Category: Olatunji Ololade

The heathen dialectic of Nigerian politics is sweepingly comprehensive and accurate about electorate mind and nature. Nigerians vote for tribe, money, and random bigotries.

People vote to actualise hate or latent hostilities. Thus the Nigerian voter’s card actuates internalised hatred for a religious group or ethnic divide, seasonally. The 2015 general elections, for instance, assumed a landmark in the country’s celebration of hate and bigotries. The electorate, severely divided, along religious and ethnic divides, voted for Muhammadu Buhari and Goodluck Jonathan in fulfilment of ugly stereotypes. Few voters could convincingly articulate their reasons for choosing either Buhari or Jonathan; true, a depressed economy, skyrocketing inflation and embarrassing corruption across government tiers substantiated the debate for and against either candidate, but for most voters, the decisive factor was the religious affiliation and ethnic root of the contestants.

The malady subsists till date; as Nigeria prepares for the 2019 general elections, the electorate separates into two conflicting factions, spawned on ethnic and religious bigotries. Devious politicians capitalise, as usual, on the people’s illiteracy, awakening dormant hostilities even as they accentuate familiar bigotries.

Even though Buhari and supposedly strongest rival, Atiku Abubakar, both hail from the north and are both Muslim, large segments of the electorate do battle in the candidates’ names, for an even more dangerous bigotry, intolerance for the anti-corruption fight.

There is no gainsaying Buhari and his team has made a mess of his much vaunted anti-corruption campaign but saner folk would rather root for Buhari, guided by his sparse victories or semblances of ‘Change’ instead of a baggage-infested Atiku.

Notwithstanding arguments to the contrary, there is still corruption in government circuits, the anomaly blooms in embarrassing but tidier proportions.

Governors still pilfer and divert the oft unexplainable ‘Security Vote,’ to fulfil their vanities. Lawmakers still embezzle the illicit ‘Constituency Allowance’ they allocate to themselves, and local government chairmen still misappropriate remnants of allocations due to them, after large chunks of the funding has been embezzled by state governors.  

Appointment into political offices is still fraught with maladies of nepotism, perjury, dirty politicking and other forms of corruption. Add these to poor infrastructure and declining standards of education and healthcare, and you have a perfect recipe for an uprising or protest-vote, if you like. About 10 million of registered voters, in a flagrant display of apathy, have refused to collect their voters’ cards.

Many more have sworn to vote for Atiku and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP), in protest against Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) perceived below-average performance. Thus the social media pulsates as you read with bickering and vitriol for and against either candidate.

At the backdrop of these shameful realities, the citizenry, mostly youth’s political illiteracy is embarrassingly far-flung and subsumed in sentimentality, that, the ruling class had to re-invent a political devil in the opposition, to exploit their ignorance and intolerance.

The youth rant in new and traditional media, that they have been excluded from power, at the state and federal level yet they have populated Nigerian politics for 58 years as thugs, murderers, vote-sellers, rhetoricians and canon-fodder for mayhem.

The altarpiece of their presence manifests in every political season, when the incumbent ruling class, comprising men and women, who previously identified as youth five to seven decades ago, deploy them as unthinking muscles, emissaries of death and destruction.

Nigeria’s current dilemma is a consequence of choices and perversions of the incumbent ruling class, comprising government functionaries, their associates and godfathers – whose collective, pathological self-interest derailed a long train of progress, while exacerbating and ignoring existential threats.

The ruling class’ sociopathic need for instant gratification pushed them to midwife equally sociopathic policies, causing them to fritter away an enormous inheritance, and when that was exhausted, to mortgage the future.

Thus there is urgent need for Nigeria’s youth to coalesce into more definitive roles and forms and make informed choices. Since elder politicians, whom Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, aptly described as the ‘Wasted Generation’ have failed to grow up and make progressive choices for the nation, the onus rests on the youth to answer as the adults the ruling class never were.

The PACT assemblage is already a failed enterprise; driven by greedy, selfish egomaniacs, the platform could not assume the prized role it ought to perform, leaving Nigeria once again at tethers end, and the brink of collapse.

This calls for urgent, proactive steps by the youth. The first is to provide a foundation for unity of ideas and cause against the incumbent ruling class’ political agenda, and to do it very quickly.

The second is to evolve a social agenda that strengthens the ideals of a common progress and commonwealth. It is not yet too late to undo ruling class malfeasance, but the deadline is fast approaching.

At the moment, the predatory ruling class are regrouping into marauding, ruthless camps. In their political paradise, governors rule for two terms (eight years) and compensate themselves with outrageous pensions and senate seats.

