Category: Olatunji Ololade

Today, complaint is often made of what we call the failure of the Nigerian dream. We lament how monstrously, forces of society accomplish and fail to fulfil their work. We lament how the ruling class function in profligacy and chaos. Nigeria laments the insensibility of governance.

But today, as usual, we fail to look inwards. Perhaps because we fear we would find in you and me, the summary of all other failures and disorganisation. A sort of heart, from which every kind of confusion and horror gravitates in our fatherland.

The complaint was often made that our problems persist because we refused to convene a Sovereign National Conference (SNC). There is the argument that our afflictions worsen because President Muhammadu Buhari refuses to implement the recommendations of his predecessor’s shady SNC.

Perhaps there is depth and a semblance of truth in such frivolous mindset even as it becomes more glaring that a trillion SNCs will not save Nigeria.

This is because any consensus or ‘practicable solutions’ proffered at the conference would be the result of self-serving efforts of generations of shady characters comprising ex-convicts, hired assassins, treasury looters, armed robbers, advance fee fraudsters, indulgent clerics and bloodthirsty political godfathers, to mention a few. What manner of humaneness could result from such gathering?

That we undermine ourselves and underestimate our worth are old stories told.

There is a tragedy inherent in our customary lamentation every time our conscience is roused with a damning incident or report, like Boko Haram’s abduction of Chibok girls and murder of ICRC’s Hauwa Leman.

In a fit of rage, tribal bigots suggest that we go our separate ways. They tout ‘true federalism and secession in one breadth, describing them as worthy solutions to Nigeria’s afflictions.

Secession is the anthem that we should shun. It is the fruit of ‘reason’ that we need to be wary of and I will continue to say this, hoping every prospective muscle – that is, the youth – by which the separatists hope to achieve their dreams of dissolution, would listen and let the masterminds risk their hides and deploy their children and wives to actualise their fantasies.

The biggest misconception about ‘secession,’ ‘insurgency,’ ‘self-determination ‘or whatever the prejudiced choose to call it, is that, it could be peaceful, and that, the outcome would be a patriotic, humane dispensation.

It’s all dirty, greedy politics. Tribal bigots want the youth to fly the flags of their dream nations. They want everybody to brandish a bumper sticker that bellows: “Death to the Federal Republic of Nigeria!” They call anyone that’s anti-war and anti-chaos: “pacifist,” “traitor” or whatever colourful adjective suits their rage.

Then, they promise the youth a prosperous future and better fate in their dream nation. Astonishingly, youth that ought to know better, buy into their farce, and they begin to dream and talk of the great uprising that would set them free from the living hell Nigeria has become.

Such dangerous beliefs led to the blooming of terrorist groups like Boko Haram, among others. The disillusioned youth becomes willing muscle to criminal masterminds in charge of such groups and he engages in bootless pursuits at the end of which he accomplishes some individualised goal – the satisfaction of sentiment, a murderous lust or material gain – which to him is everything.

Eventually, he dies before his time; if he doesn’t, he morphs into the proverbial breathing corpse, who suddenly realises in his twilight, that, he had squandered God’s greatest gifts to him: life, talent and intellect.

Then the smokescreen of youth and hastily prized platitudes begin to peter out and he realises, that, his miraculous talisman is a paltry plated coin – less suitable for the social transaction than a contemptible kobo.

To prevent the manifestation of such youth, what evils should we set out to abolish in our modern society? We must answer the question: “What evils afflict us with misguided youth?” To this, I bet very many well-meaning people would cite ‘poverty.’

Face to face, every day, with shameful contrasts of riches and destitution, high dividends and low wages, and the futility of trying to adjust the balance by means of charity, they would answer, that, they stand for the abolition of poverty.

But poverty is merely a symptom, ignorance is the disease. The extremes of riches and destitution bloom inevitably upon the extremes of misgovernance and ignorance, by which the electorate are kept in bondage. We are not enslaved because we are poor; we are enslaved because we are ignorant.

Every attempt to conceive a better ordering of society than the destructive, pitiless chaos, in which Nigeria has sunk, is by no means modern. It is as old as Plato, whose “Republic” set the model for the Utopias of subsequent philosophers and self-styled revolutionaries.

