The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Courage in the time of brutes and foetal adults

    I have seen courage flower in the face of the impossible. Such valour is frequently ascribed to an innate strength and humaneness of the courageous. It is no physical strength. And very few of the world’s bravest warriors possess such valour that defies brawn and accentuates moral vigour.

    Victor John, 15, showed such courage in a damning moment; thanks to John, the entire clans constituting Ungwan Sankwai, Tyekum and Ungwan Gata villages of Bondon district, Kaura LGA of Kaduna State were saved from total extermination by suspected Fulani herdsmen.

    Although many of the bereaved are wailing the brutal massacre of loved ones even as you read, the survivors owe their lives to the 15-year old who sighted the invaders marching on the community. John alerted his father and reportedly went from house to house to wake up their neighbours and warn them of imminent death. Eventually, his father evacuated some of his siblings but his mother and other siblings weren’t so lucky; they were hacked to death by the invaders.

    Like the Kaduna teen, Hugh Thompson, an American army pilot could be said to have exhibited moral courage in the face of odds. Thompson landed his helicopter between a platoon of American soldiers and 10 terrified Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre. Then he ordered his gunner to fire his M60 machine gun on the advancing U.S. soldiers if they began to shoot the villagers. For this act of moral courage, Thompson, like John, suffered repercussion; he was hounded and reviled by the establishment.

    Such is the consequence of moral courage. It begets a price. In the case of Victor John, it cost him his mother and siblings. And for being morally courageous, Thompson was vilified by the military – the establishment attempted to conceal the massacre and court-martial him.

    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 Martin Luther King. Malcolm X had it and Wole Soyinka epitomises it. Predictably, perpetuators 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.

    The contemporary youth however, personify a very sad contradiction of humanity and courage epitomised by John, Thompson, and the late Fawehinmi to mention a few. Essentially, they represent Nigeria’s sad decent into the gallows of inhumanity.

    Like a fugitive quirk you find no word for, the contemporary youth grows like a scar on his clan and the nation’s psyche. Too much of what he symbolises indicates decadence and elevates rot, thus the manifestation of a Nigerian youth divide incapacitated to the finer traits of citizenship and humanity.

    This glaring lack manifests virtually in every aspect of our life as a nation; the Nigerian society evolves as a perfect reflection of the nation’s youth. Given the quality of the nation’s youth, the country suffers the preponderance of cowards and shadows of men.

    From a tender age, the youth is socialized to be corrupt and inhumane; the process starts very early in life in the family unit. Many parents look upon it as a sign of great wit and astuteness to see their child cheat and oppress his peer by some malicious treachery and deceit. It gladdens their hearts to see him evolve into a ‘lovable’ brute at a tender age; they claim it’s a worthy demeanor for the very tough world out there.

    Thus from adolescence through adulthood, many parents greet every dishonesty perpetrated by their wards with cheer, as long as it translates to stupendous wealth, higher status and the comfort of knowing that their children are “smart” and inured in the ways of the world.

    These are the true seeds and roots of cruelty, tyranny and treason; parents nurture them in their wards and the latter perpetuate them in attitude, till they start procreating and perpetuating within their lineage, grosser forms of shamefulness and bestiality.

    It starts from the very little things; like grooming the child to be fraudulent through adolescence. Hence the multitude of “peaceful, hardworking and God-fearing” families engaged in desperate pursuits to enroll their wards and university hopefuls in “special coaching schools” while they purchase for them, seats at “special centres,” as they write the S.S.C.E and JAMB exams.

    Such wards are trained to circumvent the straight, moral path to progress and self-actualization, eventually they mature into foetal adults. All through their lives, they navigate the depths and shoals of challenging realities with the courage of a weevil and the wit of a hyena.

    Eventually, the seeds of indolence and monstrosity sown in them grows to prodigious bulk, as cultivated by society and custom. In the end, we have brutes and foetal adults running our lives and determining our future.

    At this juncture, many would perhaps dispute and claim that such shameful percentage constitute just a minor fraction of the country’s 170 million-strong families or thereabouts. Really? If that be the case, why is it that their voices and deeds resonate and tower above the humanity of the ‘moral few’ – if such divide ever truly exists in contemporary Nigeria?

    This minute, Nigeria manifests as the tainted fantasy of the perverted mob home and abroad. The virtues that build character, foster community and sustain a nation-state, from honesty, self-sacrifice to transparency and sharing, are ridiculed  everyday in public sphere as rubes silly enough to cling to unrealistic fantasies are celebrated on the now ubiquitous reality TV charade and social media.

    It is due to a lack of moral courage and character that the Nigerian youth tirelessly obsess about the decadent and perpetrate the obscene just to be seen as hip and flowing with the times. Hence the attractiveness of the vulgar, such as wild, ‘Reality TV’ sex, expedient sexuality, terrorism, corruption, to mention a few.

    The youth has been flipped upside-down and inside-out that it becomes increasingly difficult to identify by them, what constitutes acceptable values and culture representative of the Nigerian spirit and psyche. Thus today we praise the woman who tries to be the meanest career girl in office and applaud the man who tries to be the prettiest drag queen in the bar.

    Consequently, the country embraces depravity and perpetuates society on pathetic illusions. So doing, it amplifies the kind of twilight disconnect that accelerates the disappearance of dying empires. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is agitation for acquittal of a corrupt public officer, confused sexuality, or insidious civilization, Nigeria takes surefooted strides into moral and cultural extinction.

  • Mr. Osinbajo, shall we now treat ‘hate governance’ as terrorism?

    As Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo mustered a pious parallel to Nigeria’s cult worship of deviltry and vile. But despite his affectation of innate rebellion against the hateful and vile, Nigeria drowns in the flood of his expendable truths.

    Hate speech is terrorism, according to Osinbajo. Thus while his boss, President Muhammadu Buhari, enjoyed medical tourism abroad, and ‘poor’ Nigerians cowed from a vicious health system, the hatred and savage antics of separatists from the north and southeast, Osinbajo ignited the dying embers of his government’s resolve, into a fierce fire.

    As Acting President, Osinbajo spat fire in measured cadence. Perhaps he meant to scald, among other ills, Biafran separatist and hatemonger, Nnamdi Kanu and his kindred spirits in the northern Arewa youth group.

    Perhaps not. But when Osinbajo declared that those found to be promoting hate speech would be treated as terrorists, discerning folk at home and abroad, rejoiced that it was only a matter of time before Nigeria’s merchants of odium and grief, scalded in then Acting President, Osinbajo’s anti-hate speech inferno.

