The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • A time for moral courage

    A time for moral courage

    February 2017. A pretty, young girl blew up in Muna Dalti. She was a casualty of fear, the terror that makes us bestial. There were corn rows on the head of the girl bomber. There was a colourful bead on her wrist too. She probably loved to play dress-up and look good. Everybody forgets these bits of her.

    Folk remember her as the ‘vixen’ who flicked a switch and blew up, into a puddle of flesh and bone fragments. No one cares if she was ever innocent or raised in virtue. The village is thankful that she took no innocent life, save her teenage accomplice’s. Their carcass lay strewn about the rustic community in Maiduguri, Borno State. Their innards and blood spatter sully the village even as you read.

    Viewing her in the dust few metres from her shredded mate, the girl with the cornrows evoked the dread that wild weeds induce at the base of shoots. Two hours after her ‘sister’ and agent of a terrorist group, Boko Haram, detonated an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) at the Muna vehicle park, injuring eight people and burning 13 freight trucks, the girl with the cornrows sauntered into Muna Dalti with another ‘sister’ to explode among soft targets.

    Till date, nobody knows the names of the  girls that blew up in Muna Dalti but several folk would remember Maryam Alhaji-Wakil in whom the girl died on a sunlit afternoon in Bama. That fateful day in 2014, Boko Haram insurgents invaded her town and burnt her home. They killed her relatives and decapitated her neighbours. Then they abducted her. She was nine years old.

    Maryam’s abductors whisked her to Sambisa Forest, their terror enclave. There, she was forcibly married to Modu, a ‘violent’ member of the sect. In two days, little Maryam was violently thrust into womanhood. Modu, 35, forced his way into her unripe orifice, robbing her of innocence and the mystic pleasure of first adult sexual experience. Modu was hasty and rough thus making her ‘first time’ bestial and replete with pain. She screamed in agony but Modu didn’t care. “The louder I screamed, the more violently he shoved into me until I passed out,” she told me in an exclusive interview.

    When she came to, the nine-year-old from Bama had transformed into a broken woman in the corpse of a child.

    Cut to a fresh hodgepodge of bloodshed and mayhem perpetrated in Benue, from dusk through dawn and you have a perfect picture of terror afflicting the Nigerian State.

    January 2018. Year of the funeral pyre; hundreds are hacked to death on the pretext of herdsmen vs. host communities’ offensive in Benue.

    Contrary to widespread belief, the terror we face are hardly the podgy, covetous creatures we ennoble with public office and the Nigerian till; true terror lives in the Nigerian youth.

    The contemporary youth is both a victim and perpetrator of terror, paid for by the Nigerian ruling class.

    In the wake of the frequent genocide, public officers and politicians of the ruling and opposition parties trade blame and play to the gallery. At the backdrop of their shenanigans, poor, helpless kids like Maryam and butchered residents of Benue lose their lives.

    Irrational brick bats, incredible platitudes and senseless bloodshed have shaped our politics for too long. Many Nigerians, youth in particular, are probably living through one of the worst decade of their lives. They read of bloody genocides at dawn, poverty and strife in the next city – many more live through such. And as usual, an economy patched with foreign loans and double-talk.

    It took a perfect gathering of bad leadership to get to this moment; it would take electing an imperfect cannonball of a man or woman to brave through it and survive it. It’s about time Nigeria’s youth elected men of uncommon grit and fibre into public offices.

    What we should be interested in is a president-elect capable of providing security, fostering policies that would generate employment and education that would provide the skilled force Nigeria needs to power her industry.

    If the youth are gainfully employed, they wouldn’t become such easy marks for criminal masterminds seeking to deploy them as cannon fodder for mayhem. Today is spitting out monsters and tomorrow portends the emergence of a thousand more ogres.

    What Nigeria needs at the moment are youth driven by moral courage to change the status quo; by influencing change beneficial to all. Moral courage encompasses the nerve to do the right thing and speak the truth always. It involves defying the mob as a solitary individual; to spurn the invigorating embrace of comradeship; to be disobedient to authority, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle.

    And with moral courage comes persecution and any other form of repercussion that exposes the individual as a defenseless mark to be preyed upon. Gani Fawehinmi had moral courage, so did Malcolm X. Predictably, advocates of such morality are either maligned by fate or ascribed rogue status by the State. Routinely they are accused and charged for treason. But in their touted notoriety subsists the irony of an incontrovertible metaphor; they usually represent the best of mankind and civilization in their time.

    Come 2019, the youth should root for a candidate identifiable as the window into the people’s psyche. The one who internalizes the grief he has learnt from the streets. I speak of the candidate that manifests as the blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes can rally to project their dreams and needs; the passive yet active instrument by which Nigeria may prosper and we could achieve our dreams.

    To find such a candidate, the search begins now. None of the current contenders is worthy of the Nigerian vote. If Nigeria recycles them in power, the world that awaits us would be more painful and difficult.

    The youth needs a fresh platform to deliberate in Nigeria’s best interests.

  • Your Excellency, you will die in common hours

    What do politicians think at death’s door? How much money they could hoard into their caskets perhaps. What would you think at death’s door? You, the unbidden offering on the politician’s altar of greed?

    Greed, weaving its tissues of lust, wraps us in her shroud at birth. We grow out of the mold, startled by a pat, into a larger frame of the world’s excesses. Until we become society; and society flips us by the senses, molding us from infancy into feral, garish cruciform.

    The newborn grows into crucifixion in the house of the impoverished. He evolves through systolic throbbing of the heart at birth, oscillating between poverty and pain, power and weaknesses, ethics and amorality – vortices of a life foredoomed to a historical gyre of gloom and death.

    The lucky child however, extinguishes at birth, in the home of the poor. Thus he is spared death in macabre warrens, like Ogun State’s dirt roads and dysfunctional hospitals. He is spared gruesome expiration as bone sliver, blood spatter and brain fragments, in Borno’s theatre of war and death.

    If he doesn’t extinguish to lack of oxygen in the hospital labour ward or alagbo omo (traditional midwife)’s matted lab, he risks growing up to become a street-urchin, cult killer, armed robber, menial worker, prostitute, assassin, forever amenable to plots of the criminal ruling class.

    At the backdrop of his grisly narrative, his privileged peer grows into lush, ornate extravagance; the latter, born into the aristocratic divide is however, feted on affluence and ravaged by wealth. He grows reprobate and unfeeling, weaned to extrude his savage lusts to the detriment of impoverished peer amid starving electorate – his parents’ meal ticket or family’s hound-meat if you like.

