The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • A poison of freedom and fiscal flowers

    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 OkwudibaNnoli 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.”

    • To be continued

     

     

  • Life on a sweepstake

    We speak in several pitiful tongues. Every tongue reels a different story of identical loss and misery. Hence one comes to callousness, a savage culture of protest that drives us to ruin our world: dateline Boko Haram, Big Brother Naija, MEND, Ombatse and the complex bigotry, avarice, decadence and bloodlust characteristic of all.

    We blame the older generation for everything. We claim they created a tough world for us to live in; a world that is rigged to against us. We also accuse the ruling class of keeping us unemployed, prone to corruption, exploitation, crime and the devastation of our economy and social infrastructure. We accuse them of denying us access and right to the Nigerian dream.

    What have we done with our world? What are we doing to make it better? Nothing.

    Rather than evolve in thought and attitude, we choose to rant impotently and wallow in self-pity. And when we choose to productively engage our faculties, our conscious quest is marred by our inclinations to self-destruct.

    If our world is ruined, we are to blame for it. This is because we are major actors in every tragedy that afflicts us. We are the hoodlums causing chaos at random, according to the whims of criminal, benevolent godfathers. We are the policemen mounting roadblocks to fleece hardworking compatriots of the little money they make, every day. When they refuse to cooperate, we simply shoot them to death.

    We are the bankers pilfering the life savings of the poor. We are the bank chiefs stripping Peter to pay Paul and robbing the downtrodden to feed our wantonness and greed. We are wives to the thieving governor, and gigolo to the rogue bank chief. We are the journalists who sold out, the watchdog who became lapdogs and then, dung-dogs. We are armed robbers and thieves. We are the activists exploiting the downtrodden to perpetuate our grand schemes of greed.

    No matter the ills visited upon our generation, we lost the right to howl and cry ‘foul!’ the moment we agreed to do everything and anything to make money, like becoming instruments for the attainment of the perverse goals of the criminal ruling class.

    Shame, that we have to look unto the same generation that we accuse of ruining our world to take measures necessary to save our world. The current ruling class won’t save us. They can’t. Like you and I, they are held captive by greed, irrationality amongst several base immoralities.

    Every generation considers itself uniquely challenged like we do and each generation truly is, in different ways. But I don’t buy into over-generalizations and self-pity. Like we accuse older generations before us, successive generations will accuse us of ruining their world claiming we had better chances to resolve our crises and recreate the world that they would inherit from us.

    Our sense of entitlement goads us to believe that we are entitled to a good, fair life but for the ruling class and older generation that thwarts our dreams of bliss. When the older generation call us “illiterate and unemployable,” we respond that they render us so with visionless leadership and substandard education.

    Truth is, school is a bore to many of us. We breeze through school and apprenticeship unenthusiastically, thinking that somewhere or somehow, something would give and we would chance on bliss.

    Notwithstanding, some of us enter the labour market thinking it wouldn’t hurt to be exploited a little. Having been raised on the mantra that “Slow and steady wins the race and tiny drops make an ocean,” we subject our will to the grindstone and stoically tread the path of obedience and honest labour.

    Eventually, we realize that the system is rigged to thwart our dreams even as it fulfills the fantasies of the exploitative one percent at the top. Then we get mad. We get mad because our leaders do not see us as human beings with cosmic value and rights anymore. But despite our dissatisfaction, we keep them in power and keep asking them for handouts.

    We do not choose to be treated with respect. That is why the government takes away our dignity. We should be embarrassed by our failure as a generation. We should be ashamed that we go through life thinking the world’s a sweepstake.

    We believe the world is for the taking by a lottery; this is understandable as a carrot on a stick that the top one percent – comprising government and big business – perpetually dangle before us.

    Thus the Nigerian dream has evolved from a promise and belief that every Nigerian will get to have a good life, a job they enjoy, a generous paycheck, affordable housing, healthcare and transportation and a secure retirement, into some reality show fantasy and a pipedream.

    Today, the Nigerian dream comprises a tall fantasy that every Nigerian will get to live a charmed life. It offers attractive fancies of palatial residences in exclusive neighbourhoods, home and abroad; fancy cars, easy money, consequence-free indolence, random sex, fraudulence and violence to mention a few.

    We consider these perks our birthright and heartily pursue them on the streets and now ubiquitous reality TV shows where parents and children from relatively humble backgrounds engage in funfest of folly and inordinate lust for unearned riches.

    The tragedy of this development resonates in the number of ‘has-beens’ and reality show runners-up still loitering the red carpets for the barest chance to hug the limelight for no justifiable reason or attainment.

    Each generation has a responsibility to wisely develop itself and become indispensable to the world despite all odds. It’s about time we equipped ourselves to take over the country’s leadership and use the resources and power available to us to build a more secure, sustainable than the one inherited.

