Category: Olatunji Ololade

By Olatunji Ololade

 

Medical tourism is an ambiguous sick rose. Its a cavern of the unseen, where deathly tools manifest deficient healthcare and secret crimes of black market operators, comprising quack doctors, organ harvesters and traffickers.

Knowing this, President Muhammadu Buhari urges Nigeria to wean her heart of lusts for medical tourism abroad as Wordsworth urges England to wean its heart from emasculating food in ‘October,’ a sonnet of 1803.

Like Wordsworth, Buhari waxes lyrical, urging Nigeria to shun patronage of overseas healthcare. Tough luck, Buhari; Nigeria is on her knees, enraptured by illusions, she sucks from the wrong spigot.

Deficient healthcare corrupts nature. It violates the physical and psychic frames of its victims. Ultimately, it kills. Speaking at the Second National Health Summit of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) in Abuja, in November 2019, President Buhari, represented by the health minister, Osagie Ehanire, highlighted its dangers, stating that medical tourism would reduce if Nigerian hospitals offer quality service.

Besides costing the country a whopping N400 billion annually, many risk falling victim to organ thieves and traffickers. They also suffer exposure to quack doctors and substandard healthcare.

Simply put, embarking on medical tourism abroad is akin to hopping from a frying pan into the fire, sometimes. Picture Nigeria as the frying pan, how hot does it get?

Just recently, photos posted by a certain Sawaba FM Hadejia, generated buzz online as they purportedly reveal the shocking incident of a surgeon performing an operation on a seriously injured patient on the corridor of the Hadejia General Hospital, Jigawa, with a torchlight, due to power failure.

The imagery manifests as a sad commentary on Nigeria’s comatose health sector where hospitals are understaffed and doctors perform surgeries using torchlight due to frequent power cuts.

Notwithstanding, President Buhari has restated his resolve in his new year speech, to continue reforms in water sanitation, education, and healthcare sectors. He stressed his government’s liaisons with international partners such as GAVI, the vaccine alliance, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to access support for his social welfare initiatives.

A few months earlier, Mr. President said there was an urgent need to address brain drain in the health sector. He said the Federal Government would like to dialogue with doctors and nurses, “to study ways of retaining our skilled workforce, trained at great expense to the state, as determined by the Postgraduate Medical College.”

Perhaps he truly meant well. But Mr. President must understand that his “candid” and perhaps heartfelt homilies deflect the moral questions triggered by substandard healthcare.

It parries disconcerting queries arising from inadequacies of medical initiatives thus establishing the nation’s healthcare system as a major index of rising inequality, social injustice, profligate governance, a depressed economy, political corruption, and maladministration.

Notwithstanding, Buhari persuades citizenry of means to ditch overseas healthcare and patronise Nigeria’s inadequately funded and understaffed public health facilities or rather, the extortionate private hospitals often manned by poorly trained staff.

More significantly, he mocks the fate of the poor, unemployed masses, whose sad fate it is, to wither and die on the deathly corridors of public health centres. Some may encounter a conscientious, diligent doctor, who would pull all the stops to accord them a semblance of satisfactory healthcare from time to time. Oftentimes, they won’t.

If Buhari means well, can he vouch for his kitchen cabinet, the legislature, and medical tourist governors? Can he show over 190 million Nigerians or thereabouts how his administration cuts back on frivolities and tames the profligate lusts that drive public officers to seek medical care abroad?

The country’s poorest are worst hit by the state of the health system as primary healthcare centres (PHCs) lie comatose from inadequate funding, lack of equipment and medical personnel. On the flip side, the waiting rooms at secondary and tertiary public health facilities are overcrowded with patients waiting to see doctors.

Often people have to stand or sleep outside to keep appointments with medical personnel who are often undermanned, insouciant and exhausted.

Patients are forced to purchase medical consumables including plaster, gauze, syringe, injections, syringe, hand gloves, antiseptic wash, among others, in public health facilities – university teaching hospitals inclusive – across the country.

The consequences are never fair on the impoverished who are often left without money to pay for their treatment by the time they purchase the consumables.

Unstable electricity, inadequate funding, poor remuneration, and disgruntled health workers make the hospital environment too hostile for palliative care thus driving patients away, into the caverns of quacks and medical tourism abroad.

The situation is compounded by a troubled economy, seismic insecurity, and nepotism in recruitment processes, resulting in many doctors leaving the country.