    But for all his bluster, his fire is tame; like  the random politician’s, it will scald no one, burn no one, except human integers beneath the nation’s sociopolitical hierarchies.

    “The Federal Government has today drawn the line on hate speech. Hate speech is a species of terrorism. Terrorism as it is defined popularly is the unlawful use of violence or intimidation against individuals or groups especially for political ends,” ýsaid Osinbajo, at a National Economic Council (NEC) retreat on national security at the Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa.

    To an assemblage of state governors, ministers and other stakeholders, said: “As I have said, we’ve drawn a line against hate speech, it will not be tolerated, it will be taken as an act of terrorism and all of the consequences will follow it.”

    Sadly, Osinbajo’s pronouncement, like Buhari’s anti-corruption crusade, reverberates like a rat’s sigh under the claws of a wild cat. The anti-terrorism law, like the All Progressives Congress’s ‘Change’ mantra, resonates as the triumph of noise over bite; the elevation of will from juvenile fantasy to eternal hysterics. It’s the paroxysm of mind over matter, often likable to the wishful thoughts of a cripple at the sight of a newly broken stallion.

    Osinbajo said that the intimidation of a population by words is an act of terrorism, that the APC administration intends to curtail. He noted that the Terrorism (Prevention) Act 2011 (as amended), defined terrorism as an act which is deliberately done with malice which may seriously harm or damage a country or seriously intimidate a population.

    Such pronouncement could be considered noble and perhaps valiant, in saner clime and under more promising considerations. But this is Nigeria, a nation where politicians pay lip service to ‘change.’

    Like his principal, Osinbajo lives oblivious to the miseries and deaths of Nigeria’s hopeless, impoverished, vulnerable divide. Indigent husbands and wives, the young and elderly, toddlers and newborns, die excruciatingly by affliction of hate governance and abhorrent leadership epitomised by the incumbent ruling class.

    Many more are falling off or getting bumped off the All Progressives Congress (APC)’s wagon of ‘Change’ via deathly roads, unemployment, terrorism and poverty. Sadly, Osinbajo, Buhari and their feeble opposition in the PDP,  live oblivious to these tragic realities.

    Both men, despite their overhyped “body language” which allegedly abhors corruption, have developed a knack for platitudinous chant and sound bites; Buhari vowed to wipe out corruption and Osinbajo vowed as Acting President, to treat hate speech as terrorism.

    Yet they conveniently ignore the inconvenient truths and symbolism that insinuates duplicity in their will. Both men are unable to weed out corrupt elements in their cabinet. Their administration lacks ingenuity, ethical and intellectual capacity to resolve the country’s electricity, security, unemployment and energy conundrum.

    Even if they reclaim power in 2019, Osinbajo, his boss, Buhari and cabinet, won’t resolve the nation’s electricity, security and unemployment woes.

    This is attributable to lack of will, inventiveness, moral certitude and proficiency of their administration. Thus the rot persists on their watch: Nigeria’s road transport network is in the worst state ever and there are no concrete plans to establish a functional and dependable rail system, road, air and sea transportation among others.

    It remains extremely impossible for children of ‘political nobodies’ and commoners to access quality education, loans and self-empowerment provisions touted by Osinbajo and his boss, as part of their grand plot to combat unemployment.

    Persistent ritual killings, by Badoo gang and company, still persists across the country and Nigeria pulses dangerously with hospital corridors of death. General hospitals and other primary care health centres (PHCs) are poorly staffed and underfunded. Little wonder Buhari had to embark on medical tourism abroad, in flagrant contradiction of the APC’s mantra of ‘change.’

    The APC leadership is unable to prosecute public officers perceived to be corrupt and answerable to scandalous charges, according to the EFCC.

    While Osinbajo mustered his anti-hate speech philosophy, was he unaware of hateful governance perpetrated by the APC and People’s Democratic Party (PDP) leadership across the country?

    Ogun State still looms like a gothic platitude of pain and death from its transit townships but the “Gateway State” remains Governor Ibikunle Amosun’s bower of bliss. There, in his stately Eden, he lives immune and insensate to the ravages of ill-will and pent-up fury tearing the natives apart from inside out.

    Amosun has a blast inside the Government House at Oke Mosan everyday simply because he does not have to stir and retire to bed wondering if he would die along the deadly stretch of Lagos-Abeokuta highway, particularly at the spots where innocent children, mothers, fathers – dependants and breadwinners – die like stray fowls, accidentally or by installments, in his severely cratered, administrative landmine.

    It’s the same rot across 36 States  of the federation. And this writer’s summation is amply substantiated by prominent chieftain of Osinbajo’s APC, Senator Dino Melaye, whose controversial recall was ‘unsurprisingly’ stalled in more controversial circumstances.

    “Unfortunately, we the leaders, myself inclusive, have failed this nation and have failed the younger generation, myself inclusive.

    “The reason why we are where we are today is because there is a disconnect between leadership and followership. Once there is no trust between the followership and the leadership, it will definitely have a negative concomitant effect on the economy, and every other facet of our national life.

    ‘’What we should fix is democracy; Democracy is government of the people, by the people and for the people.

    “What we have is greediocracy; government of the greedy by the greedy, for the greedy. ‘We the leaders want to win elections at all cost, so we spend money to win elections.

    “The followership also is greedy, they accept money to vote. So, head or tail, there is a need for attitudinal change and this is affecting everything,” admitted Melaye.

    It would be lovely and humane of Nigeria’s Vice President, Osinbajo, and his boss, President Buhari, to also treat hate governance as an act of terrorism, making sure that “all of the consequences will follow it.”

  • Our ‘legendary’ schools are bereft of theories

    Our clothes are too big for us now. Fat has thinned on our bones and skin hangs loosely on our sketchy frames.

    Forget the few who got fat, (awon awodi jeun epe sanra – the birds that nourish from the pot of the accursed) we have become weightless for lack of wisdom;

    PhD, MSc, HND, BSc… name it, we have it. Yet Nigeria flounders for lack of wisdom.

    Our afflictions were of predatory leadership and ravenous citizenship. Today, we mutate into murderous Boko Haram and hate-mongering IPOB. Recently, a desperate clown announced Biafra’s secession.