Tribal bigots contemplate a new world in the light of an ideal. They claim to feel a great sorrow by the evils that characterise Nigeria, and they claim to be driven by an urgent desire to lead their ethnic groups to the realisation of the collective good.

It is this desire which has been the primary force moving the pioneers of anarchism and horrid tyrannies – as it moved the creators of ideal commonwealths in the past.

It is incense for suspicious revolutionaries claiming to fight for the interests of ethnic divides. In this, there is nothing new. What is new and unpardonably offensive is the pretension of such characters to heartfelt sorrow and shared grief in the suffering of the masses.

This has enabled cynical and anarchist political movements to grow out of the frustrations and hopes of Nigeria’s youth and predominantly impressionable thinkers, whose thought processes and politics are anything but humane.

This makes the agitation of the Nigerian separatists worrisome and markedly dangerous to the survival of the youth and the state.

The process of re-sensitising the youth away from the establishment of chaos and genocide advocated by the bigoted will be greatly accelerated by the abolition of the current political order.

However, this can only be achieved by the nation’s youth – who are unfortunately enthralled by the platitudes and desperate politics of Nigeria’s ruling class.

It is no doubt the stock in trade of the latter to refer to violent uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Iraq, Zanzibar, Tanganyika, India-Pakistan, Mali and parts of Asia among others, as worthy indicators of Nigeria’s need to follow suit.

Whenever they dazzle with such informed commentary, tell them to lead the violence they advocate with their wives, children and closest relatives.

Many activists, youth leaders and self-acclaimed political heroes today have their wives and children tucked away in secure schools and neighbourhoods abroad even as they goad impoverished, clueless youth back home to untimely doom.

If it is true that there is an appreciable number of youth capable of powering revolts for ethnic self-determination, the end of which is the dissolution of Nigeria, why can’t the same youth power the social regeneration and reclamation of the state from the clutches of the predatory ruling class, ethnic bigots and dissolution activists?

The current political dispensation and acute tribal bigotry must eventually yield to the influences of education and culture if the youth could aspire to progressive ideals. But such transformation calls for remarkable wisdom and tolerance.

 

Man’s karma travels with him, like his shadow. But karma is on nobody’s leash. The universe’s agent of cause and effect, deterrence and retributive justice, can neither be owned nor tethered. Unlike life, it doesn’t suffer the affliction of man’s dubious acquiescence to daunting, baleful bestiality oft summed up by the terse, intense statement: ’Life’s a bitch.”

Karma is our open secret. In Nigeria, it is our sacred, secret space, ignored in plain sight. It becomes our temenos, ritual precinct of reward and deserts. In this divine, marked-off terrain, the moral code of the universe operates at its darkest and most mechanical – there are no emotive shingles of pardon or persuasion, just causes and effects, actions and consequences.

In 1932, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget found that by the age of 6, children begin to believe, that, bad things that happen to them are punishments for bad things they had done. The Nigerian society, however, fights to subvert the karmic laws of cause and effect, and thus insulate individuals from the injurious effects of their vices and poor judgment.

Local ‘gender activists,’ like their European and American role models, abandon more progressive causes to pervert the birth control and abortion debate, in bid to detach sex from morality and its natural consequences.

Politics is equally rigged to reward greed, savagery, indolence, illegitimacy and so on.

Lest we forget the pervasive political and economic crisis bedeviling the country. The nation’s woes originate from her moral lapses. Endemic poverty, substandard healthcare and education, ethnic and religious bigotry, bribery and other forms of corruption manifest by the society’s poverty of morals and humane ethics.

Hence those guilty of corruption escape the consequences of their wrongdoing in connivance with a bland, treacherous government. The consequences of this anomaly are of course, better imagined – think Dasukigate, Mainagate, and so on.

The frightful blooming of the Nigerian karma is a brazen incantation of debauchery’s triumph over morals. Desire trumps ethics on the watch of supposedly invincible oligarchs.

The latter espouse raptorial power in rebuttal of patriot magic. Their awful energy incites the eerie flurry of Medusa’s reptilian hairlocks, entangling everyone and everything. From treasury looting, sponsorship of terrorism, to the elevation of random bigotries, the incumbent ruling class manifests as Nigeria’s worst comeuppance.