    At election time, he glistens the news pages in family portraits and carefully orchestrated political media campaigns. He is the darling child whose testimonial for ‘daddy,’ ‘secret philanthropy’ and ‘very Nigerian’ fashion sense, arouses the wonder and goodwill of ‘poor, silly, sentimental electorate’ as his father would say.

    As you read, he uploads in careless abandon, pictures of his wild cavorting aboard parents’ private jet bought with pilfered State funds. He throws the wildest fête champêtres at home where boondocks daughters become fair game to him and friends.

    This minute, he is ramming into unsuspecting motorists and bystanders as they wait their turn to buy scarce PMS, made unaffordable by his ruling-class parents’ savage thrusts; next minute, he is uploading picture of the dent made on his father’s car at the densely populated filling station, by his victims’ splintered bones.

    The privileged child, like the fabled palace troll, mutates into tyrant royalty. Having assimilated the ethical decay of his forebears, he blossoms in cruelty and procedural violence. He illustrates his class’ ferocious passions in the ways and pattern of licentious Rome.

    Each sadistic exertion by him establishes portents of his underprivileged’s peer future torment, by the venal occult ruling class.

    Nigeria thrives by this macabre rite. Thus while youthful electorate clamour for the ‘#nottooyoungtorun’ bill, the ruling class, comprising the All Progressives Congress (APC) and People’s Democratic Party (PDP), lend voice to the clamour, although at varying decibels and with vicious intent.

    The ruling class plans to recycle itself in power courtesy their rich, spoilt wards. Thus they snigger at youthful electorate, ranting about “taking over.” The herd may vie for power but only patrician creatures and spawns, comprising drug addicts, sex perverts, trainee looters and Ivy League crooks among others will enjoy such privilege.

    The votes our parents’ cast put us in such bind. The votes we cast puts our children in worse bind. This beggars the question: ‘For whom do we cast our votes in 2019? Whose constitution rejects our tragic ironies?

    In 2019, will you vote for the APC or PDP candidate promising a prosperous future, by the lure of money, and bigoted, poisonous politics?

    We face a far more difficult problem at our moment in history: the affliction of youth weaned on ferocious ill and savage materialism. Infant kids from two societal extremes, haves and have-nots, coalesce in ghastly pursuits inimical to the Nigerian project.

    What do you promise youth that had been told that they can have anything they want without shedding sweat for it? How do you give them a new vision to deal with bitter reality? Which candidate projects a promising story of the future, a grand vision of possibilities that Nigerians believe?

    How do we breed youth on the belief that success should never be about accumulating obscene wealth to show off but the right to live life more fully and engage more expansively, the elemental possibilities of human existence?

    There is no gainsaying Nigerian politicians worship money and feed the youths’ mad lust for affluence. Brings to mind the story of the conqueror King: Alexander, after conquering many kingdoms, allegedly fell ill on his way home. On his death bed, he realized how his legendary conquests and wealth were of no consequence. He longed for the little moment that amounted to life’s essence: to see his mother’s face and bid her bye. But sinking health would not permit him.

    In his last three wishes to his generals, he said his first desire is that his physicians alone must carry his coffin that people might realize that no doctor on earth can really cure anybody.

    Second, he requested that the path leading to the graveyard be strewn with gold, silver and precious stones which he collected in his treasury that people should know that “not even a fraction of gold will come with me.”

    “My third and last wish,” he said, “is that both my hands be kept dangling out of my coffin. I wish people to know that I came empty handed into this world and empty handed I go out of this world.” He died afterwards.

    Dear governor, senator, president, you will die in common hours. And you don’t amount to a third of Alexander. Remember when death comes in your spittle.

  • Year of the funeral pyre

    Year of the funeral pyre

    This is the year of the funeral pyre. The calendar year in which ‘patriots’ carve bullets and axes from soapboxes; and for the sport of politicians, increase the number of the dead.

    This is the year in which criminals, hired assassins and mass murderers actualise their dreams of bliss that they might become governors, legislators, local government chairmen and councilors in 2019.

    Like the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the All Progressives Congress (APC) turned governance and citizenship into a Darwinian spectacle of turbulent energies: hate-mongering, blaming, fleeing, chasing, murdering and devouring, these past three years.

    Despite this sad reality, gangs of critics who fought Goodluck Jonathan and the PDP off, tend to downplay Buhari and his APC’s ineptitude and ethical ambiguities. For instance, ex-pension boss, Abdulrasheed Maina’s scandalous reinstatement in very suspicious circumstances, has failed to incite appropriate resent. But that is just a tip of the iceberg.

    At the moment, gangs of oil thieves, striving in twos and threes, fours and fives have made it on to the boards of Nigeria’s most lucrative cash cows, the country’s public corporations. From their vantage positions, it becomes easier to cause fuel scarcity, prevent stable electricity, dominate import/export business, steal public funds, influence election results. No thanks to President Buhari and his expedient gospel of ‘change.’

    Buhari wants to free Nigeria from corruption but he is hobbled by desperate lust to play sweetheart to the Nigerian electorate and the nefarious cabal by whose designs he believes he is able to maintain his feeble hold on power.

    Jonathan’s government was atrocious but Buhari’s government as it is, manifests as a political grand opera of instability, double-speak, over-hyped achievements, anguish and resentment.

    There is no use blaming Buhari. He probably meant well until the lust for power overwhelmed the supposed patriot in him. Ensconced in his high office, he lives immune to the ravages of infrastructural lack, declining naira, power outage, insecurity, unemployment and endemic poverty snuffing lives out in the cities, suburbs and backwaters.

    Thus it was mortifying to hear his deputy, Yemi Osinbajo, harp on the APC’s capacity to live up to its campaign promise by paying N5, 000 monthly to impoverished families in the country. Where? How? Why should that be an achievement to be proud of?

    Speaking on the initiative in the run-up to the March 28 presidential polls, Osinbajo stated that the initiative was meant to support 25 million of 119 million extremely poor Nigerians who earn less than N200 a day to take care of their families. The vice president added that the fast way of dealing with that was the N5,000 monthly Conditional Cash Transfer Programme.

    “We will give N5, 000 to the poorest 25 million over a phased period, if their children are enrolled in school and participate in immunization…So we are actually doing two things; we are giving stipends to the very poorest and ensuring that in order to earn that stipend they certify two conditions,” he said.