At the expiration of their eight-year tenure, outgoing governors, with unabashed arrogance, struggle to choose their successors, and other crucial public appointees. Some wage war to turn government into their family inheritance, thus their struggles to install their son-in-laws and siblings in government quarters.

Ultimately, they seek to impose stooges as their successors. The latter are expected to cover up official fraud, embezzlement and other atrocities, that, they committed during their tenure.

This is the result of junk politics, where nothing changes – meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that institutionalise corruption and inefficiency in governance, according to Hedges.

Junk politics “redefines traditional values, tilting courage toward bluster, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of reason and intellect.

At every turn, it seeks to obliterate voters’ consciousness of socio-economic and other differences in their midst, and it is the major indoctrination of Nigeria’s most prominent political parties.

Its about time the youth established a platform, unlike PACT, where more humane aspirants foster politics as everything but a by-product of a diseased culture that seeks its purpose in characters, who are as Boorstin writes, “receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness.”

 

 

As you read, Nigeria grapples with the swell of young aspirants. In the latter, desire sprouts with seductive dissonance of savagery and surrender.

Passion in the young aspirant is armoured by greed, hypocrisy and a fever of entitlement. But like the bestial ruling class they seek to replace, Nigeria’s young aspirants are unwise, inhumane and maddened by lust. You see it play out in their utterances, conduct and public presentations.

This explains the failure of the PACT assemblage. A disenchanted aspirant and member of the group, blames its ill-fated endeavour on members’ selfishness and impatience to take over power.

Driven by immoderate lust and an exaggerated sense of self-worth, each presidential aspirant in the group, expected his rivals to “step down” and choose him as a consensus candidate. Eventually, the group picked a consensus candidate who reportedly lost the presidential primaries in his party. Shame.

There is no gainsaying PACT suffers the affliction of the covetous, a conflict between definitiveness and dissolution of self – which is amusingly, the plague of the incumbent ruling class. Within the group and among the country’s young aspirants, passion assumes a dangerous freedom, and they engage in its pursuit at all cost.

Some wily, crooked breed, scurry for the mandate of old plundering parties, even as they seek the blessings of familiar monsters, or godfathers, if you like.

This band of aspirants believe, that, by presenting their necks to the leash of supercilious godfathers, their victories are assured at the polls.

They understand that the most essential skill in political theatre is artifice. Hence they apprentice themselves to established criminal masterminds and godfathers to realise their ambition.

A different monstrosity, however, subsists in self-appointed revolutionaries cum liberators of a Nigeria presumably shackled to the whims of plundering godfathers, desperate cults and cabals.

These new kids on the block seek Nigerians’ mandate to lead via characterless, diminutive political parties and fashionable platforms like PACT.

Ultimately, they exploit a banal theory of rage and aggression, anticipating and out-stepping the ruling class to match it filth for filth, rage for rage, rhetoric for rhetoric, while professing righteous indignation at the latter’s inactions.

In truth, the passion of the PACT assemblage is similar to the incumbent ruling class’ aggressive forging; the theme is similar with the latter’s, where endless bickering, platitudinous rant, vote-buying, bloody violence, and premeditated murder mar proceedings.

Had PACT kicked off from its disgraceful start, it would eventually assume barbarism hitherto peculiar to Nigeria’s most powerful, prominent parties.

Its members’ presumed sophistication and intelligence, oft touted as PACT’s unique selling proposition (USP) will dull to the maul of its duplicity and ethical quandary.

To establish and sustain its integrity, PACT suspended itself in ideological voyeurism and fault-finding, a tactic of assault and defence, that, eventually became its perversion and tomb.

As PACT buries itself in bitter mummiform, Nigerians, the youth especially, will do right by consigning the platform and hopes it stoked in them, beneath the political thrash pile, where it shares space with the country’s rudderless political parties.

The PACT disaster is hardly astonishing, however; the platform and its members, if elected, would eventually play into a stereotype – better they dash our hopes now than later.

The history of the Nigerian youth on the corridors of power leaves much to be desired. Salisu Buhari became Speaker of Nigeria’s House of Representatives before his 30th birthday although he claimed 36 at the period. He was eventually impeached for certificate forgery and later granted pardon by former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Dimeji Bankole was just 37 years of age when he became House Speaker, in a tenure that was marred by corruption scandals and police detention.

Now 44, Dino Melaye, became lawmaker 11 years ago at age 33. The controversial lawmaker and ‘Ajekun Iya’ crooner, attained notoriety for his boastfulness, incomprehensible display of his wealth on social media, and excessive tantrums.

Uninspiring Kogi governor, Yahaya Bello, assumed office at 41 and lawmaker, Farouk Lawan, was in his 40s when he attained bad press for allegedly soliciting bribe from Femi Otedola, a businessman.