There is also the issue of foreign-trained medical students failing the assessment examination conducted by the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN); a situation senior medical practitioners ascribe to their attendance of substandard medical schools in Eastern Europe and Asia.

It’s instructive that they are hardly given licenses to practice in the countries where they schooled, argued MDCN pundits. In April 2017, 501 medical students, trained abroad, sat for the MDCN examination conducted at the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital in Kwara State. Only 132 of them passed the examination.

Yet health indicators decline in the absence of aggressive interventions to stop the medical brain drain. The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) estimates that of the 75,000 doctors registered in the country, about 40,000 practice outside Nigeria. In the UK alone, it is estimated that 12 doctors from Nigeria are registered every week, with more than 5,250 Nigerian doctors already working there.

The proposed 2020 budget of the Federal Ministry of Health is N427billion, which amounts to about 4% of the budget. This is despite a 2001 pledge of 15% of the national budget towards healthcare by member nations of the African Union at a meeting chaired by Nigeria.

In sharp contrast, Rwanda has risen from the ashes of its genocidal past to evolve the most sought-after healthcare system in Africa. The country’s budget ensures that the health sector gets over 20 percent of funding juxtaposed to the Abuja declaration of 15 percent. The health delivery system is used as a best-case scenario by many experts. It is also famed for its success in implementing the community health insurance program which has improved access to quality health for citizens.

The World Health Organization regards countries with less than 10 doctors per 10,000 people to have an “insufficient” number of medical personnel.

Thus Nigeria’s doctor-patient ratio estimated at 1:6000 is regrettable when compared to the ratio of doctor-patient in India (1:2083) and in the United States (1:500). Despite growing evidence that medical graduates no longer see a bright future working in Nigeria, the Minister of Labour and Employment, Emeka Ngige, recently stated that the country has surplus doctors.

To reverse the trend, President Buhari, recently, directed the Federal Ministry of Health and other relevant agencies to urgently formulate policies and programmes for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for national development.

However, budget limitations, inadequate infrastructure, poor fiscal governance, and corruption aggravate the country’s health challenges. Currently, less than 5% of Nigerians are covered by the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

At the backdrop of these challenges, President Buhari’s frequent trips to the UK to seek treatment for an undisclosed ailment manifests as a sad irony to millions of Nigerians denied the kind of quality healthcare he seeks abroad.

By Olatunji Ololade

 

Fathers earn and sons spend. Moguls acquire and sons deplete. Pacesetters in politics, arts and business hack their way through mortal wilderness to acclaim. They forge their path to identity, amassing fortunes and a name that they bequeath to heirs. The latter, having it all, however, suffer the burden of freedom.

Freedom binds them to the slaughterhouse of choice. Where they make the right choices, they soar into trance and society salts the earth they walk upon. If condemned to wrong choices, freedom chillingly shut their eyes to the truthful and humane, in a deadly game of blindman’s bluff.

In the latter scenario, ignorance becomes Eden and the sanctuary of heirs, where too many sons of famous fathers become spendthrifts, alcoholics, drug addicts, dilettantes. They deplete what their fathers procured.

The son, often heir to fortune on a silver platter, has nothing to measure or be measured against, except the accomplishments of his father – most of which gets squandered.

Fathers build and sons destroy. But not every child depletes what his father built. A generation may forcefully reinvent itself out of the declining fortunes of its forbears.

The current generation of youth, for instance, could recreate the Nigerian dream from its deplorable state as the fantasy of thieves, looters and blinkered murderers into a progressive, realistic and awe-inspiring vista.

To do, so we must rid our souls of moral lesions, conflict and contradictions; we must quit being shameless and grand in disarray.

We could start by substituting the lowliness of our mental skies for the bold flying of progressive mental kites.

We must redefine consciousness and progress to mean a lot more than random irresponsible sex, shortcut to wealth, cutthroat politics, degenerate sexuality, interminable gender wars, and corrupted sociology funded by NGOs and advanced by modern feminism.

To achieve this, we must decisively change the thrust of scholarship and learning in the country, from the primary through the secondary and tertiary school levels.

The consequences of our dysfunctional public education system and the shallow, over-priced private education sector are coming home to roost. We are afflicted by a youth divide comprising individuals whose education was corrupted from an early age by a lethargic system continually playing catch up with the rest of the world.

