The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Slavery is still the disease

    Today, complaint is still 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 functions in profligacy and chaos. Nigeria laments the insensibility of the ruling class.

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

    Complaint was often made that our problems persist because we refused to convene a Sovereign National Conference (SNC). There is the argument that our problems worsen because President 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 solution’ 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, decadent clerics and bloodthirsty political godfathers to mention a few. What manner of humaneness could result from a gathering of such characters?

    There is a tragedy inherent in our customary lamentation every time our conscience is roused with a damning incident or report. Racist politicians and activists tirelessly suggest that we go our separate ways. They tout secession as the only solution to the country’s league of extraordinary problems.

    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 – the youth – by which the separatists hope to achieve their dreams of dissolution, would listen and let the secessionists risk their hides and children to actualize their platitudes.

    The biggest misconception about ‘secession,’ ‘insurgence,’ ‘self-determination ‘or whatever the separatists choose to call it, is that it could be peaceful and that the end result would be a conscientious and citizenry-centred dispensation.

    It’s all dirty, greedy politics. The separatists 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-secession: “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.

    This disillusioned youth engages in bootless pursuits at the end of which he accomplishes too little or nothing. He probably accomplishes some individualized goal – satisfaction of a sentiment or material gain – which to him is everything; but for Nigeria, he accomplishes comparatively nothing.

    Eventually, he morphs into the disgruntled man on the street stereotype; who suddenly realises in his twilight, that he had squandered God’s greatest gifts to him: intellect and talent. 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 social transaction than a contemptible kobo.

    There is fundamental evil in our souls hence the vileness of our norms and culture. What evils should we set out to abolish in our modern society? To this, I bet very many well-meaning people would answer poverty.

    But poverty is merely a symptom, slavery is the disease. The extremes of riches and destitution follow inevitably upon the extremes of leadership and bondage. We are not enslaved because we are poor; we are poor because we are enslaved.

    Every attempt to conceive imaginatively, a better ordering of Nigerian society is by no means modern; it is at least as old as Plato, whose “Republic” set the model for the Utopias of subsequent philosophers and self-styled revolutionaries.

    The secessionists 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 or race 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.

    In contemporary Nigeria, it is incense for suspicious revolutionaries claiming to fight for the interests of Nigeria’s ethnic divides. This has enabled cynical and anarchist political movements to grow out of the frustrations and hopes of Nigeria’s youth.

    The process of re-sensitising the youth away from the establishment of chaos and genocide advocated by the secessionists 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 across the world as worthy indicators of Nigeria’s need to follow suit.

    Whenever they dazzle with such informed commentary, tell them to lead the struggle 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 appreciable number of Nigerian youth capable of powering revolts for ethnic self-determination, the end of which is dissolution of Nigeria, why can’t the same youth power the social regeneration and reclamation of the Nigerian State from the clutches of the predatory ruling class, ethnic bigots and dissolution activists?

    The current political dispensation and acute racial 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.

  • Saraki or Buhari will hate this

    This minute, conversation segues to Bukola Saraki’s political chess game with Muhammadu Buhari. The Senate President duels with the President and vice versa. It’s the stuff random fetishes are made of; it’s lure to a passive press and ‘lore’ to an ignorant electorate. The permutations unfurl in real time; they are dramatic, mellow, pulse-quickening.

    I place no wager on the likely outcome of the beef between the state officers. Like the proverbial cat and mouse, aides to the duo go gung ho against each other. In defence of their principals and desperation to feather their nests, they urge the citizenry to immortalise the damaged and the flawed.

    Through the circumstances, aides and associates to Buhari and Saraki deploy wit and random wile eerily, summoning our sympathies for their plaintiff principals. Like frantic metamorphosists, they would clothe dross as gold and mask succour as infernal terror.

    The perceptive listens to their eloquent drivel, incoherent rants and wanton justifications, in amusement, cautiously seeking the villain from the hero, the victor from the vanquished.

    The unperceptive are quite captivated; since reality hurts, they accept desperate sentiments as ‘truth.’ It is their daemonic aria, a flight of decadent will and imagination. No thanks to this pathetic gang of vanishing minds, Nigeria suffers the possibility of self-destruct.

    The scene prefigures the transition or ‘transformation’ if you like, of citizenship from gradual decline to rapid degeneracy. Let them bicker and bite their hearts out. I would wager, however, that when the dust settles on their discord, two victors may yet emerge, Buhari and Saraki; and the loser will be the electorate, as usual.

    Saraki recently defected from the ruling party, All Progressives Congress (APC), accusing forces within the party of causing his exit. There is no gainsaying the relationship between Saraki and the ruling party was fraught by distrust at his emergence as Senate President in 2015, against the wish of the party’s leadership.

    While his loyalists lament his subsequent trial, for alleged non-declaration of assets, which terminated at the Supreme Court’s ruling in his favour, as a premeditated offensive against him by political detractors; recent allegations of his connection to armed robbers, who robbed banks in Offa, Kwara State, killing over 30 people, rankles an ominous note.

    The police say their investigations show that some of the armed robbers were Saraki’s political thugs and that he may have provided arms and logistics to them. Saraki has denied any link with the suspects, alleging a witch-hunt.

    Thus, he quit the APC for the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), a move widely condemned as waddling back to gobble his vomit. Despite the spin accorded his return to the PDP, from which he hitherto defected to the APC in controversial circumstances, does it dispel his crunch politics?

    Will it make him preferable to President Buhari, if eventually he achieves his ambition of vying for the presidency, come 2019, as a candidate of the PDP?

    Buhari, nevertheless, restates his vision of romanticised ‘change’ to the applause of ardent, unquestioning loyalists and the outrage of his most virulent critics. Still, he relies on his epiphany of morality that the severely exploited and hapless citizenry are expected to die for. Buhari rode to power chanting change and promising a radical, progressive departure from the pilfering that characterised public office before his emergence.

    Notwithstanding his shortcomings in handling the herdsmen crisis, one can’t help but admire his resolve to end Boko Haram’s terrorism and recoup the country’s looted public funds.

    At his emergence as President-elect, the citizenry saw him as a saviour amid the ruling class’ primitive tribe of predators. Contemporary boondocks legend painted portraits of him as a warrior in wolf-skin vest, brandishing a shield of steeled morality and a stone-axe, forged to hack down monuments, that the corrupt ruling class built to entrench corruption.

