The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Yemi Osinbajo…chastity is never enough

    It is acceptable wisdom across political and social circuits that the most virulent critic poses no threat to the devious and corrupt public officer. Thus no matter how brilliantly the critic articulates censure of a crooked official’s savage, mediocre performance, he poses no threat to the office and grotesqueness that the officer symbolises.

    Indeed, the harshest critiques have been known to bounce off the hide of the Nigerian politician as bed bugs fall off the tresses of the poodle’s medicated hair. This no doubt manifests as another malady in the Nigerian scheme of things. It is the ultimate malady.

    Very few people are genuinely interested in eliminating corruption and improving the quality of life in the country. Since the era when large segments of the citizenry, bludgeoned to acquiescence by corrupt leadership, swallowed dissent to hide behind the ‘Yabis’ of unrepentant government critics like late Fela Kuti, Nigeria has suffered freefall down the steep crag of institutionalised corruption.

    Very few Nigerians would dare the dangerous activism of self-appointed government critics like late Afrobeat maestro, Fela and human rights activist, Gani Fawehinmi. The duo were two of Nigeria’s most vocal critics even in the face of brutal backlash from the government and its apologists.

    Today, we suffer the absence of Fela Kuti and Fawehinmi among others. What we have left are pathetic impostors pretending to defend the citizenry’s rights. Despite the posthumous honours accorded Fela and Fawehinmi, few mothers would want their children to engage in such dangerous agitation in the  interest of the collective. ‘Were dun wo, ko se bi lomo,’ meaning: While it is fun to behold the antics of a lunatic, it is anathema to sire one.

    Late Fela and Fawehinmi are no lunatics, but they are the figurative madmen by whose tireless activism and exploits, Nigeria’s critical mob attained a semblance uprightness and political awareness. Despite their activism, the citizenry whose rights they aspired to protect towed the path unabashed spinelessness. This emphasises the role of the critic.

    There is no gainsaying that since the advent of Nigeria’s democratic experiment, the nation elevates corruption as its cultural essence. At President Goodluck Jonathan’s emergence, state-sponsored corruption mutated into the Nigerian persona: bigotry, decadence, terrorism and official looting were weaponised by public officers and their cronies in pursuit of selfish political and economic interests.

    The Nigerian decadence, ingenious in pleasures and cruelties, became the politically-correct personae, an acceptable profanation of morality and rape of ancestral norms. Thus in Jonathan’s era, corruption’s chthonian reverence assumed the imagery and dimensions of politicised orgy. Morality became un-Nigerian as the immediate past administration evolved a program and formula for looting the country silly.

    Enter President Muhammadu Buhari and his All Progressives Congress (APC); Buhari was  expected to clean Jonathan’s mess and rid the polity of corruption and administrative ineptitude wrought on the nation by successive military and democratic tyranny. Having sacked Jonathan and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP) with remarkable ease at the March 28, 2015 general elections, Nigerians believed he would rid the country of deviously orchestrated misdemeanours characteristic of Jonathan’s PDP.

    But like a recalcitrant bug that will not go away, mismanagement, corruption and a legion of more carefully orchestrated misdemeanours have resurfaced in the nation’s corridors of power, on Buhari’s watch.

    However, this writer would be committing duplicity similar to that which the incumbent government inflicts on Nigerians even as you read, if he fails to acknowledge the flashes of competence betrayed by Buhari and his bumbling team. Buhari’s initiative at establishing one purse for the Nigerian government is worthy of commendation. Mr. President’s military campaign against the dreaded Boko Haram is commendable too.

    Although, he has failed woefully at keeping his promise to rescue Chibok girls and exterminate the terrorist sect within his professed timeline, the military has succeeded considerably, at containing the terrorists’ activities.

    Skyrocketing inflation, rising debt profile and a weakened Naira, resurgence of Biafran clamour and other secessionist tumult, to mention a few, crept on the country in the wake of Buhari’s leadership. There are the usual hardships too, like unstable electricity, corruption in the oil and gas sector, politicised anti-corruption fight and cutthroat intraparty squabbles afflicting Buhari’s ruling party.

    Suddenly, the hero mutates into a villain in the estimation of an impatient electorate. The latter, split by ethnic and political bigotry since the March 28, 2015 presidential elections, yielded to greater animosity, political and tribal divisions as Buhari’s reticence about northern herdsmen’s murderous quests across eastern and southern farmlands resonate uglier narratives about his presidency.

    Then Buhari falls sick. However, in a manner reminiscent of late President Musa Yar’Adua’s ill advised circumstances, the presidency, allegedly held by the jugular, by a mythical cabal, fails to satisfactorily explain the actual nature of Buhari’s ailment thus substantiating dreadful conjectures by the electorate. Despite devoting public fund to Mr. President’s medical tourism abroad, Buhari’s ‘handlers’ and facetious media team have suddenly lost their voice alongside their wits.

    Now, we have Vice President Yemi Osinbajo in the saddle as Nigeria’s Acting President. Since he assumed office by constitutional dictates and at Buhari’s behest, Osinbajo, a presumably ‘quiet giant’ and ‘unflinching enforcer,’ has attracted flak from the mythical northern cabal. He attracts remarkable plaudits too, which is scary.

    Nigerians should be wary of heaping praise on Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo, lest he falls victim to hubris. We do not need him to be more ‘likable,’ ‘chaste,’ ‘humble’ or cut like a paper ‘intellectual.’ Nigeria needs Osinbajo to be more efficient. He should man up and clear some of the mess left by his boss, if he is indeed man enough for the job.

    Acting President (AP) Osinbajo recorded no extraordinary achievement as Nigeria’s Vice President. And he is yet to achieve any remarkable feat as Acting President. Except his closet and raucous sycophants consider his emergence as VP or AP his extraordinary achievement.

    No one expects Osinbajo to become an overnight success. No one expects him to magically resolve Nigeria’s institutionalised corruption and administrative ineptitude. After all, corruption remains a remarkable feature of his APC platform despite the party’s initial posturing otherwise. A cursory glance at the party’s current and estimated membership will convince you.

    No doubt, Osinbajo is incapable of ridding his party of corrupt but despite this sad reality and the hideous politics pitted against him, Nigeria expects him to perform creditably. He could begin by actually attempting to serve the interests of the impoverished and presumed dispensable divide.

    Unless Nigeria experiences ‘Change’ that reflects positively in the lives of the citizenry, Acting President Osinbajo will be dismissible as just another ‘ceremonial minder’ holding forte for an incapacitated President.

    Perhaps Osinbajo will evolve as everything but another disease of governance and civilisation. Let him remember that Buhari started out as a man devoted to wiping out corruption. He sought to do that while conveniently turning a blind eye to his inadequacies and self-imposed handicaps, or compromises, if you like.

    He forgot that nature and history only cares to identify individuals as intrinsic part of species and never as a lone genus. Will Osinbajo fare better?