    We need to stop whining and take urgent action to reverse Nigeria’s decline. If we wait, life in the future will be worse.

     

    • To be continued…

  • The pursuit of self

    It  is not wisdom or courage that drives us to do the things we do; it is their absence that dwarfs our hearts from the highest deeds. Thus we evolve from a nation enfeebled by fear and greed, to become the land besotted to lust and death’s every endeavour.

    Our pursuit of self is to the detriment of the state. Despite our tiresome rant and supposed displeasure with the status quo, we remain the perfection of stagnant self-complacency.

    We do not provide a focal point to inspire progress and ultimately advance its course. The Nigerian elite today perpetuates its parasitic existence. So does the country’s working class.

    Despite our protests in the interest of the “average Nigerian,” reality proves us mostly, to be just another band of opportunists and frauds. The Nigerian working class indeed constitutes a scam. Without a doubt, this purportedly cheated class has evolved to become greater tormentors than the ruling class it despises.

    If you look closely enough, you will find that we are cut from the same stock. We possess no superior culture or refinement save our proficiency in the decadent, which explains the preoccupation of the citizenry with acquisition of material wealth, fame and a degree of influence to make an obscene show of them.

    This impacts negatively on the country’s social institutions of which many evolve like those chestnut burs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only for pricking the fingers. The downside of this abnormal situation manifests in the quality of the country’s citizenship.

    Although the pioneer ruling class emerged to serve patronising and reactionary roles in response to the agenda of the country’s British colonialists, this small band of ‘patriots’ have since evolved along rudderless and incoherent shades of citizenship.

    The Nigerian working class, on the other hand, evolved out of economic necessity, betraying conscious and desperate attempts by members of the class to align themselves with the ruling class against fellow impoverished.

    The working class has since, evolved into a crooked class, comprising struggling professionals, unemployed youth, self-styled activists and opportunists persistently milking every impasse and volatile situation to their advantage.

    With the inexorable expansion of the process of globalisation, they are bonding faster and inching together towards the absolute destruction of the nation’s populist movement.

    The scale of the current crisis is no doubt immense and reflective of the contradictions that have been piling up in 58 years of the country’s independence. Not only has the Nigerian working class been severely depleted of men of potential and substance, its capacities to make new heroes of otherwise dormant youths is ruthlessly sabotaged.

    Far removed from its limitless potentials in the pre-independence era, the country’s working class has become too handicapped to face the country’s tremendous challenges. Therefore, the citizenry’s capitulation to the country’s stringent living standards which continually manifests in the country’s leadership malaise, dying industries, unemployment, substandard education, healthcare and insecurity to mention a few.

    Caught in the vortex of these dehumanising conditions, many social commentators have advocated a Soviet-styled or Middle-Eastern sprung revolt against the country’s ruling class. However, what such advocates have failed to note are the striking peculiarities that will hinder such an uprising in this part of the globe – basically, the absence of a cohesive and a fundamentally aware working class.

    The most remarkable detail replicated in the various revolutionary actions that have taken place across the world is the reality of Freidrich Engels’ assertion that the state is nothing more than armed bodies of men, organised in the interest of the private property.

    Historical tyrants like various characters constituting Nigeria’s conscienceless leadership are just individuals, who on their own are powerless, but they maintain their influence and might by imposing themselves on the citizenry via the apparatus of coercion and violence perpetrated through their nation’s armed forces.

    But we have democracy or a semblance of it. Every segment of the citizenry is also affected by the pervasive harsh realities and inhumane conditions of our society. But our common miseries have failed to incite a rousing fearlessness to challenge and dispense of incompetent and tyrannical leaders through the ballot box at election time.

    Despite our travails, we do not reason and identify with the aspirations of the revolutionary movement. We do not see ourselves as jointly oppressed; we are a nation of individuals, where each citizen unapologetically seeks his or her selfish interests.

    What is deductible from these occurrences is that too many of us do not understand what it is to be patriotic and free. Thus Nigeria remains an independent nation constituted by citizenry who do not know yet how to be free. Despite his freedom from colonial tyranny, the average Nigerian is at present, slave to various classes of home-spawned political and economic oppression.

    The working class today lacks an authentic culture of citizenship and manhood characteristic of the free. It comprises mostly mindless folk, incapable of evolving an acceptable standard of truth and identifying with it.

    However, it’s probably due to the persistent hardship and extreme realities that they are forced to endure that the working class have become cowardly in reason and deeds. The success of any revolution is never entirely dependent on the presence of a bloodthirsty revolutionary front, but as current realities instruct, the existence of a conscientious, cohesive, patriotic, peaceful and formidable working class.

