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 unpleasantness as their fate. Thus they exhibit no conscious effort to better their lot beyond what their immediate circumstances dictate.
Almost as impulsively as the beasts of the wild, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought and consideration that by sufficient endeavor, they just might improve their living conditions.
However, a certain percentage, constituted by men and women of higher status among the nation’s working class, 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.
Very few among the latter are inspired to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves. This explains the number of self-centred, treacherous human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists and columnists parading our streets.
Very few men are indeed capable of 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 occupying the lower rung of the societal ladder regardless of any risk or discomfort it might attract to them personally.
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.
More unfortunate sections 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 modernity, higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian society or working class to be precise, have failed woefully to achieve better living conditions and a better society even in the throes of rising demand for more radical intervention and reconstruction of the social order.
It is no surprise however that the Nigerian working class has persistently proved a dismal failure. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: Nigerians have a problem with differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate political behavior. That is why the nation’s democratic experiment like any other system of governance practicable by us was doomed from the start.
What exactly has democracy offered? A 4-1-9 progressive plan that booms circumspectly like it had been doctored as part of a cold-war era propagandist scheme? But despite our self-righteousness and persistent cynicism with the current order, we really cannot explore a more worthy alternative than what we have now.
The average Nigerian can’t bear to be led by a truly honest, visionary and accountable leadership. It’s the way we are programmed to live. I’d say we possess an overwhelming and oft-convincing inclination to self-destruct thus our lack of a coherent and defensible political ideology essential to the evolution of a progressive leadership and state.
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 in the riotous gabble of his exultation of the same ruling class. No matter who is elected, the demographic and economic realities of Nigeria will persist, and there is a very limited range of politically-viable solutions for dealing with them.
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 can only be achieved by a re-orientation in scholarship and purification of thought and action.
The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be tirelessly reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advance — problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life. This informs a greater need for study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes in the journey towards the avoidance and reduction to the barest minimum of future mistakes.
The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.
It’s about time poor, struggling members of the nation’s working class learned to scorn the maxim that holds that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains; the paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood. That proverbial better society that we seek calls for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the low income earners and ambitious middle class emancipated by training and culture.
Such human elements would no doubt be conscious of the fact that not even the sustenance of oil subsidy, higher wages and a fairer economic system could protect its members from the usual handicaps and monstrosity constituted by the incumbent and predatory ruling class.
Hence they would be able to understand that such social enterprise and gesture towards change must be mooted and achieved by the working class itself in further substantiation of the working class’ capacities to assimilate the culture and common sense of modern civilization, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to posterity.
We belabour the ‘Nigerian dream.’ We abuse the idea that life will get better, that progress is assured if we keep faith, obey the rules and work hard; that prosperity is guaranteed if we continue to tread the slow, steady path to progress and a prosperous future. And in pursuit of these lofty ideals, we pervert the steady, measured, impartial course of the universe; hacking pliant paths to our dreams, from the crossroads where gluttony cavorts with depravity.
Eventually, we awaken to a cold, bitter truth: We are being sacrificed. The Nigerian dream we are sold isn’t worth our sacrifice. And the individual dreams we pursue, aren’t worth a smidgen of what we make them out to be. By the time we all struggle to achieve our dreams, Nigeria will be finished. Given that each tribe may finally achieve its dreams of nationhood via secession, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw to mention a few may establish their new nations.
When we do, the swollen belly of our pride shall become visible to us. When it does, it shall suddenly dawn on us that, all along, we had been blindly acting to a script prepared by career predators from Western nations of Europe, America and our ruling class.
The truth will become clearer to us we shall hopelessly realize that we are being sacrificed. We will all be sacrificed; some of us much quicker than others. As it is now, so shall it be in our new nations, the Biafran youth, Ijaw youth, Oodua youth and Arewa youth to mention a few, shall become disposable indices in the scheme of things.
But until then, we will continue to have today and squander it on the altar of racism and greed. Today, it’s impossible to see any offspring of our ruling class engage or become embroiled in the familiar tragedies that mar our lives. It’s always children from the breadlines, struggling middle class and backwaters that are involved. We are the youth divide traditionally required to serve as unthinking muscles and cannon fodder in the ruling class’ blueprint of pillage and destruction.
The decline of Nigeria is a story of gross injustices by the ruling class to the citizenry. But that is only an aspect of it, the greatest injustice is that meted out by individual citizen to self – the youth particularly. And this predominant malaise often plays out in our corruptibility and disinclination to foster a more humane leadership and society.
Today, we suffer declining standards of living, stagnant and falling wages that are hardly paid at due time. We suffer curtailment and absolute denial of our basic wages, long-term unemployment, slave labour, escalating crime wave, among other ills.
We perpetuate gruesome realities of the weakest being crushed decisively and maniacally by the affluent and strong. Together, we perpetuate a story of unbridled sectarian, ethnic and corporate power that has taken our government hostage, overseen the dismantling of our cultural heritage, societal and entrepreneurial values.
But if the ruling class, in connivance with predatory nations and institutions from the so-called ‘first world’ is responsible for plundering our natural resources and bankrupting the nation, we, the youth, are responsible for even worse atrocities.
We serve as the tools by which the ruling class and its cohorts overseas plunder and destroy our nation. The virus of political corruption, the perverted belief that only political and material profit matters, has spread to distort our thoughts and understanding of right and wrong. Today, it manifests in endemic proportions plaguing our communities with religious and political terrorism, economic and cyber-terrorism to mention a few.
The Nigerian society dies a gruesome death because we lay to waste, our youths and we, the latter, by our suicidal actions and thoughts, submit as prey to the predatory ruling class and their cohorts overseas.
Everyday encounters with gluttonous gangs of struggling youth reveals among other things, that many of us are the same social products as our peer from the aristocratic divide. Conditioned by life’s harshest vicissitudes to survive at all cost, we lay in wait, striving and bidding our time until we are ably positioned and strong enough to serve or rob the rich whose life we earnestly covet and decry.
A visit to any night club, party, religious organization or office still attests to this fact. Ambitious and upwardly mobile youth from the breadlines or struggling working class families engage in a variety of excesses to the applause of mates yearning to be in their shoes. Either as advance fee fraudsters, bankers, journalists, accountants, secretaries, factory hands or ordinary clerks, youths from the breadlines daily engages in a bitter, desperate struggle to chance on the shortest possible cut to sudden and stupendous wealth.
We seem beset by a greater and unexplainable fear beyond the fear of poverty amongst other harsh realities of our lives. Fear plays a greater part than hope: we are infinitely buoyed and obsessed with thoughts of the money that we could make or the possessions that might be taken from us or elude us, than of the joy and value that we might add to our own lives and to the future of our fatherland.
Most of us, like our more privileged peer crave the best of everything without actually sweating for it. And when we do sweat for it, our industry is tainted by vigorous dashes of impatience and duplicity. In our work, we are haunted by jealousy of competitors, and a fleeting interest in the actual work that has to be done. We spend greater time and passion defending unjust privileges that we are desperate to enjoy.
Such appalling youth constitute a greater segment of the human element expected to salvage Nigeria from eternal ruin and bloodbath. Consequently, our society becomes more rudderless and unstable and vulnerable, on our watch. Now that Nigeria as our fathers, ‘the wasted generation’ made it, and we the youth, aggravate it, have begun to collapse, we withdraw from the possibility of rebirth, and instead choose to exploit the infinite possibilities in our fragility and predicted collapse.
It’s about time the Nigerian youth started postponing immediate gratification and endure hard sacrifices spurred by conviction that the future can be better than the past. Beyond the politics and inanities of our existing ruling class and political parties, we face far more difficult questions at our moment in history: How do we reconcile reality with promises that have been made to us? How do we make the best of our circumstances at the backdrop of indefensible leadership failure and disillusionment of the citizenry? How do we evolve and nurture to fruition, a new vision to help us deal with our gruesome realities, even as we chart a promising story of the future? How do we divorce ourselves from the pains and disappointments of the past – particularly those that many of amongst us had no stake in but yet internalize and perpetuate unexplainable miseries thereby?
How do we redefine “Peace, Unity and Progress” with our lust for “Life, Liberty and Happiness?” How do we become more humane than we are now?