  • They will paint your ugliness in beautiful English

    The random newspaper, television station and online medium become vessels to itinerant grim reapers as you read. Editors of powerful news platforms, reporters and digital/mobile journalists in particular, have become death’s minstrels. Like Ogege, the spirit with embroidered woe, they have turned serpents, sleeping in Nigeria’s undergrowth, to merge with the hue of the prevailing wild.

    They forget that when Nigeria eventually submerges in the mire of bestial elements, even the press will be cannibalised. Nonetheless, the local media, like global news agencies, serve as emissaries and enablers of the dark, vicious lusts and ‘murders’ committed by politicians, industry titans and multinationals. How? By ignoring their monstrosities and couching their ugliness in beautiful English.

    It is hardly surprising that the politician and magnate remain the subjects of Nigerian media’s perennial fascination. Of these lot, the coarse and ferocious, wanton and bloodcurdling, are gleefully celebrated and coated in ornamental language by the press. The average newspaper, TV station and online medium wildly celebrates the ‘achievements’ and ‘statesmanship’ of established and closet criminals in public offices because it is very profitable to do so.

    To the press, it never matters that a state governor diverted and expended public fund to ship cronies and political associates abroad, to witness his lavish wedding to a trophy wife. The media hardly cares that a governor would splurge on an insolent ward’s wedding ceremony, at home and abroad, at a time he has refused to pay workers’ salaries and improve infrastructure citing ‘economic recession’ as his reason.

    Very few journalists are indeed, worried, that Nigeria’s incumbent public officers, like predecessors, have fleeced the country to the bones, in the guise of operational budgets and emoluments. State fund, stolen and diverted by these elements would attain judicious use if applied to nobler constitutional projects, like the provision of crucial infrastructure, security, potable water, stable electricity among others.

    The media hardly cares that such money could have saved lives if used to repair bad roads or renovate moribund primary health care centres. Thus while poor, underprivileged electorate die in ghastly road accidents; while thousands of newborn breathe their last and their mothers’ extinguish to birth complications, the Nigerian press obsesses about the ‘sterling statesmanship,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘brilliance,’ and ‘influence’ of the men and women  responsible for their untimely demise.

    Save some very few journalists and media that actually care, the majority of Nigeria’s Fourth Estate do not give a hoot about dying mothers and infants in Nigeria’s hospital labour rooms and corridors of death. They do not care that while the citizenry’s beloved die prematurely in extreme and avoidable circumstances, most incumbent and former senators, governors, presidents and even local council chairmen, sponsor their trophy wives, daughters and daughters-in-law abroad, to give birth in safer circumstances.

    Rather than speak truth to power, characters that could be mistaken for kindred spirits with the viper, scorpion, dung beetle, and hyena are elevated, worshipped and celebrated as the rarest of gems by the Nigerian press.

    The media celebrates these incarnations of humanity’s debris because doing otherwise could be suicidal. Politicians own the media. And tycoons determine the news. They place advertisements and pay the salaries of the men and women by whose professionalism or otherwise Nigeria accesses her news and information needs. Thus the quality of journalism you get.

    It is foolhardy of anyone to expect a journalist who hasn’t received  salaries in eight months to be objective about a news story involving a commoner and a politician. The commoner will ignite his conscience with tears but the politician will silence it with hefty ‘brown envelopes.’

    It is deceitful to anticipate fairness, honesty, integrity and accuracy from mainstream and online media whose existence and continuity are determined by the whims of influential politicians and business moguls.

    But the Nigerian society demands purity, integrity and impartiality from the press all the same.

    Journalists are accused as partners in crime with the Nigerian ruling class. To a great extent, this is true. It is also true that the Nigeria gets the journalism it deserves.

    Norman Mailer jests that “Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.” This is often true. Sadly, journalists are still the butt of the most demeaning jokes and premeditated put-downs. Nobody thinks much of a journalist.

    In the estimation  of big business, the citizenry and ruling class, the journalist, whatever his designation or job title, is the manipulable pawn and necessary evil that has to be courted and tolerated. The descent and humiliation of the journalist still persists in the hands of his employer; salaries still range from N15, 000 per month at entry level to N100, 000 per month at managerial level in most media houses.

    This resonates badly for the country. The principles of fairness and social responsibility of the press require that the journalist who would adorn the cloak of defender of the masses’ rights should be upright and flawless in character, work and personal ethics. Such admirable traits are impossible with Nigerian journalists because due to their constant and methodical impoverishment by their employers, they entertain less scruples and eagerly sell their souls to devils among the political, business class for ‘brown envelopes.’

    Yet the society seeks fulfillment of tyrant fantasies. Such fantasies often vary from the destruction of an unpopular government or despot to a worn-out civilization. Reality however, affirms the duplicity of such mindset. In Nigeria, where voters are continually tamed and kept on a leash by a ruling class that capitalises on obvious handicaps: their impulsiveness, insensibility to reason and judgment, and overt sentimentality, it becomes increasingly difficult to nurture and enable a fair, vibrant press.

    Despite its faults, society conveniently picks on a scapegoat for its infinite timidity and cluelessness: the press. The journalist is thus expected to serve as the conscience and moral compass of the society, challenging the government and checking the excesses of the ruling class, selflessly and uncompromisingly.

    As utopian fantasies go, these are noble expectations of the journalist but the Nigerian society ignores its cultural shift from conventional morality to unbridled hedonism. It assumes, hypocritically, that the press will continually give it honest and developmental news even as every segment of the society strives to unmoor the journalist from his role as a crucial appendage of the nation’s critical mob.

    The public, comprising big business, the government, and civil societies among other mob segments, vilify any journalist or news medium that seeks to educate and engage rather than entertain and perpetuate their biased definitions of reality. Several organisations are placing media advertisements and parceling expensive gifts to halt publications or shut down reportage that could hurt their interests even as you read.

    Contemporary Nigeria embraces the horrendous pageant that has turned news into paid publicity and mindless entertainment. In response, the journalist slips to survival mode and kowtows to lusts and vanities of modern, politically-correct society.

    Beneath the mindless glamour, cultural and ethical decline however, an insidious reality festers in the death of hope and incandescence of tragedy.

    At the centre of the turmoil is the journalist whose fate is so critically bound with the country’s.

    Rather than pose a challenge to the system that domesticates and enslaves him, he chooses the easiest way out and plays junkyard dog to tyrant cabals and the predatory bunch constituting the nation’s citizenry and political class. He assumes the role of a poseur and pretends to fight for the interest of the public. This sad charade will end badly for everyone.

  • Vengeance finds everyone

    This piece too, should infuriate you, if you are of the scholarly divide that celebrates insults to God as ‘rational’ exercise. I am not some religious fanatic, I simply appreciate the might and existence of Edumare. If you don’t,  it’s your grief, not mine. However, you may define this piece too as a ‘human right’ to vent by eloquence of thought.