    The existence of such peace-loving and dependable class of citizenry becomes imperative in a country like Nigeria where the ruling class seems completely lost to reason and justice.

  • Big Brother’s guinea fowls (3)

    Big Brother’s guinea fowls (3)

    •Crusted corpses in DSTV/Multichoice’s garden of dirt

    Anto is a ‘grown ass woman’ who has ‘f..ked a lot of niggas.’ But ‘no one should take this personal,’ because she and fellow inmates in the Big Brother Nigeria-DSTV/Multichoice morality jailhouse are simply ‘having a good time.’

    It’s all a game, she reportedly said in a fit of sexual irresponsibility. Some mother gave birth to Anto. Some father sired her too. But whatever anyone thinks of her and fellow inmates, they are hardworking ambassadors of their families. Pride to their ancestry, it would seem.

    Anto and peers are tragic manifestation of the modernity curse; there is too much to be feared by their theatrics and the applause they excite from viewing public, mostly youth.

    Youth like Anto, Teddy A, who allegedly had sex with fellow inmate, Bambam, in a public toilet, are ‘wildly’ described as Nigeria’s future. Even though Teddy A’s moral compass led him to ‘appreciate’ Bambam by having sex with her in the toilet, soon after fellow inmates’ Miracle and Nina’s perverse sex, they are expected to succeed the incumbent ruling class.

    Picture Teddy A as Nigeria’s Senate President; Anto as the country’s first female President and Bambam, the alleged daughter of a pastor, as a governor, bank chief, pastor cum youth mentor.

    If the imagery scares you, wait till you read published commentary about inmates sexual ‘exploits’ in BBN’s controlled environment or jailhouse to be precise. Apologists of the show’s serialised pornography tirelessly spring caustic remarks in its defense: “But you are free to change the channel;” “Nigerians are hypocrites…they enjoy the show in secret and whine in the open,” they rail.

    In response to Teddy A and Bambam’s toilet escapade, a music producer reprimanded critics thus: “I am not even judging…You never use toilet before? Cast the first stone.” Some other viewer defended the duo claiming they engaged in simulated sex.

    Whether it is simulated or not, it’s wrong, subhuman perhaps, to have two adults go at it in a public toilet used by 20 persons, on live television.

    It is even more disheartening to read subtle rationalization of the BBN perversion by journalism’s supposed leading lights; so-called fiery critics of government and societal corruption mutate into DSTV/Multichoice’s lackeys or errand boys in real time. What do they seek? A seat at the broadcaster’s annual gala or movies award night?

    Kids are witnesses to BBN inmates’ perversions. They watch it on the internet and read frenzied reports of goings-on in the show by mainstream and new media.

    Desperate rationalization of the show however, ignore its imminent repercussions on society to focus on economics; BBN apologists drone about how lucrative it is. To whom? It’s the show’s producers and sponsors that pocket all the profit.

    Even its N45 million winner-takes-all prize is devilishly exploitative on participants who characteristically become fame junkies and commercial sex workers by the end of the show.

    They bend and break and distort into hideous forms in pursuit of the prize money. Such character is unworthy of young men and women persistently touted as Nigeria’s future leaders.

    At a time when the country needs young men and women of unimpeachable character to wrest leadership from predatory leadership, the country suffers the preponderance of degenerate youth.

    There is no gainsaying Nigeria thrives as a theatre of the absurd; where public officers frolic with and sexually abuse minors; where an elected governor feverishly seeks to impose his son-in-law as his successor in a state of supposedly free citizens; where a mystical snake swallows millions of naira from JAMB coffers; where lawmakers mortgage the interests of the state to fulfill their material lusts and nomadic herdsmen murder aged farmers, in order to take over their land as pasture for cows. The list is endless.

    Given that Nigeria’s federal government and broadcast regulators are enslaved to DSTV/Multichoice’s leash of ‘questionable incentives’ and touted ‘economic worth,’ the onus rests on parents, teachers and religious leaders to counsel their wards against indulgence in such gross contests as the BBN show.

    At the absence of media and government censorship, the only thing left is an appeal to reason. Contrary to widespread notions about the show, it is actually scripted reality, which makes it unreal and fraudulent in scope.

    Viewers believe that their votes count in selecting the winner. In truth, their votes never count. The show’s producers arbitrarily decide the winner of the prize money. And very few participants in the show go on to achieve their dreams of bliss. Most of the prize winners and runners-up squander whatever good fortune they earn by the show, in the long run.

    True, the prize money may increase annually, but it is often a ploy to arouse wilder depravity in the show’s participants; no one should be surprised if DSTV/Multichoice introduces homosexual, lesbian and transgender porn via LGBT participants in subsequent editions of the show.

    That day is coming; when it does, the media and government would turn a blind eye while the public claps in appreciation.