Until recently, there was no punishment for the wicked and no deterrence for the corrupt. On President Goodluck Jonathan’s watch, Nigeria was pilfered silly. The country was persistently debauched by cliques and individuals.

There was no good or evil. The cult of moral grayness bloomed on Jonathan’s watch. Thus our reality of chronic indebtedness and bankruptcy.

Enter Muhammadu Buhari, incumbent President and leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Buhari suffers the flipside of karma – from his ascension to power and ouster by military coup in the 1980s, to his re-emergence as democratic President, the retired General from Daura, is widely appreciated and denounced along bigoted shoals of ethnic and religious extremism.

In his first term, base sentimentality and impoverished logic of entitlement fostered by the ruling class and segments of the citizenry, afflicted Buhari with a clumsy cabinet; subtle cues abound therein, establishing incompetence and workings of unforgiving karma.

Thus we have ministers whose appointments were hotly debated and questioned on basis of their shameful antecedents either as governors, commissioners and other capacities in public and private sectors.

Four years after their appointment, these ministers can only manage a hobble along the clogged, swampy corridors of the APC’s castle of “Change.” Such individuals must be replaced with competent hands. Buhari’s next cabinet mustn’t bloom as yet another bower of ill-bliss.

Contemporary legend contend that some of the outgoing ministers are victims of hubris and retribution trailing their emergence through vile, subterranean tactics. Such characters constitute impediment to national progress and his presidency – his personal inadequacies notwithstanding, if Buhari has a formidable team, his shortcomings as an administrator and leader wouldn’t be so bothersome.

Lest we forget the country’s outgoing Eighth National Assembly and its lack of character. Lawmakers in the country’s upper and lower legislative chambers currently constitute a disgraceful burden to national purse and pride.

But groupies of the ruling class would have none of that. Left to them, their cronies and benefactors in the current administration can do no wrong. In the scheme of things, not only are the corrupt saved from their just deserts, the worthy and true are punished for their uprightness and industry via burdensome levels of maladministration, taxation and bureaucratic ineptitude.

In the ensuing moral sepsis, the ruling class treats equality as an ethical baseline even as it establishes prosperity and poverty as fortunate and unfortunate draws in Nigeria’s cosmic lottery. Thus public office metamorphoses to moral insult and government officials make concerted efforts, daily, to subvert progress.

The most prescient portrait of the Nigerian character and our ultimate fate as a nation however, resonates Hedges’ apt commentary on Herman Melville’s allegorical portrayal of the American character in his literary classic, “Moby Dick.”

Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia, argues Hedges.

In truth, Nigeria is likable to the fictional ship, the Pequod. The ship’s crew is a mixture of races and creeds which is reflective of Nigeria’s heterogeneous society. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like the Nigerian society’s inordinate dash for wealth, assures the Pequod’s destruction.

While Ahab and his crew eventually gained awareness of their imminent doom, very few Nigerians appreciate from experience that our prevalent culture of acquisition, fostered by insatiable greed and based on cutthroat politics, extreme corporate profit and devastation of farmlands by oil exploration accelerates doom.

Nigeria, like the Pequod’s crew, rationalises insanity, scorns prudence and bows slavishly before hedonism and greed. The society yields to the seductive illusion of unbounded luxury, wanton idolatry, limitless power and acclaim. Thus we unfurl to degenerate forces and systems of death.

Those who foresee the impending doom lack the fortitude to rebel. Thus moral cowardice makes hostage of all. This shouldn’t encourage Buhari and his ruling class to scorn the subtle nudge of tact. History offers timeless lessons in the fate of Napolean, Hitler, Stalin, Joseph Mobutu (Mobutu Sese Seko), Saddam Hussein, to mention a few.

These men rose to lead with positive intentions. In time, they did good but later got drunk with power, losing touch with reality, causing misery for many with their own fate sealed in the Karma of their actions.

They forget that a movement toward the illicit, as Camille would say, produces a violent movement outward in desolation. We see the same pattern in the finale of Moby Dick, where Ahab’s attempt to pierce the heart of nature by harpooning the whale ends in tragedy and a vast, empty silence.

Moby Dick eventually rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one.

Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.