    If you are a public officer of the crooked divide, this piece too, should displease you. If you are an esteemed scholar with god complex, this commentary may injure your pride. It is never my intent to glorify your politics or preferred notion of the intellectual. I will not patronise you.

    What could be wrong in wishing that the Nigerian ruling class experience catastrophe it inflicts on the citizenry via bad governance? Consider for instance, the sad case of a man who loses his wife and three children to a fatal road accident caused by bad road, knowing that the State governor had persistently and criminally refused to heed pleas that he repaired the badly cratered road; could it be wrong for such a man to tirelessly utter heartfelt prayer, that our Heavenly Creator rewards the governor with similar tragedy? Would it be wrong to pray that divinely inspired vengeance, scorn all anti-retributive fetishism and religious rituals by the governor, and wreak greater tragedy in his life?

    How about the poor, helpless underage girls abducted from Baga, Bama, Konduga and other parts of Borno State? If such girls – the survivors among them to be precise – eventually understand that they were the disposable integers, the casualties of a war of wiles by a devious political class, would it be wrong that they wish upon the men and women responsible for their plight, greater tragedies and retribution?

    Maryam Alhaji-Wakil was abducted at age nine. In 2014, insurgents of the deadly terrorist sect, Boko Haram, invaded her town and burnt her home. They killed her relatives and decapitated her neighbours. Then they whisked her off to Sambisa Forest. There, she was forcibly married to Modu, a lustful and violent Boko Haram insurgent. In two days, little Maryam was violently thrust into womanhood. Modu, 35, forced his way into her unripe orifice, robbing her of innocence and the mystic pleasure of first and legitimate adult sexual experience.

    Modu was hasty and rough thus making her ‘first time’ bestial and replete with pain. She screamed in agony but Modu didn’t care. “The louder I screamed, the more violently he shoved into me until I passed out,” she revealed to me in a personal encounter.

    Thus at the tender age of nine, Maryam was violently used and sexually abused. When she could not withstand the misery of living as a sex slave any longer, she opted to serve as one of the terrorist group’s female suicide bombers. Consequently, she was dispatched with a bomb to neighbouring Cameroon. She was taken on a motorcycle to blow up any soft military target in Cameroon. But Maryam had other plans.

    When the rider dropped her, she approached the soldiers and told them, ‘I have this thing on my body. It is a bomb. I was sent to kill you. Please, help me remove it.” Instantly, the soldiers sprung into defensive position but realising that she had come to surrender, they approached her and unstrapped the explosive from her body.

    Maryam spent several months in the custody of the Cameroonian gendarmes until she was handed over to the Nigerian military. Hard as it is to picture the extent of bitterness devastating her heart, an intense gape into her eyes reveals a girl utterly torn apart. Beneath her pretty face lurks a battered soul.

    Now 12 years of age, Maryam is yet to break out the jailhouse of her past. She is still the starry-eyed nine-year-old that got whisked off to Sambisa Forest, while her relatives and neighbours fell in a bloody heap, to the bullets of Boko Haram’s terror squads. Maryam relives the days she went without food because her insurgent ‘husband’ was too poor and lazy to provide her food. She remembers the excruciating nights that she laid captive and helpless under his massive bulk, while he violently plowed into her because she  ”was an unwilling bride.”

    When Maryam eventually discovers that men and women who were meant to ‘protect and serve her’ as all good leaders should do, were responsible for her misery, should she simply ‘forgive and forget?’  When she discovers that men and women in the immediate past presidency embezzled the £2.1 billion disbursed to procure weaponry meant to secure her release and that of the 276 Chibok girls, should she seek them out for a hug and heartfelt blessings?

    It is only just that Maryam persistently utters heartfelt prayers that the daughters and granddaughters of the men and women who triggered and accentuated her misery, share similar fate with her.

    Some would claim that it is wrong to wish such retribution on innocent children of perceived bad leaders. They would counsel forgiveness saying: “Let the actual offenders be punished and not their bloodline.”

    I passionately object to such righteousness. Why? In a nation where rich, privileged criminals are given a slap on the hand and pat on the back, it is only just that offspring and wives of such criminals suffer same tragedies as victims of their inhumanity. After all, prosecutors have established certain governors, senators, presidents and bank chiefs along with their wives and kids.

    Just recently, the anti-graft agency confiscated 20 expensive automobiles from the  unemployed son of a military chief who is under inquiry for corruption. He is simply one of several rich, spoilt kids of the Nigerian ruling class misappropriating the wealth of the collective for the luxury of a few, privileged class.

    If the Nigerian leadership is just to the citizenry, the universe will in turn, be just to them. If public officers are honest, compassionate and enthusiastic in pursuit of the country’s progress and the citizenry’s happiness, may Edumare and His universe be just to them. May our Creator shower them with His infinite mercies.

    However, public officers responsible for the ceaseless disasters plaguing our lives, will get their comeuppance even as you read. Every president, federal minister, state governor, commissioner, legislator, council chairman, judicial officer and associate by whose greed, corruption and inhumaneness Nigeria careens in corruption while the citizenry perish in avoidable tragedies, will experience their due rewards, in time.

    State governors and senators for instance, may remain rich, privileged and aloof, while electorate families perish on bad roads and rural kids die for lack of adequate care, staff and facilities across Nigeria’s primary healthcare centres; very soon, they will watch their children and grandchildren suffer the same fate. Such is the working of divinely ordained retribution – I only give voice to the immutable.

    If as a president, state governor or legislator, you divert public fund to sponsor your children’s education overseas while the children of peasants and working class who voted you into power, extinguish in intellect and passion, across Nigeria’s underfunded schools, it is only just that those children of yours never amount to much or anything in life, like the victims of your greed.

    Again, self-righteous faithful and intellectual will condemn this because it is religiously or politically incorrect. They will advocate that only the offenders deserve punishment.

    To this, I would say: ‘What were our parents’ crime? What crime did Maryam’s parents commit, that made the ruling class treat her so?’

  • Your Excellencies…death may come in your spittle

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

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

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

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

    Your title will be worthless and your name, insignificant, in the estimation of the one who would rid your pockmarked hide of your gluttonous soul. At death’s door, nothing else would matter. Your life will probably flash before you and you would relive for an instant, the most crucial aspects of your finished life. You will remember the monies you stole from public coffers at the expense of the electorate that voted you into power.

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

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

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

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

    The power drunk who dances to the hum of pain and symphony of grief of our devastated wastelands, did you think the music will never stop?

    When death comes, you will remember how paranoid you were. Then you will understand that had you being the statesman you promised and professed to be, you would have no need to be so paranoid and suspicious of everyone, even your own wives and mother.

    Even so, paranoia need not prevent a leader from holding down his job, taking rational, pro-citizenry decisions and conducting himself effectively.

    Mr./Mrs. Excellency, your crimes are so great that everybody casually assumes that you must in some sense have gone mad. You who steal billions from public coffers only to bury it in sewages, water tanks and crop farms excites the passing tribute of a sigh.