•Mutations of the journalist in the corridors of power
A notable politician/public officer dismisses fear of backlash over his persistent rape and impregnation of minors. He brags to a friend in Diaspora, in his native dialect translatable thus: “The news is dead on delivery. I have top journalists at my beck and call.” He bragged that he has journalism’s shining lights on a leash of cash. As the mongrel dares extremities for a gift of bone, so do his ‘boys’ in the media, he claimed.
Predictably, the most senior media aide in the culprit’s pack of hounds spread the cash and killed news of his sex crimes.
It is only fair that the aide watches helplessly as randy, power-drunk politicians rape his daughters and infect them with gonorrhea, like his principal’s underage victims; by Edumare’s retributive grace. It is only just that Edumare situates the fruit of his loins in similar circumstances, without the luxury of justice. That he might understand agonies of his principal’s victims and their families.
The media aide is neither conflicted nor appalled. He says: “Na today e dey happen?” (It’s no oddity. It happens). A passion for truth and ethics could never spur him to imperil his job – which he considers a saving grace, his ‘out’ from bleak, thankless Journalism.
The life of a journalist-turned-media-aide is a parody in which honour plays no part. Unlike other members of his principal’s court, he enjoys no prideful place. He sits on his haunch, like a dog on its paws outside its master’s court. Like the hound, he is forever waiting to lunge, with a kill-cry and bare fangs, at perceived ‘detractors’ of his principal, the dog owner.
‘Ki lo ma nse awon boys yii naa?’ (What’s wrong with these boys?), he drones irritably, whenever his former colleagues in the media, subject his principal to harsh scrutiny and objective criticism. He assures his principal – who could be the president, senate president, a state governor, legislative speaker or local government chairman – that the press can be bought over.
Media aides wrongly assume every news editor, correspondent and reporter to be manipulable by cash, a foreign trip, a gallon of vegetable oil, Christmas/Ileya ram or a bag of rice, items by which his conscience was sold and bought.
Thus he gets a generous budget to silence the ‘boys’ and inspire them to ignore the ineptitude and corruption of his principal. Of the bribe allotment, the media aide siphons 70 per cent to his personal account, and splits the remainder among the ‘boys.’
It never gets old to see the so-called ‘press boys’ scurry for residue of the bribe with dark delight. Rebels against the prevalent rot are daubed unfairly aggressive, biased, sanctimonious or driven by questionable animosity because they have been ‘left out.’
There is a difference between ‘press boys’ and ‘Gentlemen of the Press.’ The press boy forever prowls, lobbying along the corridors of power in frantic quest to become media aide. A ‘Gentleman of the Press’ however, is a true ethical native. And he exists.
He understands that the work of a media aide connotes the soul’s struggle against the body. Thus he rejects the role, knowing that as media aide, he would suffer the affliction of languid ethics, insatiable lusts and poisonous glamour, like a courtesan haunted in post-orgasmic flush, by relentless spasms of lust for riches and unearned pleasure. Like fabled Tantalus, his thirst is never quenched.
Media aides get confused too. Mcenteer calls this condition occupational hazard for those who move from journalism into government, or vice versa. They experience confusion about the role and functions on their new jobs, likewise their colleagues and news audience, seeking information from or about them, their professionalism and evolving identities.
Reuben Abati for instance, was a notable, venerated critic, celebrated at home and abroad. Yet he suffered irredeemable descent as justifier of ineptitude and political trifles as ex-President Goodluck Jonathan’s Special Adviser on Media Affairs (SAMA).
Enter Femi Adesina, SAMA to President Muhammadu Buhari. Adesina’s performance as presidential media aide further diminishes the worth of the journalist in the corridors of power. Although his apologists within and outside media circuits justify his indiscretions claiming, “What’s he supposed to do? Would you quit if it were you?”
Nobody is asking Adesina to quit. Yet it is instructive that a man who used to be a journalist of immense wisdom and worth, at least to those inspired by him, has been reduced to whatever he is currently.
Adesina’s difficulties vary in character and severity but are classifiable as problems of ethics, irony, conflict, confusion and blur. What if he had vied for the presidency? This couldn’t be preposterous given his once luscious reputation as a thought moulder, manager of men and resources. Sadly, like his predecessors and several lesser aides, he manifested as glowing work of self-sculpture, until his descent into the labyrinth of power, as presidential statuette and every gadfly’s unfinished model.
Similar ethical dilemma afflict journalists across the seas. Charles Royer suffered unpleasant, public, irony at his election to Seattle City Hall. Before he became American Mayor, Royer attained fame for his nightly 60 to 90-second political commentaries on KING-TV. In 1976, his half-hour documentary, “The Bucks Stop Here,” exposed improper use of special-interest money in the state legislature.
The programme earned him two national journalism awards. When he became Mayor in 1977, Royer decided to share valuable information with his former press colleagues in off-the-record sessions. But TV crews wanted to bring their cameras into the meetings, against his wishes. Royer eventually showed up on TV and newspaper front pages, shoving TV cameras out. He will forever remember the headline with the photo: “TV Commentator turned Mayor shuts out TV.”
Another poignant example is Edward R. Murrow, respected radio and TV journalist’s alleged bid to prevent the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) from airing “Harvest of Shame” soon after he became the head of United States Information Agency. It was one of Murrow’s final documentaries for the CBS network and it revealed the terrible living and working conditions of migrant farm laborers in Florida.
His attempt however, failed, but leaked to the press thus embarrassing the novice bureaucrat. “Murrow, the government propaganda chief, had tried to censor Murrow, the muckraking journalist,” notes Mcenteer.
Despite their shortcomings Royer and Murrow served in more ennobling circumstances. Not as glorified errand boys or attack hounds. It is the job of journalist turned media aides to pitilessly offer harsh but constructive criticisms from patriotic and envisaged media perspective, of their principals’ intended policies or actions before they are made public.
If it is their principals’ wish to transform Nigeria, media aides should help them understand that in heaven, saints don’t become ‘God’ and an angel is nobody in particular.
•Mutations of the journalist in the corridors of power
Man loses wife and three kids to vehicle accident caused by bad road. Media aide justifies governor’s refusal to repair the road, claiming there were more pressing state projects. Aide scornfully dismisses uproar over the incident as negligible tirade of ‘the wailing wailers.’
It is only fair that the aide suffers the loss of all his children and wife, in similar circumstances, that he might understand the misery of the bereaved father and husband.
If presidential media aides disdainfully justify government indolence in curbing frequent murder of innocent rural families by northern herdsmen, it is only fair that such aides suffer inexplicable, brazen murder of their loved ones too. That they might understand the insane pain borne by victims of such killings.
A governor cum phony progressive honours an African president with an obscene N520 million effigy, to the consternation of his impoverished electorate. His media aide justifies the juvenile enterprise even as the governor owes salaries and pensions. It is only fair that the aide experiences divinely imposed hunger and famine of the purse, that he might understand the agony of the state’s starving, elderly pensioners.
If after experiencing such losses, media aides are able to smile, keep a stiff upper lip and unflinching belief in the ‘fairness, efficiency and honesty’ of their principals, Nigerians may begin to assimilate their illusory gospel of fortitude and hope.
The contemporary media aide urges you to be happy irrespective of your plight. He advances to dissenters, the illusion of happiness, an attitude akin to David Cooperrider’s “Transformational Positivity.”
Media aides urge oppressed electorate to embrace their pains and see the world anew, touting obscure and incomprehensible jargon about the power of positive thinking. ‘Nigeria is getting better,’ they urge the citizenry to believe.
Their admonition would be edifying had they experienced same miseries as the citizenry they request such optimism of. Their smiley gospel of contrived bliss and resignation would be acceptable if they could mount the soapbox and preach so, soon after they lose loved ones to avoidable deaths caused by bad governance by the principals they represent.
When the citizenry complain of perceived shortcomings of their principals, media aides liken expressed dissent to whimpers and cries of neutered enemies of the state. These days, they simply dub every critic, a ‘wailing wailer.’ For instance, if you criticize the incumbent administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, you must be one of the greedy beneficiaries of immediate past President, Goodluck Jonathan’s corrupt regime.
If you complain of deaths on the nation’s bad roads, hospital corridors of death, substandard schools, corrupt, overzealous government agency officials , they tell you that Nigeria can’t achieve a sudden resurrection from devastation and sleaze foisted upon her by previous regimes.