    If we look beyond the comedies of these antlers of currency-activated tragedy, we would find that we are indeed a curious lot. We stifle the brainy, bury the clever and make the hare-brained determiners of our life course.

    Thus in our country, there is no distinction between the cockeyed and the shrewd, anymore. Up is down and down is up.

    “Nigeria is a failed state…We are hostages to a greedy few,” becomes our mournful cry. How long shall we feed grief on impotent saw?

    In the distance, brilliant spokes of our ‘brighter future’ evade us. Around the corner, Nigeria’s ‘future’ or ‘promising youth’ if you like, flash senior citizens scary sneers at dagger-point; sometimes, at gun-point, to obtain the poor victims’ wallets.

    Pan to the first illicit meeting inside the grifter’s bedroom, dormitory or crummy café. The pace slows. Hustler meets hustled. The pace quickens, the ‘future’ scarcely breathes, until the beep that distils anxiety fetes with cold, sly gluttony. Maga don pay, shout Alleluia!

    Our ‘promising youth’ have learnt to be fraudsters. Let Magu mount the heat on ‘Yahoo boys,’ the con will always yield. It’s a fool’s paradise that we inhabit.

    Our maidens are still out in the cold, pulling a different kind of trick by the street-corner, every hour. Some days, they do the hustle on sidewalks, in the privileged neighbour’s bedroom, on the boss’ sofa and under the flicker of neon lights. Whatever the venue, pleasure seethes and sizzles beneath the shimmer of colourful, ‘sexy’ underwear.

    Our children have become brainy in the devil’s workshop. Their minds are busy where pernicious wile mutates to scourge. They are no more the ‘addle-brained’ in over-burdened lecture halls.

    Our schools are open but the theatres of true scholarship remain shut. Parents grieve, the studious weep and ASUU stews in the lull of true scholarship but our predatory governors and senators are having a blast.

    They do not care that Nigerian schools have become tombs of scholarship and unfettered endeavour.

    Who cares if our schools remain shut? Let ASUU embark on the lengthiest of strike actions, it is our children that would know grief.

    True scholarship, the knowledge that lifts, are meant for the children of the ruling class and their partners in crime, or ‘state-made billionaires’ if you like. That is why they plunder coffers to educate their children abroad.

    Statesmanship wrought in foundries of deceit; t is the way of our leaders to have our schools shut while their wards enjoy sterling scholarship overseas.

    While they rob us silly, we break into hymns of random intellectualization, seeking to impress our peer and fellow impoverished, with frantic wit and tedious platitudes.

    I could do-the-done-thing and romanticize the tragedy of our educational system. As usual, I could recycle solutions and couch them in feathery words. I could demand that government honour its pact with ASUU but would it change a thing?

    We have been thoughtless for too long but we would never know that because we do not stare hard at the picture enough.

    Our schools are not on the front row with the eminent and we do not even lead the back row of the delinquent.

    Every hour, we caress what we used to be and deny what we have become. It does not matter that our schools are never good enough, our hopes entwine delusions of grandeur. Hence our preoccupation with ‘universities global ranking.’

    In the ferocity of our silliness, we moot tiresome slogans, glorifying the apprentice shops we call ‘universities.’ For all our bluster, our schools are yet to birth a Nigerian theory. After too many years, it’s only fair that they evolved a Nigerian theory. Perhaps our home-grown socio-political theory of corruption.

    Brings to mind the story of the itinerant scholars, who came from the Middle East. Studious and parched, they arrived to cup spirited sips from our prairie spring, at that hyperbolic flagship, we call ‘Premier’ of the pack.

    Nobody told them of the conveniences that stink of shit. Nobody told them of the open galleries that doubled as baths, and sometimes, glorified latrines.

    They thought it was a joke that the laboratories are bare, at the flagship they painstakingly separated from the pack.

    One desperate call and they were back in their homeland, away from the stink of filth of Nigeria’s premier university – hope diminished, lessons learnt. No more shall their inborn thirst covet the spring of our exchange programmes.

    Still we remain what we have become. Seeking hope and finding none, we struggle to bear-hug our spent glories.

    These days, we labour to answer our famished names. Would cadavers stir to the forced, cold airs of praise? Would the tragedies of today smother in the reality of yesterday?

    Ill-informed and at tethers end, we extol over-burdened curricular like spider webs on a moth in distress. As if that would answer our flimsiest problems. Forgive me folks, if like the ‘standard’ intellectual, I recycle frantic answers to tiresome ills.

    Everything rubs on the other, to rob the other. Wisdom has deserted us. Of what use are academic honours that make our lives no better? It’s time we strip the clueless of power.

    Apology to the ‘change’ movement but our education sector reflects the ineptness of the government in power. Apology retracted, it shames me to think the incumbent government is bereft of ideas.

    While our kids stew in the stagnant filth of substandard education, APC governors jet out to celebrate their wards’ graduation from Ivy League schools’ abroad. And you and I are paying for it. Our children suffer for our frantic lust to play dumb.

    It’s about time we rid Nigeria of the empty heads holding sway.  ’Improved public schools in Rwanda see private academies close down.’ If only the headline would read: “Improved public schools in Nigeria force private schools to shut down.”

    In Rwanda, “Many private schools reported a two-thirds decline in student admissions at the close of 2016… Students in private schools decreased from 101,510 in 2012 to 79,076 last year while enrolment in public and government-aided schools almost doubled in the same period.

    Rwanda’s Ministry of Education simply expanded capacity and teaching infrastructure in public schools, it also introduced the school feeding programme and abolished school fees.

    Let us wrest our destinies from the grip of the ethically-bankrupt and intellectually-challenged leadership.

    Buhari and Osinbajo are never enough. Their ‘body language’ do not serve us. It’s about time we neutered their generation from power. It’s about we sought the candidates whose humaneness and ethics deserve our votes.

  • ‘I am Nigerian, come rape me’

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

    As you read, modern Nigeria manifests as a labyrinth of lust, an allegory of war and rape. In the wilderness of lust and shame, society becomes ‘slaughter slab,’ the multiple-room brothel, vibrantly themed and decorated for the Nigerian degenerate.