    Since the beginning of Nigeria’s democratic experiment, politics has evolved from airbrushed imagery of shady characters in newspapers, to the wild, insolent ire of an ignorant electorate, often in support of an individual or cause.

    Ultimately, politicians loom imposingly as pimps and madams, treating the electorate as whores. In their estimation, the masses are meant to be dominated and abused. And once they have their way with them, they discard them like pieces of trash, until ‘re-election’ season.

    As we approach 2019, the political hierarchies birthing and corrupting Nigeria’s ‘Change’ are on public display. How do we identify the hero from the villain, the upright from the corrupt? Of Buhari, Saraki, others, who is deserving of our votes?

    Perhaps the one whose professed politics matches the vibrations of his soul; the candidate who validates his promises, ethics and projections by dependable philosophies of human existence.

    He offers something more than “life-boat” solutions as lifelines by which we would derive satisfaction of our necessities, sow and harvest our fruits of hope and citizenship.

    He is the one who successfully nullifies the insolence of our tribal mentality. We must have seen him attain and authenticate, a worthy equilibrium between, say, the expediency of wiping off our slums vis-à-vis the affordability of beautifully planned cities and suburbs.

    He is the candidate who struggles to repair in wisdom and coherence, while we pick him apart, as he articulates his blueprint for providing good roads and electricity, standard health care and security, stable economy and quality education, among others.

    He is the candidate without the shame of baggage and the chaos of dishonour.

  • They will paint your ugliness in beautiful English

    The random newspaper, television station and online medium become vessels to itinerant grim reapers as you read. Editors of powerful news platforms, reporters and digital/mobile journalists in particular, have become death’s minstrels. Like Ogege, the spirit with embroidered woe, they have turned serpents, sleeping in Nigeria’s undergrowth, to merge with the hue of the prevailing wild.

    They forget that when Nigeria eventually submerges in the mire of bestial elements, even the press will be cannibalised. Nonetheless, the local media, like global news agencies, serve as emissaries and enablers of the dark, vicious lusts and ‘murders’ committed by politicians, industry titans and multinationals. How? By ignoring their monstrosities and couching their ugliness in beautiful English.

    It is hardly surprising that the politician and magnate remain the subjects of Nigerian media’s perennial fascination. Of these lot, the coarse and ferocious, wanton and bloodcurdling, are gleefully celebrated and coated in ornamental language by the press. The average newspaper, TV station and online medium wildly celebrates the ‘achievements’ and ‘statesmanship’ of established and closet criminals in public offices because it is very profitable to do so.

    To the press, it never matters that a state governor diverted and expended public fund to ship cronies and political associates abroad, to witness his lavish wedding to a trophy wife. The media hardly cares that a governor would splurge on an insolent ward’s wedding ceremony, at home and abroad, at a time he has refused to pay workers’ salaries and improve infrastructure citing ‘economic recession’ as his reason.

    Very few journalists are indeed, worried, that Nigeria’s incumbent public officers, like predecessors, have fleeced the country to the bones, in the guise of operational budgets and emoluments. State fund, stolen and diverted by these elements would attain judicious use if applied to nobler constitutional projects, like the provision of crucial infrastructure, security, potable water, stable electricity among others.

    The media hardly cares that such money could have saved lives if used to repair bad roads or renovate moribund primary health care centres. Thus while poor, underprivileged electorate die in ghastly road accidents; while thousands of newborn breathe their last and their mothers’ extinguish to birth complications, the Nigerian press obsesses about the ‘sterling statesmanship,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘brilliance,’ and ‘influence’ of the men and women  responsible for their untimely demise.

    Save some very few journalists and media that actually care, the majority of Nigeria’s Fourth Estate do not give a hoot about dying mothers and infants in Nigeria’s hospital labour rooms and corridors of death. They do not care that while the citizenry’s beloved die prematurely in extreme and avoidable circumstances, most incumbent and former senators, governors, presidents and even local council chairmen, sponsor their trophy wives, daughters and daughters-in-law abroad, to give birth in safer circumstances.

    Rather than speak truth to power, characters that could be mistaken for kindred spirits with the viper, scorpion, dung beetle, and hyena are elevated, worshipped and celebrated as the rarest of gems by the Nigerian press.

    The media celebrates these incarnations of humanity’s debris because doing otherwise could be suicidal. Politicians own the media. And tycoons determine the news. They place advertisements and pay the salaries of the men and women by whose professionalism or otherwise Nigeria accesses her news and information needs. Thus the quality of journalism you get.

    It is foolhardy of anyone to expect a journalist who hasn’t received  salaries in eight months to be objective about a news story involving a commoner and a politician. The commoner will ignite his conscience with tears but the politician will silence it with hefty ‘brown envelopes.’

    It is deceitful to anticipate fairness, honesty, integrity and accuracy from mainstream and online media whose existence and continuity are determined by the whims of influential politicians and business moguls.

    But the Nigerian society demands purity, integrity and impartiality from the press all the same.

    Journalists are accused as partners in crime with the Nigerian ruling class. To a great extent, this is true. It is also true that the Nigeria gets the journalism it deserves.

    Yet the society seeks fulfillment of tyrant fantasies. Such fantasies often vary from the destruction of an unpopular government or despot to a worn-out civilization. Reality however, affirms the duplicity of such mindset. In Nigeria, where voters are continually tamed and kept on a leash by a ruling class that capitalises on obvious handicaps: their impulsiveness, insensibility to reason and judgment, and overt sentimentality, it becomes increasingly difficult to nurture and enable a fair, vibrant press.

    Despite its faults, society conveniently picks on a scapegoat for its infinite timidity and cluelessness: the press. The journalist is thus expected to serve as the conscience and moral compass of the society, challenging the government and checking the excesses of the ruling class, selflessly and uncompromisingly.

    As utopian fantasies go, these are noble expectations of the journalist but the Nigerian society ignores its cultural shift from conventional morality to unbridled hedonism. It assumes, hypocritically, that the press will continually give it honest and developmental news even as every segment of the society strives to unmoor the journalist from his role as a crucial appendage of the nation’s critical mob.