    Hmmm…To think we had higher expectations of Osinbajo and Buhari. I would rather they regale us with facts and figures about measures they took to restore stable electricity supply, revivify comatose industry, revolutionise education, healthcare, provide good roads among others.

    These were achievable in the past three years – at least in convincing phases – had the APC truly devoted resources to tackling crucial social problems.

    Buhari and Osinbajo were supposed to be great men. Nigerians reposed trust in them believing they were invulnerable to the lure of illusionary politics and celebritized governance.

    A vote for Buhari/Osinbajo resonated as a vote for men with permanent personalities, integrity and values. The Buhari/Osinbajo Nigerians voted for didn’t just care about winning for personal gain alone – at least we thought – or conquering to perpetrate vendettas, hedonism, and oppression – atrocities several members of their cabinet and the ruling party are guilty of.

    We didn’t vote Buhari/Osinbajo to celebritise victimhood or blame-casting. We voted them to improve governance, provide stable electricity, revivify comatose industry, enable entrepreneurship, provide employment opportunities, improve quality healthcare, education, among others.

    Does the APC’s performance in the past three years excite electorate will to retain it in power come 2019? Has the Buhari/Osinbajo team performed well? I would give them a resounding score of 20 over 100 (20%) – obtainable by the administration’s convincing anti-corruption war.

    Notwithstanding the incumbent administration’s apparent shortcomings, the ancient political rite of domination by the attractive person with deep pocket or sheer political capital, will manifest in keeping it in power. We see it in political cult followership of characters like Atiku Abubakar, and President Buhari.

    Thus this year, Nigerians will foolishly bicker and fight in support or against Atiku Abubakar, Buhari and any situational clown that would express his ambition to contest the presidential seat.

    Nigerians will make uninformed choices, as usual. The eye elects and the mind accepts a galvanizing object and formalizes the union in espoused politics, bigotries, ethics – all of a political nature.

    This imposes a hierarchic character on the electorate, making all receptors of the beloved’s manna. The structure is sadomasochistic. Infinitely subservient.

    This year, the cycle continues and the feeling accentuates of Nigeria as the proverbial ragged babe caught in a cycle of cannibalism enacted by the APC and PDP, savages attacking and retreating in obsessive rhythms of victory and defeat.

    Nigeria, the ragged babe, is thrust to the savages for the umpteenth time; they nail her down to a rock in their slaughterhouse of greed; they bind iron thorns around her head, pierce her unformed nipples, hands and feet. They cut her heart out to sup on its blood.

    Picture us as the ragged child; the pre-nubile damaged girl. The savages live on our shrieks and cries. They nourish from our interminable miseries, pain and death. They grow young as we grow old.

    If we retain them in power, innocence dies by degenerate experience.

  • This year…as all others

    (Portrait of the Nigerian journalist in 2017)

    This year as all others, we pretended to have answers to everything. Did we? This year, we spat words and ate them, like the dog that waddles back to gobble its vomit.

    This year, we quoted Nietzsche, Plato, Disreali, Awolowo,Maitama Sule, Ojukwu, among others, to garnish our columns while we silenced true-born dissent on our news pages and networks, lest we incur the ire of irate benefactors.

    I tender unreserved apology to the few media and journalists who lived up to full measure in the spirit of integrity, social responsibility and unimpeachable ethics. They remain Nigerian journalism’s shining lights in a wilderness of vice.

    Yet this is the year we ennobled the thieving statesman and denied the patriot the plaudits we save for noble compatriots. This is the year we celebrated underachievers as the best of overachievers. This year, we celebrated the vanities of dim-witted celebrities on front-pages of our national newspapers.

    Here goes the year we exhausted newsprint and priceless airtime to glamorize the shenanigans of “society bigwigs and dim wigs” although we cannot tell and still cannot tell, the simplest manifestations of our news practice, on say, the vendor who markets the newspaper or the child-labourer to whom Universal Basic Education (UBE) remains an everlasting fantasy.

    This year, we feted the northern mafia, eastern cabal, western gerontocracy, and south-south uprising, as usual, even as they undermined our collective dreams of progress.

    Beyond our elegant words and brazen manifestations of high character, our practice is modeled after some greedy few’s cartography of citizenship than by any internal dynamic of allegiances. Hence our misinterpretation of the social contract between the media and the society we serve.

    Thus this year as all others, we hid behind interviews, ‘big interviews,’ to abdicate our responsibilities to the Nigerian public. Then we taught the public to digest perversion because we know if we treat them to such depravity, we would get more adverts and keep smiling to the banks.

    This year as all others, we turned a blind eye and conveniently lost our voice as creatures running the three arms of government squandered public fund to feed their gluttony. We watched unperturbed as most of our colleagues ennobled and defended with their lives, the rights of the ruling class to pilfer our chests and rob us silly because leaders of men like them deserve to eat and dwell like no ordinary man.

    This year, the ruling class afflicted our lives with ineptitude and savagery. In response, we cried ourselves hoarse, twisting logic and lip service, for and against our favourite public officer; eventually, we lost our voices to bigotry and confusion.

    This is the year in which our brothers in the north-east tirelessly blew to death, our mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, in the market place, schools, on the playground, in the bedrooms and houses of worship, in the name of politics and religion. This year, our brothers in the south-east determinedly kidnapped our wives and daughters, mothers and fathers, sons and heirs apparent, for a ransom, in pursuit of unearned affluence. This is the year in which our brothers in the southwest habitually mortgaged our future on the altar of politics, personal and sectarian greed. This year as all others, we refused to dissect these maladies in the interest of our nation thus helping the world to understand why we are regarded as the inheritors in whose hands the heritage dies.

    This year, we affirmed that we are amoral and somewhat intellectually challenged courtesy our ethnic and intellectual bigotry.

    This year, we failed to actualize press freedom because it was socio-politically incorrect to do so. This year as all others, we failed to acknowledge that our survival or death as a nation is undeniably entwined with the tenor of practice and citizenship of the Nigerian press.

    This year as all others, I make a case for re-sensitization of the Nigerian press. It is time we dismembered our clan of the charlatan.

    In spite of everything, we choose to play god. That is why “dogs don’t eat dogs” in our Fourth Estate although it’s okay if we eat the entrails of a few ordinary Nigerians like the unfortunate adulterer caught pants down even as we underreport thieving bankers stealing from the poor to enrich rogue CEOs and the ruling class.

    I hope we find the courage to report; “The Rot in the Media” and that for every kobo looted by government, from public and private coffers, the press gets its share. Dateline: media parleys, press conferences and governors’ roundtables.