Ultimately, the Nigerian system teaches scholars to get ahead, and getting ahead means deference to authority. The learner becomes adept, writes Richard Hoggart, at a technique of acquiring facts. He learns how to receive a purely literate education, using only a small part of his personality and challenging only a limited area of his being.

He begins to see life as a ladder, as a permanent examination with some praise and some further exhortation at each stage. He becomes an expert imbiber and doler-out; his competence will vary, but will rarely be accompanied by genuine enthusiasm.

Such a student rarely feels the reality of knowledge, of other men’s thoughts and imaginings, on his own pulses. He has something of the blinkered pony about him; sometimes he is trained by those who have been through the same regimen, who are hardly unblinkered themselves, and who praise him in the degree to which he takes comfortably to their blinders.

This is hardly a fruitful way to proceed in the world we despise, in pursuit of the future of our dreams.

Many yearn for a better tomorrow but we have “today” and fail to make the best of it. The Nigerian tragedy persists because it is a human tragedy and not a quirk interred in some mythical ‘system.’

Some Nigerians are beasts in the closet. Left to their devices, they display unforgivable inhumaneness and lack of character. Nigeria still reels from the shock of the dastardly murder of Favour Daley-Oladele, 22, who was decapitated and had parts of her eaten up by her supposed boyfriend, Owolabi Adeeko and his mum, in fulfillment of a money-making ritual. Of course, the Adeekos and their spiritual father, Pastor Segun Phillip, are ‘ordinary people.’ You could hardly ascribe such grotesqueness to them, close up, or from a distance.

Of course, Owolabi is hardly the poster image of the Nigerian youth but he projects the burgeoning mentality driving hordes of Nigerian terrorists, kidnappers, advance fee fraudsters (Yahoo Boys), call girls, armed robbers and political thugs in their youth.

We were wrong to think it a matter of years and decades that we would improve in humaneness  and insight. We pride ourselves on our education but fail to understand that true knowledge essentially translates to being an emissary of kindness, truth, hope, superior culture, humaneness and progress to every segment of the human race: the rich and poor, old and young, male and female, weak and strong, literate and unschooled,

We forget too that the true essence of learning, that is, both intellectual and vocational learning, is never simply to teach breadwinning, furnish teachers for the public schools or be an epitome of polite society. It should above all be the appendage of that fine adjustment between reality and the growing knowledge of life. An adjustment which discovers the secret of civilization and the solution to its seemingly intractable problems.

Du Bois writes that the final product of learning must be neither a medical doctor nor journalist but a man. A full man to be precise.

To make such men, our learning process must be borne of ideals and inspiring ends of living. Not desperate, sordid, money-grabbing sound bites. The end product of our educational process must have learnt to work for the glory of his calling, not simply for pecuniary gains. The intellectual must think for truth and progress, not for fame or the applause of the gallery.

Its about time we evolved useful knowledge and a culture beneficial to all. Until we attain a broad, busy abundance of such understanding, not all the finest flavours of the proverbial national cake – be they oven-baked or sand-baked – can save us from our lusts and the affliction by the predatory ruling class.

Currently, we suffer the lack of honest and broadly cultured men. Patience, humility, good breeding and taste. Comprehensive high schools and kindergartens, universities and polytechnics, industrial and technical colleges, teacher training colleges, literature, tolerance and tact – all these spring from proper learning and culture.

We cannot achieve these overnight, however. If we must elect the fine women and men, borne of catholicity of will and conduct, we should begin the process by which they would emerge right now.

It’s about time we engaged in pursuit and dissemination of knowledge devoid of loose and careless logic, like the type that produced and still produce a good number of the Nigerian electorate and ruling class.

The Kingsley Moghalus, Omoyele Sowores and the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT) collective must rise from the ashes of their dormant platforms to re-engage with the citizenry. Beyond their hastily convened townhall meetings, corny platitudes and revolutionary chants at election time, the status quo offers them wonderful opportunities to reconnect with the youth, academia, pensioners and market women of the sidewalk, among other broad segments of the electorate in realistic terms.

Its 2020 and about time they stopped trumpeting off the failings of the incumbent ruling class and get actively involved in addressing our social crisis, outside lethargic perimeters of thought.