There is no gainsaying that Nigeria currently experiences pangs of a healing process, which requires patience and commitment to the course of positive ‘change.’ It is an open secret however, that the process of rebirth is constantly hobbled by leadership and nemeses enslaved to hubris, nepotism, greed and a god complex.
The incumbent All Progressives Congress (APC) government expects to be cuddled and patronised while its chieftains and elected officers foists on Nigeria, grotesque governance akin to that imposed on the country by immediate past leadership of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
No doubt, bad roads and deadly waterways, substandard education and healthcare, depressive economy and unemployment , insecurity and untimely death, still constitute the greatest assault on the populace by the ruling class.
The citizenry’s deadliest aggressor, however, are journalists turned media aides in the corridors of power. They are like Spenser’s genitally deformed Duessa to the ruling class’ misshapen phallus.
From the presidential villa and state houses, to lower public service ministries, journalists mutate into modern versions of the whore of Babylon. Like Spenser’s Acrasia, Phaedria, Malecasta, Duessa and Hellenore, they foster the triumph of predatory government over a critical press. While a shrewd few struggle to stay upright and true, a greater number play whore to the ruling class.
It is instructive to note however, that the Nigerian media aide nurtures variants of lesser aides or attack dogs within and outside his office. While he licks the boot of his principal, his minions jostle for crumbs from his ‘operating budget’ or the largesse he gets from his employer.
Mongrels to the media aide often function further down the pecking order; they are the thugs and trolls of the traditional and new media. They issue caustic retorts to critics and perceived detractors of the media aide and his principal. A critique of a presidential media aide’s disgraceful sycophancy for instance, attracted sharp retort from one of his thugs.
Manipulative and exploitative, media aides tirelessly seek to validate humiliation, poverty, pestilence and death foisted upon mostly poor, underprivileged citizenry by their principals.
But unlike majority of Nigeria’s impoverished who are driven by hunger, tokenism and base sentimentality to justify the callousness of their elected representatives, these ‘Yes-men’ aren’t conditioned so by severe bouts of hunger or affliction by Stockholm Syndrome.
They are in perfect control of their desires and aspiration to be ‘turned’ and dominated by predatory principals. They are eager to serve and devote their lives to the celebration of evil, in whatever guise, as long as it translates to currency deposits in their bank accounts.
They are greatly efficient in closed, womblike spaces; the TV studio, compact halls, the boardroom, and State House press halls. These replace the medieval spaces in the bedchamber, groves and caves like the leafy grotto of Homer’s Calypso, where their medieval archetype is captured, seduced, sodomized and infantilized.
Thus Nigeria’s major affliction besides the archetypal rogue, corrupt journalist includes, Special Advisers on Media Affairs, some State Commissioners for Information, Chief Press Secretaries and Special Assistant on Media Affairs. These ‘Yes-men’ conduct themselves like political Labradors, constantly undergoing psychological entrancement, thus turning their linearity of quest into a Tantalus problem.
Tantalus, the eternally hungry king in Greek mythology, was condemned to stand in water under a fruit tree. Whenever he tried to drink or eat, the water or fruit receded beyond his reach. Such is the predicament of the media aide. Like his principal, he is ravenous for unearned riches and other vulgar perks. Thus his insatiable appetite for the spoils of office, irrespective of his position at the root of the totem pole.
Media aides should be pitied. They bring no honour to their work. They are mere errand boys hence their inability to speak truth to power. Before their descent and domestication like yard dogs, some of them struggled to personify the country’s finest press men, critics and leaders of thought. Today, they serve in mortifying circumstances, in capacities unbecoming of patriot-journalists and critics.
We live to a devastating stereotype. Like stray ducks, we waddle against the walls of institutionalized pigeonholes as the ram thrashes in its soul at the descent of the butcher’s knife. But we are no ducks neither are we cattle. We are humans, living like livestock and preys of the wild, because we think it’s shrewd and fashionable to do so.
Freedom has a thousand charms to show, that slaves, however contented, never know, writes Cowper. The tragedy is in the details. And the details are all around us. In our past glories and defeat, infinite quirks and measured sobriety. It is in our fabled heritage and defunct humanity, colourful history and grand inadequacies.
It’s what separates our mistakes from what we term fate; what symbolizes our mental inferiorities and political expediencies. But necessity, like William Pitt the Younger would say, is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants and the creed of slaves. Slaves like the Nigerian nigger.
A 27-minute video among other things, distinguishes a select few of Nigeria’s pioneer statesmen from the gangs of glorified eejits – if I may insult poor eejits by comparing them to the country’s ruling class – that currently occupy the country’s corridors of power. The video is of the July 1961 visit of Nigeria’s first Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, to the United States of America (USA).
Great thanks to Farooq Kperogi, a Nigerian scholar resident in the USA; after he stumbled on the video on the website of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, he promptly shared it with friends on Facebook. The video is intense with charm and instructive with lessons in manhood, desirable pride, poise and refinement epitomized by the league of extraordinary statesmen that served Nigeria at independence.
Between July 25 and 28, Kperogi, enthused and it could be confirmed in the video, the late Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and a modest entourage of about 10 key government officials visited the United States on the invitation of the late President John F. Kennedy during which Tafawa Balewa visited major historical landmarks in representative parts of the United States and addressed a special joint session of the United States Congress that was convened in his honour.
Only a select few, as Kperogi noted, “are accorded the honour of addressing a joint session of the United States Congress. Certainly no Nigerian head of state has been accorded this honour since Tafawa Balewa.”
According to the website of the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, since 1874 when the King of Hawaii first addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, there have been only 112 such privileges granted to foreign leaders and dignitaries.
The video delightful; Balewa’s enchanting address to the joint session was persistently “punctuated” by thunderous, standing ovation. In all the cities he visited with entourage, Americans waved at them hospitably, and U.S. government officials bowed very respectfully when they shook hands with the Nigerian Prime Minister. Thus was the depth of respect the pioneer Nigerian leader inspired in 1960s America.
Men like Balewa and his contemporaries at the period including late Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe to mention a few, personified the infectious grandeur, unimpeachable character, progressiveness, patriotism, depth and self-assurance that remains the prime requirements of statesmanship that Nigeria and the African continent deserves. These men, despite their shortcomings, were no Nigerian niggers. The same can hardly be said of incumbent Nigerian leadership and citizenry.
If you separate President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo from the herd, a greater segment of the incumbent leadership could be likened to men gifted with the mentality of the hyena and the sensibility of the guinea fowl. Their lust for unearned riches, acclaim and Western approval illustrates their ignorance and awfully preadolescent mind.It reiterates a very shrill cry for help that’s at once self-seeking, infantile and regressive.
It is what makes Nigerian public officers pilfer and deplete the nation’s treasury in order to finance reckless trips abroad, to learn Western-European governance styles. It is what makes them lobby and pay for interviews with foreign cub reporters even as they avoid Nigerian reporters.
During such interviews, they assume the poise of inveterate boobs by their utterances and demeanour, which are tailored to glorify disturbing plots and agenda of foreign newshounds and their sponsor nations.
The citizenry is guilty of same ridiculousness as indicated by widely broadcast documentaries on Niger Delta militancy; the insidiously “professional” and manipulative ‘This is Lagos’ and ‘Law and Disorder in Lagos’ documentaries which glorifies shanties and street urchins as the essence of Lagos.
Such media fare reveals contemptible plots and derogatory news agenda, to the delight and pitiful acquiescence of the news subjects.
I am yet to see a Nigerian journalist travel to the United Kingdom or the US for instance, to enjoy similar courtesies and exhibition of idiocy from the countries’ leadership and citizenry. It’s even more worrisome to note that the incumbent Nigerian leadership has never enjoyed and will never enjoy the kind of respect accorded late Balewa, Awolowo and their ilk.
The kind of inferiority complex projected by the ruling class and passed down to generations of Nigerian youth affirms the western belief that we are not as mentally proficient as they are. Consequently, they see us as irredeemably ignorant, inept, corrupt and susceptible to inexplicable violence and inferiority complex. Unfortunately, the average Nigerian’s sociability and prodigal nature manifests to further serve as evidence of a collective inferiority of a crude race that recognizes and accepts its intolerable limitations.