Lest we forget the theatrics and tantrums of Ayodele Fayose, former Ekiti governor; Nigeria will not forget the wild antics of Fayose in a hurry. Now 57, the latter was undoubtedly young when he became Ekiti governor on May 29, 2003.

The jury is forever out on the quality of leadership offered by the aforementioned as public officers, yet, whenever, a young person is elected as President, or into public office in other parts of the world, young Nigerians erupt in a frenzy, afflicting the social media with righteous rage, and chanting the We-Are-Not-Too-Young-To-Run refrain, often tiresomely.

Truth and patriotism symbolise our preferred aspirant, we expect these qualities from heroes hence the widespread clamour for younger aspirants.

We have seen such passion erupt in the French as they elected 39-year-old President Emmanuel Macron; in the Canadians as they elected 46-year-old Justin Trudeau.

Today, we see it romanticised by Nigeria’s youths even as they serve as ultimate impediments to its attainment. The Nigerian youth seeks to take over power from a ruling class that recruits them as thugs to disrupt elections, maim, kill and scuttle the ambition of promising young aspirants.

The same generation of youths make a living as social media hooligans (e-rats), whose job is to hoodwink, bully, spread falsehood and thwart the ambition of young aspirants and promising change-makers, as you read.

The same band of youth will retire to rant, on their digital devices, and as paid protesters, about the youth’s urgent desire and right to take over power from the predatory ruling class. Their only argument is that, they are Nigerians, in their youth.

The ‘young’ presidential candidate illustrates a fable. He is political Nigeria’s novel personae. He is “Not Too Young To Run” for any elective post hence his time has come to upset the oligarchic wagon.

His cult runs where dissent rebounds. But alas! He speaks from both sides of the mouth. His passion for power translates to gibberish whatever his platform; since he knocks sweetened banality against the ruling party, All Progressives Congress (APC) and its arch rival, People’s Democratic Party (PDP)’s washed-out bromides, he hovers under an interpretative cloud.

Like a changeling of fickle principles, passion and integrity are changeful in his wake. Call him androgyne. He is luminously masculine yet feminine, but ascribing femininity to his weaknesses disparages the female gender; for there are women imbued with unimpeachable acumen, courage, character and depth – pivotal traits he doesn’t possess.

Chanting the ‘Not Too Young To Run’ anthem, he wears naivete like a badge, and brandishes ebullience as replacement for substance.

His enthusiasm reached tipping point as President Muhammadu Buhari signed the ‘Not Too Young To Run’ Bill into law on May 31, this year.

There was a rush of excitement and hope among the youths as the country amended sections of the constitution that hitherto inhibited youth under the age of 40 and 35 to vie for the presidency and governorship positions respectively.

President Buhari, seeking to cash in on the buzz, invited members of the Not Too Young To Run Group (NTYTRG) to witness his endorsement of the bill. Samson Itodo, NTYTRG leader, commended Buhari and feeding on the hype, young aspirants emerged on the political scene, to vie for Nigeria’s presidency, governorship and other crucial posts.

Eventually, they united under the aegis of Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT), to choose a consensus candidate from within their ranks, to counter the influence and spending power of the rapacious ruling class.

The assemblage of supposedly intelligent, vibrant youths vowed to make PACT a platform on which the best and most acceptable aspirants, are backed by all to fly the youth’s presidential flag in 2019, against the might of Nigeria’s unwieldy, conflict-ridden, behemoth parties.

The PACT arrangement, however, crumbled as the young aspirants bickered and whined like clueless youngsters over a kite. Selfishness, greed and immaturity hampered their bid to gift Nigeria with what could have been an inspiring team of bright, spirited candidates or a semblance of it. Some of the aspirants eventually distanced themselves from the arrangement and the choice of a consensus candidate.

Sadly, PACT, by its shenanigans, fulfilled a dark prophecy of its untimely demise, few hours after it’s birth.

At its emergence, PACT paraded smooth-talking candidates with charismatic profiles – most of whom flaunted exaggerated sense of self-worth. Extravagant sections of the press called them titans. But they are no titans. They are simply merchants of rot, who united to clothe dross as gold and filth in newer, fanciful packs.

The group fell to the cravings of desperate youth with unbridled lust. Soon after they spoke in brilliant, rousing cadences, their language began to trail off in confusion.

Some of them are achievers, no doubt, while others flaunt a gift of the garb, but oratorical prowess and personal attainments are never enough to ride the tide of avarice and immaturity coursing through the group, let alone to preside over an unwieldy Nigeria.