 

 

 

The true patriot, like the Delphic oracle, is maddened by vapours. His dissent is incensed by fertile consciousness; having seen and felt the towering injustice of the predatory ruling class, he chooses to rebel.

His rebellion, however, is neither funded nor fathered; like an androgynous earth mother, it self-fertilises without help from society’s captors and oppressors: the corrupt presidency, venal governors, legislators, and international NGOs with a bleeding heart. He understands that they are all spawns of the same ogress womb; carnivores of the same badlands.

But society and peer, like their captors and oppressors, consider him victim of an errant demon. “Is he the only one? Must he rebel at all times?” they drone as he subjects all to the unforgiving spokes of his blind sight. Neither society nor its oppressors appreciate being derobed or called out, he would learn.

Like the unappreciated hero, the true patriot is eventually abandoned. An outcast, he is constantly assaulted and stigmatised for lacking modern society’s essential traits of being: narrow-mindedness, base sentimentality, and a hankering to traverse gloomy straits. Then he must nurture a taste for funded outrage, lust for sullied money and political passivity.

The true patriot is absent in Nigeria, perhaps because the nation thrives on inertia; submissiveness, bred by a culture of illusion, is exploited by demagogues, who present themselves as saviours to a groveling citizenry.

Demogogues promise glory without sweat, success without sudor, and get significant segments of the citizenry, mostly youth, hung up on the fantasy of a world without hardship.

Eventually, the youth discover that they had been conned; high-strung and embittered over the immateriality of their much coveted Eden, they become suicidal and apathetic.

Such jadedness becomes a powerful element in ushering society’s submission to tyranny. It rids democracy of vibrancy, leaving it beleagured. It afflicts a nation with spiritless youth.

Where the youth participate actively, they are unperturbed by pressing social concerns. Where they exhibit concern, they display scripted outrage. Their lack of political literacy makes them susceptible to a pitiful range of diversions, like demogoguery and platitudinous chant.

Wolin would call them victims of imperial politics but I would call them unbidden offering on an altar of vultures.

A spectre haunts Nigerian youths. Having entered an unholy alliance with the predatory ruling class, they do not constitute formidable opposition to scare corrupt leadership aright.

Negative, emasculated passivity  flourishes, when the youth  subordinate themselves, unquestioningly, to the ruling class.  Playing passive requires extreme sacrifice; the docile youth, in fulfilling his role as gelded, amoral being, must silence his mind.

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

Through the depths of his affliction, however, the Nigerian youth is efficiently managed by his oppressors. The corporate hierarchy that holds government and the citizenry hostage, effectively manages the youth by keeping him ignorant and manipulable, via donations to youth-driven NGOs with cosmetic purposes, for instance.

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

A foundering educational system accentuates ignorance and apathy, particularly among the youth, whose inherited task includes the fosterage and sustenance of democratic consciousness for national rebirth.

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

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

President Muhammadu Buhari allocated a paltry 7.04% of the N8.6 trillion 2018 budget to the education sector, lower than the 26 percent recommended by the United Nations to enable nations adequately cater for rising education and development exigencies.

But who knows? Buhari may eventually attain a rude awakening, and understand that Nigeria would appreciate at least an 18 per cent allocation to the education sector.

His emergence as President-elect for the second time, constitutes a treat, and Buhari should make the best use of it.

He should scorn the ‘highly informed, expert opinions’ that counsel an ‘expedient’ and ‘radical’ recourse to the policies foisted on us when ‘structural adjustment’ forced Nigeria to reduce spending on education, health, and infrastructure, among others.

There is no way a team of government apologists comprising ex-journalists, politicians, lobbyists and party loyalists can effectively spin a precarious education budget for the second time. No degree of righteous umbrage and frosted psycho-babble could manage public dissent and discomfiture arising from such ill-advised spending.

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

It doesn’t matter that the system has been effectively rigged to produce what many corporate hierarchies persistently cite as “unemployable graduates.”

The few “employable” ones, are mostly scions of Nigeria’s leadership, and they are recruited from Ivy League and mushroom universities abroad, where they have been schooled only to fulfill responsibilites and find solutions that willpreserve the status quo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humaneness is the product of enlightenment, a comprehensive, adequately funded, and supervised educational process,but Nigeria’s leadership are ignorant of such civilisation. They are products of society’s moral void.