    If truly, the evolution and progress of a nation is determined by the nature of its youth, what do we make of Nigeria; where youths rush to have sex in DSTV/Multichoice’s serialised pornography?

    It’s an ugly reality for ex-BBN inmates outside its jailhouse. Anto, Teddy A, Bambam , Miracle, Nina and co will find life bleak and frustrating soon after they lose their pass to the red carpets. They will desperately lust for sustained media mention to no avail.

    In the BBN show, winners become famous and losers, almost famous; like past participants, some will become prostitutes, drug addicts and pitiful fame junkies. Eventually, they will burn out, unsung.

    Until then, swamped by adrenaline, wild ego and depravity, they will exult in DSTV/Multichoice’s fiery lava of grime. It’s ill-bliss which eventually disappears. In time, their names will resound as the crusted corpse’s muffled groans in a garden of dirt.

  • Nation of gods and lesser creatures

    Nation of gods and lesser creatures

    We do not know how to create a heaven or sustain the like of it but we love to create gods by the dozen. I do not speak of divinity that manifests only in far-fetched miracles and dreams; I speak of individuals we deify as our vanities dictate.

    Being rich is the closest you get to being god in Nigeria. Add an impressive root and very intimidating academic record to the mix and you have yourself a 21st century hero or god. Of what calibre are man-made gods? Who really, is the Nigerian idol? Olusegun Obasanjo? Atiku Abubakar? Diezani Allison-Maduekwe? President Goodluck Jonathan? Muhammadu Buhari? Wole Soyinka? Late Gani Fawehinmi?

    Do their deeds make them worthy of hero-worship or blind deification? To what would these individuals owe our reverence of them? Some would say it is their brilliance and extraordinary achievements. Anyone could be brilliant from time to time but intelligence is what we have to affect all of the time.

    How intelligent are our ruling class? How brilliant are Nigeria’s industry titans – state-made and corruption-activated billionaires to be precise?

    By their citizenship, do they provide pathways to empowering the Nigerian youth; the disillusioned jobless graduates and school drop outs of Umukegwu, Akokwa, Urualla, Apongbon, Idumota, Agege, Agbor, Sankwala, to mention a few?

    Do they teach the youth to evolve beyond the greed, selfishness and idiosyncrasies of their generation?

    Do they teach us to make peace with our guilt and conquer our demons? The answer lies as much in their utterances as their deeds. Transcendent moments and heroic acts are in truth, deeds of an exalted intelligence and unsullied mind, traits that the incumbent ruling class pitifully lack.

    Despite our protests and dissatisfaction with the status quo, the Nigerian citizenry equally lacks that towering immensity of intellect and strength of character that remains prime requirements in the constitution of a progressive race.

    Our lust for heroes and gods illustrates a fable; it is not of latent strength but disintegration. It reveals the weakness and shallowness of the Nigerian adult’s awfully preadolescent mind. Thus his predisposition to creating gods of impoverishment and war.

    Some would say the random hero may pass as god. But the Nigerian hero is a human sound bite. He is essentially a half-formed mammal, animal to be precise. He is hardly humane. He has been flipped upside-down and inside-out; he has been scrambled, corrupted and fertilized by ghastly manifestations of self love, tribalism, wantonness, perverted education and sense of worth.

    “All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours,” says Aldous Huxley, English writer. However, the manner in which the Nigerian electorate worships its ruling class and celebrates its bestiality makes it impossible for the latter to affect the necessary humaneness, tact and humility that are prime requirements of occupants of exalted public office. Having made super humans of them, they begin to delude that they are unquestionable. They parade themselves as gods and see the electorate by whose strength they attained their exalted positions as lesser creatures.

    Nigerian idols seek the exaggerated safety and coziness of fortresses they build around themselves to protect their ill-gotten wealth and ostentatious lifestyles, soon after their election into public office. Suddenly, it becomes taboo for them to hobnob with the working class. It becomes abominable for their wives, daughters and cooks to visit the same grocer or shop in the same market as the masses.

    They loot public coffers without inhibition and in response, we celebrate them and grovel at their feet for crumbs of what is rightfully ours. Whenever they intrude our world, they leave behind pungent memories and pains. Whenever they come to town, we must be kept in traffic for them to move freely. Whenever they are ‘guests of honour’ at our functions, we are treated with little or no honour. Apology to Kayode Oteniya.

    The chief quality of a true leader is the apparent sincerity in his manners. The speeches he makes are never mere platitudinous enterprise and his developmental programmes are never extraordinary elephant projects; his politics and humanity are not only heard but concretely seen and felt.

    Really, there is prime merit in everything about him, and his life generally, radiates truth. His life is what we may call a great sober sincerity. A sort of temperate authenticity that is not only blunt but uncompromising.