    Degeneracy abounds across societal slabs; across ruling class and the governed, rich and poor divides. While the incumbent ruling class touts its distorted fable of crooked martyrdom, donning the puritan’s cloak, the governed, comprising Nigeria’s teeming impoverished and fast disappearing middle-class, shed blood and brawn to ennoble the monstrosity of their common oppressor, the ruling class.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Thus an ethnic crisis was narrowly averted. It took the prompt intervention of security operatives for the situation to be salvaged. Charly Boy eventually suspended the protest, telling his cohort that their point had been made. “My brothers and sisters, I’ll like to say thank you for a good job well done; and to say to my fellow comrades, we’ve made our point, let Nigerians judge… Let Nigerians do the needful, do the right thing,” he said.

    “Permit me, my fellow comrades, to say that we’ve come to the end of this particular sit-out,” he said.

    “Charly Boy caused it, how can he go to Wuse Market to talk against Buhari?” “Those Hausa boys dealt with him…serves him right,” resonates the arguments on social media.

    Expectedly, Nigerians are queued in layers of conflicting perspectives in respect of the Charly Boy’s ill-fated protest.

    Armchair critics analyse the ensuing imbroglio claiming Charly Boy was probably pursuing someone’s agenda. He must be horseman to some political mastermind’s dark schema, they argue. He is too comfortable, too rich and catered for, to indulge in such desperate display of commoners’ grief, argues Nigeria’s armchair Trotskys.

    But that is simply one way to look it. Charly Boy and company perhaps intone a heartfelt misery. Perhaps he isn’t just another child of privilege paying lip service to commoner’s plight, but a true patriot whose love for Nigeria and the country’s suffering and smiley masses, transcends the bounds of his gated paradise.

    At the backdrop of these incidents, President Buhari remains in London on medical vacation spanning 100 days or thereabouts. His anti-corruption fight remains a sham, a pseudo war against institutionalised sleaze. And the National Assembly still impedes the strides of his administration.

    As usual, there were casualties during the recent protests. It is not surprising that the wounded are mostly unemployed youths, impoverished wards of commoners. However, a rare thing occurred by Charly Boy’s exposure to hurt. A child of privilege, like him, shouldn’t indulge in such dangerous enterprise. But Charly Boy did. Was he for real?

    Was his cohort for real? Are they true patriots? Or are they familiar victims of rape? Like hordes of underprivileged youths, were they caught in dizzying sexual dialectic, by which the Nigerian rapist(the ruling class), vainly and methodically strives to plow the raped (clueless, impoverished citizenry) barebacked?

    Did paltry sums change hands? Who paid who to stage a phoney protest? Was it a real protest? Was the pro-Buhari group driven by money or dangerous bigotry? Were both groups comprised of true patriots, seeking Nigeria’s best interests?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It is about time Nigerian youths assimilated the finer aspects of tact, humaneness, service and humility. The ‘popular’ musicians chanting their political ambitions on platforms of popular parties are undeserving of the citizenry’s votes. The truly committed patriot would distance himself from the usual ogres. Those who wouldn’t are simply out to ‘rape’ or be ‘raped,’ for a fee.

  • Nigeria’s special fool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In our calling, there are still no-go areas. We can never question religion save the instances we get to castigate one faith to elevate another, in the heat of poverty-induced pogroms we have learnt to call ‘religious crises and ‘politics.’ Need I say people are simply hungry? They are jobless too. That is why they become willing muscles to criminal masterminds.

    The labourer still goes home with heavy steps, and the heart of the casual worker resuming night shift shrivels desolately, like fresh mutton sautéed with local gin. Even the newborn arrives sorrow-clad; he probably wishes that he had waited till never.

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

    The Nigerian columnist thinks himself a national hero. A noble intellectual and man of letters. Such is the wonder of a newspaper column; it goads too many of us columnists to think too highly of ourselves.

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

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

    Who is your columnist? Is he truly that great, heroic man speaking and pricking conscience as a tireless patriot? Is he that uncommon, high-cultivated man of letters that has eluded our nation for so long? Is he a heroic seeker of truth and shiner of hope?

    It could be honourable to be all that and much more. But alas, we are no heroic bringers of light and that is because our readers aren’t heroic seekers of it. Very few columnists live to fight and conquer persistent monstrosities visited on us by the ruling class because they belong to the same school of ‘stomach infrastructure’ as their teeming readership.

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

    If we could overlook such decadence in our readership, we can’t justify a smidgen of it in Nigeria’s Fourth Estate even if we tried. Now that we have replaced our heroes past, we embellish their truths into absurdities and bad lies. Every day, we fail our people with shame we do not feel. We have become the stamen that lets down the azalea, the comforter that brings grief, the emissaries of needless hate. We have become slaves to the tyrants we ought to remove. Did we fight the military to a standstill so that we may become their instruments as democratic tyrants? Shall we forever be gut-challenged?

    We offer no direction folks save our shenanigans in the interest of the ruling class. Today every columnist seeks friends in high places but then, we are only being Nigerian. It’s time we inspired by the wisdom of dead writers. Sages from whose ashes we struggle to rise. It’s time we held a cup of water for the dying veterans to sip. It’s time we searched their eyes to learn the gleam of courage and earn it.

    It’s time we screamed in coherence. It’s time we usurped the dominant order and rid our lives of the blanched bubus that makes us the vacuous wimps that we are. It’s time we congregated to produce the leadership that we crave. Now that the die is triple-cast, let us put our hearts to what our pens write.

    And if we fall to the inanities we suppress and yet ennoble in others, then we shall find that we are the broken clay pots calling the kettles black. We could midwife the dawn that would herald our freedom yet.

    Let us become the conscience of the ruling class and the pulse of the breadlines. Lest we become dead to future generations. Lest they never get to read of our selfless beginnings. Lest they only get to know of the noon that confused us and the sunset of our debauchery.

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

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

  • Nigeria elevates wisdom of the dung-beetle

    As you read, methodical folly becomes Nigeria’s perennial fascination. The gross and barbaric proliferates in plain sight. And society approves the descent down the pole of morality and civilisation. Thus men and women with character of a dung-beetle, the scarab, are worshipped and glorified as rare gems.

    On the watch of such characters, the democracy we declared recoils into a spent shadow. The scarab was primeval Egypt’s minister of decay, her epitome of muck and amorality. In Nigeria, scarabaeans dominate the corridors of power. They have turned government into a death cult, a painted tomb of justice and progress.

    Seventeen years on, in the grip of such blood-drenched mascots, democracy afflicts us like the proverbial slut making a surreptitious exit with her drunken lover’s wallet. Consequently, we suffer poverty of character and this manifests as quiet, wily, mean-spiritedness; akin to the patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours, the corrupt police at illicit checkpoints, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the thieving public officer on his perch. This patience is illustrative of the predator hunting its prey.