    The public, comprising big business, the government, and civil societies among other mob segments, vilify any journalist or news medium that seeks to educate and engage rather than entertain and perpetuate their biased definitions of reality. Several organisations are placing media advertisements and parceling expensive gifts to halt publications or shut down reportage that could hurt their interests even as you read.

    Contemporary Nigeria embraces the horrendous pageant that has turned news into paid publicity and mindless entertainment. In response, the journalist slips to survival mode and kowtows to lusts and vanities of modern, politically-correct society.

    Beneath the mindless glamour, cultural and ethical decline however, an insidious reality festers in the death of hope and incandescence of tragedy.

    At the centre of the turmoil is the journalist whose fate is so critically bound with the country’s.

    Rather than pose a challenge to the system that domesticates and enslaves him, he chooses the easiest way out and plays junkyard dog to tyrant cabals and the predatory bunch constituting the nation’s citizenry and political class. He assumes the role of a poseur and pretends to fight for the interest of the public. This sad charade will end badly for everyone.

     

     

  • The traitor within

    A lawmaker got impeached for embezzlement of public funds. Today, that Speaker emerges from dishonour as “pride to her people.” Our thieving “Honourable” of yesterday, is today, an informed choice for ministerial appointment. That shameful “Honourable” has been exonerated and venerated as a fine stateswoman by the same assembly that disrobed her.

    A party chairman was prosecuted for dipping his hand in the public till, and he was issued a sentence, that even now, resounds as a pat on the back. A thieving pilfered the treasury silly, and he is let off the hook in an astonishing act of political expediency.

    A dishonest bank chief was caught stealing poor customers’ savings to service her vanities, and those of her rich, spoilt clients, and she was issued a punishment justifiable as a modest and enjoyable vacation.

    Political thugs, assassins, arsonists, executive fraudsters and murderous public officers are let off the hook in the wake of suspicious plea bargaining and bullying of the state. Such realities suggest rapid deterioration of our morals and mind. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: despite our professed righteousness, the Nigerian society ennobles mindless profiteering off the state by public officers and their associates.

    The situation worsens by Nigerians’ seeming desperation to substitute virtue for vice and approximate the rewards for uprightness to loathsome ridicule, and an inclination to witch-hunt the just and ethically sound.

    This is not to imply that certain honest individuals do not exist in our clime, but they are persistently repudiated and consumed by the system they are committed to serve. Nigeria’s culture – despite our claims to probity – in fact, reveals a deeper evil than we renounce.

    It reveals the extent to which pretentiousness, selfishness and greed, erodes the average Nigerian’s capacity to grasp the precepts of honesty, human rights and associated values. It reveals a culture from which the expectations and realities of humanity has been totally wiped out.

    The downside is that public officers we elect to serve as the means to the attainment of our various ends, end up exploiting us as the means to insane ends. The greedier we evolve, the more neurotic we become – as elected representatives and electorate – in our practice of leadership and citizenship “for the general good of society,” “for the good of future generations” and everything and anything, except humankind.

    Hence the appalling recklessness with which we acquiesce to bestiality of all kinds, accept betrayal and the most atrocious mode of leadership indefatigably imposed by a treacherous minority on our wanton majority.

    A unilateral breach of contract characterizes the Nigerian leadership. Governance in Nigeria today, involves the most insidious form of tyranny exemplified by wanton disregard for human life and an indirect use of physical force. It consists, in essence, of one man or a group of men exploiting and monopolizing the material wealth of the entire nation, and then refusing to extend the benefits accruable from the exploitation of such resources – which is a cardinal principle of government by representation – to all.

    This privileged few ceaselessly misappropriating the nation’s wealth to themselves, can be likened to commonplace, contemptible fraudsters. The Nigerian leadership commits grievous acts of fraud and extortion utilising variants of an indirect use of force; which consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or other forms of unconscionable deterrents to any citizen courageous enough to challenge them and demand his constitutional right to equity promised as core dividend of democratic governance.

    Consequently, many Nigerians in desperate bid to be socio-politically correct, have perfected the art of moral subterfuge; the hallmark of which is the perverse inclination to aver that a thieving Governor actually means well or a light-fingered Speaker couldn’t help defraud the nation of hard-earned billions and dip his hand in the public till – because they were helpless pawns in the manifestation of a monumental rot the nation should be done with.

    There is no moral difference between a 20-year-old who resorts to armed robbery or advanced fee fraud to actualise his dream of owning a yacht, an expensive bar, penthouse and state-of-the-art Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV), and a Governor, legislator or President who in desperation to amass wealth and operate a Swiss bank account, advocates some grand scale public goal, without regard to context, costs and means – which are usually enshrouded in dense patches of venomous fog to hide the fact that millions of lives are devastated and national growth, grievously stunted, in the actualisation of such public goal.

    There is no excuse however, to justify the selfishness and greed of a Nigerian populace that persistently yields to cravings and temptations by which it loses its right to fair government and it’s much sought epoch of peace and abundance. Progress can only be achieved by a conscious effort to challenge the status quo and demand that among other things, a country’s leadership live up to promises it made at election time.

    Picture by what leaps our lot would improve if Nigerians did not involve in such abject perversions and evasions that spur them to delude that some criminally-minded and power-thirsty politician is motivated by patriotic concerns for the “public interest.”

    Picture what realities the nation could approximate if every citizen desisted from bartering their mandates for chicken-feed, rationalising and driving their minds into states of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that their favorite public officers are actually, mistaken or evil.

    The current generation of Nigerians will continue to plug away and die in preventable misery if they continue to worship and celebrate state actors and elected representatives, who pleaded for our votes,  that they may afflict us with poverty and unmitigated misery.

    Democratic tyrannies and corrupt governments continue to thrive wherever the governed barter their chances at progress, for a token, or gross, dangerous bigotries.

    As 2019 approaches, let us not articulate our miseries and dissent, like the proverbial pawns, eternally programmed to self-destruct.

  • ‘I am Nigerian, come rape me’ (2)

    The ability to fend off rape is a prerequisite of the Nigerian psyche. Vulnerability is a double-edged snare. It presents a trap, creating a maelstrom of gluttony and death, around the vulnerable and ethically frail.