    At death’s door, you will lose the courage and deviltry by which you battled and conquered your most dreadful foes. You won’t have your great war chest and grand armies of thugs and corrupt law enforcers to command. At death’s stare, you will go blind in the face and your mind’s eye.

    You will understand why it was so easy for you to subdue political enemies and not the enemy within you. You will understand why you could contend with recalcitrant underlings, cantankerous wives, stubborn wards, treacherous aides and associates. You will understand why

    you could look on earthly tempests and not flinch. But you will never understand why death will take neither gold or silver to spare your life.

    Mr./Mrs. Excellency, there is no gainsaying that your life is the stuff dreams or the wildest fantasies are made of. You have grown from the desperate politician with tall dreams and modest wealth to become filthy-rich, power-drunk and self-possessed. You have become the titan who is quite successful at ‘cancelling out’ and overpowering other titans.

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

    Remember Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who collapsed, coughing up blood in 1925. The X-rays showed he had severe gastro-duodenal ulcer. Thereafter, ulcer pain was ever present. Then he suffered increasing insecurity, paranoia and finally became detached from reality. By late 1942, his mental health had caught up with him. All the bombast and pomp had gone. He had no reserve of courage or wile and he yielded to ulcer, deep-seated depression among others.

    The Greek war became his unmitigated disaster, the shame from which Italy had to be rescued by the Germans. Power intrigues with Germany quickened his latter descent. In July 1943, he was in effect, imprisoned by fellow Italians on the island of Ponza, then moved to a naval base in Sardinia and later to a ski resort. After Italy surrendered in September, Mussolini was rescued by a German SS glider team and flown to Munich. The Germans then returned him to Italy and installed him as the puppet dictator of the remnant Italian Social Republic.

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

    Mr./Mrs. Excellency, like Mussolini, the time for humouring yourself will soon be over. Although your circumstances differ from Mussolini’s, your end will come varied, like the whimpers and howls of  poor, helpless Nigerians, whose miseries never matters to you.

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

    Death travels with the restive wind but you think you will escape its scourge by simply hopping on the next plane to join your families abroad. Hmmm…What if it comes in your spittle?

  • This is socially and politically incorrect…but you will say, ‘Amen!’

    I know. You know. We all know that nobody cares how brilliantly this article is articulated for or against the interest of the citizenry or the Nigerian ruling class. The jury will always be out over the perceived victimhood, tyranny, humaneness and monstrosity personified by the country’s citizenry and leadership. It depends what side of the divide you inhabit.

    Just like everyone else, you are inclined to protect the source from which your bread is buttered. You will defend the source of your ‘hard-earned’ or ‘ill-gotten’ wealth. It’s a human thing – a foible most are vulnerable to.

    Everybody pays lip service to ‘Change.’ Even President Muhammadu Buhari selectively effects ‘Change.’ He had good intentions no doubt, he is simply too flawed to prosecute a flawless anti-corruption fight. But this is hardly about the ‘true intent,’ ‘honesty,’ ‘noise’ and ‘posturing’ of Buhari’s anti-corruption campaign.

    Now that it is glaring that soapbox rant, contrived marches and social media protests will never be enough to save us from corrupt leadership and the rigours of the Nigerian wilderness, we could initiate action by chanting heartfelt ‘Amen’ all through this piece, while we plot to reclaim our nation from the predatory ruling class.

    I could advocate that we change our leadership at election time but our people have perfected the art of substituting tyrants with savages and vice versa. The youth dream of a revolution; they talk of ‘benching’ the incumbent ruling class with the spite of a serpent and the spunk of a fraidy-cat. As we have hordes of youth mooting a ‘take-over’ of government and advocating leadership by Nigeria’s youth, so do we have gangs of youth mounting the soapbox to rant and state candidly that, Nigeria is unripe for a youthful leader and youth-driven political platform.

    Some interesting character recently advised that rather than start a youth movement, the Nigerian youth should stage a hostile take-over of existing political parties – I wonder how the youth are expected to review and overhaul the cancerous bulk of existing parties’ predatory ‘philosophies.’ Too many of such arguments are brilliantly put together and published across the mainstream and new media by beneficiaries of the nation’s corrupt structures.

    Having acquired some wealth via patronage of the corrupt ruling class, they desperately model their existence after the vulgar lives and guilty pleasures of the same ruling class they once vented and spat at. Who cares how they made money or attained acclaim? Ki ‘won’ sa ti lowo as the folk artiste, 9ice, would say.

    This leaves us in dilemma. How do we identify youth by whose exploits and honest exertions Nigeria may progress and attain freedom from the predatory ruling class? This is conundrum for other fora but this minute, I charge you to chant ‘Amen’ with the passion you put in the ‘Ice Bucket Challenge,’ “Wehdonesir Challenge’ and so on…

     

    The citizens’ heartfelt prayer

    Eledumare o! The One who is never deceived by the furor of our hastily conceived citizens’ protests on Facebook, Twitter and the streets of Lagos and Abuja; the One who is never perturbed by the duplicity of our revolutionary slogans and feeble mass actions, our backs are no longer against the wall, we are crawling into the wall like irritating geckos.

    Our accidental revolutionaries, labour leaders and columnists of note are quietly eating up their words in the wake of ‘crucial’ meetings with the ruling class. They tell us to ditch the placards and save our chants till more auspicious hour. Whispers of currency smother our rant and revolutionary cry. At the end, everything remains the same. Our fates are bent and broken according to the whims of our predatory ruling class.

    Thus we seek the comfort of your infinite mercies against the scourge of merciless leaders and duplicitous, self-serving rights activists. We pray that you repay our leaders and their ‘influencers’ back in their own kobo. Dear Author and Finisher of faith, please rewrite our pitiful fates as the Christians pray. And even though “The pen has been lifted” as the Muslims say, kindly rework our fates as you do to your most favoured faithful.

    If our leaders are truly on the right path…if truly, they lead honestly and with unpretentious fear of You in their hearts, treat them the way you would treat your most favoured among humankind. However, if they lead us with disdain and deceit in their hearts, treat them the way you treated Abu Ashram and the Abyssinians when they rose against Mecca.

    Afflict their mansions to tear down the comfort they build to our discomfort. Upset their bellies and purge them of the provisions they gorge like gluttons. As we spend our finest moments in darkness, make their access to light a luxury of the past. Reorder their fates that they too may go to sleep and rise in everlasting darkness.

    Make their wives hiss and fret for want of fresh air like our wives do. Make their kids and grandkids flail and choke in the grasp of unforgiving heatstroke, like peasant kids do. Bless them with noontime heat and bedtime heat even in the rains. And every time they seek from you the mercy they fail to accord us, treat their prayers the way you would, the wantonness of the gluttonous and accursed. Make their prayer points and praise-worship trail off in confusion. Smite their patronising prophets till they become not much in sight.