    Oftentimes, it manifests in uncontrollable spasms that have seen us bury our best and elevate our worst, in abject negation of the cycle of morality and the universe.

    In such stew and stink, many a Nigerian of commonplace roots live through each day without ever contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanising squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate and 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 – comprising men and women of privilege – guided by personal ambition, consciously strive in thought and will to attain higher status but very few among these are concerned enough to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves.

    Very few men are indeed capable of humaneness that inspires 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 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 end.

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

    Thus despite our claims to modernity, higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian society have failed 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 citizenry 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 about 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.

    Apparently, 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 simultaneously smothers his protests by extolling the ruling class, whose dominance he seeks to terminate. 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.

    It’s about time Nigerians consciously evolved in thought and will, in pursuit of saner social order. But such conscious evolution can only be achieved by re-orientation in scholarship and purification of though.

    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 – and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization must be resolvable largely by elected representatives of the people by reason of their exposure, leadership skills and humane constitution.

    This informs a greater need for study and thought. It requires appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes, in the journey towards the reduction to the barest minimum, the possibility 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 and youth divide, scorned the maxim that holds that their worries are always reducible to a cup of rice, a loaf of bread or paltry bribe. The paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood.

    The better society that we seek requires 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 positive change, must be mooted and achieved by upright youth and working class, in further substantiation of their capacities to assimilate the culture and refinement of humane civilization.

    A veritable step towards such reality is to vote the incumbent administration out of office and elect a younger, less ethnic, less directionless, visionary and benevolent leadership. But to achieve this, the youth must establish a more truly progressive, vibrant and detribalised social and political platform.

  • Parable of the press and the Nigerian spectacle

    This minute, the fable persists of Nigeria’s ‘crooked’ press. The incumbent government conceals the true nature of President Muhammadu Buhari’s ailment ‘to prevent the press from twisting the truth into lies’ and sensational news, it claims. In turn, a disenchanted public accuses the press of unpardonable rot and indolence.

    On radio, TV, social media and the newspapers, ‘critics of note’ berate the nation’s press. At the backdrop of this entitled rage, the public bemoans the descent of the press. Neighbourhood pubs pulsate with howls of liquor-smashed folk bemoaning the dearth of ‘investigative journalism.’ Pastors, Imams, labour leaders and self-styled activists mount the soapbox to bewail and flay the press. Political, corporate, intellectual and spiritual hoodlums weave a discordant melody of scorn and syndicated hatred.

    This gory imagery of the press however, reveals the core of the Nigerian persona. The press is crooked because it serves and hails from an infinitely corrupt, dishonourable and uncivilised society.

    The press afflicts Nigeria so because it is peopled by men and women sired by debauched tribes, degenerate communes and lineages. Show me a corrupt reporter and I will tell you captivating stories of ancestral filth and decadence, communal muck and insolence, institutionalized greed and selfishness.

    Were our families, communities, religious temples and other social institutions untainted by filth, the nation’s press would be free of unscrupulous characters – after all, they are every journalist’s bastions of socialisation.

    By its press, Nigeria suffers rebirth of degenerate image, an explosion of tarnished persona. The incumbent press fulfills our institutionalised tendencies, glorifying the rough edges of primordial vice and giving it a trendy tone.

    The Nigerian press painstakingly redefines journalism in society’s besmirched image because failure to do so is tantamount to career suicide or economic hara-kiri. Those who attempt to be ‘professional’ or ‘ethically different’ become unbidden martyrs on the nation’s altar of smut.

    Remember Dele Olojede, the Pulitzer-prized journalist. Having earned international acclaim for doing good journalism, he ventured into the nation’s amoral swamp with the swagger of an idealist. Olojede sought to create a professional medium as fabled Peter Pan sought purpose in mythic Neverland. NEXT, his brainchild was certainly imperfect, but it was a welcome alternative in a swamp of caged, commercialised media.

    Olojede’s dream suffered stillbirth; NEXT, for all its cheek and vaunted splendour, espoused the tenets of fragile fiction. Little wonder Nigeria flipped to ‘Epilogue’ one sheet after NEXT’s preface. Forget Olojede and his defunct NEXT, several ambitious professionals and ethical journalism have been interred on the famished paths, where tall dreams fade to snide realism.

    Yet Nigeria craves Renaissance Press. Government and the governed bemoan the dearth and  death of good journalism even as they plot and effect the murder of the journalist in the street. Need I recall the willful murder by society, of brilliant men and women by whose spark, journalism attained honour and a pride of place among most honorable callings?

    Society thwarts good, ethical journalism wherever it finds its random sprouts. Driven by varied, selfish interests, politicians, so-called ‘corporate titans,’ activists, NGO-entrepreneurs, clerics and several other classes of refined thieves and criminal masterminds, bemoan the death of a vibrant press at the backdrop of their frantic, coordinated struggle to tame and enslave the press.

    You must know that companies’ expend a large fortune via their Corporate Affairs Departments to ‘kill negative stories’ and ‘befriend the press.’ In the mix, big business endow the academia with massive funding to create and implement academic theories and experiments geared to tame and emasculate the press.

    And if you would look beneath the smokescreen of Public Relations’ ridiculous, dandy theories, you would find a devious, criminal and contemptible plot to hinder socially responsible, public service journalism.

    But while businesses exert sinful influence on the press, politicians own the press. Government departments, functionaries and  agencies ply the press with intimidating advertisements; governors, senators, council chairmen, the presidency among others, keep the press on a leash of ‘carrots’ and intimidating largesse, in desperate bid to ‘own the editors’ and ‘determine the news.’

    Lest we forget the journalists playing dumb to degenerate, vainglorious, overbearing Mullahs and ‘General Overseers (G.Os)’ or ‘Spiritual Daddies’ if you like. Nigeria should never forget how the nation’s Christian leadership goaded former President Goodluck Jonathan with deceptive, currency-activated prophecies to fulfill their decadent lust for mammon and hatred for Buhari, who they claimed would ‘Islamise Nigeria.’

    And marching in virtual lockstep with these shades of despicable characters is the country’s amoral, impoverished citizenry. Driven by greed and inexplicable malice, large sections of the citizenry foster and fulfill the savage lusts of the nation’s leadership. Hence their inclinations to serve as duplicitous pawns and cannon fodder to the ruling class’ firestorms.