    His fervor is undomesticated, bordering on the wild and forever wrestling naked with the elements that be, for the love of the good and the truth of things. In that sense, there is something of the savage yet humane in him like all great men.

    He is one in whom one still finds human substance. He relishes no opportunity to tell any colourful story of himself anywhere; usually, he stands bare and grapples like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things.  ‘That, after all,” according to Thomas Carlyle “is the sort of man for one.”

    And such is the type of man we should value above all others. He is the man who as American writer, Norman Mailer, puts it, would argue with gods and awaken devils to contest his vision. When he dies, his death would be felt nationwide as something more than a historic calamity; women would weep and men would fight back tears as if they had heard of the death of a very dear friend or Saint.

    The creation of such honorable man and god would be our noblest work. But we seem incapable yet of such honorable task. We could start by stripping ourselves of the greater vanities and contradictions. Unhappy the land that has no heroes, says Andrea; No, unhappy the land that needs heroes, responds Galileo in Bertolt Brecht, late German playwright and poet’s “The Life of Galileo.” Regrettably, the meaning is lost on all.

  • Our timid electorate and Rochas Okorocha’s priapism of lusts

    Our timid electorate and Rochas Okorocha’s priapism of lusts

    You could be forgiven for thinking Rochas Okorocha, Imo State governor, suffers priapism of lusts; that curious hankering that incites a man’s ambivalence towards his innate moral constructions – relative morality to be precise.

    If Okorocha truly lives and breathes the excellence and native wisdom he projects, he just might understand the dangers of persistently yielding to crooked impulses.

    His erection of the statues of former Liberian and South African presidents, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Jacob Zuma respectively, in his state, trumps his antecedents and strikes a wrong chord across social and political circuits in a state grappling with poverty and government inefficiency.

    At first glance, the statues excite feelings of wonder and revolt. Wonder at its patron’s curious lusts and revulsion at the true import of the effigies in the state.

    While controversy raged over the alleged billion naira effigy, Okorocha struggled to dispel notions of his alleged profligacy in commissioning the statues, hinting that the cost is less than a billion. He accused opposition parties in the state of inciting the controversy through shady insinuations.

    He particularly condemned the Socioeconomic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) for calling for a probe of his government over the statues. In a statement by his Chief Press Secretary (CPS), Sam Onwuemeodo, in Owerri, Okorocha challenged SERAP to name any law stopping his activities. He hinted that the statues might not have been funded from the government’s purse?

    Okorocha initially claimed to erect the statues in celebration of leaders, who had through “selfless efforts” contributed to the development of the state, Nigeria and the African continent.

    “With the statues, they have been inducted into the Imo Hall of Fame and have received the highest award in the state called the Imo Merits Award “ said one of the governor’s lackeys, according to a recent media report.

    Following the humiliating resignation of South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, over corrupt allegations, Nigerians have been wondering what will become of his statue erected in Imo state.

    It would be recalled that sometimes last year, Okorocha immortalized Zuma with a gigantic statue; a street was even named after Zuma in the state and he was also given a chieftaincy title.

    Given that Zuma was forced out of office by his own party ANC, for being corrupt. Has Okorocha immortalized corruption in Imo state? Has the man with native wisdom, gone the way of the madding crowd to institutionalise sleaze in his native state?

    This of course is discussion pursuable in subsequent forum.

       To be continued…

  • Towards a better electorate

    A great majority of Nigerians of commonplace roots live through each day without ever contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanizing squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate.

    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 guided by personal ambition, consciously strive in thought and will to attain more privileged status that remains the exclusive preserve of more fortunate members of the society; 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 and treacherous human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists and columnists parading our streets.

    Very few men are indeed capable of that kind of love 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 by the impoverishment of their fellow citizens.

    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.

    Greater segments of the Nigerian population 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 higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian electorate have failed woefully to achieve better living conditions and a better society.

    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?

    The average Nigerian is no more electable than the leadership he endures yet he loves to speak truth to power even as he functions simultaneously to smother his own voice.

    No man; be he a distinguished columnist, lawyer, soldier, or public officer in any office can command the tides of history. The few that appear to have done so–the Napoleon’s, Caesar’s, Hitler’s–were really nothing more than the most capable at making it appear that they command the tides, when in fact they were simply skimming along with them.

    Thus the need for the Nigerian working class to consciously evolve in thought and will in pursuit of a more balanced social order. Such conscious evolution could only be achieved by a re-orientation in scholarship and purification of thought and action.

     

    • To be continued…
  • Of politicians and serial killers

    Of politicians and serial killers

    When a president’s child dies, ‘it’s a tragedy.’ If a governor, lawmaker or minister, loses his child, ‘it’s heartbreaking.’ And God forbid that a politician dies a ‘shameful death’ that’s ‘well-deserved’ or he expires for a reason that the media is too timid or compromised to reveal, ‘Nigeria mourns’ all the same.