Earlier, PACT waxed poetic, provoking the citizenry’s dormant passion with deceptive dialectics. At deeper perusal, the assemblage’s passion was shown for what it was, the spunk of beetles kindling wet wood.

Today, their language echoes as infantile drivel, much like the battle-cries of four-year-olds playing war Generals against an army of hostile corn stalks.

There is too much about them that rekindles outrage hitherto stoked by the predatory ruling class. For instance, PACT, like Nigeria’s two biggest political parties, suffers duplicity in ethics and multiplicity of covetous personae.

Aspirants, goaded by ego and inordinate lust to become the group’s sole presidential candidate, squandered a rare opportunity to gift the country with credible candidates for political office on the altar of greed.

It was a given that the PACT would fall apart. Their initial language was untranslatable by realistic yardsticks. They spoke the same gibberish as the incumbent ruling class they sought to unseat. Ultimately, they brought nothing new to the table, save a slew of platitudes and tiresome rhetoric.

For instance, a candidate whispered in certain quarters to decriminalise homosexuality, in his desperation to earn the support of Nigeria’s LGBT divide – the latter urge him to make bold his resolve, like Social Democratic Party’s Donald Duke.

Some other dizzy candidate, of the PACT assemblage, promised to turn marijuana into a national revenue earner and establish a N100, 000 national minimum wage package for the country in a manner reminiscent of APC and PDP’s lifeboat solutions. Another promised to rescue the Chibok girls, eradicate terrorism and entrench gender equality without a practical blueprint for achieving such.

In their condemnation of the incumbent ruling class, they harp on trite banalities in a tenor peculiar to the former.

Their desperate rants and promises establish them as dangerous daydreamers, who could and would rip apart, a nation already fragmented and ruined by bigotries, maladministration and plunder.

Eventually, candidates of the various parties constituting the PACT platform thrashed blindly about the nation’s political swamp, inciting folk up and down rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. Eventually, their language did not make sense.

They are casualties of what Benjamin Demott calls junk politics. Junk politics does not demand justice or reparation of rights. It personalises and moralises issues rather than clarifying them.

It’s impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about Nigeria’s optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on ‘I feel your pain’ language and gesture, to borrow Demott-speak.

There is a joke in contemporary circuits that the battle for Nigeria’s freedom would be fought and won in social space and by the cudgels and blades of ‘woke’ youth. This notion sprouts from ideological fields at home and abroad, where pasture, copse and tributary of thought, flourish from sickly seeds of violence and death.

Being ‘woke’ is next to being a deity in contemporary youth circuits. It confers on the ‘woke’ a colossal ego, an exaggerated sense of awareness and idolatry of fawning peer. Hence the revolutionary chants wielded to inflame the polity via Facebook, Twitter, and shades of mainstream and manipulable media.

Beneath the radical chants, however, subsists an immoderate hankering for money, fast cars and other material things. This translates to a morbid race against time, to acquire wealth by ‘woke’ young assassins, internet scammers (Yahoo Boys), and prostitutes.

Lest we forget the gangs of ‘woke’ political thugs, human rights activists, ‘youth leaders,’ public officers, pen robbers, armed robbers and thieves comprising the nation’s youth.

Due to perceived trashiness and philosophical harlotry of the journalist, this band of youths do not leave the battle for their freedom from Nigeria’s predatory ruling class to the press.

However, several youths find their freedom in money and yet lose it to the legal tender, every day. Money changes everything. Every hour, it turns thousands who could have overcome its darkness into eternal addicts to the base and inane.

For the love of the naira, thousands lose their souls and their lives every day. Man and woman, father and mother, son and daughter, privileged and pauper, engage in the pursuit of money to conquer poverty and be free.

Cowardice is what we should conquer. Cowardice enslaves all to mean and murderous politicians. It cripples the rage of impoverished youth to the wiles of vicious political parties and public officers.

While it is appreciable that the incumbent ruling class’s failings stem from its mental, ethical tuberculosis, it becomes worrisome to see the youth bound to its leash.

An inordinate lust for money enslaves the youth, and cowardice sustains their allegiance to tormentors in the political class.

A man is either free or not. There can be no apprenticeship for freedom, argues Amiri Baraka, U.S. author and political activist. But Baraka’s wisdom strikes no chord with Nigeria’s ‘woke’ cowardly youth.

The lure of absolute cowardice cannot be spurned, because it comes wrapped in bouquets of freedoms and fiscal flowers. Hence the youths embrace it.

Absolute cowardice is their door to freedom. From its thresholds, they seek glimpses of proverbial Eden. Vistas of ancient paradise illumine their world, from modern perversions like DSTV/Multichoice’s Big Brother Naija (BBN) amorality show, private parties and basement orgies, political hooliganism to mention a few.