    The humiliation of the journalist persists in the hands of his employer. Salaries still range from N15, 000 per month at entry level to N70, 000 per month at managerial level across most media. Just three media houses may claim exceptionality in this respect and this reality is known to the government, big business, advertisers and general public that the Nigerian journalist is an endangered species, haunted by his employer and tormented by the public he serves.

    These sad realities lead to daily exodus of skilled and promising hands from journalism and hourly influx of quacks, fortune hunters and blackmailers into the profession.

    Yet Nigeria demands a free and effervescent press, peopled by flawless professionals, inured to the ethics of investigative, public service journalism. Even as such admirable traits and unimpeachable character are rarely attributable to every segment of society.

    Nigeria’s critical mob, like the fabled treacherous rabble, seeks fulfillment of tyrant fantasies: the fantasies often vary between the destruction of an unpopular government, despot or worn-out civilization by the press. Reality however, affirms the duplicity of Nigeria’s critical mob.

    The latter is continually tamed and kept on a leash by a ruling class that capitalizes on its obvious handicaps: its impulsiveness, insensibility to reason and judgment, poverty of soul and intellect, its irritability and overt sentimentality – which are undeniably characteristic of beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution, like savages and carnivores.

    I stand corrected given the penchant of the citizenry to flout traffic rules, moot imprudent plots and decapitate one another driven by religious, ethnic bigotry.

    The Nigerian press won’t fulfill the society’s utopian fantasies. No. The press will continue to subvert Nigerians’ noble expectations of it in perfect understanding the society’s cultural shift from uncompromising morality to unbridled amorality and hedonism. The press won’t give society honest, developmental news because every segment of the society strives to unmoor the journalist from his role as a crucial appendage of the nation’s conscience.

    This minute, the press feeds society biased definitions of reality as determined by big business, government, looters, lobbyists and other civil society. Contemporary Nigeria embraces the emotional pageant that has turned news into paid publicity and mindless entertainment. The journalist in response, kowtows to lusts and vanities of modern society. The press understands that the call for good journalism is mere spectacle and display, a fulfillment of Nigeria’s lust for pagan ostentation. The press is you get is the press you deserve.

  • This grave we dig, may bloom tomorrow

    I will not dare to think that this grave we dig today shall bloom tomorrow. But it could. Nigeria could become the mass grave we dig to bury the shoots of nationhood and bliss, nurtured by men we may never measure up to. But this is hardly about the founding fathers in whose hands Nigeria pirouetted and prospered. And then plummeted.

    This is about you and me. This is about our knack for turning logic on its head to complement our innate greed and perversions. If we could help it, Nigeria would die on our watch, today. This minute, every civil dream and seed of State may evaporate, if we could incite our will to fete our wiles.

    We think Nigeria is a mistake. But Nigeria was never a mistake. It is never the mistake. You and I are the mistake. We are the emblems of hope serving as crops of wrath, where greed and deceit whets inhuman appetites.

    As you read, the myth of war and secession holds fast. Despite the bitterness that trails the Nigerian civil war, characters that ought to know better acidly pronounce the necessity of war and violent secession like the next best thing that could happen to you and me.

    This myth holds particularly true among the youths. War and separation remains appealing to the youth not just because politicians, activists and journalists of vulpine intent and intellect tout them as worthy alternatives, the youth lust for war and secession because the idea offers fleeting moments of sentimentality that reinforces their dreams of acceptance and self-worth.

    Even those who know it to be a farce are loath to jettison the infectious romanticism that gets them giddy like overfed cattle gorging on barn supplies, every time secession is mentioned.

    The youth are told that the only times in their lives that they would be worth something and enjoy a hopeful reality is when they agree to serve as cannon fodder for total balkanization of the Nigerian State.

    They do not know the import of the politics they perpetuate. It’s not about defending the interests of a minority tribe neither is it about paving the way for a more responsible and humane government. It’s about working for some tyrant activist who works for some rich and privileged cabal, driven by the most hideous and selfish interests.

    Many have argued that if Nigeria is to move forward or attain progress of any kind, we must sit down to reconsider and decide if really it would serve everyone’s interest to preserve the Nigerian dream. I agree that the nation needs to sit down to deliberate over the most dependable and progressive path forward.

    However, it would be the greatest fraud and disservice to you and me if we accept that splitting Nigeria remains the most practicable solution to our grief. The very voices that cry for a referendum will get to the forum to pound drums of dissolution and rancor. Suddenly they will become strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the preservation of the Nigerian State.

    It is alright for a people to determine what course of action would best serve their interests but it would be suicidal for us all to believe that our travails shall end in a resuscitated  Biafra, contrived Republic of Oodua, Niger Delta Republic or United States of Arewa.

    In every new, independent nation we build, there will be no secure civilization or securities by which a nation thrives. This is because whatever new States we create will comprise of ignorant, turbulent proletariat stymied by crushing poverty and interminable penchant to play dumb. Such manner of working class or grassroots would as usual be dominated by the same ruling class whose insensitivity and wile informs our desire to separate.

    Were the nation’s legislature at its best not a coven of men with the mentality of rats and perfidious bums, there would be no wisdom in the convention of a sovereign national conference. But the Nigerian legislature is what it is and you and I are to blame for it.

    There is a better life to be had by the Nigerian dream if our youth could endeavour to look inwards and channel the latent reserve that we have scorned for ages. It is about time we understood that in any new nation we create, the current youth will never become part of the ruling class.

    As it is now in contemporary Nigeria, every new leadership we have in every new nation we create will effortlessly dominate us and impose upon us their children, relatives, political associates and puppets while they make labourers and thugs of the youth by whose blood, foolishness and sweat the new nations were achieved.

    The choice is ours to make; we either choose to remain a bunch of fools and clueless agitators or we could choose to leave the current leadership to its idealised madness while we create fresh platforms and chart fresh paths to the future of our dreams.

    Our greatest problems besides corruption, are racism and greed. But the Nigerian youth need not be handicapped by these. We should understand that our future lies in our hands. Sovereign National Conference or not, no solution or highfaluting socio-political or economic policy would work under the leadership and citizenship of unrepentant racists and self-aggrandizing characters that we personify.

    It is time to heal. It is time for the Nigerian youth to take its rightful place in the scheme of things. I will never tire from saying that it’s about time we sought and identify saner parties and humane candidates. We shan’t find such candidate amidst the incumbent ruling class or the gangs of youth scurrying under their canopies claiming they are ‘getting involved for Nigeria’s sake.’