That we are very accommodating and hospitable like Akin Akindele rightly notes shouldn’t make us “bend over backwards to impress any white or yellow man more than we would any other ordinary person.” But the import of such admonition is lost on us; mediocre and highly incompetent foreigners come to Nigeria and are immediately regarded as ‘expatriates.’
Yet many brainy and exceedingly talented Nigerians are treated with contempt and suspicion at home and abroad. Abroad, they are despised for being talented and Nigerian, based on blinkered generalisations about the average Nigerian’s presumed fraudulence and deviousness. At home they are despised for being different and capable of evolving the process that would lead to that progressive and prosperous socio-economic system that we seek.
If we are to be judged by indigenous mores of morality or what Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, deems the human measure of all things, we shan’t fare excellently well, not by a smidgen. We have fared diffidently for too long; that is why local and international ‘idiots as fragile as clay toys’ have evolved into outsized heroes and gods, on our watch. To the rest of the world, we are just a bunch of contemptible niggers; still.
It’s about time we rejected the nigger stereotype. It’s about time we de-institutionalised corruption, tribalism and greed. Neither restructuring nor true federalism would rid us of woe. And no highfalutin solution could work under the leadership and citizenship of unrepentant bigots and self-aggrandizing characters like you and me.
DEATH is another fable that shouldn’t be said aloud, in the house of Idrisu. It rages in unspoken words. Rukaya, the surviving child of the family, has learnt to speak of it quietly, in a whisper. If you move close enough, you could hear the authoritative pellets and barbed arrows, poisoned spears and pointed swords, as they hurtled through the air, to hack down her family and defenseless neighbours.
Stoically, the 53-year-old rehashed the scenes in which her parents and younger brother were bludgeoned to death by the rampaging hordes of Zangon-Kataf, Kaduna State, in May 1992. In a voice laden with grief and the feral nuance of a bereaved survivor, Idrisu recalled that the violence was triggered over a “childish” dispute over ownership and control rights to a local market between the native Atyap farming community and their Hausa neighbours, a settler community.
“I was grinding locust beans for my mother at the backyard when I heard a shrill cry from within our house. Fearfully, I rushed inside to meet a gang of armed youths, mostly teenagers, marching through our corridor. They caught me and hit me repeatedly with blood-stained clubs. They dragged me into our living room where I saw my father gasping for breath over the lifeless bodies of my mother and younger brother.
IPOB members
“I screamed and tried to rush to his aid but I was held back and made to watch as one innocent-looking boy laughed maniacally and dealt a final blow to the back of his head with a digger (backhoe).
“I heard the crunching sound of his skull breaking and I watched helplessly as my father choked to death, on his own blood. They promised not to subject me to such painful execution. They promised to be lenient with me,” disclosed Idrisu.
But if the 53-year-old learnt anything from her experience, it was that leniency could at times be worse than death. The assailants raped her repeatedly urging her to be thankful. “They said I was going to enjoy myself to death. When my screams became unbearable to them, the sixth boy to take turn on me stuffed my mouth with his dirty boxers. It was then that I began to feel dead. I became very dizzy and everything turned black. I feigned unconsciousness,” she said.
Yet the hyperactive teenager “continued doing it until he was satisfied,” said Idrisu. Then he got off her and took after his gang as they engaged in hot pursuit of some other victims. Idrisu, shaken and awfully worn, removed the boxers from her mouth staring at the spilled guts of her mother and the innards of her father’s skull.
•A scene during the Kaduna mayhem
The grotesqueness of the sight and the rancid smell wafting from her genitals made her very nauseous, she claimed. Thus she vomited twice all over their carpet. “I felt sick to the stomach. Those boys were very smelly. Days after I was rescued and relocated to Makurdi to live with my uncle (her late mother’s younger brother), I could still perceive the terrible stench wafting from their mouths, armpits and genitals. I can still smell them now,” said Idrisu, adding that she had been having persistent nightmares ever since.
But despite the magnitude of her loss and the recurrent nightmares, Idrisu couldn’t stay away from Zangon-Kataf. “It’s the only home that I have come to know. My uncle’s wife thinks it was foolish of me to have returned here but she wouldn’t understand. I cannot leave my father’s house to be inhabited and destroyed by strangers. It’s all that I have left to remind me of my family and the love we once shared,” she said.
•A scene from a Boko Haram attack
A vintage glass shelf stands over the spot of her family’s execution like a shield positioned to wipe out unpleasant memories of her past. But Idrisu claimed that it was never her intention to use the shelf as a screen. “I have moved on. That shelf stands there because there is no other place that I could put it in the house. As you can see, I have rented out most of the rooms in the house. Life goes on,” she said.
But life drags like a rickety wheel to Tanko Maijeida. The septuagenarian is caught in the violent web of his past. Although no shot from the buried wars can kill him now, a bullet from resurrected skirmishes killed his son. Consequently, Tanko Majeida welcomes every new dawn like a setting sun.
“There is really nothing left to live for,” said the native of Jema’a, Kaduna. Maijeida lost Mahmud, his only son, to the rampaging hordes of Bulbulla, Jos. Woefully, he recounted the scene in which his son was shot to death in the sectarian crisis that pitted the Berom and Jasawa tribes in the state against each other in the twilight of 2008.
According to him, Mahmud was hacked to death by people who were supposed to be his friends and co-apprentices at the furniture company where he worked.
“It’s so sad that our people have learnt to think with the machete and speak with bullets. My son had nothing to do with their fight. He wasn’t Berom and he wasn’t Jasawa. And he resided in a part of town heavily populated by the Yoruba and Igbo. Yet they killed him. They pushed him out to the warlords who attacked the house of a client in which he was working.
•A scene during an electoral violence
“Eye witnesses said that his co-apprentices, after pointing him to his assailants, joined in beating him. Then they held him as he was shot in the neck…My late wife died giving birth to his only sister. She is all I have left. I have no son to carry on my lineage,” lamented Maijeida, choking back tears.
Despite his irreparable loss, Maijeida believes in the capacity of the average Nigerian to be good. “As there are bad people, we also have good people. There are still some very kind Nigerians in this country. I was rescued by a Berom family on the day my son was hacked to death by members of the same tribe. I wish they had killed me instead,” he lamented.
Not ethnic enough
And while Milda Ogoka’s grief may seem milder, it is of a more insidious nature, she claimed. The native of Abia State lamented her inability to progress professionally due to her employer’s knack for placing ethnic interests above merit.
“He is Igbo and yet he discriminates against fellow Igbo. He prefers to employ and promote people from his native Anambra to plum positions. And he is brazenly supported by his wife who is also from Anambra. I have spent 13 years working for them and even though I was in line to become the next General Manager, Southwest Operations, after the former one resigned, our chairman ordered the Administrative Manager to rescind the management’s initial recommendation to appoint me to the position. To pacify me, he increased my salary and gave me an official car. It’s so unfair. I would have resigned but the new GM pleaded with me to stay. She is my friend and she admitted that she knew I had been wronged. She arrived four years after I started working at the company and she got employed by my recommendation. Yet she was given my spot because she hails from the chairman’s hometown,” said Ogoka.
A similar sore festers within the cadres of a southwest civil service (currently under investigation) where non-Yoruba are allegedly denied the opportunity of progressing beyond a certain grade level.
“If you are not Yoruba, you cannot become a director or permanent secretary in the state. It is wrong. Promotion should be handed out by merit. Your ethnicity shouldn’t be criteria for rewarding your efficiency,” stated Ifeoma Ahaegbuna, a victim and staff of the affected ministry.
But in a swift response, a senior staff of the establishment stated that Ahaegbuna’s claim is unfounded.
“Nobody does that here. Not in any state in the southwest. It is what they do to our people in the state civil services in southeast Nigeria. Many Yoruba come back dejected after being robbed of their due positions and rewards because they are not Igbo. There was a case of a woman who remained assistant head teacher till she retired even though her Igbo contemporaries and subordinates got promoted and became head teachers. She did the promotion exams and passed, yet she was never invited for oral interview. She eventually resigned and came back home against the counsel of her Igbo husband,” he said.
Tribal love and other stereotypes
The manifestations of the ethnic scourge permeate every aspect of life across the country. Even the hallowed and much romanticised confines of love and marriage aren’t impermeable to its blight. Consider the case of Bisi Shogbade, a lecturer and widower; his fiancée’s parents have been against his proposal to wed their daughter right from the moment he disclosed his intentions.