The following are suggestions by which they could engage with the rest of us…

 

By Olatunji Ololade

 

An encounter with Taiwo Ajai-Lycett is awe-inspiring, for only a woman cast in her mould could uninhibitedly play the role of mother and godmother to the son and grandchildren of a man who subjected her to physical and sexual violence.

Only a woman like her could survive the trauma of rape by ‘simply moving on.’ Although she doesn’t approve of rape, she hadn’t the nerve to turn what happened to her into a performance theatre for the police, wolfish ‘friends’ and women’s rights activists to exploit. She hadn’t the nerve to ‘bare it all’ on social media while shopping for sympathy and marketable grief.

“When you are able to understand that its not about you, you move beyond past and present hurt, and then you are approaching freedom. You become fully grown. The universe gives you whatever you need to grow, and I am not talking in terms of material things. I would rather build than destroy and leave the universe to judge,” she said.

Indeed, she is all about building worlds. In her neighbourhood, she helps families grow. She is an enabler, who doesn’t focus solely on women. She extends her humaneness to both gender and the family.

For instance, she offered for free, part of her residential space for neighbourhood carpenters to practice their craft. It was her way of ensuring that they are employed and able to cater for the needs of their families.

She said, “I know it’s not easy being a man, particularly in contemporary Nigeria. They needed that space and I gave it to them as long as they kept it clean.” Ajai-Lycett counsels young couples to make beneficial choices. She urges young men, wearied by toil, vicissitudes and age, to support the dreams of their wives. Where need be, she supports their families financially. Thus everybody calls her ‘mummy’ in celebration of her nurturant role.

If Ajai-Lycett is a feminist, she projects that brand of African feminism that developed outside sullied and biased academia. She practices feminism in which the inclusion of men and women is evident, in the nurturing of family across social, economic, and political strata.

Her brand of feminism, as Awapa would say, is about people, their children, their work, their day to day experiences, their stories of the past and hopes for the future. It fosters the participation of women in placing the food on the table. It is a brand of feminism that complements and humanises the patriarchy.

Far from her Eden, however, misandry eats deep into the contemporary female psyche, like a virus. It corrupts the middle-aged and young adult female, and burrows deeper, infecting 13 and 14-year-olds. ‘Modern’ teens at 15 through 20, swim in the slurry of misandry, slurping it all up even as they flounder amid its infinite storms. It is the point at which they discover and authoritatively declare on social media that “All men are scum,” among other obscenities.

By age 21 through 30, they hasten through various stages of awareness, confusedly, embracing furry anti-male slogans, weaponising felt and ‘unfelt’ grief into savage animosity towards men.

Yet they need men to fulfill random impulses thus social media becomes their performance theatre, where they share everything online, mostly of a sexual nature, in a no-holds-barred fashion.

A popular misandrist, for instance, loves to post the adventures of her soul as she masturbates, on Facebook. She brags about her capacity to attain mind-blowing orgasms and denounces the existence of God in the same breadth. She recounts with relish how she screams to taunt her very religious siblings and extended family, in the heat of a squirt.

She condemns adultery but boasts about flirting and sleeping around with other women’s husbands. Last year, she got pregnant for a supposedly perfect hunk, who identified with her misandrist ideologies. The latter, she bragged, begged to be with her knowing she could only offer him an “open marriage.”

Unknown to her, her perfect beau simply belted out notes he knew she loved to hear. He was the liberal, alpha feminist male, who joined her in scoffing at ‘chauvinistic’ men, online and offline, while raiding her secret places.

Her gravest mistake was getting pregnant for him. Like this curious character, many a misguided female shops for non-committal sex with random boys and men on social media. She brags about how many ‘oafs’ and ‘scums’ she had bedded and kicked out of her door following random, passionless sex at the back of her ‘personal car,’ her ‘personal sofa’ and ‘six-foot bed’ in her ‘personal apartment.’

If she gets pregnant, she either terminates it or keep the baby. Either way, she becomes very bitter, slipping into default modes: ‘spiritually embittered’ or the ‘sapiosexual’ man-hating feminist, who lives by her own terms and ‘does not give a hoot what anyone thinks.’

Innately she craves for someone to love and trust. Outwardly, she seeks solace in bitter and ‘daring’ feminist literature. She would probably write a daring, ‘feminist’ novel or think-piece that gets celebrated among her herd.

Far from the glitter of acclaim, however, she is just some weak, needy girl craving a man’s love and attention. Sometimes, she chooses to experiment and runs into the arms of a fellow woman or girl, justifying her lesbianism by the claim that men can’t just get her off.