    Nobody mourns the death of the masses. Except the bereaved. Thousands are hacked to death in the northeast by politically-sponsored Boko Haram; hundreds are murdered in cold blood by vicious herdsmen rampaging through Benue, Oyo, Ogun and Bassa, Plateau States; their deaths are inconsequential in the scheme of things.

    Indeed, a single death is a tragedy while a million murders becomes mere statistic. Apology to Stalin.

    Today, we become the tragic nuance of Africa’s psyche; no thanks to machinations of rich, spoilt governors, lawmakers and a presidency to whom electorate deaths resound as spirited waltz in a bloody, never-ending political rite.

    “Politicians are at the root of ill. They are the cause of everything,” a fair-weather friend of mine would always say. There is truth in his relative truth. Nigerians’ acquiescence to politicians’ bloodlust is eternally confounding.

    What is it that gets to us? Their poetry of citizenship? Their wrongness of style? Perhaps their variable truths, half-truths, unpardonable lies and eccentricities that pierce like shears in the hands of a flesh gardener – or serial killer if you like.

    Every politician is complicit. None is worthy of the benefit of doubt. If your favourite politician or benefactor in public office do not have an army of thugs or assassins at his beck and call, he or she fulfils the role of a slayer.

    Every politician is an executioner of lives and extinguisher of hopes save the ones that do not loot public coffers or divert public fund for personal use – remember, diverted funds lead to multiple deaths on bad roads and substandard hospitals. Do we have any such politician or public officer alive?

    Even the ones that posed as the people’s champions until their election, have learnt to keep their mouths shut in the National Assembly, presidential cabinet and State Houses. It’s called ‘Table Manners.’ Indeed, “When you are eating you don’t talk.

    Odi, Okija, Bakassi, Maroko, Gbaramatu, Ijegun, Makoko, Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, Plateau, Kano, Katsina,; where do our factories of misery and death resound?

    How do we evade this sorry pass? By whose leadership shall we triumph against the odds? Come 2019, in whose manifesto should we believe? Whose humaneness runs deeper than the madness we fete as life’s truths? Atiku Abubakar? Muhammadu Buhari? In which candidate does the spirit that restores the land to productive order reside? None.

    In whose possession does power reside? The predatory ruling class or the masses bartering their strength for a quarter bag of rice, N500-bribe or worse?

    We still find sport in the tragedy that our lives have become and we still do nothing save our persistent rant and idle talk over the weekends in our courtyards, while we devour relative truths on the pages of barely dependable newspapers.

    The politicians are still in control and they have grown more devious. While we indulge in idle talk and futile debates in our soapbox circuits, they incite the jobless and impoverished among us to  terrorism, interminable bigotry and mass murders –  think herdsmen-farmers bloodlust, the carnage in Borno among others.

    Talking grief amounts to nought. Aren’t revolutions born because patriots decide to react? Then it spreads like wildfire in harmattan to incite the guts of latent spirits.

    On the bread lines, below our poverty lines, our talk is of struggle. Our struggle is of class. Would I like Marx enthuse the incense of the muse, I would pen brilliant chapters to illumine the agonies of the working class. Would I like Engels excite the whims of scholarship, I would espouse the philosophy of the millennium and analyse the workings of materialism, its benevolence to the lucky few, and its malevolence to the underdog.

    Like Russell, I could make a case for Socialism. Like Rand, I could prescribe the virtues of selfishness. Yesterday, I bandied Nietzsche-speak like our salvation depended on it. Today, I know better; misfortune won’t flee our portals just because we desire to be great. There should be more to end our grief than the greatness of extraordinary folk.

    Perhaps I should propose a Soviet-styled uprising and incite the downtrodden to arms. Like the Bolsheviks, I could incite the working class to power, united around the mantra, ‘Bread, land, peace.’

    Oftentimes, I visualize the success of a mass revolution, the triumph of the electorate and the re-emerging middle class. I wonder if compatriots might be consciously inspired not by the ideas of Marx or the contemplations of Nietzsche, but by the Nigerian reality.

    The earliest insurgencies occurred in climes different from our ‘liberal democracies.’ Now we have democracy but despite its touted advantages, our lives are hardly better.

    I think we should take more active part in our politics. Our problems can never be solved by rant or idle cynicism. Nor can we survive self-destruct by ideals much better than those our modern prophets extract from volatile arsenals of misinterpreted scriptures.

    Nigerians should never vote for any All Progressives Congress (APC) or People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate again except they intend to commit political and socioeconomic suicide.

    Most APC and PDP candidates are likable to vultures jostling for carrion meat at the crossroads. They are birds of a feather – after all, APC is currently teeming with established rogues, looters and thieves recycled from the PDP and associated parties.