    They claim that money they save from anticorruption campaign and fuel subsidy removal would be used to improve infrastructure, agriculture and health sectors; if they fail to live up to their words, make their kids expire to indecipherable sickness and malnutrition right before their eyes, like peasant kids dying in agrarian communities for lack of infrastructure, balanced diet and good primary health care.

    Deny their trophy wives and newborns of oxygen and the best medical care as they deny kids of poor folk breathing their last, while their mothers are still ‘pushing,’ in hospital labour rooms and corridors of death, nationwide.

    Bless their kids with gifts of patricide and mindless violence like they do to our jobless youth for political gains, every day. Turn their swimming pools to raging deeps to drown their progeny and trophy wives, like our clogged waterways do for lack of government intervention.

    Subject their lives and those of their loved ones to the elements of bad roads as they do to us. Blind their pilots’ to the safest course every time they flee our land for overseas medical checkup. Make their planes plummet to crash on humid rocks and plunge in the sea, as our beloved’s in the throes of bird-strike, and our dreams in the face of stillbirth.

    Let them not enjoy the fruits of their labour. Make their Ivy League educated wards eternal sources of their everlasting sadness. Make them the bad harvest of their inordinate lust for wealth at our expense. Despite their wealth, afflict them with the poverty of good health, peace and contentment. And for every one of them condemning this piece, we pray: “Faja’alahum ka’asfin m ma” kulin.” Amin.

  • We are all karma’s ‘bitches’

    Karma is our open secret. In Nigeria, it is our sacred, secret space ignored in plain sight. It becomes our temenos or ritual precinct of reward and comeuppance. In this divine, marked-off terrain, the moral code of the universe operates at its darkest and most mechanical – there are no emotive shingles of pardon or persuasion, just causes and effects, actions and consequences.

    In 1932, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget found that by the age of 6, children begin to believe that bad things that happen to them are punishments for bad things they have done. The Nigerian society however, fights futilely to suspend the karmic laws of cause and effect, insulating individuals from the injurious effects of vice and poor judgment. Local gender activists, like their European and American role models, abandon more progressive causes to pervert birth control and abortion in duplicitous bid to detach sex from its natural results or consequences. Politics is equally rigged to reward greed, bestiality, indolence, illegitimacy and so on.

    Lest we forget the pervasive political and economic crisis bedeviling the country. The nation’s woes originate from her moral lapses. Endemic poverty, substandard healthcare and education, ethnic and religious bigotry, bribery and other forms of corruption manifest by the society’s poverty of morals and humane ethics.

    Hence those guilty of corruption escape the consequences of their wrongdoing in connivance with a bland, treacherous government. The karmic consequences of this anomaly are of course, better imagined – think Dasukigate, Mainagate, Diezanigate and so on. Until recently, there was no punishment for the wicked and no deterrence for the corrupt. On President Goodluck Jonathan’s watch, Nigeria was pilfered silly. The country was persistently sodomized and defiled by rampaging hordes of moral perverts. There was no good or evil. The cult of moral grayness bloomed on Jonathan’s watch. Thus our karmic reality of chronic indebtedness and bankruptcy.

    Enter Muhammadu Buhari, incumbent president and leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Buhari suffers the flipside of karma – from his ascension to power and ouster by military coup in the 1980s, to his recent emergence as democratic president, the retired General from Daura is widely appreciated and denounced along bigoted shoals of ethnic and religious extremists. Base sentimentality and impoverished logic fostered by the ruling class and espoused by segments of the citizenry, afflict President Buhari and his bungling cabinet.

    In the presidential cabinet, subtle cues abound, establishing the workings of unforgiving karma.

    We have ministers whose appointments were hotly debated and questioned on basis of their shameful antecedents either as governors, commissioners and other capacities in public and private sectors. Two years after their appointment into the presidential cabinet, these ministers can only manage a hobble along the clogged, swampy corridors of the APC’s politics of “Change.”

    In Buhari’s cabinet, we have fabled genii asphyxiating in the stifling grip of intellectual squalor and the grotesque, institutionalised corruption plaguing the country. Nothing works. Contemporary political legend contend that some of the ministers are victims of hubris and karmic forces trailing their emergence through vile, subterranean tactics. President Buhari’s cabinet members in a nutshell, constitute impediments to his success – his personal and administrative inadequacies notwithstanding, if he has a formidable team, his shortcomings as an administrator and leader wouldn’t be so bothersome.

    Lest we forget the country’s Eighth National Assembly and its lack of character. Lawmakers in the country’s upper and lower legislative chambers currently constitute a great, shameful burden to national purse and pride. But groupies of the ruling class would have none of that. Left to them, their cronies and benefactors in the current administration can do no wrong. The absence of a critical electorate thus encourages the ruling class to persist in maladministration.

    In the karmic scheme of things, not only are the corrupt saved from their just desserts, the worthy and true are punished for their uprightness and industry through unjustly burdensome levels of maladministration, taxation and bureaucratic ineptitude.

    In the ensuing moral sepsis, the current ruling class treats equality as a moral baseline even as it establishes prosperity and poverty as fortunate and unfortunate draws in Nigeria’s cosmic lottery. Thus public office metamorphoses to moral insult and government officials make concerted efforts daily, to subvert the law of karma.

    The most prescient portrait of the Nigerian character and our ultimate fate as a nation however, resonates Hedges’ apt commentary on Herman Melville’s allegorical portrayal about the American character in his literary classic, “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia, argues Hedges.

    In truth, Nigeria is likable to the fictional ship, the Pequod. The ship’s crew is a mixture of races and creeds which is reflective of Nigeria’s heterogeneous society. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like the Nigerian society’s mad dash for wealth, assures the Pequod’s destruction.

    While Ahab and his crew eventually gained awareness of their imminent doom, very few Nigerians appreciate from experience that our prevalent culture of acquisition, fostered by insatiable greed and based on cutthroat politics, corporate profit and limitless devastation of farmlands by oil exploration accelerates doom.

    Nigeria, like the Pequod’s crew, rationalizes madness, scorns prudence and bows slavishly before hedonism and greed. The society yields to the seductive illusion of unbounded luxury, wanton idolatry, limitless power and acclaim. Thus the country unfurls to degenerate forces and systems of death.

    Those who foresee the impending doom lack the fortitude to rebel. Thus moral cowardice makes hostages of all. This shouldn’t encourage Buhari and his ruling class to scorn the subtle nudge of tact. History offers timeless lessons in the fate of Napolean, Hitler, Stalin, Joseph Mobotu (Mobutu Sese Seko), Saddam Hussein to mention a few. These men rose to lead with positive intentions. In time, they did good but later got drunk with power, losing touch with reality, causing misery for many with their own fate sealed in the Karma of their actions. Moby Dick eventually rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one.  Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark. We are all karma’s ‘bitches.’

  • Broken toys without batteries

    As you read, youths with key-pad confidence are pounding away on their mobile phones, iPads and computers; they are mouthing off and tormenting virtual space with insolent gibberish, over centrist candidate, Emmanuel Macron’s victory at France’s presidential election. Macron is just 39 years of age and predictably, Nigerian youth are screaming: “If he can, yes we can!”