“Even though her father hails from Anyagbai, Kogi State, and her mother, a native of Benin, Edo State, are both products of inter-ethnic marriage, they vehemently refused to let me wed her. They claimed they would never let their daughter wed a Yoruba man,” lamented the native of Osogbo, Osun State. And to his chagrin, his fiancee of seven years succumbed to her parents’ wish.
“I met and pleaded with her mum but she was adamant. And their daughter followed suit claiming she could not go into a marriage her parents wouldn’t bless with consent,” said Shogbade.
Ethnic chauvinism has so far been responsible for the wanton stereotypes of Nigerian tribes. Each tribe is associated with vices and anomalies peculiar to them.
Beyond the sanctity of love and wedlock, and the cutthroat world of business, ethnicity has become a common feature and bargaining chip in local politics. This, Abiodun Akande, a sociologist and historian, attributes to the fact that Nigeria’s national identity has been at odds since the colonial era, with the appeal of more exclusive ethnic identity as fostered by the country’s colonialists.
•Bereaved mothers and wives mourn loved ones in the wake of anethno-religious conflict
Birth of prejudice
Akande is probably not too far from the truth; in pre-independence Nigeria, party politics and formation assumed an ethnic colouration, even as it metamorphosed into the post-independent First Republic. The Action Group developed from the political wing of the cultural association of the Yoruba educated elite, the Egbe Omo Oduduwa; the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons (NCNC) was closely allied with the Igbo State union and played a significant role in the internal affairs of the party, while the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) was founded by the Fulani aristocracy. In the smaller ethnic groups, a local political party was often indistinguishable from the cultural association. And more significantly, the division of the country into three regions for administrative convenience by the Richards Constitution of 1946 led to the development of strong regional feeling.
The consequence of this was that by 1953, the major political parties in Nigeria – NCNC, AG and NPC, were associated with the major ethnic groups and the three regions, Western, Eastern and the Northern regions. To further crystallize the tripartite ethnic cleavages, the party leaderships were structured accordingly: the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, led the NPC of the North; Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe held the ace for the Igbos’ NCNC, while Chief Obafemi Awolowo led the AG in the Yoruba southwest – each leader representing his regional divide.
It was, however, the absence of well organised, strong, visionary and purposeful cross national political parties with organisational depth that led in part to the collapse of the First Republic, according to Ademola Azeez, Department of Political Science, University of Ilorin (UNILORIN).
According to Emmanuel Udogu, a Professor of International, Comparative and African Politics, it is safe to contend that many individuals might not consider it insulting to be referred to as ethno-nationalists, “Because the concept generally implies the love for one’s ethnic group. Yet there is often a hidden problem stemming from the psychological and primordial attachment to one’s ethnic group in a pluralistic society. The situation in a polity such as Nigeria becomes more problematic when the politics of who gets what, when and how, gravitates toward ethnic clashes and antagonisms.”
You don’t sell your father’s house to buy a land
The political equation no doubt becomes more confounding and discordant in democratic and pluralistic societies like Nigeria where an overwhelming sense of communal solidarity tends to intensify ethnic preference, so much so that in the struggle for power, to promise less for one’s group in the spirit of harmony and impartiality, was tantamount to betraying ethnic interests.
Little wonder then that another influential minister in the country’s Second Republic, allegedly expressed, proverbially, his concern about the inauguration of a national conference by the late Sani Abacha’s military administration. He reportedly said: “No man becomes a hero by selling his father’s house to buy a land.”
What the minister implied, was that Abacha, a northerner, was by the scope of the national conference he inaugurated, selling off northern interests without surety of what he would get in return. Although the assertion was later refuted, the moral within is applicable to many ethnic groups and their disposition to both grassroots and national politics.
Nigerians won’t forget easily the ugly resurgence of desperate tribal agitation in the wake of President Goodluck Jonathan’s defeat at the March 28, 2015 presidential elections. Jonathan lost his seat to incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Just recently, Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), led a very bitter and hostile campaign for the Southeast’s secession from the Nigerian state in vehement protest against the leadership of President Buhari. Kanu, in flagrant violation of his bail terms, constituted a hostile Biafra Secret Service and made pronouncements classifiable as hate speech.
Activities of Kanu’s IPOB led to the Nigeria Army’s inauguration of Operation Python Dance in his southeastern base of operation. Kanu’s whereabouts remain shrouded in mystery, while security agencies are still hunting for him. His IPOB group has also been classified as a terrorist group by the Nigerian state.
•A Borno trader examines damaged ware in the wake of aBoko Haram bomb attack
A never-ending bloodbath
Religious polarisation and ethnic bigotry feed upon one another to spark bloody clashes across the federation.
Boko Haram a.k.a Jamā’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihād (Group of the People of Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad), an Islamic extremist terrorist group based in Northeast Nigeria and active in Chad, Niger and Northern Cameroon, has killed tens of thousands and displaced 2.3 million from their homes since its advent in 2009. It was currently ranked as the world’s deadliest terror group by the Global Terrorism Index of 2015.
And very few people would forget the massacre of 2, 000 people about 16 years ago in communal clashes sparked by introduction of Shari’a (Islamic law) in Kaduna State. Two years, later, violence triggered in part by a controversy surrounding plans to hold the Miss World beauty contest in Northern Nigeria claimed about 250 lives.
Despite the massive loss of lives and property in past conflicts, acts of violence recurred in the troubled zone. On April 18, 2011, for instance, hell was let loose in Southern Kaduna, particularly in Zonkwa, following the post-election crisis that erupted in many states in the North.
Residents fled from Zonkwa, Kafanchan and other trouble spots during the post-election violence. During the fracas, fleeing youths hid in pit latrines and wells but the unlucky ones were gunned down, slaughtered, burnt alive or dumped in wells. Although most women and children were spared, they were subjected to humiliation.
Out of the 38, 976 displaced persons, over 90 percent are women and children, according to the statistics obtained from the Nigerian Red Cross.
In addition to providing a new set of triggers for violent conflict, the increasing tendency for communal tensions to be expressed in religious terms has drawn groups into violent conflict that have no interest in the deeper underlying causes of ethnic and religious violence across Nigeria.
“Ignorance of the followers of our different faiths and manipulation of religion for personal gains by the political class with the help of clerics from both religions has made it difficult for Nigerians to enjoy harmonious coexistence,” according to Rev. Joseph Hayab, Northern Coordinator, Global Peace Foundation of Nigeria (GPFN) and former Special Adviser on Religious Affairs (Christian Matters), Kaduna State.
“To guarantee religious freedom and peace, we must fight ignorance and replace it with good knowledge. We must not allow our religious leaders and groups to instigate us against one another by bringing unhealthy debates and competition into every issue of national discuss,” he said.
Burying the ethnic divide
Dr. Rahman Lawal, the Head of Mission, Nadwat, an Islamic religious group, argued that, “From time immemorial, religious sects had harmonious relationship amongst one another; even the minorities were not sidelined or intimidated. It’s modern day politicians that broke the bond of brotherly existence and mutual respect amongst the various religious faiths, through their Machiavellian approach of polarisation via ethnic bigotry and hegemony.”
Lawal advised that the Nigerian press, “As Fourth Estate of the realm should foster interfaith, ethnic harmony and tolerance by producing balanced and unbiased reports. Hate must not be fed by the government and the press.”
Rahman and Hayab were participants in a recent Interfaith Leadership and Human Rights project, under the International Visitors Leadership Programme (IVLP) sponsored by the United States Department of State. The duo with eight other Nigerian clerics and a journalist met with colleagues in the US over a three-week period to deliberate on measures of achieving religious freedom and tolerance amid diverse populations and secular government.
Rev. Cyprian Imandeh, Catholic Priest, Archdiocese of Abuja (FCT), however, argued: “Justice is what we need. A system that has respect for rule and order can guarantee peaceful coexistence amongst all regard less of religious affiliation. Once there is justice we can all arrive at our goal.”
Head, Legal Department of the Christian Home for the Needy (CHN), Helen Agbonkonkon, argued: “Section 38 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (1999) clearly guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion but in practice, such freedom is only an illusion. Religious freedom and peace can only be guaranteed in Nigeria, if and only if there is a platform for equality, tolerance and acceptance. There must be concerted effort by all and sundry to work for it. We can borrow the American concept of describing freedom of religion as inalienable right which no state or government can control,” she said.