    This year as all others, I suggest humaneness and high ethics, to improve our welfare and standard of delivery. It’s time we asked: “Who is a journalist?” and aspire to an untainted definition of it. It’s about time we redefined what level of knowledge, qualification and professionalism is expected of a journalist. It’s time we ascertained what manner of passion channels the direction of our news practice.

    This year as all others, I suggest we ditch politicians who treat us as disposable pawns in their grand theme of schemes. Come 2018, shall we service depravity of folk for whom our pens write melodies, instead of maladies impoverished folk are dying to have us publicize that they might fare better?

    In 2018, shall we remain intellectual hit men for every hoodlum with deep pocket? Shall we become cliff-hangers to take portraits of looters and celebrity-nincompoops with promising smiles? Shall we remain the media managers that pay poorly even as we label expatriate firms slave-drivers?

    Next year, will the masses stare at our cover pages resignedly, knowing they would never feel or hear the infinitesimal clangor of freed hope because we remain aberrations of their desperate circumstances? Shall we continue to speak from both sides of the mouth? Shall we continue to eat like “idiots” at the feast of the one who calls us “idiot?”

  • Dear Child, school is not for slapping Satan

    Dear Child, school is not for slapping Satan

    Dear Child, I understand that school has become the rattlesnake that swallows its own tail, the ethical swamp where teachers lead scholars to absorb criminal etiquettes like sanitary towel. How long since you soaked up our dam of folly?

    I cannot paint to you what knowledge was nor can I teach you the fire in Jonathan Swift’s heart as he wrote If.

    I can’t teach you the swirl of half-familiar, half-strange songs of Gabriel Okara’s Piano and Drums.

    I can’t teach you to feel the madness of the unfettered poet neither can I oblige you the wisdom of Ise logun ise lest you fail to find in D.O. Fagunwa, a kindred spirit.

    But I could unschool you from the gospel of the new enlightenment. Alas! I see you dance where the beat splays rhythm. I see you stomp your feet as you sing and slap Satan: Gba, gba, gba…gba Satani leti ! (Slap, slap, slap…slap Satan’s ears) in ‘praise and worship’ every morning at the school assembly.

    Then you do the fundamentalist hustle into decrepit classrooms where you learn to war with ‘infidels’ on the watch of perpetually inept teachers, everyday.

    We have left the era of the teachers that taught us to be leaders of men. We are in the era of the tutors that bandy the “end time” in lieu of expensive knowledge, for which papa burns sweat and mama goes a-borrowing, everyday.

    And so you learn, not knowing. And so you grope, not feeling. And so you grow, ill-equipped to pursue the future you would never have.

    But who cares if tomorrow dies with the glow of our desultory sunset, today? You have got the ‘word’ and it’s all that matters.

    You, a mere child, have become “prayer-warrior” and unrepentant merchant of the “end time.”

    I do not blame you kid, for we force you to believe that you were at birth, a sinner, were you?

    It is the way of the world to make you die before your time, will you? Would you rather live? Would you rather know?

    Would you rather feel all that makes life worth living and all that makes it worthless? Would you rather lose, yet find, life’s conceit and essence in a single line of poetry?

    Would you rather find the pains and comfort of certainty in the cold, harsh chambers of science?

    Would you rather live by the “word” as you should know it or as you have been tricked to believe it?

    Would you rather go to school to learn how knowledge could really become power?

    I hope you discover why at birth, you chanced on our twilight of death: death of knowledge, death of being, death of history, death of joy, at the end of our sad, sad life.

    Child, in your eyes, I see our “better tomorrow” in full blossom and demise. I see you walk the beaten path because you have been taught to tread no other.

    In your eyes, I see the fires of decadence burning, I see the dreams of a fraudster. In your silence, I hear the rumours of dawn that’s radiant with moonshine. In your eyes, I see the dreams that rebel; I see the patriot’s death, the politician’s greed and the vanity of impatient youth.

    “Money talks bullshit works;” “Woe betide knowledge, and pain, and toil.” Labour has lost its honour, in your eyes. I should ask why but I know you know that “Slow and steady” wins no race in our fatherland.

    I see you have learnt to despise teachers, hate the police and treat journalists with disdain, because we taught you to see them as human antlers on the pate of the damned.

    We have thought you to follow the money thus you avoid the mindless burrow like a mole grasping through blindness of bliss and sorrow, on the bypass to fast-fleeting fortune.

    Child, you will grow up inept to blame us and fault others for the mistake your life would become, if you follow the fleeting path.

    You will lay the fault for choices no one forced you to make on us, on others, worse still, on our Creator. We have failed you. Fault accepted, blame resolved, will you now grow up?

    I hope things change soon. I hope you find thirst for history, hunger for poetry and insatiable craving for the ends of science.

    I hope you find the joys of childhood, the trauma of adolescence and the tumult of early adulthood. I hope you learn life’s bitter truths early enough.

    I hope you get to understand that school is for learning and the worship houses should do for slapping Satan.

    Perhaps you will discover the ignorance of your learning process and understand that slapping Satan every morning would make your life no better. The best-heard prayers are hardly said. They are the shiny rivulets masking the face of the factory hand. They are the recalcitrant throb in the forelock of the insatiable scholar and teacher. They are the fires burning within the heart of the patriot dying to make a difference.

    I hope you get to make a difference. I hope you become the patriot we never were.  Perhaps you will learn to become a man on your own terms and eventually become more than an appendage of the dreams of those whose hands are white and their hearts, black.

    But having gone through the rites of rot we call schooling, can you guarantee the future we may never have? Will you parade something more than a charred brain?

    I hope you shame us. I hope you grow up, find purpose and put our wealth to better use. I hope you become a true leader of men.

    If you don’t, you will end up tormenting us like the ruling class, or the militants pretending to fight for the poor in the creeks of the dying delta and the forest of Sambisa, ‘in the name of God.’

  • Nigeria’s embarrassments

    Nigeria’s embarrassments

    In model earth, the incumbent government would be a scar to Nigeria, a degeneration to coarse civilisation. But there is hardly anything ideal about our world thus we are stuck with a Hobson’s choice. While it may be true that we dodged devastation by voting out Goodluck Jonathan and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP), it need be understood that President Muhammadu Buhari’s presumed moralist, disciplinarian stance and the All Progressives Congress (APC)’s romanticised ‘Change’ has become urban legend, a whimsical narrative peddled by incurable optimists dreaming of a better tomorrow.