    As you read, modern Nigeria manifests as a trap. Some would call it a labyrinth of lust, where society becomes maze and ‘slaughter slab,’ a multiple-room brothel, vibrantly themed and adorned for the Nigerian degenerate.

    There is no gainsaying degeneracy abounds across societal slabs; across ruling class and electorate, rich and poor divides. While the incumbent ruling class touts its distorted fable of crooked martyrdom, donning the puritan’s cloak, the governed, comprising Nigeria’s teeming impoverished and fast disappearing middle-class, shed blood and brawn, to ennoble the monstrosity of their common oppressor, the ruling class.

    Few months ago, we saw how spectacularly the Charles Oputa aka Charly Boy-led protest group and a pro-Buhari faction hacked at each other with cudgels of folly and blades of rage.

    Charly Boy, despite harsh criticisms and unsparing mockery trailing his ‘Resume or Resign” campaign, mobilised his “Our mumu don do” civil society-driven movement to protest President Muhammadu Buhari’s elongated medical tourism in the United Kingdom, at Abuja, Federal Capital Territory (FCT)’s Unity Fountain and Wuse Market.

    One school of thought nullified Charly Boy’s self-painted portrait as modern day hero, calling it an epic fraud. The self-acclaimed ‘Area father’s’ critics disparaged his professed activism and attempt to ride against violent currents of Nigeria’s tribal, religious bigotries.

    Despite their harsh criticism, Charly Boy’s apologists saw him as a stunning, courageous patriot, devoted to restoration of the public parliament’s mythical state of influence and enormous power. To the latter, Charly Boy was the black knight and Nigeria, his damsel in distress.

    From a previous, violently quashed protest at Unity Fountain, Abuja, the Charly Boy gang moved its stage to FCT’s Wuse Market. But rather than match antics with the Area Father and his crew, a pro-Buhari group in the market, responded decisively, in a tenor of violence and murderous rage.

    Charly Boy, 66, was attacked in Wuse market by angry, pro-Buhari protesters – mostly northern youth. The musician and his cohort eventually fled for their lives, with the pro-Buhari group hot in pursuit. Charly Boy was eventually rescued by another group of south-eastern youth and security operatives, who fired gunshots and tear-gas to disperse the mob.

    Thus an ethnic crisis was narrowly averted. Charly Boy eventually suspended the protest, telling his cohort that their point had been made. “Permit me, my fellow comrades, to say that we’ve come to the end of this particular sit-out,” he said.

    Expectedly, Nigerians queued in layers of conflicting perspectives, in respect of the ill-fated protest.

    Armchair critics analysed the imbroglio, suggesting that Charly Boy actualised some puppeteer’s agenda. He must be horseman to some political mastermind’s dark schema, they argued, claiming that he is too comfortable, too rich and catered for, to indulge in such desperate display of commoners’ grief.

    But that was simply one way to look it. Charly Boy and company perhaps intoned a heartfelt misery. Perhaps he wasn’t just another child of privilege paying lip service to commoners’ plight, but a true patriot whose love for Nigeria transcends his gated ‘paradise.’

    There were casualties during the recent protests. It was not surprising however, that the wounded were mostly unemployed youths and impoverished wards of commoners. Nonetheless, a rare thing occurred by Charly Boy’s exposure to hurt. Was he for real? Was his cohort for real?

    Are they true patriots? Or were they victims of a familiar rape culture? Like hordes of underprivileged youths, were they caught in dizzying sordid dialectic by which the Nigerian rapist (the ruling class), methodically plowed the raped (clueless, impoverished citizenry) barebacked?

    Was the protest phony? Were the conflicting parties driven by money or dangerous bigotry? Or were they comprised of true patriots, seeking Nigeria’s best interests?

    Their savage world of rape undoubtedly, features higher characters: the puppeteers, who determine the extremes of their ordeal but that is a discussion fit for other fora.

    Nigeria would be better off if its youth committed to more laudable ventures; like the pruning of the National Assembly to a unicameral legislature; like protesting against ‘budget padding’ and other corrupt acts by the country’s legislators, the presidency and governors.

    It’s about time Nigerian youth stopped lending themselves as muscles to every devious plot or shady protest for a paltry fee. Let the senators, governors, corporate titans and ministers hiding in the shadows, gather their children to lead such protest marches and their currency-activated bloody massacres.

    Nigerian youths may draw inspiration from Kenyan peers; Cynthia Muge, 24, had no millions in her bank account but few months ago, she contested as an independent candidate because she lacked the funds to obtain the Jubilee Party’s nomination form. She defeated five older men to secure the Member of Country Assembly (MCA) seat in Kilibwoni Ward, Nandi County.

    Flat broke, the University of Nairobi graduate devised a social media and house-to-house campaign strategy to poll 8,760 votes and beat her closest competitor, Wilson Kiptanui of Jubilee Party’s 8,354 votes.

    John Paul Mwirigi’s story is equally inspiring. The 23-year-old unemployed orphan and sixth of eight siblings, also contested as an independent candidate against veteran politicians of established political parties. He emerged winner, polling 18, 867 against Jubilee Party’s Rufus Miriti, who had 15, 411 votes. Three other seasoned politicians — Mwenda Mzalendo (7,695 votes), Kubai Mutuma (6,331 votes) and Raphael Muriungi, a Deputy Governor, two-tome ex-MP and former Assistant Minister (2,278 votes) — were beaten by him. Yet Mwirigi lives in his family home, a local granary in his village.

    It is about time Nigerian youths assimilated the finer aspects of tact, humaneness, and patriotism. They could start by ditching the ‘popular’ parties and politicians, and commit to truly patriotic and unsullied candidates. Those who wouldn’t are simply out to be ‘raped’ for a fee.

     

  • Portrait of Nigeria’s youth as caged animals (2)

    Millennials” have a delusive edge to them; a supposed sense of worth and ardour for growth that defies convention. Digital broadcaster, DSTV/Multichoice, understands this “truth” hence it sinks its fangs into their minds, as the falcon does to stray rat.

    There is no one to protect this significant youth divide from the aggressive cues and wild decadence the broadcaster insinuates into their psyches. The fault is hardly with DSTV/Multichoice, however, but with Nigerian parents who leave the purveyor of filth to the task of raising their wards.