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

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

 

 

 

 

The illusion of progress becomes a bane to development, where a nation’s leadership, pawns her sovereignty for hefty tokens from the industrial complex.

Where such malady subsists, the government becomes lackey to big business and provides little more than technical expertise for corporations and business elites bereft of ethics and a concept of the common good.

The government, beholden to corporate hegemony, preaches resilience to the average Nigerian. To be resilient, however, is to be pliable, docile, exploitable.

Resilience is touted as the core value of Nigerian culture hence the term, “suffering and smiling,” to which millions of Nigerians earnestly subscribe to.

The highest form of patriotism is presumably attained where dissent is smothered by the racket of “national progress.” All we need is the right attitude, the willingness to be politically-correct.

Political campaigns of national rebirth are built around this idea of subjugating the self to national interest. This involves the creation and amplification of slogan over substance, E.g. “Good People, Great Nation,” and material over mind, as reflective in the country’s “cash for vote” culture.

Sloganeering thus attains the depth of a religious revival; chants are composed to trigger sentiments. The political and business elites and agents obligated to them, assist them in preying on the populace; journalists, advocacy gurus and civil societies, among others play muscle in this moral and emotional carnage.

For instance, a fawning press highlights the political class’ pillaging of public treasury as beneficial investment relations and courting of foreign investors. Hence the photosplash of grinning, esurient governors signing bilateral trade agreements with foreign investors.

The most crucial details are often left out of the reportage: like the fact that most of those agreements are legitimised ponzi schemes, geared to fleece unsuspecting states and citizenry of Nigeria’s collective wealth.

Despite her vast oil riches and promise of economic growth, Nigeria has failed to lift her people out of extreme poverty over the past three decades. The World Bank’s 2017 Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals, revealed that 35 million more Nigerians were living in extreme poverty (living on less than $1.90 a day) in 2013 than in 1990.

While the World Bank and sister organisations are oft criticised for releasing damning ‘reports’ and ‘revelations’ borne of malicious intent, its recent SDG report is worth contemplation at the backdrop of Nigerian leadership’s frenetic plundering of the nation’s wealth for a privileged few.

A recent revelation served up another reminder of how much malfeasance costs the country. Emails leaked by anti-corruption charities, Global Witness and Finance Uncovered, suggested that a $1.3 billion payment by two multinationaloil corporations in 2011 for a lucrative but undeveloped Nigerian oilfield, never went to the public trust for which it was intended. Instead, almost all of the money, nearly half of that year’s national education budget, was divvied up as kickbacks between high-ranking government officials, notes Yomi Kazeem.

Such flagrant abuse of public office is possible where the citizenry are apathetic to governance issues and ingratiated by an institutionalised culture of corruption.

There is no gainsaying Nigeria suffers the lack of a humane culture and progressive educational system.

Matthew Arnold’s 1869 treatise, Culture and Anarchy, holds that a broad knowledge of culture, “the best that has been thought and said,” would provide standards to resist the errors and corruptions of contemporary life and ask the broad moral and social questions.

Sadly, most universities have become high-priced status enhancers and occupational training centers. As Donoghue writes, prestige is the paramount commodity. Hence the obsession with Ivy League schools’ certificates, and First Class degrees.

The latter should be seen as mere appendages, offering leverage by which the graduate or individual could assert his worth or value to his immediate and larger society.

Where the individual is found wanting in morality, professional and personal ethics, he becomes retrograde to the rebuilding process. Where he is considered amenable or subservient to national goals, an illusion of progress is fostered and celebrated. The truth, however, is that such individual accepts tyranny of the political party and leadership in power.

In Nigeria, party vanities and public officers’ selfish whims are perennially disguised as ‘national interest’ and are aggressively pursued by a misappropriation of national resources.

Whatever the devastation wrought on the state and the populace, in their pursuit of such selfish interests, politicians and the party in power expect the citizenry to maintain a stiff upper lip. They are expected to buy into the fantasy of progress, promised at the end of the pillage.

The Nigerian crisis is a human crisis. The foundation for progress is non-existent in the country because the human elements that should construct such eonian monument are inherently corrupt.

Consequently, we have a ruling class that is essentially, degenerate, predatory in nature, and a working class that religiously fulfills the role of a docile, self-flagellating lower brute.