    We need to unite on a platform immune to the insanities of hubris, materialism, racism and associated bigotries.

    We need to identify the demons that drive the ruling class and dispossess our minds of vanities that makes us habitable to similar fiends. The tragedy of our generation subsists in our seemingly uncontainable prospects and our desperation to be lorded over and contained, for a fee.

    We are more endowed in intellect and humanity than the incumbent ruling class and the spoilt brats they seek to impose on us. Agreed, we have differences but let us seek unity in our bid to neuter the predatory ruling class.

    It is about time that the Nigerian youth, irrespective of personal politics and tribe, learnt to live and strive, united in pursuit of a common government, sensitive to mutual miseries and dreams, yet humanely separate in politics and individuality.

    If this unusual and unpredictable development is to flourish amid peace and order, reciprocal respect and budding intelligence, it will call for that truest and most dependable social surgery I advocate: revolution by the ballot boxes. The New Nigeria Nationalist party professes noble ethics and humane politics. But such were the claims of Nigeria’s most repugnant parties.

  • Contemptible rascals

    This minute, Nigeria pulses with revolutionary marches. In the melee, politicians call the shots,  career hoodlums, activists and secessionists feed fat and the youth serve as disposable pawns, guzzling on spite and sound bites like incurable idiots. The average youth becomes an easy mark in the frantic enterprise. It doesn’t make a darn bit of difference what his causes are. He fully immerses into the backward civilization into which he has been born, evolving bald-facedly like a barbarian, badgering onto the stage for acclaim through the trap-door.

    The problem of the Nigerian youth is that he believes himself staggeringly capable of revolt, but he does not know how to revolt. At the end, in his desperate bid to rebel against the established and much dreaded order, he becomes easy mark to political puppeteers and criminal masterminds. He ends up propagating the contradiction of that style of living which cultivates sincerity and at the same time frustrates it. Thus the Nigerian youth remains his own greatest enemy and the most inimitable adversary to the Nigerian dream.

    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.

    Revolution is never the rebellion against a pre-existing order, but the setting-up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one. How different could an order anchored by the current crop of Nigerian youth be? They are not yet the patriots they are meant to become. Thus the nerve and degeneracy of the overfed and overcompensated juvenile; having gathered more than he could chew, gets high on his own saliva and condemns his peer mooting a revolution or calling for referendum.

    This citizenship business still confounds him and youth like him. Education has failed to improve them. They have learnt too little and they have too little to pass on, save hooliganism, insolence, incompetence and greed.

    Such youth are driven by panic; fear plays a greater part than hope in their affairs. They obsess more about possessions they may acquire or lose, than of the progressiveness and joy that they might create in their own lives and in the lives of others. Russell would say “It is not so that life should be lived” but the Nigerian youth could not be bothered even if they knew that much.

    Many whose lives ought to be fruitful to them, to their friends, and to the world in entirety are hardly inspired by hope and sustained by joy. They seek in imagination, the vanities that might be and how they could be actualised.

    Ultimately they choose the path of decadence. In their private relations, they are pre-occupied with the vacuous. They are engage in giving affection and respect at a price and the reward often comes by their desperate quests.  In their work they are haunted by jealousy of competitors, and are least concerned with the actual task that has to be done.

    In politics, they spend time and passion defending unjust privileges of their benefactors, godfathers, class or ethnicity, even as they make their world less happy, less compassionate, less peaceful, more full of greed and underprivileged whose growth is perpetually dwarfed and stunted by oppression.

    A spectre is haunting the Nigerian youth. They have entered an unholy alliance with the ruling class. They do not constitute formidable opposition to keep leadership on its toes neither do they offer invaluable support to keep it on track.

    Their approach to politics complicates class antagonisms: society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, the ruling class and the working class; the proverbial middle class got lost somewhere at the crossroads where the bourgeoisie swallows up the proletariat.

    Though youth does not really have the means to stop the economy, the ruling class dreads the youth, as was discernible when a wave of panic seized the Nigerian government by the jugular in the wake of the Occupy Nigeria protests. What do they fear? It’s without doubt the frequency and the potentials of youth mobilizations. Massive youth mobilizations were taking place across the globe and with often grievous and far-reaching consequences in the affected nations; the Nigerian leadership no doubt dreaded a Nigerian manifestation of the Arab Spring.

    The fear of the Nigerian leadership was however hardly far-fetched given the tainted radicalism of the Occupy Nigeria movement. In a violent society that has no future to offer them, the Nigerian youth have very little to lose thus their lack of hesitancy in confronting the State. The wish to abolish status quo was widespread among the nation’s youth as they romanticised the idea of a revolution as the protests dragged.

    In spite of the youth’s passionate struggle against the incumbent leadership’s utter insensitivity and cluelessness, the eventual result was predictable. Having put up a great show and ear-splitting noise, the youth retired to their respective homesteads.

    A more discerning school of thought argues that the Occupy Nigeria enterprise succeeded because desperate, self-serving politicians bankrolled it; inciting it mostly jobless and unemployed youth with platitudes  and coordinated spite.

    This says a lot about the Nigerian youth’s revolutionary potential. Eventually, the nation’s youth were written off and their grievances dismissed as the crazed rant of a pathetic mass of political zombies and revolutionary impostors. The youth were eventually dismissed as essentially hopeless and misdirected.

    Despite the fervor of the Occupy Nigeria movement, the youth remain exploited and perpetually exploitable – victims of what George Bernard Shaw, terms “the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry.”

    Most of the time, youth mobilizations and revolutionary movements attract sympathy from the workers and the population, as if the youth were saying loudly what the majority couldn’t afford to say. Thus, in many instances, youth mobilizations restore to the social camp the confidence in the masses’ ability to resist; and in some cases other working sectors engage in mobilization, following the youth. The Nigerian youth however, presents a contradiction to the benefits of such relationship of trust.

    He is accustomed to keep his head down like one eternally doomed to be adept in all the arts of the beggar. He even presumes a little upon the possession of talents which, as he ought to know, can never compete with cringing mediocrity. In the long run he comes to recognize the inferiority of those who are placed over his head, and when they inflict greater hurt upon him, he becomes refractory and shy, turning round to crawl into the wall when he is backed against it. This is hardly the way to get on in the world.