In the living theatre of their world, there is no lull between dreams and realisation, toil and rewards; morbid fantasies mutate into instant visibility.

The afflictions of contemporary youth are akin to medieval Rome’s imperial masques: charades, gruesome sensuality, horseplay and inquisition.

But while Roman emperors made sexual personae an artistic medium, Nigerian public officers go several steps further; they elevate murderous lust, carnal and ethical perversions to a religion. Touting these as modern forms of freedom, they urge the youth to assemble for worship in their temples of filth.

The youth, of course, become enthusiastic worshippers in their tormentors’ holy place: think ‘card-carrying’ members of Nigeria’s doctrinal brothels, or political parties if you like. Too many youths have given their souls for shackled forms of freedom.

In Nigeria, the youth are stage machinery, mannequins, minor actors and decor, in the ruling class’s theatre of the absurd. Considering the antics of BBN inmates, southern cultists, Boko Haram insurgents and murderous herdsmen/terrorists of the north, the lives contemporary youth demonstrate the inadequacies of our modern myth of freedom.

Nigeria suffers the affliction purportedly free, ‘woke’ youths, who are flummoxed and sickened by their alleged freedom. Sexual liberation, political irresponsibility, financial independence, our deceitful mirage, ends in lassitude inertness.

Freedom and responsibility are utopian to the Nigerian youth. It does not matter if he is a presiding governor, a legislator, civil society thug, press hooligan or ‘woke’ social media warrior; his afflictions are homogeneous to his roots and pop culture.

With money, he assumes the integrity of gnomes and adopts the random metamorphosis of greed. Without money, he resists the evolution of worldly experience. He embraces multiplicity of wile, theatrical guise and becomes anarchic, often in tandem with the whims of the ruling class’s wildest bunch.

Theatrical mutation and excessive self-love, seductive principles of modern youth, can never be reconciled with growth and morality. Contemporary performances of the youth in social and political theatres emphasise Nigeria’s descent from a moral cloud into dissolute fenland.

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

Like Okwudiba Nnoli notes, it uplifts and crushes, enhances and debases, exhilarates and disenchants, dignifies and dehumanizes, enlightens and blinds, unites and divides. Thus under the influence of money, humaneness and the quest for the collective good are ferociously smothered by disruptive and selfish considerations.

Consequently, justice, freedom, equality, dignity and other human rights, are sacrificed on the altar of the perennial rat-race for the accumulation of money.

More worrisome is the reality of presumably ‘woke’ youth being unquestioningly docile to the power of money. Their loyalty and sympathies are often hawked to tyrants who treat them like dogs on a leash.

This is emblematic of Gustave Le Bon’s philosophy of ‘The Crowd,’ which was valued not only by Pareto, Freud, Mussolini, and de Gaulle, but even by Horkheimer and Adorno. Le Bon contends that the type of  ”hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instills them with fear…Should the strength of an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from servitude to anarchy.”

 

 

Today, we stand on the bight of history to salvage or waste whatever hope survives, again. For all our rant of progress and our clamour for change, see what politics we advocate. See what candidates we celebrate.

Like a mixed economy, men of mixed politics touting philosophies of mixed premises, assault our psyche with debilitating mathematic and skill. They have led us from the epoch of gloomy realities, to the point where geometry of military vigour and feeble rebellion dissipates in our ruined world.

It’s about time we exercised tact and meticulousness, in casting our vote at the forthcoming general elections.

I ask that we be wary of everybody and everything. I ask that we watch out for certain questions which we will frequently hear and certain apologies that may resound as philosophical query or rhetoric. They are in truth, psychological confessions and expositions of the treachery and chaos constituted by our preferred candidates and their apologists.

If we pay good mind to their politics, we would find that every touted good by some candidates, masks a damning evil, like the extent to which altruism erodes a man’s capacity to grasp the concept of rights, or the actual value of human life. And the extent to which his conscience and humaneness has being wiped out.

I ask that we be wary of the extremely humble and patronising candidate, who is desperate to serve as the means to the end of others; such character will ultimately regard others as disposable means to achieving his ends, often at very expensive cost.

The more neurotic and ‘conscientious’ he gets in his practice of altruism, the more he will devise schemes “for the love of the collective good,” “for the love of the common man,” or “posterity” and “leaders of tomorrow.”

Every effort of such candidate will be geared at reinforcing all manners of sentiments and sound bites – he would claim to seek the fulfilment of “the people’s needs” except the actual needs of electorate, like you and I.