A recourse to educational foundations, in the light of Arnold’s 1869 treatise, would Nigeria’s interest, given that herformal and informal education process is theoreticallyand practically defective.

Western scholarship, religious education and ethics have been so corrupted, that, they evolve like communicable diseases – neutering culture and claiming lives, for the sake of a few relative truths, idiosyncrasies and currency.

The enlightenment we flaunt is basically a ghost of human education. Under its foul stench, we fight a lost battle for survival against politicised corruption, social strife and entrepreneurial selfishness.

Nigeria regresses by lack of honest and broadly cultured men. Patience, humility, integrity, honesty, good breeding and taste spring from proper learning and culture.

It’s about time we engaged in pursuit and dissemination of knowledge devoid of loose and careless logic. The final product of our educational system must be neither a  medical doctor, nor journalist but a learned and humane patriot.

To produce such men and women, our learning process must be borne of pure, practicable ideals and broad, inspiring ends of living. Not desperate, sordid, money-grabbing sound bites.

True knowledge essentially translates to being an emissary of truth, hope, superior culture and progress. It is never simply to teach breadwinning, furnish teachers for the public schools or vocation for the unemployed. It should above all, bean appendage of that fine adjustment between what Du Bois calls reality and the growing knowledge of life. An improvement of civilisation and solution to its seemingly intractable problems.

Thus the end product of our educational process must have learned to work for the glory of his or her calling, not simply for pecuniary gains. The intellectual must think for truth and progress, not for fame or the applause of the gallery.

This is attainable by conscious endeavour. President Muhammadu Buhari could start by laying the foundation for such a monument. He should improve Nigeria’s education budget beyond the disgraceful 7% fraction as allocated in the last two years.

Then he could supervise the founding and redesignation of the primary school for the secondary, and the comprehensive high school for the polytechnic, university and teacher training colleges.

If we could successfully weave such a progressive and connected process, we could establish an educational system and not a distortion of it.

More significantly, we could establish the Nigeria of our dreams, where the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the humane, enlightened and true.

 

 

Elitism fades to melodrama, where the elite, misappropriates the role of a revolutionary, and considers himself greater than the state.

In his struggle to usurp privileges and power, he inflicts misery on ordinary citizens, those whose predicament allegedly triggered his discontent.

“For the love of country” becomes his arrant lie, the falsity that becomes his slogan. Thus, this minute, Nigeria pulses to duplicitous rant. Having lost or seen their favourite candidate lose at the last general elections, cliques and criminal masterminds among the nation’s elite are going for broke.

These characters, comprising top clerics, political and business leaders and failed aspirants, have resorted to spite, couching their dissonant vibes in the language of patriots. For instance, they would claim to condemn President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption fight ‘for the love of country.’

Too much of such duplicity is discernible in the exploits of militant warlords of Nigeria’s delta and north-east regions – many whose ‘hardcore’ agitation had been seen to extinguish, soon after they got ‘settled’ by the ruling class or power brokers aligned to the former.

The incumbent elite, despite his pageantry of poise and mantra, answers to a more frantic form of savagery than militant terrorists and warlords; ultimately, he affects the passion of a wildling.

Ferocity manifests as crucial aspects of his passion, the clique culture, authoritarianism, and sense of entitlement characteristic of his class. Its a precursor to rite of Nigeria’s rape cycle.

The country’s elite is morally ambivalent. He pays lip-service to patriotism even as his provocative ‘purity’ incites filth in its wake. Stripped of his slogan, his passion betrays neither breadth, nor depth. It is barely individuated from the insensitivity and grotesqueness resonant of the primeval gladiator arena.

His passion connotes moral emptiness. What Paglia would liken to the still heart of a geode, rimmed with crystalline teeth. His platitudinous chant are disguised as a series of soothing gestures, like rubbing a lantern to make a genie appear.

In truth, he weaponises a dark sentiment, luring the masses into a dark cycle of sadomasochism. His exaggerated gestures and confessions of love, are an assertion of savage lust. He moots no selflessness or sacrifice, only refinements of domination.

Beneath the glitter and ire of his platitudinous chants, however, subsists a frantic hankering for privileges and spoils of power.