    “We have only two days to live; it is not worth our while to spend them in cringing to contemptible rascals,” Voltaire would say. But what if “contemptible rascals” also qualify a greater percentage of the Nigerian youth?

     

    • To be continued…

  • Yemi Osinbajo, ‘incestuous’ bullies and tumours

    The joke persists in moral circuits that when brigands and outlaws copulate, their incestuous liaison produces the Nigerian lawmaker. If you excuse the ribaldry therein, you would understand why the lawmaker excites the loathsome tribute of inexorable scorn. There is no gainsaying that the Eighth National Assembly hardly symbolises the conurbation of nationalism, detribalisation, altruism and high ethics often associated with evolved species of humankind.

    The Nigerian lawmaker sticks out like metastasized tumour; a priapism of vice and nuisance to be endured, like varicose veins of a veteran harlot. A surfeit of base politics and exaggerated high jinks perpetrated on the floor of the country’s Senate and House of Representatives further establishes the National Assembly as a coven of adult delinquents.

    It would be recalled that one week after a male senator was forced to apologise to his female colleague for dealing her a blinding slap, a chairman and deputy chairman of a House of Representatives committee got locked in a fight. The deputy chairman, a woman, dealt the chairman several blows.

    The latter completely lost his balance as the impact of the assault from the heavily built female legislator shattered his eye glasses to smithereens and left him with a bloody eye. Pandemonium ensued when he tried to retaliate but he was prevented by their colleagues who formed a ring around his female aggressor.

    Cut to another hodgepodge of members of the Federal House of Representatives embroiled in a free-for-all fight, street-brawler style. The lawmakers engaged in fisticuffs on the floor of the House as members opposed to the embattled Speaker of the House at the period, tried to introduce a motion for his impeachment, over corruption allegations. Parties loyal to the aggrieved rebels pounced on them and they exchanged blows to the amusement of the world.

    Few years after the disgraceful incident, one of the major characters whose dress was torn to shreds as he got beaten to a pulp, has made the news again. The controversial lawmaker’s name will still not be mentioned on this page lest it desecrates this column and offend the sensibility of decent folk. The hilarious character, in degenerate fit, allegedly threatened to beat up and impregnate a fellow senator. He was recently embroiled in a fake certificate scandal thus calling to question his claims to higher education. Nigeria waits with baited breath as the lawmaker fights his proposed recall by the constituency he represents. Lest we forget the Senate leadership that was recently acquitted of corruption charges in suspicious circumstances.

    At the backdrop of these shameful proceedings, you could be forgiven for likening the National Assembly to an asylum – apology to sane, decent folk therein. There is no gainsaying that the upper and lower legislative chambers move epic clowning, violence and tomfoolery into the open air of gangsterism and psychosis to the amusement of the world.

    In the National Assembly, institutions and culture fade into irrelevance as the ‘honourable’ legislators mutate into insuperable difficulties and impediments to progress. Their feverish quest to tame and woo the executive into a romance of mutually rewarding incestuous relations equally evokes the dread locusts inflame in the heart of the peasant farmer.

    Against their onslaught, incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari put up a feeble response. The retired military General, before his incapacitation by an undisclosed ailment, stuck to his carrot and stick approach, perching on a three-legged stool of contrived supremacy and invincibility to Nigeria’s legislative antagonists.

    Buhari sought to eradicate diseased plants from the nation’s fields of enterprise even as he sowed sickly seeds under the roof of the Nigerian barn house. Crucial appointments he made and wanton concessions he approved, in the spirit of political expediency, ultimately neuters the impact of his anti-corruption crusade. Now a desperate terror unfolds; Nigeria fears that its amoral Senate, having overwhelmed and domesticated Buhari’s presidency may move on to the next phase of its plan, and impeach President Buhari.

    Acting President Yemi Osinbajo, despite his tough composure, is considered featherweight by the impenitent horde occupying the nation’s legislative chambers. Thus their desperate antics to tame and bully him.

    Conflict over the national budget and the legislature’s untoward theatrics beyond the bounds of its constitutional duties pit them at loggerheads with Osinbajo. The lawmakers seek to turn him to a parlour pet same way they domesticated his boss. But would Osinbajo roll over and play pup? Will he accept to be turned into a glorified puppet collared to the legislature’s cassock of notoriety?

    There is no gainsaying that the National Assembly is currently infested by shades of poorly, self-centred characters thus the nation’s hope rests on the Executive – since the judiciary has established itself as highly unreliable and hostile to justice and national progress. Acting President Yemi Osinbajo, cuts another portrait of hope for the nation just like Buhari did before his demystification.

    Despite his alleged distaste for corruption and predilection to truly serve, Osinbajo should understand that the government he presides over, ride on a great deal of presumption and moral baggage. Nigerians believed that Buhari and Osinbajo signified hope, prudence and inestimable opportunity to eradicate corruption but  their team and All Progressives Congress (APC) platform, becomes the bane to the successful attainment of our ideal state.

    Osinbajo should always remember that Buhari became conflicted in personal and administrative ethics hence the catalogue of failures and inaction already listed in his wake. For instance, he has been accused of nepotism, god-complex and intellectual languor. Will Acting President Osinbajo these pitfalls?

    The presidential cabinet subsists with dubious change agents feigning a moral and growth crusade. Like many state governors and lawmakers operating on the platform of the APC and rival parties, they epitomise ethical deceit. They negate and reject the strife of contraries by which true, positive ‘change’ evolves.

    Osinbajo of course, must be aware of this bitter reality. Unlike his boss whose naïveté and duplicity goaded to grow bananas out of a pine tree. Nigeria needs Osinbajo to be tirelessly honest, decisive and humane. It doesn’t matter if his spell as ‘President’ is temporary, Nigeria needs him to stand as a man.

    This minute, Nigeria flounders in a vortex of dysfunctional public institutions and organs of government. The legislature, executive and judiciary crush the hope of the citizenry and stifle the birth of progressive vistas of the future, in a cycle of incestuous cannibalism. In the crushing, bloody symbolism, the Nigerian citizenry is cast as a babe, persistently dragged and violently exchanged by ogres who nail her down upon a rock; they bind iron thorns around her head and waist, pierce her palms and feet, and cut her heart out to make her feel the heat and frost of their inordinate hankering for riches and bloodlust.

    They live on the shrieks and cries of the babe. They nourish from her blood and forcefully suckle from its unformed tits. It’s about time we reversed the cycle.