    Buhari may not be corrupt but his government is septic with worms; and his APC, contrary to its earlier posturing, manifests as you read, like a clean breath of fresh stench. Contemporary facts affirm this ugly reality: from embattled former pensions boss, Rasheed Maina’s – reinstatement while under scrutiny for fraud – to shameful shenanigans of an APC-controlled House of Assembly and a very corrupt civil service, Buhari seems to have bitten more than he could chew.

    Maybe his touted renouncement of corruption isn’t childish or duplicitous after all; 2019 is 365 days away and so much could happen before the next general elections. Will Buhari do better or will he do enough to get re-elected?

    Buhari’s fate and the APC’s chances should be the least of Nigeria’s worries, youthful Nigeria to be precise. What is the future of the youth in the coming dispensation? Will the youth continue to serve as thugs and errand boys for the incumbent ruling class? Will we bend and break to the lure of filthy lucre?

    An inordinate lust drives the Nigerian youth to self-destruct. Having perverted the natural order that places man above money, the animate cowers to the inanimate. Nigeria submits to mammon, and science, technology, power, property and other bastions of materialism own and control us. The consequences are rampant and discernible for all to see.

    The lust for money has put paid to our staunch adherence to a cultural value system, that incontestable code of personal and societal ethics that supposedly humanizes the average Nigerian and moulds him into a fuller, better breed.

    The current generation, the youth especially thus manifests a dissonance with future bliss and progressive leadership anticipated of it. I will not bother over the shortcomings and atrocities we inherited from preceding generations lest I tow the oft beaten path and glamourize our claims to victimhood and base sentimentality.

    If the Nigeria we inherited is truly shorn of values and promises of a brighter tomorrow, must we aggravate the circumstances that foist upon us such hopelessness?

    One of the most curious kinks of this generation is its sustenance and worship of the incumbent ruling class. Consider the former administration of President Jonathan for instance; men and women that erstwhile professed to champion the people’s rights united to defend Jonathan’s ‘honour’ and justify the unceasing ineptitude and mindlessness of his administration.

    They conveniently forgot that the administration’s insensitivity, clumsiness and gluttony cost Nigeria thousands of lives and public fund till date. Evidences of the government’s incompetence and tactlessness abounded in its appointment of men and women unfit to run a roast corn kiosk to man the nation’s finance, aviation, health, defense, foreign affairs, education, works and housing ministries to mention a few. The citizenry’s election of shady men and woman into the nation’s legislative chambers and their defiant justification of the emergence of such individuals in the country’s hallowed chambers was equally instructive in the nation’s descent the steep slope of institutional corruption and decadent culture.

    This anomaly periodically incites harsh criticisms and disillusionment among the citizenry. However, as had always being the case, the leading critics take no part in the pursuit and actualisation of majority will beyond lip service. Nonetheless they proceed with the most vulgar extravagances courting power and projecting it, irrespective of the nature of men and women that wield it.

    It is incontestable that many of such men, including the former president’s media aides attract to themselves, too much of every ill that lies on the threshold of psychosis and common crime. They cackle like a coven of crooked enthusiasts that see every shortcoming of the incumbent administration as cause for political theatrics and hysterical spinning.

    Such men are very useful to the ruling class; wobbly in intellect and infinitely handicapped by greed, they repeatedly parade themselves as pirates amenable to crimes and accessible to venal enterprise. They eventually shed their pretensions to heroism and honour to unite with the ruling class in its savage war against the citizenry.

    We have fought many wars in Nigeria. Wars for Biafra and the soul of the Niger Delta. The ongoing war for and against the soul of the northeast currently asphyxiating in the grip of terrorist sect, Boko Haram. And the never-ending war against thieving governors, legislators, and a corrupt judiciary.

    These wars are ultimately triggered by our failures with money and its innumerable material vestiges. But the wars of the underdog, Nigeria’s impoverished lot, has a greater significance than all of the others.

    This daily battle for the soul and survival of the struggling working class and barely existent middle class is merely an episode of the universal war that constitutes the true nature of humanity and history of the world—the war of good against evil, ruling class against working class, the haves against the have-nots.

    These wars however, are lost on all fronts even before the masses march on to the battle field every day. This is a consequence of the knavery of men, mostly in their youth, entrusted to serve as our moral sentinels, custodians of culture, value and hope for a brighter tomorrow.

    These men, contrary to their touted crusades in the interest of the citizenry, unconscionably mutate into more savage destroyers of hope and forms of life than the ruling class they were known to despise.

    But rather than call them out as the savages and murderers of hope that they have become, the Nigerian masses continually rationalise their betrayal arguing that they were only being smart. Perfidy and greed thus become noble enterprise in the Nigeria of our dreams.

  • Parable of the gecko thinking itself an alligator

    The gecko thinks if it quits the roof to live in the forest long enough, it will become an alligator. Will practice make the cat’s meow boom like a lion’s roar? Let us accord our leaders their rights to everlasting folly, Nigeria will soon be rid of them. Until then, we will get the quality of leadership that we deserve.

    I have seen all sorts of revolutionary marches and I’ve come to the conclusion that the Nigerian revolutionary is an incurable coward. It doesn’t make a darn bit of difference what his causes are. It’s worse if he’s in his youth; then he fully immerses into the backwardness he has been born, evolving quite brazenly like a barbarian, badgering onto the stage for acclaim through the trap-door.

    The conscientious and the just, the honorable, the gracious and humane; the unselfish and the quick may begin a movement but soon it slips from their grasp, turning them from leaders of the revolution into victims of the revolt. Thus their seemingly desperate inclinations to distance themselves from every revolutionary march.

    However, the Nigerian youth believes himself staggeringly capable of revolt, although he does not know how to revolt. In his desperate bid to rebel against the predatory ruling class, he propagates the contradiction of that lifestyle which cultivates sincerity and at once frustrates it. Thus the Nigerian youth remains his own greatest enemy.

    No revolution can be successful if the human elements serving as its force of change are wholly incapacitated to see to the fruitful end, the ideals of the insurrection, which brings me to the quality of youth mooting the revolt.

    Social media activists will do Nigeria great good if they could mature beyond impotent rant and activism on Facebook and Twitter. I do not despise them for having found cause to rage and rant online; I only pick issues with their lust for perpetually engaging in never ending duel with themselves and their shadows. It’s somewhat incestuous, cowardly and narcissistic.