From frolicking with fellow vixens, she moves on to bored housewives or married women who flirt with her on their digital devices from the confines of their offices and homes. Eventually, the latter find her boring, her touches, gross, and her rant too repetitive and a middling kind of brainy. Then they run back to their husbands whom they never left for her anyway.

At this juncture, she realises that it is only on the pages of feminist literature and misandrist fairy tales that married women ditch their husbands to marry or move in with lesbian, feminist lovers, no matter how earth-shattering their joint orgasms are.

She hovers around 35 to 40 years of age at this period. Forty creeps on her while she is busy posting anti-male messages on Facebook and Twitter; and penning yet another feminist-lit blockbuster.

But where she attains no literary or artistic renown, she simply fades frustrated, into her life’s eternal midnight.

Eventually, she finds Jesus. She finds Allah (SWT). She discovers sudden wisdom in religious scriptures that she hitherto pilloried as too anti-feminist and pro-patriarchy. She has no more use for tired slogans and banal anger. Most of her peers are now quietly married away and severing connection with her kind. She begins to covet the marital securities and stability that she scorned in her youth.

She realises that she had gone through life on the wrong track. She finds that she was never created to compete with man but to complement him – as he was created to complement her.

She tries to live again but its too late. She discovers that she had actually been enjoying for hours, her 15 minutes of fame. The truth dawns on her in a moment of eternal damnation. Her orchestra is done playing and it’s time to exit the stage.

Olatunji Ololade

 

Toxic masculinity’ is the new rage. It connotes everything supposedly wrong with Nigeria’s male folk. Coined in Western feminist circuits, an obsession with it at the homefront highlights the workings of the misandrist mind. Yea, most of Nigerian 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 tar 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 feminist 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 sand castles come tumbling down.

The Nigerian man must, however, live to thwart the onset of feminist 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 feminists or Feminazis, if you like, have gained 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, that, “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 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 ferine feminists aggravate the destruction of the family system and denies 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, on 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 gender. 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 millenial, 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.

 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 is stuck at being a man while juggling traditional and modern precepts of his becoming.

Essentially, he must unlearn customary 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 getting smitten by woman’s uncanny being.

Picture, for instance, the pathetic case of a southwest governor whose masculinity was recalled and cancelled out by his wife, in their youth. The wife, to the chagrin of the governor’s relatives, performed a cultural lobotomy on him. State House legend contends that Madam First Lady continually boasts to peers and aides that she is the de facto governor of the state.

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

That was all it took to reduce His Excellency. Now, stunted in full bloom, he is being kept as a parlour pet by his wife. The consequences of his failing, however, manifest dangerously on the poor citizenry of the state, who are forced to endure his inefficiency and absenteeism.

Going by the First Lady’s boast, His Excellency must have suffered the grievous lack of a father-figure as a child.

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 by 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. At the backdrop of aggressive misandrist campaigns at work, in arts, literature and the media, subsists international fellowships, strictly for women professionals, and the general ones for which “women are strongly advised to apply.”

Consider too, the periodic conferences of Nigerian and African women on professional and sociopolitical platforms. The Women in the Media conference has become a thing, likewise the various “Coding,” vocational and self-help gatherings of undergrads, high school students and housewives.

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 perspectives to gain 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 become cringe-worthy, oftentimes. But art must mirror reality, some would argue.

How real and didactic are the narratives? Consequence-free promiscuity, lesbianism, denunciation of marriage, and outright misandry are common themes. Even the brilliant themes of self actualisation and financial independence of the Nigerian woman are weaponised and rooted in the sex, lesbianism and 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 politics and

plots of her becoming, its saddening to see her male counterpart stew in criminality and ignorance.

Little wonder that, misandry, masquerading as feminism, has gained a monopoly on 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 perpetuated by carefully articulated propaganda and research.

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.

Nigeria’s malefolk, however, make no attempt to improve their lot. While the successful woman makes conscious efforts to mentor protegees, influencing their growth, her male peer, in contrast, breeds proteges as thugs, assassins, terrorists, internet hoodlums to mention a few.

Nobody can blame the woman for stealing his thunder. In euphoria, she asserts her dominion in aspects of culture, sex and gender politics. Her campaign is heavily funded too, by international NGOs seeking to destabilise the African family and social space.