Among other measures, shall we institutionalise the debate as a platform for scrutinising our candidates? I moot a discuss, where the crucial, dreaded questions get asked.

Let us wield it as a looking glass by which we view and analyse the politics, antecedents and soul of each candidate. Let us not be deceived by their politics of unblemished altruism.

The advocates of such selflessness often promise automatic and wholly magical solutions to problems of poverty, security, sub-standard education and healthcare to mention a few.

They promise success and survival to anyone and everyone but what they ultimately offer are “life-boat” solutions – fleeting lifelines by which short-term benefits are derived. Such philosophy of governance and moral conduct conflict with our social realities. It’s akin to applying menthol on a bullet wound.

Let us not be deceived by their promises of restructuring, modern and affordable housing, true federalism, fiscal prudence, quality education and so on regurgitated by our preferred candidates.

Let us begin to ask how they would pay for these things and at what cost to you and I.

Thus the beauty of a platform by which we would make each candidate define his philosophy of social reform, welfare governance and the psychology of his noble experiments in the interest of our most basic necessities.

The appalling recklessness by which our candidates propose, justify and project “government with a human face” may be discernible, measured and disclaimed through the looking-glass of well organised political debates and frank-talk.

Thus we could begin to identify and abstain from such candidates and their philosophy of bogus realities.

Who knows? We may discover, in the nick of time, that the hallmark of their “humanitarian” mentalities is the advocacy of some limitless grand scale public goal or initiative, without regard to context, costs or means of achieving it.

Eventually, we would understand, that, for such a goal or initiative to be desirable to you and I, it has to be made public and glamorised because the costs are not to be earned, but to be expropriated; and a dense patch of venomous fog has to enshroud such vital issues as the means of achieving it.

This is because the means are to be human lives. Human lives like yours and mine; battered, bruised, browbeaten and easy to fleece.

Healthcare appropriately illustrates a modicum of their life-boat ventures. “Isn’t it desirable that the government subsidises treatment of compatriots living with HIV/AIDS?” clamours an average citizen. The preferable answer would be “Yes, it is desirable.” Who would have a reason to say no anyway?

It is at this point that both mental and moral processes of a collectivised brain are wholly cut off. The rest is fog. Only the desire remains in sight of our “altruistic” candidate.

“It’s for the greater good. It’s hardly in my interest but the interest of others. It’s for the public, a helpless, ailing public,” rants the familiar candidate. Consequently, the fog hides such facts as the embezzlement of public fund, unbridled looting of the public till, compromise and sacrifice of medical science, professional integrity and the careers and happiness of those who are to administer such care, the nurses and medical doctors; and those who are to enjoy it, the patients.

The examples of such projects are innumerable as daily, our favoured candidates, whip up more altruistic hogwash to bait us, draw us in and confuse us.

Therefore, be wary of the candidate promising to clean up our slums while avoiding questions about what happens to the victims of such cleansing and those in the next income bracket.

Be wary of the candidate who seeks to “educate the shanty kid” while avoiding crucial issues as the quality and welfare of staff to anchor such educational project. What will be taught, and what back-up measures are to be adopted in the event that the initiative fails.

Be wary of the candidate who seeks that Nigeria too gets to do the moonwalk and conquer space even as he avoids the crucial issues of government and private sector neglect, Nigeria’s white elephant space technology and discrimination against the nation’s polytechnics and technological training schools.

Be conscious of their unreality – their blind, savage, ghastly fantasies that inspires them to prevaricate and if possible, avoid the usually unanswered and unanswerable question to all their “popular” and “altruistic” goals: “Who really gets to enjoy the benefits?”

New months ago, a colleague of mine told me in a voice laden with contempt that, “Nobody reads you guys anymore. Nobody cares what you write as a columnist. You are just wasting your time,” he said. According to him, the best form of social commentary is that which seeks to elevate and shamelessly venerate even the worst of Nigeria’s ruling class. “You have to be smart,” he advised.

Few months later, another colleague told me in the same tenor that it’s about time I started sucking up to the politicians and industry leaders. “You need them more than you would ever know. You need connections with them and the money they can give you. You can’t keep writing English, you have to be smart,” he said.

Between the two, an indisputable truth resonates jarringly; it echoes the depth of our descent as men and citizens. Both colleagues of mine, while issuing a subtle mockery of my professional and personal ethics, endeavoured to tell me the truth as they have learnt to see it.

I agree with them that being close to politicians and sucking up to the latter manifests in almost instant and outrageous wealth for many journalists. Forget journalists, it is a veritable shortcut to instantaneous and sudden wealth for Nigerians of all gender, professional, religious and ethnic divides even as you read.