Gold plated doors and sofas. Plastered walls and Venetian glass. Platinum pumps and home theatre. Spring locks, expensive cars and wine cellars. Offshore villas and bank accounts; trophy wives and concubines among other things, symbolise the good life; according to the contemporary elite.

Civilisation, as Thoreau would say, has been improving our houses and husks, but it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. In Nigeria, the “civilised” or sophisticated elite’s pursuits are no worthier than the barbarian’s.

He spends the greater part of his life in pursuit and acquisition of affluence. At the prime of his life or apex of his growth, he becomes a President, Governor, industry titan, religious leader and “very successful” activist or media consultant, among others. Essentially, he becomes “rich” in societal terms.

But for all his touted affluence, he remains inherently poor; a consequence of his poverty of intellect and mind. This manifests as his handicap, which extends beyond the familiar trope of the human forelock or Intelligent Quotient (I.Q.) thus his alarming vanities and incompetencies.

Take for instance, the abject horror the nation’s political elite perpetuates in the name of governance and provision of decent shelter or “affordable and low-cost housing for all.”

Via such “citizenry-centred” and over-celebrated efforts, they brazenly embezzle public fund. The political elite, thereby, perpetrates a two-pronged atrocity with chain reactions: it defaults in its promise of “affordable, low-cost housing” and subjects the citizenry to untold hardship, characterised by homelessness and the burgeoning of slum republics prevalent in Nigeria’s high-profile cities.

To this, not a few elitists in government and their apologists within and outside the corridors of power, would argue, that it is not the duty of the government to provide housing for all.

They would argue, that, the government couldn’t provide decent shelter for all even if it tried. Then they would seek refuge in the workings of capitalism which purportedly provides for every man to fend for himself, according to his means.

They would pertinently state, that, the persistent failures of their class to facilitate an acceptable human state of affairs in the country are hardly unforgivable failures. They would claim that they merely add up to their inability to fulfill their constitutional obligations due to the “Nigerian factor” and because doing so, would impose avoidable inconveniences on them.

They would also argue, that, it would be essentially, inexpedient, to fulfill their statutory responsibilities, given the unstable and feral nature of Nigeria’s democracy.

Simply put, it is the moral character that breaks down. How many Nigerians can afford to pay between N9 million or N15 million to acquire the two and three-bedroom contraptions shamelessly splattered across the “affordable and low-cost housing estates?”

Only party chieftains, cronies and associates of serving public officers are able to afford such conveniences at ludicrous rates. Once they acquire them, they put them up for lease, at rates that would make Shakespeare’s Shylock, a saint.

Even in the primeval epoch, every family owned a shelter sufficient for its coarse and simple wants. Today, in Nigeria’s towns and cities, where civilisation supposedly prevails, the fraction of those who own houses is negligible.

The rest pay an annual rent that renders them impoverished and barely able to feed and clothe, let alone attempt the ownership of a house.

The Nigerian elite cares less about such issues than about getting one of its own into power. Its members are loyal not to posterity and ideas, but to the pursuit and attainment of wealth and power by any means.

In an ostensibly capitalist country, these self-styled vanguards of private enterprise espouse and brazenly perpetrate an oppressive social philosophy, that, upholds the existence of the average Nigerian as an imperceptible social organism—a view which implies that his needs are not valid instruments for perceiving social reality and improving it.

So doing, they project themselves as the chosen few supposedly endowed with special insight and ability to direct others. This implies the existence of an elite foundation of knowledge and aristocracy; a socio-political arrangement inaccessible to logic and beneath the mind.

Notwithstanding its astounding rise to relevance, the Nigerian elite will be toppled off its high horse sooner than it can ever imagine. This is unavoidable in spite of the citizenry’s seeming docility and apathy.

The elites are probably unaware, that they have lost the weaponry that guaranteed their rise to eminence and made all of their conquests possible: idealism and morality. They lost both precisely at the height of their acclaim, since their claim to either value was a fraud; the evident realities of their politics demonstrate the brute illogicality and cruelty of their social code and gospel of sacrifice.

The country’s elite do not preach sacrifice as a temporary means to some desirable and lasting end. Sacrifice is their end—the sacrifice of the lives of others.

It’s about time the ‘others’ reclaimed their lives.