Pastor Wale Afelumo of the Inspiration Life Community Church, Abuja, said: “Until we see our differences as a strength and not as a threat, peace will elude us. We must welcome one another as equal contributors and brothers. I end with Martin Luther King Jr’s words…’If we do not learn to live together as brothers, then we will perish together as fools.”
Angela Madueke, Pastor of Enugu-based Excellent People Intercessory Ministry noted that, “Nigeria is a country blessed with rich cultural and language diversities. It’s unthinkable to assume that all these people should worship God the same way.” She stated that, “for religious freedom and peace to exist, freedom of worship must be succinctly observed and everybody should be treated with dignity and respect they deserve. The golden rule, “live and let live” should be enshrined into the body politics of the nation and tolerance must be a watchword,” she said.
Sheikh Taofeeq Ibrahim, National Missioner, Peace and Conflict Resolution, Islamic Movement of Nigeria (ILMAN), stated that, “Religious freedom and peace can only be guaranteed in Nigeria if corruption can be given a spiritual vaccine. Also, there should be a bill that will distance religion activities from the politics of the nation.
This is because the manipulation of religion by some powerful individuals who hide under the guise of religion to pursue selfish interests remains a major bane to peace, ethnic and religious tolerance in the country.”
Udogu, however, suggested the writing of a new constitution capable of resolving the country’s resource control and ethno-religious and political conflicts. He advocated the composition of a truly representative governance system and constitutional framework with federal character. It is the only way to detribalise governance and politics in the ethnic mosaic that is Nigeria, he said.
On another note, Umar Habila Dadem Danfulani of the University of Jos (UNIJOS), stated that the use of military force and emergency powers cannot permanently resolve the problem posed by sectarian violence given its historical, ethnic, elitist, class and religious character.
The Nigerian citizenry must be mobilised towards engaging and embracing the political reality of multiculturalism and on the basis of this recognition, address the challenge of multicultural citizenship.
If we should go our separate ways, we shan’t stop being the brutes we are. We shan’t stop pretending to have answers to everything, except our duplicity and greed. We shan’t stop exulting by sick dialectics like treacherous revolutionaries in a dusk of compromise.
A simple lust remains our woe; it invalidates the elite class and its infinite abstractions. It amplifies the tragedy of the working class and the Nigerian youth. It is the lust for luxury and unearned greatness.
Like pond scum over moss, the Nigerian elite ingratiate himself to the predatory ruling class in every circumstance and clime even as he makes a big show of speaking all manner of truths, except “truth” to power. Now that his duplicity drags, like a rickety wheel caught in quicksand, the Nigerian elite will forswear youth.
Not a few people, self-acclaimed elite and progressives, have written to fault my call for the Nigerian youth to save Nigeria. They claim the Nigerian youth is incapable of such human qualities like wisdom, altruism, maturity and tolerance. One particular “progressive elite” wrote to say that “Nigeria can never thrive in the hands of the Nigerian youth.” He said leadership and nation-building are serious matters that shouldn’t be left in the hands of youth whose idea of citizenship revolves around the acquisition of the trendiest luxury ride and whims of every political predator and criminal mastermind.
I am tempted to believe him given the brutal reality of his assertion. But then this “progressive elite” goes on to recommend bloody revolution to wipe out the incumbent ruling class and a secessionist palliative by which “every ethnic group would go its separate way “peacefully or violently” to forge its destiny away from the madness of the Nigerian dream.” This secessionist agenda, he claims, “should be driven by the Nigerian youth whose fire and spark is variously misapplied in the current political enterprise.”
In a nutshell, our “progressive elite” and lest I forget, an Associate Professor of Political Science, believes the Nigerian youth is incapable of leadership and positive steps at nation-building but this same youth, he argues, would serve well in a bloody massacre of the ruling class and secessionist agenda of every ethnic group.
If you are in your youth and you are reading this, then you have known what the almighty elite and articulate hero of practicable politics thinks of you. Maitama Sule, Anthony Enahoro, Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Tafawa Balewa to mention a few, united to build the heritage we destroy, in their youth. But you and I are never considered as worthy of such dignified human endeavours as conscientious leadership and statesmanship, like our late leaders (although Maitama Sule is very much alive). Of course, they had their faults, they made mistakes, but every unforgivable blunder of theirs is acceptable to our next best attribute.
Today, the Nigerian youth becomes the butt of damaging critiques and interminable cynicism. Are we going to do anything about it? Or shall we continue to wallow in self-pity and hate even as we continually pursue an agenda to self-destruct, according to the whims of the incumbent ruling class?
We should never serve as cannon fodder by which familiar shady politicians and activists will achieve their secessionist agenda. If every Nigerian soldier, police officer, student, banker, journalist, doctor, accountant – to mention a few – in his youth could endeavour to scorn the call for bloody revolution or secession and rather advise its propagators to recruit their sons and daughters, mothers and wives, fathers and other blood relatives to propagate their agenda, the end result will spell infinite good for you and me. Trust me.
But many Nigerian youth and self-acclaimed “progressive elite” will continue to pound the drums of violence and bloodshed from their safe havens abroad while they stay far away from the scenes of genocide they incite. Many more have their escape strategies activated and their escape routes marked, in preparation for the hour when Nigerian drowns in the bloodbath they excite.
Such elite class represents the purely physical evil whose limit we can never be sure of. Our ultimate goal should be to neuter them, everlastingly to be precise. The abolishment of the infinite evil they epitomize can be achieved by the ballot box. We cannot totally abolish the inhumanity of such contemptible characters but like pestilence, we can diminish their influence by securing a fair and healthy socio-political system for all.
It’s about time we accepted the racism and infinite prejudices of this class of Nigerians as a grievous fact, unpardonable in its intensity, unfortunate in results, and dangerous for the future, but nevertheless a hard fact which only time and conscientious efforts can efface.
The Nigerian youth owes it to themselves and subsequent generations to assume that selfless citizenship and leadership that the Nigerian situation so eloquently demands.
Let us dispel notions of our incapacities to produce such leadership and citizenship by exorcising ourselves of the damaging culture and common insensibilities of modern political civilization. Let us rise to the imperative demand for trained youth leaders of character and intelligence; men and women of ability and missionaries of culture, thoroughly adept at harmonizing traditional and modern civilization in the establishment of precepts of self-sacrifice and the inspiration of common identity and ideals.
But if such men are to be effective they must have political power; they must be backed by the best public opinion and be able to wield for the attainment of our aims, such weaponry as the experience of the world has taught, are indispensable to human progress.
Of such weaponry, the greatest perhaps, in the modern world is the power of the ballot. The only effective means to deny the patent weaknesses and shortcomings of the Nigerian youth is to dissociate from such weaknesses and shortcomings. This could be achieved by positive citizenship and incursions into political activity.
It would never serve us to remain armchair Trotskys like a reader satirically noted penultimate week. It is time for the Nigerian youth to champion the cause of that prosperous future of our dreams by effecting a change of guardianship of the Nigerian State. Let us do away with the predators we have allowed too much leverage on our power plinths. Let us deny their wives and children continued access to our seats of power.
It is no longer acceptable for us to bemoan our luck and curse the times while we serve as pawns in the designs of every politician and lobbyist with deep pocket. The Nigerian youth should establish a veritable platform to prosecute its pursuit of freedom and self-determination. To achieve this, we need to establish political leverage, like a youthful and citizenry-centred political party and interest group.
It is not enough for us to declare that the incumbent ruling class is the cause of our social condition and for us to aver that our social condition would spell the doom of any promising political enterprise. We must change in order to effect the change in leadership and governance that we seek.
If wishes were horses, President Muhammadu Buhari would retain his seat, come 2019, likewise Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. Strike that. Even if failing health incapacitates Buhari, his legacy and dream would live on with a ‘President Yemi Osinbajo’ – while Buhari remains crucial part of the political equation, from the shadows.
The President and Vice President’s groupies excite by such pliant notions of realism or political pragmatism if you like.
This writer belongs to neither camp but he believed and still believes in crucial parts of Buhari and Osinbajo’s ‘Change’ agenda irrespective of the team that implements it.