    The blame goes to a Nigerian leadership stymied in a swamp of freebies, like complimentary boxes of the broadcaster’s DSTV Explora, free satellite subscriptions, among others.

    The press, which ought to serve as Nigeria’s shield and last bastion of resistance to the South African broadcaster’s perverse programming, like Big Brother Naija (BBN), and other weird inclinations, is enslaved to its tokens.

    In pursuit of N45million and a brand new SUV, inmates of BBN’s amorality jailhouse shunned dignity, decorum and supposed good breeding, to engage in wanton sex, voyeurism, and tantrums.

    Like dogs and bitches in heat, they had sex in a public toilet, before a global audience. The depletion of condoms provided by the show’s organisers, by inmates, further emphasised the crooked bent of the show. They wanted inmates to have random sex without inhibitions or fear of venereal diseases.

    The scene prefigures the transition in Nigerian civilisation from high morality to decadence. The antics of youth in the debate about the BBN depravity, however, emphasised a throwback to primordial whim.

    One hyperactive youth responded to my critique of the show, stressing that it offers youth like him, limitless opportunity to ‘blow’ (become celebrities) and achieve their dreams. He cited the case of certain former inmates who attained instant fame at their exit from the BBN show.

    To that, I said: “Should terrorism be legalised and considered productive because perpetrators make a fortune by it?” The youth quipped in response: “Oga na English u dey speak.”

    Since Shekau and co attained eminence and cult-following via Boko Haram; and the terrorist sect’s commanders receive at least N500, 000 monthly stipend in hard currency, for provisions and ‘running costs,’ why not declare Boko Haram, a legitimate path to acclaim and self-actualisation?

    Going by pro-BBN argument on social media, we could also approve armed militancy in the Niger Delta, because Asari Dokubo made a fortune by it. Then we can go on to legitimise armed robbery, internet scams/advance fee fraud, public office corruption and organised prostitution etc. because some youths attain celebrity and wealth by towing these criminal paths.

    The obsession with DSTV/Multichoice’s BBN show thrives by the broadcaster’s smirking depravity and the sudden melting of inhibitions of its Nigerian public. It’s like the holocaust and apocalypse.

    Society stands at ground zero, incinerated by the South African invader, DSTV/Multichoice. The latter’s Nigerian staff play pimping pawns; they persistently solicit for secondary pawns comprising fame-junkies and fortune hunters, eager to live like caged animals or guinea pigs, in the broadcaster’s televised dross – for prize money.

    The shows’ participants simply cheat themselves of a learning experience; they circumvent slow, steady, educative path to acclaim, to self-intoxicate in BBN’s accidental celebrity. Unknown to them, the instant fame and opportunities in which they luxuriate are merely flash currents in the electric moment before lightning strikes, and they are reduced to rubble: celebs, glitter and all.

    A glance behind the glitter usually reveals something more than a colourful paradise. It invalidates the deceptions of fame and instant wealth. It is akin to what Saul Bellow likened to picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk or rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation, in his novel, Humboldt’s Gift.

    Many who grasped these super-charged wires and serpents have been found to incandesce in acclaim for a little while, and then they wink out, which leads to a more profound suspicion of DSTV/Multichoice’s BBN celebrity culture.

    Winners and losers are goaded into a maenadic dance of death by the manipulative broadcaster and their puerile, fawning fans. Eventually, they incinerate in despair, to rigid definitions of their lives by the public and their handlers.

    The discerning among them eventually understand, that they weren’t really significant. Looking inwards, they will cringe from different labels they had been led to bear and answer to, like bitches and pups in a dog farm.

    There is no gainsaying DSTV/Multichoice’s BBN perversity unmoors its audience from reality, coaxing them into a world of magic. In the cowardly retreat, truth is reviled and ignored according to manipulations of a predetermined universe, where the search for truth and solutions to real life problems become irrelevant in the scheme of things.

    At the moment, the Nigerian youth is too intoxicated by filth and primordial sentiments to mind real issues that affect their world, and which may ruin their lives in the long run. Boko Haram’s abduction of 110 school girls in Dapchi, for instance, was negligible to them.

    The sad case of Hauwa Mohammed, the 25-year-old midwife and ICRC staff who got kidnapped by Boko Haram wasn’t worthy of their fury or obsession. Hauwa’s death cry, via Whatsapp didn’t incite their angst. It hasn’t provoked them to action.

    “Please go and tell my parents they don’t know the situation that their daughter is in now. For God’s sake, go and tell them…We are now in the barracks and the gunmen have come back again. Oh, Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun (We belong to Allah and to Him we shall return),” she cried.

    Hauwa still isn’t considered front-page material by a cowardly press, and her abduction doesn’t infuriate her spineless peer or spur them against the criminal leadership that renders several Hauwas easy marks to terrorists and other delinquents.

    They would rather fixate on peers bonking each other like he-goats and dogs in heat, in the BBN show.

  • Because we fail as patriots

    Nigeria fails as a nation because we fail as patriots. We do not muster a superior culture of nationhood. Instead, we curate the worst that we dared espouse, labelling it the ‘Nigerian factor,’ and embellishing it as our flamboyant code of conduct.

    We have murderous knaves controlling our ruling and opposition parties; promising youth enslaved by dangerous tokens, and a sly, desperate electorate confined by greed, poverty of tact and the purse.

    Nigeria won’t progress, until we overcome the incumbent ruling class. We shan’t progress until we overcome ourselves. Yet, we covet an incestuous relationship with self – the dark, chthonian parts of our innate nature.

    We mould our clans where tribal foolery fraternises with vile. Senior citizenry molests our young in a never-ending cycle of sleaze and moral paedophilia. But the young are hardly the prey we think they are. Every second, they morph from starry-eyed victims to eager participants and masterminds of our dehumanising ritual of violence, mental, biological aberration.

    Ours is a classic tale of Darwinian waste and mayhem, the squalor and rot of Nigerianness – a distortion of African civilisation. Nevertheless, we block the real import and consequences of this hideous cycle on our psyches and our future as a nation, that we might retain our integrity as brutes and eternal wildlings, perhaps.