    Twitter and Facebook warriors should never let so much luster, ‘brilliance’ and fury go to waste. Anyone could lampoon the ruling class on the over-glorified Facebook wall. But it takes courage to marry action to rhetoric.

    Revolution is never the rebellion against a pre-existing order, but the setting-up of a new order contradictory to a corrupt one. How different could an order anchored by the current crop of Nigerian youth be?

    A spectre haunts the youth. Having entered an unholy alliance with the ruling class, they do not constitute formidable opposition to keep the ruling class on its toes neither do they offer invaluable support to keep corrupt leadership on track.

    If we truly intend to make our lives fruitful, to ourselves and coming generations, 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 aim to make 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 in this way, there will be no need for the regeneration of our fatherland into fragmentary parts by political reform or bloodbath; all that is needed in the way of reform shall come automatically, owing to the moral regeneration of youths.

    Let us begin at the grassroots. Let us begin to court neglected segments of society like the “despicable area boy,” and “irascible market woman of the sidewalk” among others.

    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.

    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.

    We should represent interests of wage-earners and even of the professional classes, that are the slaves of 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 temptations of power. And let our passion not be overcome by the emergence of narcissists and corruption of broadly cultured men.

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

    We should be done quoting Awolowo, Azikiwe, Bello, Voltaire, Bonaparte, Fawehinmi among others. It’s about time we stopped mocking humanity excited by men channeling peace in quilted sleep. Shall we propagate deeds that would become incense for poetry and history that elevates.

    The current political parties negate our dreams of bliss. It’s about time we created a youth movement that would understand the silences of the oppressed in order to speak them – and resolve them. The kind of youth movement that would restore to the social camp, trust and confidence.

    The Nigerian youth, sadly, presents a contradiction to the benefits of such relationship of trust.

    He is accustomed to living like a lout and a beggar. In the long run, he understands the inferiority of those who are placed over his head but when they inflict greater hurt upon him, he becomes refractory and shy and crawls into the wall when backed against it. This is hardly the way to get on in the world.

  • The northeast bazaar (1)

    •Is Nigeria’s humanitarian crisis a meal ticket to UN agencies, other NGOs?

    There is a formula for writing the story of the northeast. If you are a Nigerian journalist, you stick to the script. You are expected to fawn and grope through lattices of horror and contrived appreciation to present a humane story, often tailored to funding needs, schema, politics and administrative ego of United Nations’ multilateral agencies and other international non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

    You may be tame or sensational in your reports but whatever you do, do not reveal the fraudulence and rot characterizing international NGOs.

    Not a few journalists are familiar with the process; perhaps they are too awestruck by patronage from the NGOs hence you never get to read of the decadence across dystopic expanses of Konduga, Muna Dalti, and other Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps managed by UN agencies in Borno and the northeast region.

    A recent fire outbreak in Muna Dalti revealed the extent of the agencies’ complicity in endangering the lives of Borno IDPs. The magnitude of the loss makes you wonder what the UN agencies in the state, particularly the one responsible for sheltering refugees, do with outrageous funding for shelter that it receives.

    The fire completely razed the camp. A personal tour revealed that the tents burned faster because they were built with sticks, rubber and nylon sheets. The dwellings are fit to house animals yet Nigerians were forced to dwell in them. Do UN agencies receive outrageous dollar funding to house IDPs like fowls?

    Adding insult to injury, UN agencies and other NGOs’ internal press teams interview victims of such disasters and take ‘touching’ pictures of them that project their funding needs and political agenda.

    Sometimes, they enable their journalist friends from abroad to take the pictures and even contribute in no small measure to actualising preferred shots. They consider as fair game, anything that glorifies their work, criminalises local government (often deservedly) and substantiates their extreme claims for material and financial support.

    One such picture could be of several tiny hands (of kids) eating from a bowl of badly done rice mixed with stones. The fraudulence of the shot subsists in the portion of stones in the food. Yopu get the feeling that the stones were deliberately added to the food to achieve impact. Who does that?

    It is instructive to note that Nigerian journalists are hardly given the privilege of taking such shots, except they are contracted to do so by aid agencies. The UN’s agencies for instance, accord such privilege only to their internal media teams or foreign (often Caucasian) journalists from abroad. You could be forgiven for imagining racist undertones to such act.

    Five years ago, while on a visit to the Garwa refugee camp in Maroua, Cameroon’s Far North Region, I witnessed the extremities endured by Nigerians fleeing Boko Haram’s onslaught from Banki, northeast Nigeria, into Cameroon. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) administrators of the camp tossed fragments of bread to hundreds of starving refugees, who shoved and fell over each other to grab portions of the loaves. For each lucky refugee, a portion was equal to a bite.

    Of course, they were livid that I witnessed the situation. They tried to frustrate me from doing my work but for the governor of Maroua, who facilitated my access into the camp afterwards.

    While UN authorities would argue that they can  only do so much with ‘inadequate’ resources, is it also due to resource inadequacy that UNHCR staff tossed bread at starving IDPs like animals? There were more humane and dignified methods to feed the starving refugees but UNHCR officials opted to feed them like guinea fowls.

    Just recently, Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno State accused UN agencies of alleged misappropriation of about $334 million (N133.6 billion) meant for “humanitarian interventions and assistance” for Boko Haram victims in the state and north-east sub-region.

    He made the allegation while receiving the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA)’s Deputy Regional Director for West and East Africa, Beatrice Mutali, at the Government House in Maiduguri, Borno’s capital.

    Shettima lamented that the crisis is grossly misrepresented and exploited by humanitarian workers. He accused NGOs of splurging on bullet proof vehicles from intervention fund and operating in the northeast without any concrete and visible relief on displaced persons. He also alleged that more than 500 U.N. workers had invaded Maiduguri, the Borno state capital, and that their presence and expenditures are “questionable” given their lack of impact on some of the two million refugees in the state.

    Of course, Borno officials are also been found complicit in sex for food scandals, theft and other crimes on IDP camps. One would think that the situation would improve over the years but it gets worse. A recent encounter with shady and very hostile staff of international NGOs in Konduga, Borno State, further attests to the loathsomeness and detachment characterising relief workers’ relationship with IDPs. It’s far removed from what you see in cozy humanitarian reports.

    At the Konduga IDP centres managed by UN agencies and collaborating NGOs, minors share rubber tents with the elderly; the poor, helpless souls huddle together at the mercy of the elements through heat and rain, cloudbursts and sandstorms.