    Again, Nigerian youths are mired in delusions of grandeur. They overestimate their worth. Whether rich or poor, educated or illiterate, the Nigerian youth becomes the emptiness that approximates silence, for lack of will and unimpeachable values. The impoverished youth flaunts the personality of a paper cup and rich spoilt brats behave true to type, they personify the pop that empty drums make amid burning dump – no doubt, an Ivy League education without ethics makes a trust fund ‘baby’ an expensive toy without batteries. Substandard education makes the middling youth even worse; it moulds him into a broken toy without appeal. Take a look at contemporary youth of rich and poor divides.  They are disposable and yet enjoy patronage by the ones Wole Soyinka eloquently described as the wasted generation.

    The Nigerian youth possesses the personality of a paper cup. This is because like paper cups, they are used to being used and disposed by the predatory ruling class. Yet whatever callousness they are forced to endure, the ruling class should not be blamed They shall not be blamed, for we made ourselves unbidden offering on the altar of vultures

    The Nigerian youth becomes his own karma.

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

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

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

    The Hausa youth believes he has inalienable right to statutorily and heavenly accorded rights to reign supreme and lord it over his peers irrespective of merit considerations. And the Yoruba youth, goaded by sentiments of his perceived higher wisdom, towering depth in diplomacy, culture and politics believes that he is entitled to the best the country has to offer, on a platter of gold.

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

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

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

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

    We identify all that is wrong with our society but we are never specific about what must be done to correct them. It is relatively easy to join a picket line and tirelessly castigate our elders and ruling class for everything that is wrong with our lives but these actions, while they demonstrate frustration, in some instances even heroism, deal generally with symptoms of· our problems and not the solutions. All the picket lines in the world will not resolve ills of fraudulent and impatient youth, perverted values, greed, racism, disillusionment with study and substandard education.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Nigerian youth betrays self. Poverty and job insecurity are cited as reasons for the betrayal; true, the society betrays the youth by the hour but it’s about time we stopped repaying perfidy with perfidy. It’s about time we evolved dependable and practicable means of creating and instituting a leadership and culture of citizenship we could trust.

    Only then can we evolve as heroes of truth and our dream world. How?

  • Lagos is my success story and I am a journalist (2)

    It is not ‘just a billboard’ if it suggests subliminal bias to impressionable minors. It is not ‘a harmless campaign’ if it corrupts the thinking of the youth. Thus every element of the ‘Lagos is my success story’ media campaign manifests as a ritual of provocation; a rite of mediocrity, scorched by prejudice and shackled to ignorance.

    The grandeur of the campaign subsists in its classification of role models; Lagos names its finest and celebrates them. But role models, like mentors, should be exemplars of excellence, ethics and unimpeachable character.

    Thus of hip hop crooner, Olamide Adedeji a.k.a Baado and Sunday Punch Editor, Toyosi Ogunseye, who would Governor Ambode request to mentor his teenage child? Of Fuji maestro, Wasiu Alabi a.k.a Pasuma Wonder and Prof. Sophie Oluwole, the UNILAG academic working with various African countries to have indigenous African knowledge systems included in schools’ curriculum, who would Ambode suggest as mentor to his daughter?

    Of hip hop singer, Banky W and Ajanaku Babatunde, a staff of Ojota Senior Secondary School, who won the Best Teacher Award in the Lagos Secondary Schools Category recently, who would Ambode suggest as mentor to his son?

    As Lagos celebrates its 50th anniversary, it excludes teachers and journalists from its narrative out of spite – latent spite perhaps. The spiteful dialectic of the incumbent State government is sweepingly comprehensive and accurately projects the fallacies and notions of the ruling class about the worth and contributions of educators and journalists to the statehood.

    Beneath this curious malice, an uglier message resonates: “Journalists and teachers are worthless in Lagos.” Thus Governor Akinwumi Ambode and his team once again, amplify his predecessor’s barbed love and veiled loathing for teachers and journalists.

    True, Lagos announces the best teacher in the State and awards a prize to the recipient often in a drab ceremony. But the latter’s exploits are deliberately underplayed and hidden in plain sight.

    While Lagos celebrates marketers of filth, sex scandals, violence and corruption – alongside very few remarkable citizens – as the State’s pride, at its 50th anniversary, the State deliberately ignores the achievements of the moral, devoted, sterling men and women by whose exploits and contributions the likes of Governor Ambode and his team became the ‘titans’ they claim to be today.

    Teachers moulded Ambode and his team into the men and women they have become today. And I am sure the incumbent government remembers how it used journalists to achieve its dream of emerging as Lagos’ new ruling class – a sad reality this writer continually objects to.

    Yet Lagos violently silences the excellent achievements of exceptional teachers in the State, the same way it stifles the attainments and value of journalists to Lagos. This is the juncture at which the governor’s lackeys would scoff and exhume ‘revelations’ and ‘realities’ of the media’s dirty secrets. Thus it won’t be surprising to hear them prattle about the level of corruption and incompetence of journalists and the Nigerian media. It’s sadder to note that their argument could be true, in most part.

    This doesn’t mean that all journalists are corrupt. Not every journalist can be tarred with the brush of incompetence and corruption. Perhaps the Lagos government has suffered unsavourable experiences by journalists thus its undisguised disdain for them.

    But shall we as journalists cum citizenry of the State also condemn the Lagos government as a coven of brutes and looters of public fund simply because of tragic experiences with previous governments?

    Would it be appropriate to label Governor Ambode as irredeemably corrupt, incompetent and vicious, simply because most incumbent and past public officers have been established so? Would it be logical to infer that his ongoing development drive is a ruse, a coordinated scheme to con the electorate and earn their mandate for a second term simply because most governors are known to do that? Would it be alright to tar the ‘indefatigable governor’ with the brush of the pseudo progressive and performer simply because his predecessor and peers have established themselves so? If it would be wrong to imagine such of Governor Ambode, it is likewise unforgivable to consider all journalists corrupt and ‘lap dogs’ of the ruling class, simply because of a few or many ‘bad eggs.’

    I do not care what manner of relationship the State nurtures and sustains with its ‘friendly journalists’ and ‘media managers’ in the State; I speak for the youth. I speak for the diligent men and women pulling all stops to foster development by engaging the citizenry and ruling class via progressive, honest, public service journalism.

    It is unclear what manner of due process birthed the ‘Lagos is my success story’ media contract/jamboree but the manner of execution of the campaign, from the trashy bill boards used to its horrid subliminal messages, establish the mediocrity, shallowness and prejudice of the team in charge.

    Lagos emphatically markets hip hop artistes to the youth as role models, irrespective of their true nature. Olamide for instance, is a very talented and brilliant artiste – no doubt – but he continually preens about people wanting to kill him in almost every music track. He celebrates promiscuity, consequence-free violence and sex in lewd lyrics and expressive beats. And you could really dance to it.