    Western science and cultural aesthetics predictably, become apparatus in our frantic attempt to revise the Nigerian horror into imaginatively palatable form. Notwithstanding our frantic lunge for substance and acclaim on frontiers, where the world’s more advanced civilisations project their race and illusions of oneness, Nigeria remains hideous in name and status.

    While we make exaggerated gestures in the fields of space science, information technology, industry, sports, and so on, Nigerian children die at birth and thousands of mothers die in painful labour. The youth are unemployed. Public officers loot public coffers with impunity and disregard for Rule of Law. Law enforcement officers turn violent affliction on the citizenry and society, that they ought to protect; and the executive, legislative and judicial arms of government mesh in a fetid whirl of strife and plunder. Anarchy rules our hinterlands and metropolitan Nigeria.

    While this piece too, resounds as hackneyed howl and lamentation, a regurgitation of the towering monstrosity we have become, it need be restated that our ultimate nemesis is the Nigerian youth.

    The youth epitomise the nub of discord and deathly rally ripping the tide of our march to progress. Why do promising youth evolve like brutes and loathsome trolls? How did our once incandescent spokes of dawn erupt in moonshine?

    Many have attributed the afflictions of the Nigerian youth to lousy leadership, a nonstop dominance of the predatory ruling class and tiring recalcitrance of the younger generation to engage in communal and national politics beneficially. Many more would readily diagnose the maladies of the nation’s youth to structural banes and the perverse culture of citizenship by which they are weaned and ushered into adulthood.

    In the wake of plausible and often farfetched analyses, too many ‘patriots’ conveniently excuse themselves from the nexus of blame and severally propound the sad realisation that Nigerians are innately incapable of self-determination and self-governance. Many still recommend the American example, the British palliative, the Chinese abracadabra and Malaysian ingenuity among others, as solutions to the nation’s ills. How?

    These arguments have overtime, attained a language of their own and thus evolved as a dialect of dissent and exaggerated self-abnegation. The nation’s academic elite, political and economic ruling classes frequently marshal clashing precepts as solutions and justifiable putdown of the ruling class and the lower working class as their politics dictates.

    A more damning view identifies the electorate’s persistent claims to victimhood and sense of entitlement as whiny and symptomatic of a dense and irresponsible citizenry. Between the conflict of hyperboles and emotional vituperation, Nigeria suffers the affliction of intellectual miscreants and promising youth-turned-foetal-adults.

    As youths, the coordinated tragedies afflicting our consciousness daily, append the only real structure to our lives as impoverished Nigerians. The disturbing reality of fast slipping youth, the recurrent rites of bigotry and ethical quandary of coping with the strict moral code of adulthood and ideal society, obscures our understanding of life’s ultimate purpose and meaning. It spurs millions of misguided Nigerian youth to engage in mad, desperate pursuit of fast and fleeting riches, even as ripples of their actions keep hundreds of millions more in the doldrums and binds of despair.

    Consequently, the radical dissent that sprouts from oppression is pitiless and unbending. It splits our world into ‘insensitive ruling class’ and ‘clueless lower class,’ ‘elite’ and ‘downtrodden,’ ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ It fosters even more fragmented discord that continually pits Nigerian Christians against Muslims, Hausa against Igbo, Igbo against Yoruba, and Yoruba against Ijaw. It promotes spurious segmentation of our society into moral and amoral, good against evil, and apostates versus believers. Within this poisonous clime, the Nigerian child is born. If he survives the birth hour, he is violently thrust into adolescence and misshapen adulthood.

    From Boko Haram and Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) terrorism, internet fraud, cyber-terrorism, financial/bankers’ terrorism and political terrorism emblematic of the ruling class, recent developments in the country present a sad prologue to a heinous and wider conflict between the nation’s wealthy ruling class and the impoverished majority of the breadlines and disappearing middle-class.

    A bloody and protracted war thus ensues: this war, caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment, substandard health facilities, rising food prices, big business and government conspiracies against the Nigerian state, manifest at alarming proportions daily and by the second.

    Thus, our society drifts rudderless on a seething sea of sleaze. Now that our world as we have made it begins to collapse, we withdraw from the possibility of rebirth, and choose to exploit ‘infinite possibilities’ in our fragility and doomsday predictions.

    En route 2019, the youth, predictably, becomes ruling class muscles in the theatre of ruin and discord. Yet, no child of the ruling class is co-opted in the ritual of bloodshed and death. They are tucked, safely abroad.

    Picture the murderous herdsmen, NDA, Boko Haram, MASSOB, IPOB, OPC, and so on with sons, daughters and wives of Nigerian ruling class. Let our governors, legislators, and the presidency hand machetes and guns to their sons, daughters and wives.

    It’s about time we shunned the politics of spurious militancy, bloodshed and devastation, to embrace growth and immense possibilities of progressive endeavour, like a political platform founded by the youth, for all and posterity.

     

    • To be continued…

     

     

  • Beyond lip service

    When the python gets caught in the knot of its own curl, it becomes food for the hyena and a joke to the millipede. The Nigerian youth is not a python but he/she is caught in the wave of his/her own curl.

    There is no gainsaying the incumbent ruling class thrives by the cowardliness of Nigerian youth. We are their meal tickets yet they treat us with disdain because we are cowardly. They deem us undeserving of appreciable courtesies, accountability and deference.

    To all the monstrosity they affect, we sit back and curse the times. This business of cursing the times is outdated. It’s time we shed the walnut of the crinkled shell. We have got more serious work to do. But for all the courses we have set adrift, nobody offers direction.

    Social media activists and company will do Nigeria a lot of good, if they could mature beyond impotent rant and activism on Facebook.

    I do not despise them for aerating their anger and discontent with the status quo, but it’s about time they stopped engaging in ceaseless duels with their shadows. Facebook, Twitter activists and co shouldn’t let so much luster, brilliance and fury, go to waste.

    Anybody could lampoon the ruling class via bitter, condescending vitriol, posted as status update on their Facebook walls, it takes courage, however, to marry decisive action to rhetoric.

    If we truly intend to make our lives fruitful, we should begin to see in imagination, the things that might be, and the way in which they are to be brought into existence. We should stop squandering time and passion defending and lamenting unjust privileges enjoyed by the ruling class.

    We should begin to aim at making the world less cruel, less full of conflict between rival greed, and more full of humane elements, whose growth has not been dwarfed and stunted by oppression.