Having perverted the politics of influence, she seeks to decisively put the Nigerian man in his place. But what really is the Nigerian man’s place? Where is his place? Confusion leads to grave consequences. Confusions about masculinity has 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, are constituted by amoral men and weaklings whose claim to courage reposes 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 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, family pastors, neighbours, house-helps and extended family members.

Olatunji Ololade

 

AISHA Buhari, Nigeria’s First Lady, makes a rousing recourse to moral nature. By urging parents to see to the moral upbringing of their wards, she addresses Nigeria’s supreme pestilence, our moral problem. Nobody pays attention to this. Save a paltry few in the country’s performance theatre, whose chief intent is usually to grandstand or pay lip service as a rite of artifice.

Whether Aisha’s recourse is bland performance or not, her acknowledgement of the nation’s moral canker is noteworthy.

Mrs. Buhari challenged parents to take charge of their families and ensure good moral upbringing of children to minimise crime in the society. She gave the advice on Monday while hosting a special prayer session for Nigeria, at the Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Aisha said the lack of moral upbringing of children and the collapse of family values was largely responsible for the social crises facing Nigeria. She, however, fell short of identifying her generation and that of her husband, President Muhammadu Buhari, as one of the country’s afflictions.

Save occasional spasms and pretensions to high ethics, there is little the younger generation can imbibe as moral fibre from their ruling class.

Nigeria cannot escape impending doom until we modify our attitude towards nationhood. But first, we have to build character. Character is the spool by which we would spin the colourful yarns of citizenship and leadership.

It is an artificial construction, no doubt. Our defense against animalism. Without character, we would get ship-wrecked in the barbarous deep that it is nature, or animal instinct, if you like.

It was a lack of character that afflicted us with the incumbent ruling class. It’s poetic irony, therefore, that Aisha would recommend to us a remedy to rid Nigeria of afflictions constituted by her class.

Modern Nigeria careens in flight and fear, as you read. Millions yearn to flee from bad leadership, economic failure, power outage, corruption, insecurity, infrastructure collapse, substandard health and education among others.

Fear is the next pandemic; many commit crimes and die in fear of poverty and financial insecurity thus our afflictions by Boko Haram, career kidnappers, murderous herdsmen, trigger happy policemen, soldiers and vigilante groups.

Amid the blooming dystopia, Aisha rose from her chambers to mastermind a rite of redemption. Perhaps she meant to cast spells to lull the punishing elements. But then, she understands that presidential chants and paternosters won’t rid Nigeria of her current afflictions.

The battle must begin at the home-front. A cursory look at our families excites the creepiest form of marvel. The Nigerian family unit today parades the worst form of savagery. Parents contract marabouts, Christian prophets and native doctors to invoke God’s mercies and protection on their wards engaged in cyber-scams (Yahoo-Yahoo) and prostitution at home and abroad.

The indoctrination starts quite early, from childhood. Mothers are mightily pleased to see a child hurt an annoying neighbour’s dog or cat; and fathers consider it a mark of martial spirit to see their son tyrannise his weaker peer.

Lest we forget those whose parents raise righteously, breeding them in cages of holiness, to perpetuate the worst forms of bigotry and inhumanity, according to the scriptures.

Many parents consider it a sign of great courage and astuteness to see their wards cheat and oppress their peer. It gladdens their hearts to see their little children evolve into ‘lovable’ brutes at a tender age. They appreciate it as a worthy demeanour for the very tough world out there.

Thus from adolescence through adulthood, they greet every dishonesty their children perpetrate with cheer, as long as it translates to stupendous wealth, higher status and the comfort of knowing that such children are “smart” and inured to the ways of the world.

These are the true seeds and roots of cruelty, tyranny and treason. Parents nurture vile in their wards, who perpetuate through lineages, grosser forms of grotesqueness.

It starts from the very little things, like teaching children to cheat through school. Hence the multitude of “peaceful, hardworking and God-fearing” families engaged in desperate pursuits to enroll their wards and university hopefuls in “special coaching schools” while they purchase for them, seats at “special centres,” as they write the S.S.C.E and JAMB exams.

Such wards, who had been trained to circumvent the straight, moral path to success eventually mature into foetal adults. All through their lives, they navigate challenges and shoals of reality with the courage of a weevil and the wit of a hyena.