    Nigerians should seek out candidates whose politics ignite the lush fragment of history that was once our lives.

    They are not in the APC or PDP. Not at the moment. It’s time for a new movement. A new party. But unlike Obasanjo’s Third Force.

  • Your children will be slaves

    Your children will be slaves

    Nigeria is filled with beautiful boobs, human mass with luscious glands for politicians to slurp.

    Ask the presidency, your state governor, legislator, the itinerant lobbyist and power broker and they would oblige you the adventures of their souls atop thickset spoils.

    To this conniving band, the electorate is simply a mass of organs by which they nourish their lusts. Nigeria is their jungle, an eden of boobs and wildlife. In this degenerate eden they inhabit, the they survive by preying on electorate blessed with mouth like the parrot’s and the will of the catfish.

    When brackish waters recede, the catfish burrows deep into mud earth but that hardly prevents the fisherman from yanking it out of its filthy haven. Picture the electorate as catfish, the fisherman as the country’s ruling class; Nigeria becomes brackish waters and she recedes.

    Nigerians love burrowing into proverbial mud earth to evade negativity. They scurry deep into unlikely havens – ethno-religious bigotry and other sentimental foolery – to evade the violence of governance savagely doled out to them by the ruling class.

    In the crevices of mud earth, they immerse in filthy fluid. They soak in shameful rivulets like sanitary towel and hope to emerge sparkling clean.

    It’s a familiar scene, a Nigerian reality that often resounds like the fable of doomed Odysseus and the labouring ships.

    At the backdrop of this shameful proceedings, the argument persists in academia, social and political circuits, that the future is blurry and bleak because of the youth’s absence in politics. But I maintain that by Nigerian standards, the youth  are in politics.

    ‘Youthful men and women’ in their 60s, 70s and 80s control the country’s ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and major opposition platform, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

    To sustain their legacies, their clannish pride covet incestuous bond with self – nurturing dark, chthonian parts of their innate nature. Hence Nigeria’s youthful-senior oligarchs impose their wards as successors and the country’s administrators even as they molest boondocks young in a never-ending cycle of sleaze and moral pedophilia. But the latter are hardly the preys they are thought to be.

    They are willing participants in a dehumanising ritual of violence, biological and mental retardation. From the hopeless to the vain, presumptuous and credulous, the country pulsates with nourishing boobs. Unlike the literal, fleshy sacs, often the delight of old and young, the Nigerian boob is neither pouch nor sac but human youth.

    It’s 2018, and the image persists of the nation’s youth as human assertions imagined in degenerate stillness by specific and random politicians.

    Unlike the artist’s masterpiece, sculpted in bronze and stone, the youth evolve like plasticine, easily malleable and amenable to devious politicians’ plots. As 2019 approaches, the country’s ruling class once again perfects its grand plot and counter-plots to tame the youth, preserve its ill-gotten wealth and tyranny. The youth predictably become willing pawns in the designs of the criminal ruling class.

    From the herdsmen murders in Benue, Boko Haram’s terrorism, Niger Delta militancy to random political killings and rumblings in Rivers, Taraba, the youth become the nub of discord and deathly rally ripping the country apart.

    Many have attributed the afflictions of the Nigerian youth to bad leadership, nonstop dominance of a predatory ruling class and tiring recalcitrance of the younger generation to engage in communal and national politics in a beneficial manner. 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 tragic theory of Nigerians as being innately incapable of self-determination and self-governance. Many have recommended the American example, the British palliative, the Chinese abracadabra and Malaysian ingenuity to mention a few, as the ultimate measures to resolve 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 dictate.

    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 sentimental vituperation, Nigeria suffers the affliction of intellectual miscreants and promising youth-turned-foetal-adults.

    The coordinated tragedies afflicting our consciousness daily, append the only real structure to our lives as impoverished Nigerians. From burdensome realities of fast slipping youth, recurrent rites of bigotry to the ethical quandary of coping with strict moral codes of adulthood and ideal society, our lives obscure in purpose and meaning.

    Thus the scorning of ethics by the youth for fast, illicit riches even as ripples of their actions keep hundreds of millions more in binds of despair.

    Consequently, the revolutionary dissent that sprouts from oppression is pitiless and unbending. It radically 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, Yoruba against Ijaw.

    While this piece too may resound as hackneyed howl and lamentation, a regurgitation of towering monstrosities we have become, it need be said that our ultimate solution lies in our will to effect true change.

    Do not vote for APC, PDP and others. Let the youth unite; register a party of true patriots, elect men and women of unimpeachable character. Effect change. Failure to do this will sustain your status quo as slaves and your children as slaves to your oppressors’ children.