    A life lived in this spirit—the spirit that aims at creating rather than possessing—has a certain fundamental single-mindedness and purpose, of which it cannot be wholly robbed by adverse tyranny and circumstances.

    If we could summon the courage and the vision to live so, we would have no need to break our fatherland into fragmentary parts, either by political reform or bloodbath. What is needed as reform, shall come automatically, owing to our moral and decisive disposition as patriots.

    Let us begin at the grassroots. Let us begin to court the segments of society we would rather not be caught courting. Let us begin to include the “despicable area boy,” “irascible market woman of the metropolitan market and the sidewalk” in our march for freedom.

    Let us begin to value the insolence of the enfant terrible police officer, disgruntled teacher, directionless undergraduate, campus cultist cum political assassin, and respond to it, in plan. Let us begin to value the inputs of these human integers that we have learnt to disregard and smother in our march for freedom.

    The evils of power in the present system are vastly greater than is necessary, but they shan’t diminish by any suitable form of activism save our concerted effort to do the hackneyed, in ways it has never been done before. No bloody revolution will serve our cause; the ballot remains our next best alternative as usual.

    It’s about time we stopped speaking with divided voices. It’s about time we freed our kind from the leash of the predatory ruling class. I speak of that great bulk, not only of the very poor, but, of all sections of wage-earners and even of the professional classes, that are enslaved to the need for getting money.

    Almost all are compelled to work so hard and covet hand-downs from the predatory ruling class that they dare not aspire to that unimpeachable standard of morality that has as its main objective, freedom and attainment of the common good.

    If we could induce every Nigerian in his youth to desire his own happiness more than another’s pain; if we could be induced to work constructively for improvements which we could share with the entire world, the whole system by which our nation diminishes might be reformed root and branch within a generation.

    Let us begin to build that proverbial bulwark of citizenship whose ideal of patriotism is held untainted by wantonness, ill-bliss and the temptations of power. Let us not be daunted by the prevalence of socio-political unrest and ineptitude in governance. And let our passion not be overcome by the emergence of narcissists and corruption of broadly cultured men.

    We could start by becoming the stalwarts they never want us to become. We could start by exciting dormant will to pulsate where ambition joins with hope to perpetuate, for the love of the good, our common good.

    Let us begin that assemblage of writers, artists, students, lecturers, free readers, thugs, social commentators, militants and labour groups that we love to espouse and yet shy to perpetuate.

    Aren’t we done with impotent saw? Let us begin to match our threats with action. Let us begin the movement by which we would reclaim our destinies, and will, from the grasp of the lot in whose clasp we asphyxiate.

    If we could so successfully network in thousands and tens of thousands on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter et al; if we could so painstakingly network to dance (SalsaNaija), see movies (S.H.A.R.E Monday movies) to mention a few; how can we not congregate to salvage our lives from machinations of men bereft of heart, and honour?

    We are done quoting Awolowo, Azikiwe, Bello, Voltaire, Bonaparte, Fawehinmi and others. Let us not mock humanity excited by men channeling peace in quilted sleep. Let us begin to propagate deeds that would become incense for poetry and history that elevates.

    The odds are great but we who have learnt to navigate the worst of mine-fields with determination and grace, should learn to decimate the ogres that maul our lives to pieces.

    It’s about time we formed a party of the people, for the people, by the youth. It’s about time we identified our humane candidate.

  • Tragedy of Nigerian poor’s herd mentality

    That President Muhammadu Buhari was persistently ridiculed and condemned as a failure even before his second year in office, was a direct consequence of his inability to uphold the corrupt but highly lucrative systemic bazaar of the past. Although Buhari’s leadership suffers the affliction of crooked men and women, his glamourised aversion to corruption and his ongoing anti-corruption campaign, resonates dangerously to the country’s crooked divide. Too many men and women accustomed to pocketing and spending money that they didn’t earn are suddenly aghast and petrified by their inability to conduct ‘business as usual.’

    There is the oft-repeated logic and inclination to blame this persistent malaise on capitalism; however, attractive as such sophistry may resound, the impulse for acquisition, pursuit of gain and money in fact, has nothing to do with capitalism – it is merely a symptom, like perverse capitalism, 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 preponderance and regeneration of tyrants, greedy-guts, fraudsters, narcissists, murderers and bloodhounds of all kinds and of all nature, across the country’s landscape.

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

    Despite a protracted and tumultuous history of impoverishment and bad leadership, Nigerians continue to look for quick fix solutions thus mortgaging the country’s present and future for short-term benefits.

    Through decades of moral perversions and self-inflicted 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.

    Today, the fear of poverty as the irrepressible lust for money, drive too many to commit gross acts of dishonesty and irresponsibility. Personal greed is pervasive and poverty is endemic. It represents the triumphal punch delivered by the proverbial system against the country’s poor, hopeless masses. Nigeria suffers the consequence of the supremacy of money. Money rules the Nigerian society. It elevates and ennobles the possessor of it; whatever the nature and import of the rich’s membership of the society, as long as he has money to flaunt and throw around, nobody cares what value he adds to and denies the society.

    Thus the pardon and acquittal of several corrupt politicians and deposed bank chiefs; even after insurmountable evidences were marshaled against them by prosecution, they get off too easily with court sentences that were tantamount to a pat on the back. The poor, on the other hand, epitomise more of what is wrong and contemptible with the society. They represent that segment of the society that is easily swayed, viciously condemned and trodden by the power of money.

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

    Materialism is fostered and greed is ennobled in the mad dash for money. 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 the poor in Nigeria being unquestioningly docile to the power of money. This impoverished lot is hardly impressed by humaneness and promising leadership. To them, these are manifestations of weakness. Their loyalty and sympathies are reserved for tyrants that treat them like dogs on a leash; to the latter, they exhibit the greatest obsequiousness and erect the greatest statues.

    While it is true that the poor would often trample maniacally on the despot, who by a poetic twist of fate – be it by class politics or masses revolt – gets stripped of his power and authority, they do so because having lost his strength, the despot becomes relegated to an ignoble spot among the weak and repressed, who are to be loathed and not feared.

    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.”