    The officials in the camp almost lynched me and broke my camera. They claimed I didn’t obtain permission from them before speaking with IDPs even after showing them a pass granted by state authorities. They were actually worried that I would speak with IDPs who would reveal the true situation in the camp – which was deplorable. They would rather I spoke with IDPs handpicked by the; the ones who wouldn’t reveal that they managed the camp like a pig farm.

    It is noteworthy that perpetrators of such wickedness to IDPs are often black Africans comprising Nigerians and fellow Africans. This is certainly a practical ploy by Caucasian managers of the agencies, who believe that the dirty work should be done by the IDPs’ compatriots. This shields Caucasian staff of the agencies from likely criticism and accusations of inhumanity. There is asides lopsided employment regimes and benefits unevenly instituted between local and international staff of UN agencies among others.

    The malady subsists at the backdrop of fraud and embezzlement of funds within UN agencies. A 133-page examination of “fraud detection, prevention and response” across 28 organizations in the U.N.’s network, carried out by members of the organisation’s Joint Inspection Unit (JIU), for instance, revealed that the UN simply ignores fraud committed by its staff.

    This casts a suspicious shade on the UN’s $1bn (£800m) humanitarian response plan launched in partnership with the Nigerian government recently. But while Peter Lundberg, deputy humanitarian coordinator for the UN in Nigeria claimed it is to help prevent the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians over the coming 12 months, President Muhammadu Buhari accuses the UN of exaggerating the humanitarian crises.

  • Unbidden offering on the altar of vultures

    An Ivy League education without ethics makes a trust fund ‘baby’ an expensive toy without batteries. Substandard education makes the middling youth even worse. It moulds him into a broken toy without appeal. They are both disposable but they enjoy patronage anyway – by the ones Wole Soyinka eloquently described as the wasted generation.

    The Nigerian youth is a breed with all the personality of a paper cup. Thus like paper cups, we are used and disposed by men and women unfit to be elders. Yet whatever callousness we are forced to endure, our elders are not to blame. They should not be blamed, for we made ourselves unbidden offering on the altar of vultures.

    It is the malady of this age that the youth are too busy preaching that they have no time left to learn. In Nigeria, we are too busy dumbing down that we barely have time left to grow. It is a sad manifestation of stunted growth that we evolve into foetal adults and spend the rest of our lives seeking the comfort of debilitating “life boats.”

    It is even more disheartening to see us adopt as a favourite past time, the pillorying of our elders and the rapacious ruling class. Many a Nigerian youth love to prophesy the worst about our fatherland thus it is never surprising to hear the average youth pronounce with emphatic pessimism thus: “This country is doomed” or “Nigeria is finished.”

    The Igbo youth laments his persistent marginalization from the scheme of things. He believes Nigeria is skewed to work against him and fellow Igbo because his peers from other ethnic groups are wary of his towering acumen, industry, courage and political savvy.

    The Hausa youth believes he has the right to inexplicably reign supreme and lord it over his peers without resort to merit. And the Yoruba youth, goaded by sentiments of his higher wisdom, towering depth in diplomacy, culture and politics believes that he is entitled to the best the country has to offer, on a platter of gold.

    The contemporary youth frantically perpetuates his sense of victimhood and entitlement. The idea is to keep whining until he gets lucky and corner an immense portion of the proverbial national cake, with minimal exertion and at no cost.

    We used to be regarded as the promising youth, the gifted generation that would rescue Nigeria from the brink of ruin. But that spell of hopefulness has dissipated now. Our “wasted” elders have seen through our noise and bluster. They know we are increasingly handicapped by greed and lack of creed. By creed, I mean a coherent and specific set of goals, a consistent series of norms according to which society is to be remade.

    Since we have learnt to blame the ruling class for everything, what is it that we want from the ruling class? We don’t need their permission to make something of the world where they have failed but we still live our lives seeking their permission to evolve positively and maturely.

    It takes courage and decency to evolve a humane ideology and establish it. We haven’t the courage and the will, and this interferes with our ability to accomplish progressive change. More worrisome are our violent attempts to be radical; eventually they resonate too feebly as a kind of rudderless activism.

    We identify all that is wrong with our society but we are never specific about what must be done to correct them. It is easy to join a picket line and castigate our elders and ruling class for everything that is wrong with our lives but these actions, while they demonstrate frustration, in some instances even heroism, deal generally with symptoms of· our problems and not the solutions.

    All the picket lines in the world would not resolve the maladies of fraudulent and impatient youth, perverted values, greed, racism, disillusionment with scholarship and substandard education.

    A broad wave of disillusionment persist above the silver linings we seek to succeed our darksome clouds. Yet with precision and unfaltering devotion, we work ourselves up into such a state that we can only see the volcanic flare of our destructive acts as glitters of grandeur.

    We have perfected the art of standing on barrel-heads to spout and be seen, while we engage in pursuit and acquisition of mostly unearned wealth and greatness. Eventually, we luxuriate and spread out like a green forest with sour fruits and severed roots.

    Apparently, we suffer a throwback to the 70s – the era that launched a trend in which Nigerians became preoccupied with themselves more than the survival of the nation. Self preservation has become an inexorable obsession of many youths seeking to escape the slow, steady path with its craters of mishap and socio-economic vagaries.

    What Joshua Lubin identifies as the “Me” decade has indeed, recoiled inward rather than concern itself with crucial national issues, like national progress and ethical rebirth. Therefore, popular culture attracts dubious labels such as “narcissistic” and “decadent” from critics and the “wasted” older generation.

    The Nigerian youth has become so self-involved that almost every action and train of thought perpetuated by him serves as an instrumental resource to situate this generation in historical context, as perfect illustration of the much-hackneyed and over-exploited “Lost Generation.”

    Our inordinate quest for self-fulfillment further establishes us as the worst that could possibly happen to a heavily endowed nation like Nigeria.

    But we aren’t actually so bad. If we could look inwards to summon latent will and channel it towards the rejuvenation of outdated mores of morality and simple decencies, our lot could change for better.

    Yet some gothic rabble would read this and consider it “Pollyannaish.” To this lot, any enthusiastic lunge at hope or belief in a brighter tomorrow, manifests as blind optimism and a pathetic attempt to be patriotic even while it’s absolutely idiotic to do so.

    They would love to see the nation ruin in order to justify their inordinate cynicism and yearnings about the pointlessness of the Nigerian dream. They continually affirm their ill will and prayers of doom for the nation by tirelessly projecting separation and insurmountable bleakness on the Nigerian state.