Despite reservations about the duo’s leadership, Buhari and Osinbajo remain Nigeria’s best attempt at humane leadership, if they could muster the will to institutionalise truly benevolent leadership.
Nigeria should consider it a treat, if by some radical twist of fate, a more promising and younger team emerges on the scene. But the possibility of such younger, promising team fades out in plain sight as the country hastens to 2019 in the absence of credible opposition driven by humane, patriotic ideals.
Thus while it is indeed true that Nigeria may do better than Buhari and Osinbajo, it would be suicidal and quite impractical to ditch them in quest of younger leadership in 2019. Who are the youth? Do they include career aspirant, Atiku Abubakar, or comic relief, Ayodele Fayose? Or is it the ‘almighty’ Senate President, Bukola Saraki? Do these men possess the nerve, wisdom and moral character epitomised by Buhari and Osinbajo?
To the ‘mythical’ cabal allegedly holding Buhari hostage to power, it’s Buhari or Nigeria implodes come 2019. A less scary alternative is for Nigeria to stand by, while they (the cabal) anoint their preferred northern candidate to succeed Buhari, in the event that his health fails him. Let’s hope his health does not fail him as Osinbajo is anathematic to the cabal’s fantasies of power.
Amid the plots and counter-plots, Buhari and Osinbajo suffer the affliction of savage forms. Political apologists comprising mutant aides and associates, like the medieval Sirens, form a thick wall around both men. Like the Sirens, they belt out mellifluous notes of shady intent and ill bliss, luring both men to doom and disrepute.
These political aides, advisors and associates are driven by greed and a curious fear of irrelevance should Buhari and Osinbajo get booted from office hence they do not tell them truths they ought to hear.
Instead, they humour the President and VP with outright lies, honeyed praise and half-truths. The president’s media team for instance, has developed a curious knack for demonising Buhari’s critics and attacking them with puerile ‘facts.’ The media team metamorphoses as you read, into savage and juvenile forms emblematic of the president’s most virulent and often venomous critics. This tragic alteration of Buhari and Osinbajo’s apologists eventually manifest as dumbing down of presumed intellects and leaders of thought.
Recently, the Special Adviser on Media Affairs, Femi Adesina’s recent spiritualized, damning allegory about the president’s critics. Adesina, in an article titled: ‘PMB and the Descendants of Shimei,’ published on Saturday, July 22, 2017 in The Sun Newspaper, said that Buhari had ended the “dream of the PDP to rule the country for 60 years” and as such PDP members wanted him dead.
He identified PDP members as the descendants of ‘Shimei’ who could “have their heads removed” if not for the kind benevolence of Buhari. The former president of the Nigerian Guild of Editors has certainly evolved from his ‘A new sheriff is in town’ cloying deification of Buhari to more hysterical praise.
The presidential media team’s ripostes range from juvenile retorts to outright prophecies of doom for Mr. President’s critics. Sometimes, they channel their inner comedian and utter ridiculous counters to constructive criticism of the presidency’s perceived missteps.
For instance, Senior Special Assistant to the president on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, recently issued what he considered a brilliant retort to Buhari’s critics, claiming the president couldn’t resume work after his medical tourism abroad because his office was ravaged by rodents. Predictably, local and international media including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), mocked the presidency and the country over Garba’s gaffe.
“Following the three months period of disuse, rodents have caused a lot of damage to the furniture and the air conditioning units,” he told a local medium. Garba conveniently forgot the fact that his principal’s office initially budgeted an outrageous sum of N1.9 billion, according to The Punch newspaper investigations, on clearing of sewage and fumigation in the 2017 fiscal year.
They also forget that despite the confidence inspired by the Buhari/Osinbajo leadership, it is apparent that the All Progressives Congress (APC), the platform by which they emerged, does not wish Nigerians well.
The presidency’s apologists should understand that Nigerians do not confuse the APC’s tiresome platitudes for an abiding love for Nigeria. By the antics of APC public officers, it is apparent that they only wish Nigeria prospers in order to milk her. The APC, like its predecessor, People’s Democratic Party (PDP) does not want the Nigerian citizenry to prosper.
Consider goings on in the National Assembly for instance; legislators carry on insensate to the miseries of the electorate they claim to represent. Lawmakers bicker, fight and conspire in pursuit of selfish interests, at the expense of citizenry.
Recently, senators protested late payment of salaries even as state pensioners, mostly senior citizenry who voted them into power, wither away in an endless wait for their gratuities every year and as you read.
It was hardly surprising that they drew the ire of Prof. Itse Sagay, foremost lawyer and presidential adviser on anti-corruption. Sagay recently stated that a Nigerian senator earns N29 million in monthly pay, in a speech he delivered at the Nigerian Society of International Law public lecture in Lagos. “From the information I have gathered, a Nigerian Senator earns about N29 million a month and over N3 billion a year,” he said.
“Wardrobe allowance N621,061.37; recess allowance N248, 424.55; accommodation 4,968,509.00; utilities N828,081.83; domestic staff N1,863,184.12; entertainment N828,081.83; personal assistant N621,061.37; vehicle maintenance allowance N1,863,184.12; leave allowance N248,424.55; severance gratuity N7, 425,736.50; and motor vehicle allowance N9, 936,982.00,” Prof. Sagay added.
Sagay subsequently challenged the Senate to prove him wrong by publishing what the lawmakers collect as salaries and wages.
But rather than respond in a civil manner, the Senate accused Sagay of hate speech, claiming he is a “senile, jaded, rustic and outdated Professor of Law” who may be “under influence of substance.”
The Senate’s response was of course crafted by kindred spirits to APC media and political apologists. It is instructive to note that these apologists, mostly media aides and political associates, were erstwhile regarded as leaders of thought in their respective fields. They were believed to of superior intellect, refinement and unimpeachable candour.
But they offer themselves for deployment in ways that contradict everything they ought to stand for.
What President Muhammadu Buhari was persistently ridiculed and condemned as a failure even before his second year in office, was a direct consequence of his inability to uphold the corrupt but highly lucrative systemic bazaar of the past. Although Buhari’s leadership suffers the affliction of crooked men and women, his glamourised aversion to corruption and his ongoing anti-corruption campaign, resonates dangerously to the country’s crooked divide. Too many men and women accustomed to pocketing and spending money that they didn’t earn are suddenly aghast and petrified by their inability to conduct ‘business as usual.’
That former President Goodluck Jonathan took God for a fool also attests to the plague and degenerate sway of money. Jonathan, in abject desperation for acceptance and goodwill of Nigerian masses, travelled from the presidential villa in Aso Rock, Abuja, to stage a dramatic communion with God, on his knees, before Enoch Adeboye, a respected cleric.
Cut to another hodgepodge of the ex-president on his knees, before Ayo Oritsejafor and other self-appointed “men of God” in faraway Jerusalem, Israel. Jonathan in flagrant disregard of religious tenets advising that man’s communion with his Creator should be personal and unpretentious, deserted his abode in Abuja to embark on a spiritual jamboree of his self-styled ‘humility’ and communion with God across the country and overseas.
Predictably, psychologically and materially-impoverished loyalists cum the ex-president’s media aides argued that he simply loved to ‘lead by example’ thus politicizing his “humility” and “love of God” to the fascination and appreciation of all. It is however, unclear by what standards they will prove that heartfelt prayers muttered by the former president on his knees, in the corners of his room, would have been less significant than his theatrical communion with God.
Were these spiritual shows emblematic of Jonathan’s unpretentious love of God or were they symptomatic of a desperate wish to perpetuate him in power for the attendant fiscal and material perks? Cut to Stella Oduah, aviation minister’s N255 million bullet-proof automobile scandal Sambo Dasuki’s $2.1 billion arms purchase scam and Abdulrasheed Maina, former pension boss’ N21 billion pension fund racket to mention a few, and you have an interesting picture of the Nigerian ruling class’ inexorable lust for money and other material things.
There is the oft-repeated logic and inclination to blame this persistent malaise on capitalism; however, attractive as such sophistry may resound, the impulse for acquisition, pursuit of gain and money in fact, has nothing to do with capitalism – it is merely a symptom, like perverse capitalism, of the society’s steady descent the slope of the decadent and grotesque.
Max Weber, the late German economist and social historian would say it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all cultures of the earth but I would say that the Nigerian malaise is brought about by the absence of an enduring moral code.