The seeds of indolence and bestiality sown in them, grow to prodigious bulk, cultivated by society, codified as custom. Eventually, we have brutes and savages running our lives and determining our future.

Many may dispute this, claiming that such characters constitute a minor fraction of the country’s 190 million population. I whole-heartedly disagree, but if they insist, I hereby iterate that such wonderful families we have now that blessed us with the current ruling class, thieving bank chiefs and corrupt law enforcers.

Such wonderful families we have that blessed us with lazy and corrupt civil servants, light-fingered bank clerks, desperate, treacherous journalists and lawyers. Such wonderful families we have that blessed us with prostitutes, armed robbers, Yahoo boys, and currency-activated clerics to mention a few.

One degeneracy gravitates into the other and we have for ourselves, a nation of finely bred brutes and foetal adults programmed to self-destruct.

The argument that it’s the lack of good leadership that breeds corruption does not hold much substance anymore. Let each one of us be accountable for his or her actions.

Bestiality, like blood, runs in the veins of both the government and the governed. Age and experience have lost good measure and our old have no important advice to give to our young anymore. Their experiences have been so partial and fraught with fraudulence that at the end, they pass off as miserable failures.

Every Nigerian is a law breaker. The rich believe they are above the law and the poor believe they could sneak under it or wiggle through it and away from its grasp.

While it may be easy to dismiss Mrs. Buhari’s supplication conference as yet another religious show-boating, her recourse to moral instruction is worthy of attention.

Aisha urges parents to instil good morals in their children but the same parents constitute the rich lobbyists conniving with her ruling class to impoverish Nigeria further. They are the poor folk cursing the times and her ruling class even as they vie daily to serve the whims of the same class.

They are the parents purchasing seats and liberties to cheat for their wards at JAMB and SSCE “special centres.” They are the bankers pilfering our accounts at 50 kobo, N50 to N5000 by the second.

They are the motorists hastening off their appropriate lanes to face oncoming vehicles and endanger lives. They are the public administrators stealing pension fund meant for elderly retirees and using same money to fund presidential candidates at national elections.

They are the journalists receiving money to doctor and tilt stories according to the whims of shady politicians and the dangerous business class.

They are the lawyers twisting the law to serve the whims of Nigeria’s worst criminals ever. They are reading this thinking the writer is just another ‘grifter’ calling the con-artist, ‘fraud.’

By Olatunji Ololade

Life as a freeman is simply unthinkable to a Nigerian nigger. Outwardly, he lives to a devastating stereotype. Inwardly, he brawls against typecasts as the ram thrashes in its soul at the descent of the butcher’s knife. But he is neither brawler nor ram. He is a human living like livestock because he thinks it’s shrewd and dapper.

The Nigerian, channelling his freedoms wholesomely and with integrity might have no gripe about this. But who determines what it is to be free? What determines a Nigerian nigger? Some would argue that it is somewhat tyrannical to deny a man of his rights, particularly the freedom to answer as a nigger.

Freedom, indeed, has a thousand charms to show that slaves, however contented, never know, writes Cowper. The tragedy is in the details. And the details are all around us, in our past glories and defeat, infinite quirks and measured sobriety.

It is in our fabled heritage and defunct humanity, colourful history and grand inadequacies. It distinguishes our mistakes from what we term fate; our mental inferiority and political expediencies.

Necessity, like William Pitt the Younger, would say, is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants and the creed of slaves. Slaves like the Nigerian nigger.

It is not what you call him, however, but what he answers to that defines him yet this minute, another innocent child is born into the world as a Nigerian nigger. His parents shall name him Clinton, Dave, Cregg, Oliver, Richard, Lovett, Colet, Da Silva, Humphrey, Jackson, to mention a few. His real names: Akanbi, Chiedu, Ijeoma, Chimaroke, Isichei and so on shall become his “native names” or “middle names.”

At a tender age, he shall be taught to despise most things Nigerian, by parents who would eventually bemoan the erosion of the Nigerian culture.

He will be enrolled in schools that teach the superiority of western civilisation and be taught to accept his place as member of a hostage race and generation. Growing up, he would learn to evolve a masochistic appetite for racial rebuke and fashionable humiliation.

Time and over again, he would learn to assimilate and project “imported condescension” as the next best palliative to his innate malaise.

In time, he would get too impatient for his dosage of indoctrination and imported disdain and doggedly sweat his way through standoffish, ill-bred and disdainful immigration officials in order to enjoy his share of dishonour and racial profiling overseas.