Little wonder it has become trendy for many a Nigerian to virulently criticise the incumbent leadership or opposition until they are co-opted into the special circuit of treasury looters, associate looters or aspiring looters. And this is the point at which they begin to exhibit ‘table manners.’

According to a famous and now domesticated human rights and political activist, “Table manners demand that when you eat, you don’t talk.” Thus in showing table manners, many Nigerians careen in the perilous swirl of the country’s tragedies, with their mouths stuffed, until the end.

The end is what should scare us. I speak of that imminent epoch when we shall grope through personal misfortune into national tragedy; when anarchy and genocide finds perch, past corruption and greed, in our hearts – while we burn and flay for mammon, tribe and tin-gods.

The language of our rage will not be understood by all even as our fury is patronised by all. In our tumult, our perverted neighbours of the ‘first world’ shall nourish and thrive. Nigeria shall become that perfect prey for the ‘first world’ and all manners of world to rip off.

It’s not such a long haul to that epoch right now; the tragedies that would ruin us are right at our doorsteps. They are rooted in our hearts and clannish havens of chaos and plunder. They manifest as Boko Haram, characterless politicians, falling oil prices, comatose industry, persistent looting of our treasury by the ruling class and gradual mutation into a corrupt, one-party state.

But even as we fret over the likelihood of the country’s eventual descent into socioeconomic and political recession, friends like mine and of the ruling class fixate on the next corrupt politician, whose deep pocket they could scavenge from.

These parasites could be likened to the mythical harpies and servants of the furies. They abide in and currently run amok our socioeconomic and political space doling unequal plaudits to a savage ruling class, for a fee.

The servile journalist becomes a perfect symbolism of the harpies. He is a fortune hunter and airborne brigand, befouling society and our corridors of power with anal droppings. He represents the aspect of bestiality that ravages and kills for the sake of lust.

He would argue that a murderous, thieving public official or politician is the best Nigeria ever had. He would argue that a ruthless dunce was the best thing to happen to Nigeria, politicizing the latter’s perceived ”humility” and “love of God” to the fascination and appreciation of groupies nationwide.

There is the oft-repeated logic and inclination to blame this persistent and saddening malaise on greed, ‘enlightened self interest’ or capitalism; however, the impulse for giving a monster a mild name, the lust for acquisition, pursuit of gain and money are merely symptoms, of the society’s steady descent the slope of the decadent and grotesque.

Max Weber, the late German economist and social historian would say it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times, and in all cultures of the earth but I would say that the Nigerian malaise is brought about by the absence of an enduring moral code.

This deficit manifests in deficiencies of personal and societal ethics – the consequence of which is the regeneration of tyrants, greedy-guts, fraudsters, narcissists, murderers and bloodhounds of all nature, across the country’s landscape.

The trials of Nigerians’ moral degeneration – as exemplified by the citizenry’s inordinate lust for money and the country’s recurrent tragedies– reveal an overarching tendency to savour short-term greed and relief over long-term prosperity.

Despite our afflictions of impoverishment and bad leadership, Nigerians continue to look for quick fix solutions by casting their votes for the clueless and corrupt at election time, for a fee, thus mortgaging the country’s present and future for short-term benefits.

Through decades of self-inflicted scourges and disasters, Nigerians continue to bemoan their tragic fate; while many argue that the country ruins because the youth are too weak and too selfish to spill as much blood as is required to rid the nation of every human and institutional affliction, many more contend that the country’s woes will disappear immediately poverty is eradicated by the ruling class.

It is our so-called intellectuals, labour leaders, radicals and human rights activists that amaze me; add to the mix every mercantile journalist, ‘columnist of note and substance’ and you have a perfect blend of Nigeria’s worst enemies. It will no longer do to excuse subnormality and greed as political and socioeconomic expediencies. Everybody knows that every one of us is playing his own card.

We are enjoying a great deal by selling out. It is what the domesticated activist called exhibition of “good table manners.” Funny how every journalist, labour leader, banker, doctor, cleric and activist to mention a few, have developed excellent “table manners.”

 

 

Nigeria is blessed with a few brilliant, industrious youth, no doubt. But as you read, many of the nation’s youth regress into fleeting fractures of hope they ought to represent. Many more seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis 40 years before they get the physical kind from chain smoking, binge drinking, gluttony and mental indolence.

The ruling class, however, will not bat an eyelid as long as their children inherit their stash of the country’s looted wealth.

Notwithstanding ”ordinary” youth continue to perpetuate that sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes as “wisdom” among the rich but arrant foolishness of the masses. Hence the successful doctor, banker, journalist, engineer, accountant to mention a few, amongst us, do not care about anything and anybody else.