  • You are like brittle toothpick in the paws of a mongrel

    You are like brittle toothpick in the paws of a mongrel

    Someday, you may choke on your spittle. You could die if you do. Death could come in your saliva. When it does, your face will bulge with varicose veins straining to go ‘splat!’ in your head. In that moment, neither medicine nor the finest surgeon will be available to help you. Your money will be useless. Your power, ‘street credibility,’ thugs, charisma, will disappear in plain sight. Your concubines, trophy wives, spoilt kids and sycophants will be unable to charm death. Many of them would  be glad that you are dead.

    Whatever your degree of affluence, you will discover that you are worthless, like brittle toothpick in the paws of a mongrel. In split seconds, death will maul you the way boondocks crowd chew tinko (horse meat of the impoverished) they purchase with your hand-outs.

    You will remember the smile on your face and the sneer in your heart as you lured starving citizenry to sell their votes to you for a N500 hand-out, a quarter of rice and stale bread.

    Death will find you in common hours. And when it does, it wouldn’t recognize you as the powerful governor, senator, council chairman, vice president, president.

    Your title will be worthless; at death’s door, nothing else matters. Your life would probably flash before you and you would relive for an instant, the most crucial aspects of your finished life.

    You will remember the monies you stole from public coffers. You will remember your guilty and diabolic pleasures: the aides and concubines whose anuses you plowed for bewitched wealth; the newborn and seven-day-old infants whose heads and intestines you pounded in a mortar to make black soap and anti-death talisman. You will remember the sons and daughters you sacrificed or ‘used’ if you like, to ascend the ladder of man-made gods.

    You will remember the poor primary school kids you left at the mercy of nature’s wild elements – harsh sunlight, torrential rains and windstorms – because you had better things to do with State money, like the acquisition of mansions abroad, the seduction of a trophy bride or purchase of sinful pleasures.

    When death comes, you will remember the infant children, parents and youth whose lives never mattered to you even as they died in ghastly auto accidents on the cratered roads you refused to repair.

    Death will find you while you read commentary on your latest social and political theatric. The grim reaper will claim you while you exult in the praise of your fools and court sycophants; in that moment, you will find that you are the greatest of fools.

    Your Excellency, your paranoia is so great that you steal billions from public coffers only to bury them in sewages, water tanks and crop farms.

    At death’s door, you won’t have your great war chest and grand armies of thugs and corrupt law enforcers to command. At death’s stare, you will go blind in the face and your mind’s eye.

    You will understand why it was so easy for you to subdue political enemies and not the enemy within you. You will understand why you could look on earthly tempests and not flinch. But you will never understand why death will take neither gold nor silver to spare your life.

    Mr./Mrs. Excellency, you have grown from the desperate politician with tall dreams and modest wealth to become filthy-rich, power-drunk and self-possessed. You have become the titan who is successful at ‘cancelling out’ and overpowering lesser titans.

    Your virtues have turned to failings and you soar in a fetish cloud of lust and arrogance. As you exult with lust that will kill you, remember greater men and women who expired in the throes of fetishes like the ones that afflict you.

    Remember Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who collapsed, coughing up blood in 1925. The X-rays showed he had severe gastro-duodenal ulcer. Thereafter, ulcer pain was ever present. Then he suffered increasing insecurity, paranoia and finally became detached from reality.

    By late 1942, his mental health had caught up with him. All the bombast and pomp had gone. He had no reserve of courage or wile and he yielded to ulcer, deep-seated depression among others.

    The Greek war became his unmitigated disaster, the shame from which Italy had to be rescued by the Germans. Power intrigues with Germany quickened his latter descent.

    In July 1943, he was in effect, imprisoned by fellow Italians on the island of Ponza, then moved to a naval base in Sardinia and later to a ski resort. After Italy surrendered in September, Mussolini was rescued by a German SS glider team and flown to Munich. The Germans then returned him to Italy and installed him as the puppet dictator of the remnant Italian Social Republic.

    He was eventually captured and shot by Italian partisans near Como; his body was flung in the back of a truck and driven to Milan where, on April 29, 1945, it was strung upside down alongside that of his mistress in Piazzale Loreto, where 15 Italian partisans had been shot in August 1944.

    Like Mussolini, the time for humouring yourself will soon be over. Your end will come varied, like the whimpers and howls of  poor, helpless Nigerians, whose miseries never matter to you.

    The indices of your brutal end emerge but you are too blinded by power and ego to see them; by your machinations, there is widespread poverty and unemployment in the land; Boko Haram afflicts the northeast, herdsmen invade southwest and Biafra’s dead bones jut from the grave across the southeast.

    Death travels with the restive wind but you dream of escaping its scourge by simply hopping on the next plane to join your families abroad. You forget that death could find you in your spittle aboard your private jet.