Abroad, he would labour to be part of what kills him, trying the patience of unwilling hosts by his fractious misconduct and commitment to disgrace. He shall seek a better life sweeping the streets, doing the dishes, driving cabs and washing the anuses of elderly Caucasians with the desperation of one who would rather die in penury abroad than return to Nigeria.

If he were born into money and enjoys the good fortune of schooling abroad, he shall dwell fostered by the lowliness of his mental skies. He would die to impress judgemental class mates and neighbours by insane parties and acquisitions.

He will wander well kept streets – by immigrants like him – of London and New York to purchase forgetfulness at the mall.

So pronounced is his inferiority complex that the tragedies of his civilisation perpetually wail in the slightest details; he will host extravagant weddings and birthday parties often to the benefit of his host country and obsess about foreign football leagues, politics and disasters.

Like a tadpole in an Iju-Ishaga pothole, he would bathe in puddle and muck, hoping to grow scales and scissor-tail like an alligator in the English wild.

An inelegant grifter, he channels joy and fulfillment from the attainments of his exploiters while cursing his homeland on social media.

Ultimately, he seeks escape by renouncing his roots. He conveniently forgets that, no matter how long the tabby cat postures as a lion, it will forever remain a cat, a pitiful, whiny parlour pet.

He will justify his entitlement to ‘greener pasture abroad’ arguing that the so-called “first world” was built from the blood and sweat of his slave ancestors. Through modern servitude abroad, he shall endure verbal nettling as a ‘third world nigger’ by less enlightened employers.

An arrogant fellow, he considers himself a higher specie than the Asian, whom he derides as ‘Chinko.’ In turn, the Asian views him condescendingly as a ‘lazy nigger.’ While he hustled across the Mediterranean to serve his exploiters in the West, the Asian built from the rubble of his exploitation by the West, till he became an exploiter of his exploiters.

China, for instance, has risen from the detritus of its sweat factories to colonise her exploiters and recolonise Africa. The Nigerian nigger, Giant of Africa, is busy making excuses, blaming capitalism and hugging it in one breath thus personifying Chika Onyeani’s “Capitalist Nigger” depiction of the black race as a consumer race and not a productive race.

“The Black Race depends on other communities for its culture, its language, its feeding, and its clothing,” argues Onyeani, adding that blacks are economic slaves because they lack the ‘killer-instinct’ and ‘devil-may-care’ attitude of the Caucasian and the ‘spider web economic mentality’ of the Asian.

Contrary to Onyeani’s claims and Western propaganda, there is no perfect nation to be born. The crises in modern Europe and America: financial meltdown, unemployment, homelessness, extreme narcissism, sexual perversions, state-sponsored terrorism, racism among others, puncture far-fetched arguments about their invincibility and wisdom.

In order to halt the exodus of our wards overseas, where they answer to the modern nigger stereotype, Nigeria must seek economic liberation through hard work, self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and fiscal discipline. We must build better Nigerian neighbourhoods to prevent our youth from moving to hostile white neighbourhoods. We must learn to seek progress in unity too, because when spider webs unite, they attain the strength of a lion, according to an Ethiopian adage.

Then let us seek to be honest and good. Good people produce good leaders. Bad people produce and ennoble bad leadership. The attitude of the Nigerian mind towards citizenship and democracy as political measures of self-determination must be divested of the toxicity of greed and bigotries.

It is time to heal. The youth must seek progressive engagement in President Muhammadu Buhari’s government even as they unite on a new political platform, immune to the ravages of ethnicity, materialism and greed.

The tragedy of our generation subsists in our prospects and desperation to be lorded over and contained, at a price.

The offshoot is grisly. It made a Nigerian President nurture insults from reprobate Caucasians threatening to withdraw financial aids if Nigeria fails to legitimise same-sex marriage. It makes a misguided money-bag vie to purchase a British club even though his planned splurge might conveniently improve the fortune of his home league.

It is what excites the Nigerian lust to be less-than, to the perverse pleasure of the so-called “first world.”

It is an emotional attachment, a bond of interdependence between captive and captor that develops when someone threatens your life, takes away your freedom, and doesn’t kill you.

It is what causes the Nigerian to bark like a stray dog, pitifully seeking the collar end of the leash of the “first world.”