    Toyosi on the other hand, is an investigative journalist whose work has enriched the human condition in Lagos teaching hospitals, industrial complexes, socioeconomic and security sectors. It is only in Lagos government’s middling and misshapen universe that a character like Olamide would command greater recognition and respect than Sunday Punch Editor, Toyosi Ogunseye, and The Cable’s former Editor, Fisayo Soyombo, among others.

    Sunday Punch’s Toyosi has won the CNN/Multichoice African Journalist of the Year Award, back to back, among several local and international media excellence awards. Her stories, like celebrated investigative journalists, Emmanuel Maya’s and Fisayo Soyombo’s depict and shed light on the corruption of the human condition and likely solutions to societal maladies.

    These are men and women of uncommon valour and devotion to the pursuit of public good and they are celebrated world over for their exploits.  Lest we forget the very few but rare breed of honourable senior editors, journalists and multiple merit award-winners at Nigeria’s major newspapers.

    These journalists and their ilk expose the shamelessness, incompetence and greed of public officers and so-called ‘corporate titans.’ They are serial award winners for public service journalism that any nation would be proud of. But the Lagos government scorns their achievements.

    Perhaps if Toyosi, Soyombo and colleagues were children of a governor, corporate titan or friend of the incumbent government, they would be celebrated as great role models and ambassadors of Lagos.

    Welcome to Lagos, the State that gleefully hosted Kim Kardashian in celebration of perverse celebrity in curious circumstances. This is Lagos, where foreign footballers, artistes and politicians with expiry dates are canonised while the timeless contributions, citizenship and excellence of journalists and teachers are ignored, simply because they have got no ‘swagger.’

    Yeah, Lagos values ‘swagger’ over merit. It celebrates brilliance only when it is garnished with the base and corrupt, atrocious ego and strut.

    However, some of  the persons celebrated in  the ‘Lagos at 50’ media campaign are indeed deserving of recognition. They are men and women of merit and remarkable citizenship. You  could identify them as your politics and personal ethics dictate.

    Ambode’s ‘Lagos is my success story’ for all its glamour and ingenuity, symbolises the cultural shift of Lagos from disciplined enterprise, humaneness and morality to unbridled hedonism. It markets celebrity to the youth as the zenith of ambition and human endeavour. It is the stuff dreams are maimed by.

     

  • Lagos is my success story and I am a journalist (1)

    Lagos despises journalists and teachers, it would seem. The Lagos government has no regard for the educator and pressman. In the estimation of the incumbent government for instance, journalists and teachers belong to the invisible divide, the negligible integers loitering at the foot of the totem pole, in the State’s warped categorisation of ‘eminent’ citizenry.

    This among other reasons, explains the incumbent government’s brazen disregard for teachers and journalists, in its showy ‘Lagos is my success story,’ media blitz.

    Of course, the media team in charge of the project will rant and rave. They will claim that it is impossible to represent every interest in the ongoing media campaign launched by the State in commemoration of Lagos’ 50th anniversary. They will dismiss this as yet another outburst from a journalist with ‘hidden agenda’ against Mr. Ambode. That’s understandable, they need to justify the salaries they earn – whether they deserve it or not.

    However, this writer has no agenda against Ambode. In fact, the incumbent governor attracts applause as he unfurls as a humane and decisive administrator – if only he would sustain the pace at which he seeks to improve infrastructure, security and the economic growth of the state.

    Beneath trifling considerations about the media campaign for the State’s 50th anniversary, ugly truths resonate in shrill notes. Funke Akindele, actress; Fuji artiste, Wasiu Alabi (Pasuma Wonder), hip hop artistes, Bankole Wellington (Banky W) Tuface Idibia and Olamide are celebrated as worthy role models and ambassadors of Lagos State.

    That these characters are celebrated alongside elderly folk of various callings, indicate that the State government nurtures a robust fascination with the youth and a hankering to connect positively with the youth divide. This is impressive even in the face of the underlying ugliness that informed the State government’s choice of subjects for the campaign.

    Akindele, Alabi Pasuma, Banky W, Tuface Idibia and Olamide are artistes and celebrities; like Folorunsho Alakija, Michael Otedola and other elderly subjects used for the campaign, they are widely adjudged to be rich, famous, poster icons for several youths.

    Governor Ambode and his team perpetuate the emphatic message to impressionable youth: “Only celebrity artistes, billionaire businessmen and politicians are recognised as role models by Lagos State. They are the only ones worth celebrating by Lagos.”

    Lest we forget the random pictures of the artisan and market woman used without emphasis in the campaign; the latter will undoubtedly be referenced by apologists of the shoddy and quite shady campaign.

    The use of the random artisan and trader alongside Lagos government’s preferred ambassadors is instructive. The artisan and market woman represent the highly populated divide of have-nots and residents of Lagos suburbs and backwaters. They are of the segment that the State government and politicians perpetually exploit to get votes and win elections via an insidious culture of tokenism and sound bite politics.

    The artistes including Olamide, Banky W, Funke Akindele and Tuface Idibia are of the disposable ‘muscle’ divide; they represent the agents often deployed by the State government and political class to achieve influence with the electorate. The Lagos government, like governments world over, persistently make use of celebrity artistes to influence the electorate and sway votes to advantage. They understand that these artistes enjoy large following among the citizenry hence they persistently tap into and cash in on the power of their celebrity.

    Whether the subjects used in the campaign are worthy role models and true ambassadors of the soul and essence of Lagos is yet another subject fit for future discourse. This brings us to Governor Ambode and his team’s exclusion of journalists and teachers from the campaign. I choose to highlight the State’s exclusion of educators and pressmen from the campaign given the crucial roles they play in the development of the State.

    Journalists and teachers represent the State’s middle class. Their contributions to nationhood are immense: teachers are nurturer of society and journalists are its conscience and custodians of morality. But like policemen and soldiers, among others, they are persistently undervalued and vilified. This explains why retired teachers are never treated well by the State.

    Even in Lagos, retiree teachers are denied their gratuity and many of them still die wretchedly, of hunger and lack. At their death, their family members are made to jump through hoops in order to receive the retirement benefits the deceased were denied in their lifetime.

    We have great teachers; I categorically refer to primary and secondary school teachers in Lagos yet none of them was deemed worthy of celebration as Lagos clocks 50. I hope Ambode’s aides won’t start making noise about how they celebrate the best teachers across the state’s district. This piece condemns the incumbent government’s neglect of the teachers as it celebrates Lagos’ most prized ambassadors, as the State clocks 50.

    That journalists are also neglected however, comes as no surprise. This is the juncture Ambode’s men would scream: ‘Soni Irabor is a journalist. He was included!’ Good for Mr. Irabor. It’s worth celebrating that he was included. But we also have journalists that have won over 10 to 25 local and international awards for media excellence, for stories written about developmental issues affecting Lagos and various parts of the country and even Africa.

