The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Beyond lip service

    Someday, death will become something more than an unexplainable mystery to the incumbent ruling class. Every public officer will die; their family members too. Despite their inhumanity, they are human after all. They breathe and bleed just like we do. At their demise, they shall discover what manner of life they deserve in the afterlife. They shall find that money and rank they covet are useless after the last howl had fallen silent, at their funeral. They shall learn that currency-activated prayers their clerics hoist above them will serve like raincoats under a blitz of cannon balls, at the end.

    In the wake of their demise, how shall they be remembered? How do we remember men who summon our joys to harness it with a sable bind? Shall we remember them with rage and rant? Shall we wish they burn in the earth, like splinters of wood fed into the hearth to spite the fire? Shall we wish that they lie in plagued repose low down with the worm and ant?

    How shall we be remembered? How shall posterity remember the ones who have perfected the art of letting their voices trail off in confusion at decision time? What will our children think of our desperation to keep the worst of our kind in power? What pantheons or dungeons shall we inhabit in the annals of Nigerian citizenship?

    The troubles of Nigeria are unwieldy like a storm. By our perversions, we impregnate and corrupt a history and civilization 56-years old. Great evil lies in you and me, and by our perpetuation of it, we make history the way of the diabolic, that decapitated his newborn to satisfy his hunger pangs. Too many threads of heedlessness, woven of gluttony and lust, of racism and fear, inequality and blind hate of the stranger, form in our souls, a thick network.

    Yesterday, we suffered violence and bloodshed by militants in our creeks, down in the Delta. Today, we suffer violence and bloodshed by Boko Haram and Niger Delta Avengers.

    Every day, we suffer greater violence and bloodbath by murderous and incompetent ruling class. The most remarkable characteristic of the Nigerian ruling class, according to Prof. Itse Sagay, “is its complete and total insensitivity to the public outcry and outrage over the percentage of our resources that the members appropriate to themselves for their own consumption.”

    Sagay, in his lecture on ‘Good Governance and Enforcement of Law and Order’ at the Nigerian Institute of Management’s 2013 Management Day, lamented that while Nigerian Senators and House of Representative members earn $1.7m and $1.4m respectively per annum, American Senators and British parliamentarians earn 174, 000 and £65,738 respectively per annum.

    Yet income per capita for the US and UK is $46,350 and $35,468, respectively, while that of Nigeria is $2,248. The figure have grown more outrageous over time. Simply put, Nigerian legislators pay themselves the highest salaries of all legislators in the world, even though their country is amongst the least developed in the whole world.

    More worrisome is the government’s inequitable distribution of benefits and punishments meted out to people from different classes and professions, along with the asymmetrical distribution of respect and dignity. Eventually, you get the feeling that some people don’t count and never expected to count in the Nigerian State.

    In the wake of violence and bloodshed by successive terrorist groups, mostly constituted by youths, in the country, Mr. President, legislators and governors simmer in frustration and moral outrage. Jumping on to the bandwagon of these elected representatives’ deceitfulness and officialese, monarchs, clerics, newspaper columnists and other bastions of society pay lip service to the degeneration of the Nigerian youth and State.

    It is hardly astonishing that the government and cohorts resort to explanations of criminality, a feral underclass, and dysfunctional parenting. These are easier explanations for which the government does not need to accept responsibility. However, a careful assessment of the situation reveals that a greater percentage of the culprits are motivated by poverty, illiteracy, dysfunctional parenting, unemployment and inequality induced by unfair government policies, insensitivity and oppression by the ruling class.

    But such cruelties foisted on us by the most insidious ruling class, do not justify the descent of the Nigerian youth into barbarism or bloodthirstiness of any kind – but we choose to be savages anyway. Insensitivity and bloodlust enjoy sweet repose in the psyche of the Nigerian youth thus habituating them to all manners of savagery and triviality.

    Hence it wasn’t surprising to see the youth, the media and the general public descend on Shema Obafaye, former Lagos State Commandant of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defense Corps (NSCDC) as violently as a mugger, as frighteningly as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man, over his gaffe when he featured as a guest on a breakfast show on Lagos-based private television, Channels Television.