This deficit manifests in deficiencies of personal and societal ethics – the consequence of which is the preponderance and regeneration of eejits, tyrants, greedy-guts, fraudsters, narcissists, murderers and bloodhounds of all kinds and of all nature, across the country’s landscape.
The trials of Nigerians’ moral degeneration as exemplified by the citizenry’s inordinate lust for money, the country’s recurrent tragedies and propensity to self-destruct, reveals an overarching tendency to savour short-term greed and relief over long-term prosperity. Despite a protracted and tumultuous history of impoverishment and bad leadership, Nigerians continue to look for quick fix solutions thus mortgaging the country’s present and future for short-term benefits.
Through decades of moral perversions and self-inflicted disasters, Nigerians continue to bemoan their tragic fate. While many argue that the country ruins because the youth are too weak and too selfish to spill as much blood as is required to rid the nation of every human and institutional affliction, many more contend that the country’s woes will disappear immediately poverty is eradicated by the ruling class.
Today, the fear of poverty as the irrepressible lust for money, drive too many to commit gross acts of dishonesty and irresponsibility. Personal greed is pervasive and poverty is endemic. It represents the triumphal punch delivered by the proverbial system against the country’s poor, hopeless masses. Nigeria suffers the consequence of the supremacy of money. Money elevates and ennobles the possessor of it; whatever the nature and import of the rich’s membership of society, as long as he has money to flaunt and throw around, nobody cares what value he adds to and denies society.
Thus the pardon and acquittal of several corrupt politicians and deposed bank chiefs; even after insurmountable evidences were marshaled against them by prosecution, they got off too easily with court sentences that were tantamount to a pat on the back.
The poor, on the other hand, epitomise more of what is wrong and contemptible with the society. They represent that segment of the society that is easily swayed, viciously condemned and trodden by the power of money.
The power of money is indeed frightening and overwhelming. Like Okwudiba Nnoli notes, it uplifts and crushes, enhances and debases, exhilarates and disenchants, dignifies and dehumanizes, enlightens and blinds, unites and divides. Under the influence of money, humaneness and the quest for the collective good are ferociously smothered by disruptive and selfish considerations. Materialism is fostered and greed is ennobled in the mad dash for money. Consequently, justice, freedom, equality, dignity and other human rights, are sacrificed.
More worrisome is the reality of the poor in Nigeria being unquestioningly docile to the power of money. This impoverished lot is hardly impressed by humaneness and promising leadership. To them, these are manifestations of weakness. Their loyalty and sympathies are reserved for tyrants that treat them like dogs on a leash. It is to these latter that they exhibit the greatest obsequiousness and erect the greatest statues.
While it is true that the poor would often trample maniacally on the despot, who by a poetic twist of fate – be it by class politics or masses revolt – gets stripped of his power and authority, they do so because having lost his strength, the despot becomes relegated to an ignoble spot among the weak and repressed, who are to be loathed and not feared.
This is emblematic of Gustave Le Bon’s philosophy of ‘The Crowd,’ which was valued not only by Pareto, Freud, Mussolini, and de Gaulle, but even by Horkheimer and Adorno. Le Bon contends that the type of “hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instills them with fear…Should the strength of an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from servitude to anarchy.”
Democratic ideas are therefore in profound disagreement with the psychology and experience of the Nigerian poor. It is unsurprising then, that materially and mentally impoverished folk would distrust democracy and its promise of collective good, to covet and pursue the vain and ephemeral perks of socio-political harlotry.
Nigeria is still not the greatest country in Africa. ‘It’ is not the greatest country in the world. ‘It’ is a creature borne of incest, still. But it is hardly the ‘contraption’ frequently alluded to by generations of revolutionary poseurs and armchair Trotskys. It is shallow and very unrealistic of the latter, to wish our problems away by simply calling for secession; an end to the ‘forced marriage’ of our cultures and ethnicities by British colonialists.
Nigeria fails as a nation because we fail as a people and progenitors of African civilisation. Rather than muster a superior culture of nationhood and society, we curate the worst that our forebears dared espouse, coating it as the ‘Nigerian factor,’ and embellishing it as our flamboyant code of conduct.
Thus we covet an incestuous relationship with self – the dark, chthonian parts of our innate nature. We mould our clan where racial foolery fraternizes with vile. Senior citizenry molest our young in a never-ending cycle of sleaze and moral pedophilia. But the young are hardly the prey we think they are. Every second, they morph from starry-eyed victims to eager participants in our dehumanising ritual of violence, mental and biological aberration.
Ours is a classic tale of Darwinian waste and mayhem, the squalor and rot of Nigerianness – a distortion of African civilisation. But we block the true import and consequences of this hideous cycle on our psyches and our future as a nation, that we might retain our integrity as brutes and eternal wildlings.
Western science and cultural aesthetics predictably, become apparatus in our frantic attempt to revise the Nigerian horror into imaginatively palatable form. Notwithstanding our frantic lunge for substance and acclaim on frontiers where the world’s more advanced civilisations project their race and illusions of oneness, Nigeria remains hideous in name and status.
While we make exaggerated gestures in fields of space science, information technology, industry, sports, and so on, Nigerian children die at birth and thousands of mothers die in painful labour. The youth are unemployed. Public officers loot public coffers with impunity and disregard for Rule of Law. Law enforcement officers turn violent affliction on the citizenry and society they are meant to protect; and the executive, legislative and judicial arms of government mesh in a fetid whirl of strife and plunder. Anarchy rules our hinterlands and metropolitan Nigeria.
Within such stew and stink, Nigeria ranked 152nd of 188 countries in the 2016 African Human Development Index (HDI) according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Thus we are back at the crossroads of vile and extinction. There has been no improvement in our plight.
While this piece too, resounds as hackneyed howl and lamentation, a regurgitation of towering monstrosities we have become, it need be said that our ultimate nemesis is the Nigerian youth. The youth epitomise the nub of discord and deathly rally ripping the tide and march to progress of our fatherland. But why do promising youth evolve like brutes and loathsome trolls? How did our once incandescent spokes of dawn erupt in moonshine?
Many have attributed the afflictions of the Nigerian youth to bad leadership, nonstop dominance of the 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 sad realization that Nigerians are 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 breadlines’ 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.
As youths, the coordinated tragedies afflicting our consciousness daily, append the only real structure to our lives as impoverished Nigerians. The burdensome reality of fast slipping youth, the recurrent rites of bigotry and ethical quandary of coping with the strict moral code of adulthood and ideal society, obscures our understanding of life’s ultimate purpose and meaning. It spurs millions of misguided Nigerian youth to engage in a mad, desperate pursuit of fast and fleeting riches even as ripples of their actions keep hundreds of millions more in the doldrums and binds of despair.
Consequently, the 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. It fosters spurious segmentation of our society into moral and amoral, good against evil, and apostates versus believers. Within this poisonous clime, the Nigerian child is born. If he survives birth hour, he is violently thrust into adolescence and misshapen adulthood.
From Boko Haram and Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) terrorism, internet fraud, cyber-terrorism, financial/bankers’ terrorism and political terrorism emblematic of the ruling class, recent developments in the country present a sad prologue to a heinous and wider conflict between the nation’s rich ruling class and the impoverished majority of the breadlines and disappearing middle-class.
A bloody and protracted war thus ensues: this war, caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment, substandard health facilities, rising food prices, big business and government conspiracies against the Nigerian state, manifest at alarming proportions daily and by the second.
Thus our society is flung rudderless on a seething sea of sleaze. Now that our world as we have made it, begins to collapse, we withdraw from the possibility of rebirth, and choose to exploit ‘infinite possibilities’ in our fragility and doomsday predictions.
The youth predictably become prominent actors in the theatre of ruin and discord. They become the muscle to actualise the ruling class’ blueprint of collapse. But if we consider our plight deeply enough, we would find that no child of the ruling class is co-opted in the drama of violence and bloodshed. They are tucked safely, abroad.
Picture the NDA, Boko Haram, MASSOB, IPOB, OPC, and so on with sons, daughters and wives of Nigerian ruling class. Let our governors, legislators, and presidency, people these groups with their sons, daughters and wives.
It’s about time we shunned the politics of spurious militancy, bloodshed and devastation to embrace growth and immense possibilities of progressive endeavour, like a political platform founded by the youth, for all and posterity.