    They include Emmanuel Maya, Toyosi Ogunseye, Adekunle Yusuf, Ajibola Hamza, Muyiwa Lucas, Fisayo Soyombo, to mention a few. These journalists are in their youth, like the artistes featured by Ambode’s team but they are deliberately ignored. They are not worth celebrating, according to Governor Ambode and his team.

    Nonetheless, the story of Lagos will never be complete without acknowledging the contributions of past and present journalists and teachers. These esteemed segments of the citizenry are however, overlooked and their relevance severely underplayed by the incumbent government, like its predecessors. This is why no teacher and journalist are represented in the State’s 50th anniversary media campaign.

    This loathing for educators and pressmen can hardly be understood even as it continues to unravel. Thanks to teachers, education reflects in Gov. Ambode. Great thanks to Edumare and his teachers, he is gradually becoming a source of pride to Lagos and Nigeria perhaps. Part of the glory should definitely be given to his parents and the governor himself as it requires a great deal of discipline and adherence to norms for a man to evolve like Ambode.

    Once again, it’s worth celebrating that Lagos now has a governor who believes in fostering development at the grassroots. Ambode determinedly institutes development in areas erstwhile neglected by his predecessor, Babatunde Fashola. This no doubt indicates that somewhere within Ambode’s bulk subsists appreciable and inspiring humaneness, foresight and lust for excellence.

    The governor will do well to ensure that retirees and pensioners in the State receive their benefits in the first six months into their retirement. Retired teachers do not get paid in time. They have to wait for several years before they receive their benefits from the state. Many have died without receiving their benefits.

  • In the future of our dreams…

    Everybody has an opinion on Muhammadu Buhari. Too many folk argue for and against the National Assembly, the corrupt judiciary and anti-corruption campaign. Add these to the antics of juvenile lawmakers, crooked attorneys, a shady populace and moral duplicity of the executive and you have a perfect condiment for a soap box tirade.

    But I would be insulting good reason by burning depth and wit on such worthless issues and characters. I would rather speak to the breed on whose watch Nigeria may resurrect and survive. I speak of the Nigerian youth. I speak of you and me.

    Beneath our passionate cry for change subsists a spinelessness that ornaments even the deserter with the valor of knights, thousands of miles from the scenes of combat and the valiant’s death. We have failed to make a response ideal to our cause. We have failed to display courage necessary to our survival and adequate to our time.

    It’s every man for himself. The successful journalist, doctor, banker, engineer, police officer to mention a few, do not care about anything and anybody else. It’s what Evelyn Waugh describes as the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich. Hence the desperation of the Nigerian youth to get rich, within the bounds of that dear old “wisdom” and thought process that infinitely manifests as foolishness.

    Such is the mentality of several youths, regrettably lacking in guts and flimsy in substance. Our utterances persistently echo as discontent, insignificant as the spores of fungi yet impinged on the base surfaces of our minds. It’s shameful to see what cowardly lot we have become.

    We dream of the future and talk of change within the limits of our intelligence, forgetting that the world of such future that we anticipate, will foster a more demanding struggle against the limits of our intelligence; not a cozy rose bed in which we can lie down to be waited upon by a more compliant fate and forgiving time.

    Our cries are for a historic revolution, bloody or not. Yet our thoughts pander between the dangers of revolt and the inherent benefits in accepting the status quo in a prudent act of self-preservation. Hence we revolt by impotent words and a mad, desperate dash for wealth or what we’ve learnt to coin as our share of the Nigerian dream.

    This is our Nigerian dream: a lush, breathtaking future that de-emphasises toil and accords our vanities a caressing glance. In the future of our dreams, we hope to keep strings of constantly increasing bank accounts at home and abroad. We hope to drive the best cars, live in palatial mansions in posh neighbourhoods. We hope to own and enjoy the most lucrative businesses.

    In the future of our dreams, everything would work out just fine. Injustice and iniquity will persist. Public officers won’t be accountable to the electorate. Elections won’t be fair and free of fraud and other irregularities. Public service will fluorish by the whim of a criminal civil service.

    In the future of our dreams, we shall have more beautifully planned cities in replacement of our slums. We will bury the poor in the backwaters and project the rich and their gated communities to lure the world to the Nigerian dream.

    In the future of our dreams, more liberal journalists, writers, musicians, artistes shall be enslaved to deep pocket politicians and criminal masterminds.

    In pursuit of our dream future, we coalesce into riotous camps of retrograde youths, offering ourselves as willing tools to every devious politician, godfather and criminal mastermind with deep pocket and a destructive plan.

    Every youth seeks the easy shortcut to the future of his dreams. Collectively the sum of our dreams manifest as the worst human expression of  vanity, civilization and desire. We do not do much to improve our plight. This is why it is easy for most of us to ignore the human social crisis in Nigeria’s northeast while they obsess about Big Brother Nigeria’s reality of lust and ill bliss.  There is no conscious effort to mobilize ourselves for the good of our kind.

    Most youth pressure groups are a sham. Individually, members hustle to project themselves as the leaders of thought and drivers of hope of this generation. I speak of the self-styled “youth leaders,” “advocacy gurus,” “evangelists” and “mentors” endlessly seeking local and international merit awards, presidential tea sessions and handshakes for leadership and inspiration they are yet to offer – and are infinitely handicapped to offer.

    This shameful lot refuse to contribute their quota to the pursuit and achievement of the collective good. Yet they desperately apply for international and local funding, for their shady schemes and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Too many of them are muscles and agents of Nigeria’s crooked ruling class.

    Too many youth fall for their ruse thus indulging in unprecedented self-deception. The solutions we project are ill-suited for our problems. We conveniently apply the balm to our chests, while our hearts clog with lust for unearned victuals and ill-gotten wealth.

    Eventually our deceitfulness and greed roost with devastating consequences in our lives. Little wonder we have Boko Haram, Niger Delta militants, kidnappers, Yahoo Boys, and every other corrupt youth scattered across our tribes, workplaces and pressure groups to the detriment of all and the Nigerian dream.

    But rather than speak as much truth to ourselves as we love to speak to power, we conveniently ignore our dread for the truth in relation to our kind. The impact of our dishonesty extend far beyond our travails as you read. It gets scarier knowing we shall undoubtedly pay for our duplicity whether we like it or not as we are doing now.

    The post oil subsidy removal palliative cash has crashed from its fabled N1.3 trillion to N426 billion and then nothing. Thus our subsidy removal protests were in vain. The youths that died have died in vain. President Jonathan and company got away with fraud. Buhari and company are getting away with nepotism and more politically-correct racket.

    Shall we continue to do nothing about it? This is the minute we dismount the soap boxes in our living rooms, bars and offices to launch a decisive protest. This is the moment we act. The incumbent ruling class were done with us on March 28, 2015, immediately the new ruling party was announced. They will not remember us until election time. Let us begin to forget them.

    Is it so hard to evolve a party for the Nigerian youth?

     

    •To be continued