Yet we pine for positive social change in which we could thrive. The few that claim to be intellectually endowed and progressive in thought seek knowledge and skills relevant to their dreams of bliss but even these few have no taste at all for the vagaries of honest industry.

When we cry for a historic revolution and youth-friendly society, our thoughts pander to a more permissive and corrupt society, that will aid our desperate dash for unearned wealth or what we deem our share of the Nigerian dream.

This is our Nigerian dream: a lush, breathtaking future that de-emphasises honest toil and accords our vanities a caressing glance. We dream of strings of bank accounts at home and abroad; we hope to drive the best cars, live in palatial mansions in highbrow areas and enjoy the most lucrative contracts and job offers even when we do too little to deserve such perks.

Our lust for the fleeting banishes reality. And this depravity is pervasive. Decades ago, it manifested as worrisome and inordinate self-love; today, we re-establish it as the language of the socially inspired and politically correct. Hence the frenzy by which we seek out and worship industry titans, political messiahs, entertainment superstars and other celebrity icons.

It’s all part of a ploy to incarnate our vanities via those we worship and establish a false intimacy with them.

If modern gospel of prosperity and motivational literature won’t make us celebrities, then celebrity idols, reality television and sheer violence will. We impatiently wait for our cue to walk on stage inside our theatre of the absurd to be admired, feared or envied.

Our vanities cramp the growth of our human spirit: they restrict the resuscitation and positive engagement of our productive faculties. Thus we find it hard to subscribe to sucah faith, simple decencies, honesty and values that demand that we enthusiastically dedicate ourselves to progressive personal growth and realistic rejuvenation of the Nigerian enterprise.

That is why we had bigoted fops threatening to destroy Nigeria and perpetuate ethnic genocide if a certain politician or public officer retains his seat or gets booted from office. It is unforgivable for any youth to lend himself to such pitiful causes despite glaring political and socio-economic constraints that the ruling class foists upon us.

A societal madness has begun to occur: bigoted, unemployed youth and bigoted, employed youth; lost souls wandering the streets of Nigeria’s major cities, day and night, like loose molecules in an unstable social fluid have begun to ignite.

Thus our cities have become covens of cruelty where youth, fired by angst, a lingering sense of hurt and revolt, take alarming steps from threatening violence to perpetrating it.

Traditional neglect of the youth as integers of growth has evolved to dangerous generalizations and the demonization of peaceful majorities.

Today, economic forces create an overriding sense of disenchantment and futility among the youth. Additionally, the insensitivity of the ruling class triggers reactionary attitude and self-aggrandizing pursuits amongst the youth.

The prominence of social justice and equality movements has dissipated as we become more concerned with identity politics than the greater good. Ironically, the ruling class, their close associates and scions are the only beneficiaries from this splintering of Nigeria into bigoted, selfish associations.

A prevalent crisis of confidence has occurred in reaction to the social turmoil. More youths are feeling empty and without purpose yet we continue to moot revolution like the next best thing we could orchestrate after our last follies have fallen silent.

We forget, still, that there is a time to speak and time to act; time to scream and silently orchestrate the inestimable violence of uprightness.

Protest movements fail because youths needed to drive them are lacking in grit, honesty and ideal; thus we remain perpetually exploitable – victims of what George Bernard Shaw, terms “the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry” and an opportunistic malady that Noel Ignatin rightly identifies as “the original sweetheart agreement.”

Eventually, the Nigerian youth is written off and our grievances dismissed as the crazed rant of a pathetic mass of revolutionary impostors. Here, then, is the crucial temptation facing us; either we acquire at least a provisional and concrete ideology and the ability to commit ourselves to more progressive enterprise, or we expose ourselves to greater exploitation and disillusionment.

More often than not, we are tempted to give up and retreat, in search of some comfortable, greener pasture where we can luxuriate and “survive” according to the idiosyncrasies and social conditioning several “developed” nations deem worthy of us; this is always the resort of cowards and the feeble-minded.

The alternative is to drastically overhaul our values to become more progressively inclined and concerned with the political, the economic and social; to acquire the competencies and the skills necessary for the tasking work that must be done if the social structure of Nigeria is to be even slightly modified.

Solutions can never be discovered without profound understanding of law, governance methods and the economics and social organization of humane statehood.

It’s about time we cultivated progressive interest in such realms and practicable goals and norms for their actualization; without these, we will continue to flounder in the sea of often ‘well-meaning’ but ineffective good intentions.

These are dark days for the Nigerian youth. We are going through a particularly unpleasant form of hell but it’s a hell that we have made for ourselves by our ghastly greed, laziness and inarticulateness. But we have still got youth on our side and thus the possibility of change.