    Individually, their contribution towards nation building is virtually non-existent or abysmally low, they are amazingly adept at sowing seeds of doubt and disillusionment amongst their peer and younger generation. But they love to be seen as heroes of truth and the new world.

    These are company to be scorned and avoided by progressive youth.

  • Parable of Nasir El-Rufai’s competency test

    Governor Nasir El-Rufai is a man of the gallery. Oftentimes he becomes spectacle to his tailored audience, an assemblage of haters and sycophants peopling his courtier and political courtesan class. El-Rufai’s recent exploit evokes a fable; a divisive meme of leadership and professionalism.

    The two concepts clash in the arena of El-Rufai. Posturing as the hardnosed disciplinarian, the Kaduna governor butts head with about 22,000 teachers and the Kaduna State chapter of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC).

    The reason is not farfetched. Having watched with dismay as teachers in the state flunked competency tests, the Kaduna governor did the needful by approving the dismissal of affected teachers. Predictably, the diminutive governor’s move generated buzz in the social space as mainstream and new media sensationalised his measure on the wings of protest and articulated vitriol by labour union and political opposition.

    Trust Ayodele Fayose, Governor of Ekiti, to never miss an opportunity to throw darts at perceived shortcomings of colleagues in the All Progressive Congress (APC); Fayose accused the Kaduna governor of sacking teachers with the support of President Muhammadu Buhari.

    “I’m warning Nigerians again, the agenda of the APC is to sack workers. They are sacking teachers in Kaduna and Buhari is supporting them,” he said on Twitter.

    The tweet triggered a debate which saw some in favour but others against Fayose. The latter’s spokesman, Lere Olayinka tweeted: “In Ekiti, we did not conduct competency test for teachers, we still made first position in NECO in 2016 and 2017. El-Rufai can come and learn from us.”

    The Kaduna governor, replied Fayose thus: “Your Excellency Sir, we are not sacking teachers in Kaduna. Rather, we are replacing unqualified people who are unfit to be called teachers to save the future of the next generation.”

    El-Rufai’s retort is instructive. It addresses the conundrum of ‘the next generation.’ Of course, the governor talks a good game and he has done what ex-governor of Ekiti, Kayode Fayemi, attempted to do via his defunct Teachers’ Development Needs Assessment (TDNA).

    Now the minister of mining, Fayemi reportedly helped El-Rufai by introducing him to the consultant that conducted the controversial assessment of Kaduna teachers. The competency tests, which were based on Primary 4 level examinations, were failed by over half of the primary school teachers who sat for it, implying that they are unfit to teach at the foundation level.

    El-Rufai didn’t goof by his latest deed. The Kaduna governor is undoubtedly on good course but among other things, he needs to cushion the adverse effects of his actions by employing qualified replacements for the unqualified teachers.

    He also needs to evolve a process to identify those that could be retrained and re-employed into the teaching service.

    Then El-Rufai has to admit truths related to the reality of Kaduna’s incompetent teachers. The latter, like millions of Nigerian graduates are victims of the incumbent ruling class, to which El-Rufai, sadly belongs.

    El-Rufai in a recent interview admitted thus: ”Unqualified teachers entered the system because the recruitment of teachers was politicised. The local government council chairmen and other senior politicians and bureaucrats saw teaching as a dumping ground for their thugs, supporters and other unqualified persons.

    “Teachers were employed at local government level without adherence to standards. In many instances, no examinations or interviews were conducted to assess the quality of recruits. Political patronage, nepotism and corruption became the yardsticks, thus giving unqualified persons a way in. Teaching jobs were given as patronage to those connected to politicians and bureaucrats.”

    The governor’s admission speaks to the decadence and regression of his ruling class. It echoes the wound-like rawness of Fayemi’s jarring speech to recent graduands of the University of Lagos (UNILAG). Fayemi told the graduands:  “quit whining and start doing — for ourselves and for our country. If something angers you so much, instead of whining, think hard about possible solutions and do something about it.”

    Thus within El-Rufai’s privileged bulk too, lurks a humane realist. But can El-Rufai divorce himself from the insensitivity, sloppiness and entitlement mentality characteristic of Nigeria’s ruling class?

    What has the Kaduna governor done to establish himself as a deviant from Nigeria’s decadent political culture; after all, he was part of the system since the past regime of ex-president, Olusegun Obasanjo.

    The afflictions of Nigeria’s educational system certainly exceeds competency tests and the scourge of bungling primary school teachers. The country’s political machinery and civil service need reforms too.

    At the moment, cult of self dominates Nigeria’s cultural and political landscape. This cult is responsible for plaguing the country with what El-Rufai identified as a culture of “political patronage, nepotism and corruption.”

    It advances what Hedges identifies as the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, lavishness, and utter conceit. El-Rufai’s ruling class is hindered by masturbatory ego, insensitivity to electoral woes, persistent duplicity, and incapacity for remorse.

    It is about time that the Nigerian electorate sacked this ruling class, comprising public officers who educate their wards abroad even as they devastate the nation’s education system by their ineptitude.

    Several governors, senators and traditional rulers educate their children abroad and travel overseas to celebrate their graduation while schools in the country are shut down for over 10 months as in the case of the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH) and the host state’s bungling governor.

    This brings to mind again, the competency test. While some have applauded the move, others have frowned at it. However, President Buhari, on Monday, declared his support for El-Rufai’s replacement of the incompetent teachers.

    To justify the decision to sack the teachers, the state government released some answer scripts from the competency test, revealing how many could not answer questions set for primary four students. The state government lamented that about two-thirds of primary school teachers in the state failed to score up to 75 per cent in the examination.

    This no doubt requires urgent corrective measures. But if subjected to the same test, how many senators, governors and presidential staff would excel unassisted? If El-Rufai and peer are so particular about establishing quality education in Kaduna and neighbouring states, would they kindly extend similar passion to the anti-corruption campaign and establishment of competent leadership across the country?

    There is a joke in public circuits that the country’s incumbent ruling class would fail a 1, 000-word essay on ‘My Politics.’ This joke affirms the gruesome reality of Nigeria’s corrupt, bungling ruling class. Yet they gleefully score cheap points via El-Rufai’s significant measure.

    As you read, El-Rufai’s ruling class afflicts children of the electorate with substandard education while they educate their wards abroad.

    Sound bites and statistics electrify them as fermented grape excites the lust of the habitual drunk. Little wonder they deploy statistics in the same way that Andrew Lang’s drunken man uses lamp-posts – for support rather than illumination.