    For Obafaye’s “My oga at the top” slip-up and his inability to accurately state his organization’s internet address, he became an object of nationwide ridicule. Footage of his blunder went viral on the social media making him an object of malicious jokes and caricature on Facebook, Twitter, Blackberry Messenger, T-shirts, and rascally musical medley by local disc jockeys (DJs).

    It was one gaffe that Nigerian youths particularly, couldn’t forgive; consequently, branded mugs, face-caps and T-shirts with the inscription: “My oga at the top!” were produced and sold at a profit in merriment over Obafaye’s gaffe.

    Several celebrities cashed in on the madness and donned the branded T-shirts to major public events in pitiful desperation to replenish their dwindling acclaim. A smart movie producer attempted to cash in too on the national ridicule of a man and public servant while it lasted by hastily putting together and releasing a film titled, “My oga at the top.”

    Nobody cared what sorrow or misery burdened Obafaye’s heart nor did anyone pause to imagine what shame and disillusionment his wife and kids are forced to relive and suffer daily long after the mockery had quieted to a murmur.

    If the Nigerian citizenry, the youth particularly, could be so coordinated and methodical in their perpetration of such “good-natured” ridicule and hate, would it not do Nigeria immense good to have us unite in more coordinated and disciplined revolt against the oppression and cruelties of the incumbent ruling class?

    We are past the novelty of coordinated mockery and moral outrage. The most powerful indignation we could express exceeds the pages of acerbic columns and social media; it subsists in latent courage and will we haven’t yet summoned the courage to express.

    Until we mature in grace and learn to apply ourselves to passionate pursuits for the love of the good, our pains shall run amok where we seek ease and bliss, always. It’s a matter of choice; to which system of thought should we commit our lives to? Is there anything in our norms worth saving? Shall we define the Nigerian dream in the language of humanity? Shall we begin to officiate for posterity’s sake? Shall we begin to affect the honesty and decency to which we pay lip service? Shall we choose the right candidates and vote them in at election time come 2019?

    It’s about time we refined the subtleties that make the Nigerian dream the fantasy of thieves, looters and blinkered murderers.

  • Youth like papercups (1)

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

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

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

    It is even more disheartening to see us adopt as a favourite past time, the pillorying of our elders and the rapacious ruling class. Many a Nigerian youth love to prophesy the worst about our fatherland thus it is never surprising to hear the average 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 things/bounties. He believes Nigeria is skewed to work against him and fellow Igbo because his peers from other ethnic groups are wary of his towering acumen, industry, courage and political savvy. The Hausa youth believes he has inalienable right to statutorily and heavenly accorded rights to reign supreme and lord it over his peers irrespective of merit. And the Yoruba youth, goaded by sentiments of his higher wisdom, towering depth in diplomacy, culture and politics believes that he is entitled to the best the country has to offer, on a platter of gold.

    Every youth desperately perpetuates his sense of victimhood and entitlement. The idea is to keep whining until he gets lucky and corners 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 an 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 attempts to be radical; eventually they resonate too feebly as a kind of rudderless activism.

    We identify all that is wrong with our society but we are never specific about what must be done to correct them. It is 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.

    It shouldn’t hurt to evolve faith and be steadfast in it. If we could discard our sentiments about the lifestyle of Tuface Idibia, we would find in the musician some worthy anecdote about the quality of faith. Tuface Idibia believed in his dream of stardom. And he relentlessly pursued it through the stark streets of Festac, the wilderness of hunger spasms and institutional adversities to become whoever he is and whatever he is today. If I had used Soyinka, or Late Babatunde Jose, many would claim they grew up when Nigeria neither smothered dreams nor murdered hope. Hence my choice of Idibia, the minion who managed to become a poster icon for generations of Nigeria’s music hopeful, despite the odds.

    Yet many would read this and consider it “Pollyannaish.” To this lot, any hearty lunge at hope or belief in a brighter tomorrow manifest as blind optimism and a pathetic attempt to be patriotic even while it’s absolutely idiotic to do so. They would love to see the nation ruin in order to justify their inordinate cynicism and yearnings about the pointlessness of the Nigerian dream. They continually affirm their ill will and prayers of doom for the nation by tirelessly projecting separation and insurmountable bleakness on the Nigerian state.

