initiatives like the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP) and address high levels of post-harvest loss via an electronic warehouse receipt scheme and strengthening of the warehousing system, in part by leasing and rehabilitating government grain storage facilities.

For a small fee, farmers can deposit their produce at these facilities, confident that it will be safely and securely preserved. In return, they receive a receipt grading the value of their produce that can be used as collateral. So doing, participating farmers can hold back their produce and sell when the price is right, rather than immediately after harvest.

The ABP and capitalization of Nigeria’s Bank of Agriculture were some of the visionary steps taken by the Buhari administration to stimulate and increase the flow of credit to farmers, but there is still much to be done, and the government’s initiation of the SPW smacks of an insidious lack of integrity, personal and institutional ethics.

Buhari’s SPW resonates a terrible contradiction: he purportedly wishes to free governance from corruption but SPW will shackle him to the corrupt, and pronounce his government’s domination by chthonian nature. At every turn away from the infernal, he runs right back into its dark embrace.