    Democratic ideas are therefore in profound disagreement with the psychology and experience of the Nigerian poor. It is unsurprising then, that materially and mentally impoverished folk would distrust democracy and its promise of collective good, to covet and pursue the vain and ephemeral perks of socio-political harlotry.

  • Expensive faith

    Three years ago, bitterness was dressed as a garland of flowers and handed to Goodluck Jonathan, piecemeal, calculatedly; till he got utterly swamped by its scent. Some dandy ‘priests’ sold him a triumphant tale of success at the March 28, 2015 presidential election. Their prophecies were convincing. They leapt from forked tongues with extraordinary spunk and fire, seducing the former president and ensnaring him to bogus plots that reality shut out at birth. The prophets lied. Jonathan lost the presidency to Muhammadu Buhari.

    Faith destroyed Goodluck Jonathan. Faith in spurious prophets to be precise. His hankering for unearned ‘grace’ and ‘glory’ ensnared him in a futile, mischievous plot to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Goaded by flawed prophecies, the former president committed series of flawed actions that eventually showed him up as a pitiful hostage to lust and emissaries of mammon.

    At his defeat, Jonathan awakened to a rude shock: “The prophets lied.” While rumours of a ‘N7-billion-booty-for-heavenly-grace’ rent the air, Jonathan grudgingly accepted that he had been fleeced in an elaborate con reminiscent of Christian Andersen’s timeless plot of the fabled emperor’s invisible garment. Having discovered Jonathan’s lust for power to be irrational and naked, the swindlers sold him a curious talisman for victory, the Most High’s ‘grace.’ But Edumare’s ‘grace’ is never for sale. Hence Jonathan, like the fabled emperor, walked naked in the political square; stripped of glory, passion, integrity and belief in the false ‘prophets.’ The invisible ‘grace’ they sold to him was never of Edumare’s infinite mercies. Eventually, Jonathan did what a man and good sport should do, he accepted defeat and made that ‘epic’ phone call to Muhammadu Buhari.

    In Jonathan’s tragedy subsists timeless lessons for the intuitive. Will Nigeria’s youth emancipate themselves from the shackles of their spiritual daddies and mommies before they suffer worse fate than Jonathan? This applies to both Christian and Muslim youth that are persistently swamped by vapid mysticism, brainwashed and domesticated like dogs on a leash to a conflicting canon of ‘faith and profit.’

    Such credo are advanced principally by the nation’s shady Pentecostal pastors and Muslim clerics. The latter, having witnessed the stupendous wealth enjoyed by their Christian peer, have resorted to equally desperate means to attain heavenly ‘grace’ and bounties.

    By their gospel, worldly success has become the major indicator of spirituality and “God’s grace” hence their subjugation of the divine spirit of the soul, to the pursuit of riches. Thereby, they succeed in brainwashing daily, their oft submissive and unassuming “fishes” and flock, mostly youths, turning them into hapless preys in their pursuit of material wealth and paralysis of asceticism.

    In the mix, it becomes very easy for politicians to co-opt the help of these false prophets to brainwash and mislead the youth in tandem with selfish political ends. It becomes easier for so-called Daddy G.Os (General Overseers), to instruct their ‘fishes’ and ‘flock’ to lean towards a particular power bloc and cast their votes for a particular politician, irrespective of the recipient’s qualification for such benefits.

    Strange thing, faith. In pursuit of salvation and “His Grace,” the faithful “believe” quite laxly and live less humanely; even as their passions pale as their faith increase, by their daddies’ holiness and grace.

    It doesn’t matter that the truths the preachers preach, as their deeds, reveal an insufferable perspiration towards ridiculous and shared goals: a mansion, a choice car, a huge bank balance and an intimidating fortune with limitless possibilities to exploit.

    But if no one could read in between the lines, at least everybody gets to see their truths in dazzling, ugly manifestations: expensive suits; huge, bullet-proof black jeeps with sirens to announce their presence; well appointed mansions; trigger-happy armed escorts and a wanton lust for the fleeting epitomize their righteousness and grace.

    In essence, their messages revolve around wealth. To the poor, they offer deliverance and the banishment of poverty. To the rich, they offer salvation and the perpetuation of wealth undiminished. It doesn’t matter how the latter come by such wealth. It doesn’t matter if in acquiring such wealth, they flout heavenly tenets. What matters is for both the poor and the rich to “sow seeds” in the name and temple of God.

    Everybody affects the transcendence of faith but nobody wishes to fulfill its demands. True devotion demands total abhorrence of the worldly, and steadfastness in faith. But what is faith? How expedient should it be? Kind of a trick question, isn’t it?

    Nobody wishes to observe the rigorous dedication and humaneness characteristic of faith.

    That is why some desperate bank chiefs could steal from poor, struggling publics and yet scurry to their pastors to purchase absolution, and a first class cabin to Paradise at offering time.

    And that is why our equally errant and desperate pastors always manage to “intercede” on their behalf in the presence of God that He may for their sake, disable his Commandments.

    Ill-gotten wealth shan’t acquire His Holy grace. Money will never be enough to hinder retribution and acquire salvation. The gospels being appreciated rob too many of intellect and thought. That is why they label clerics who are one-and-a-half-witted, geniuses – because they have been programmed to worship only a third or smidgen of wit.

    The gospel of prosperity-at-all-costs negates the doctrine of control by conscience, which requires rigorous honesty and fastidiousness. In simple terms, the Nigerian cleric vehemently contradicts and rejects the ascetic view that covetousness and lust for material wealth should be shunned as preached by valid and true scriptures.

    Equally duplicitous and yet vulnerable to deceit, these loyal congregants pander to their gospel of prosperity thus substituting simplicity and honesty with a new brand of spirituality, that invests materialism and covetousness with high moral significance.

    Both clerics and adherents thus engage in material pursuits, not only for the expediency of making a living, but in the expectation that they would amass a fortune. In this regard, they recklessly pray and intone: “It is my right to be rich! Heavenly father, you have promised me so! I bless you father because I am rich!”

    A major effect of this belief is that the modern faithful seeks to accumulate wealth with an earnestness of purpose that ridicules the very foundations and admonitions of faith.

    Such an approach to monetary gain constitutes a moral habitus that burdens the seeker and possessor of money with a bandit’s obligation towards his loot.