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

     

    • To be continued…

  • Kayode Fayemi…The devil’s in his details (1)

    The wound-like rawness of Kayode Fayemi’s words indicates that somewhere within his privileged bulk, a humane realist lurks. The Minister of Solid Minerals’ jarring speech to recent graduands of the University of Lagos is widely interpreted as a spectacle of conceit and insensitivity to Nigeria’s shortchanged, underprivileged youth. I disagree.

    Of course, the former Governor of Ekiti betrays insensitivity, sloppiness and entitlement mentality characteristic of Nigeria’s ruling class. But while this may pass as yet another intrusion of unfair generalisation or political stereotype in the estimation of Fayemi, he has done too little to establish himself as a deviant from Nigeria’s decadent political culture. This is understandable.

    Fayemi, despite his impressive academic and professional record, bathes in the slurry of Nigeria’s murky politics when need be, it would seem. For instance, in the political news feature, ‘Money and Violence Hobble Democracy in Nigeria,’ New York Times’ Lydia Polgreen, on November 24, 2006, portrayed Fayemi’s governorship aspiration thus: “Mr. Fayemi’s campaign treads the treacherous middle ground between the high road, on which pro-democracy advocates have traditionally marched directly to defeat, and the bruising, money-driven politics that dominate Nigeria’s electoral contests.

    “On a recent campaign swing, he handed out nearly N500,000, or $4,000, in a single day. He estimates that winning the election will cost him $4 million, a sum he has raised from allies and friends in Nigeria, as well as from his contacts in the West.

    “After one rally, as Mr. Fayemi tried to leave town, a fracas erupted among some youths who crowded around his car. A dozen young men began arguing with one of his aides and blocking the car. Apparently the campaign had given money for a local youth wing to a man no one could identify, and he had absconded with the cash. Mr. Fayemi would need to pay them again, the young men explained, surrounding his car as they pressed their case. Mr. Fayemi threw up his hands. “This is what we live with,” he said.

    The aide argued with the young men, but their mood darkened as the dispute stretched for several minutes. Finally, Mr. Fayemi relented. “Just pay them,” he said. The leader of the young men seized the stack of cash, carefully counting the notes in the glow of the car’s headlights: N10,000, or about $80. Once he confirmed the amount and nodded his assent, a cry went up.

    “Excellency, Excellency!” the young men shouted, using the honorific for governors, opening the cordon and allowing Mr. Fayemi’s car to pass through.

    “This is our politics,” Mr. Fayemi said, an edge of disgust in his voice. Such payoffs clearly make him uncomfortable, but he said he hoped that the ends would justify the means.

    “Money,” Mr. Fayemi said. “It is the language of Nigerian politics. As much as you want to get away from that, you also have to be mindful of those short-term things you must do.”

    Fayemi eventually became Governor of Ekiti State but Polgreen’s analysis of his personal ethics and political culture offer sullied portraits of his psyche. It symbolises his decadent flirtation with the youth and professed disdain for money-driven politics in one breadth. But this is certainly a discussion for another forum, another day.

    This minute, Fayemi may be applauded for his profound admonition to UNILAG graduates and Nigerian youth in general. In a lecture titled: ‘The Successor-Generation: Reflections on Values and Knowledge in Nation Building’ at the 2017 UNILAG Convocation Lecture in Lagos, Fayemi, an alumnus of the school said to graduands: “Don’t think you are entitled to a job, just because of your parents’ influence or what they have. Don’t think things would be all rosy because you graduated from UNILAG with good grades. Be prepared for surprises and disappointments because life is bound to hand you a couple. The only guarantees you have in this life is what you do for yourself with the grace God has bestowed on us all.

    “We need to get off our high horses, quit whining and start doing — for ourselves and for our country. If something angers you so much, instead of whining, think hard about possible solutions and do something about it.”

    The media, in reporting his speech however, sensationalised it, casting ambiguous headlines weaponised as click-baits on news portals and social media. The tenor of some headlines portrayed Fayemi as an unfeeling symbol of the incumbent ruling class. “Quit whining, nobody owes you anything” intones one such headline.

    Predictably, several Nigerians decided to shoot the messenger and ignore the message, thus committing a piteous form of ad hominem with juvenile relish and unabashed recklessness.

    Yes, