Category: Olatunji Ololade

Cowards with columns pass as men of valour. I am a columnist and perhaps a coward. But you would never know. You could never tell if I am true to the calling or just another character pushing pen and idle rant to make ends meet.

It is never my intent to arrogate to myself some blundering heroism or self-abnegating priesthood, there is too many of my ilk doing that. I write to vex your ego and caress it, as your prejudices dictate. I write to contend and affirm those defining moments in which you have discovered me to be a coward or villain, time and over again.

Nigeria has taught me that heroism is overrated, villainy could be relative and cowardliness is a virtue, where perverted will consorts with ill.

You are entitled to whatever you think of me. And I am entitled to what random thought I deem worthy of your readership – knowing the tenor of my rant inadvertently guides you to define me. So, if I am your hero, I believe you think too much of me. If I am your villain or contemptible coward, I guess it pleases you.

But if you consider me to be an idiot, I hope you finally get to understand that no one can be a Nigerian without being in the strictest sense, an idiot. The average Nigerian is a special fool. The higher his status, the more adroit he is in perpetuating his folly. But this is hardly flak for the Nigerian fool in high places. It has always been his luck to find some greater fool to admire him. This is about the greater fool.

This is about men and women whose nerves are disoriented and moral fiber, handicapped. This is about men and women presumably of higher learning and good breeding. Those extraordinary Nigerians by whose talent and individuality, Nigeria customarily channels pride and banalities of a better tomorrow.

This is about the Nigerian columnist, the one whose dazzling intellectualism Moliere’s riposte of the knowledgeable fool fittingly substantiates.

Today, the Nigerian columnist grovels at the feet of the ruling class, like mongrels. Today, we recognize the stench of the looter with the fattest envelope and our trained eyeballs hardly misses the deep pocket with the promising smile.

In our calling, there are still no-go areas. We can never question religion save the instances we get to castigate one faith to elevate another, in the heat of poverty-induced pogroms we have learnt to call ‘religious crises and ‘politics.’

Need I say people are simply hungry? They are jobless too. That is why they become willing muscles to criminal masterminds. The labourer still goes home with heavy steps, and the heart of the casual worker resuming night shift shrivels desolately, like fresh mutton sautéed with local gin. Even the newborn arrives sorrow-clad; he wishes that he had waited till never.

Within this cheerlessness, the masses stare resignedly at our cover pages with knowing glares. They know they would never hear the infinitesimal clangour of chilled truth neither shall they enjoy the comfort of temperate hope because we have become the aberration of their desperate circumstances.

Yet we pride ourselves as national heroes. Noble intellectuals and men and women of letters. Such is the wonder of a newspaper column; it goads too many of us columnists to think too highly of ourselves.

Add to the mix, a mass of fawning, frosty readership and you have a perfect cocktail that makes a narcissist and lapdog of even the most modest journalist.

How far we evolve depends on the quality of citizenship exhibited by the most patronizing and hostile audience. Yet it would never do to lay the blame for what we have become on society. That would be tantamount to perpetuating the “Nigerian factor” – that ageless pretext we have learnt to incite every time we fall short of measure.

Are we truly great and heroic? Are we uncommon, high-cultivated men and women of letters; stout seekers of truth and shiners of hope?

We claim: ‘If we are no heroic shiners of light, it’s because our readers aren’t heroic seekers of it.” True, most columnists live to fight monstrosities visited on us by the ruling class because they covet the beauty of ‘stomach infrastructure’ as their teeming readership.

Columnists live to echo the cynicism and intolerable disloyalty of all manners of readership. And many a reader lives to applaud such treachery because it is politically correct to do so. The result is the gang of conscienceless and duplicitous citizenry that we have. Thus Nigeria embellishes truths into absurdities and bad lies.

Every day, we fail our people with shame we do not feel. We have become the stamen that lets down the azalea, the comforter that brings grief, the emissaries of needless hate. We have become slaves to the tyrants we ought to remove. Did we fight the military to a standstill so that we may become their instruments when they turned democratic tyrants?

We offer no direction save our shenanigans in the interest of the ruling class. Today every columnist seeks friends in high places but then, we are only being Nigerian. It’s time we inspired by the wisdom of sages from whose ashes we struggle to rise.

Let us put heart to what our pens intone. Let us become the conscience of the ruling class and the pulse of the breadlines lest we become dead to future generations; lest they never get to read of our selfless beginnings and know of the noon that confused us and the sunset of our debauchery.

If we fail to change, our twilight will malign us. And in death, we shall lay rapt in lowly graves, our ears keen for the least abrasive diatribe we may get to treasure as the eulogies we never had.

Let us brighten our world with truth. Let us imbue it with wisdom and deep delight.

The democracy we declared has recoiled into a spent shadow. Eighteen years on in the grip of blood-drenched mascots, it steals from our sweetest fantasies, like the proverbial slut making a surreptitious exit with her drunken lover’s wallet.

Consequently, we suffer poverty of character and this manifests as mean-spiritedness. It’s akin to that patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours, the motorist at the police checkpoint, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the public officer on his perch – this patience belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts its prey.

Oftentimes, it manifests in uncontrollable spasms that have seen us bury our best and elevate our worst in abject negation of the cycle of the universe and morality. But who needs morals in a nation where fair is foul and foul remains fair?

As you read, many a Nigerian of commonplace roots live through each day without ever contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanising squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate thus exhibiting no conscious effort to better their lot beyond what their immediate circumstances dictate.

Almost as impulsively as the beasts of the wild, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought and consideration that by sufficient endeavor, they just might improve their living conditions.

However, a certain percentage – comprising men and women of privilege – guided by personal ambition, consciously strive in thought and will to attain higher status but very few among these are concerned enough to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves. This explains the number of self-centred, treacherous human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists and columnists parading our streets.

Very few men are indeed capable of the humaneness that drives martyrs to persistently rebel against glaring social evils, in the interest of less fortunate members of the society. But there exists a few however, that are truly bothered.

These few, driven by compassion tirelessly seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape; some new system of society by which life may become richer, more joyful and devoid of avertable evils that mars the present. But surprisingly, such men oftentimes, fail to curry the support of the very victims of the injustices they wish to remedy.

This is because more unfortunate sections of the Nigerian populace are hopelessly ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and disillusionment, apprehensive through the imminent danger of instantaneous chastisement by the holders of power, and morally defective, owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation.

To excite among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort in pursuit of general improvement of the status quo, proves basically a hopeless task, as antecedents of such efforts have proven.

Thus despite our claims to modernity, higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian society have failed woefully, to achieve better living conditions and a better society.

It is no surprise therefore, that the Nigerian working class has persistently proved a dismal failure. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: Nigerians have a problem with differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate political behavior.

That is why the nation’s democratic experiment like any other system of governance practicable by us was doomed from the start.  What exactly has democracy offered? A 4-1-9 progressive plan that booms circumspectly like it had been doctored as part of a cold-war era propagandist scheme?

But despite our self-righteousness and persistent cynicism with the current order, we really cannot explore a more worthy alternative than what we have now. The average Nigerian can’t bear to be led by a truly honest, visionary and accountable leadership.

The average Nigerian is no more electable than the leadership he endure, yet he loves to speak truth to power even as he functions simultaneously to smother his own voice, by extolling his tormentors and keeping them in office.

No matter who gets elected, the demographic and economic realities of Nigeria will persist, and there is a very limited range of politically-viable solutions for dealing with them.

Thus the need to evolve in thought and will, in pursuit of a more balanced social order; such conscious evolution can only be achieved by a re-orientation in scholarship and purification of thought and action.

The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advance — problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life.

These and other inevitable problems of the Nigerian civilization must be resolvable largely by the electorate by reason of education, exposure and devotion to the constitution.

The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.

It’s about time poor, struggling members of the nation’s working class learned to scorn the maxim that holds that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains. The paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood.

The better society that we seek, calls for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the low income earners and ambitious middle class emancipated by training and culture.

Such human elements would no doubt be conscious of the fact that not even the sustenance of oil subsidy, higher wages and a fairer economic system could protect its members from the usual handicaps and monstrosity constituted by the predatory ruling class.

They would understand that the much clamoured social enterprise and gesture towards change, must be mooted and achieved by the working class electorate via peaceful polls, and the electoral revolt of humane civilization.

To achieve progress, Nigeria needs to vote underachievers out of public office.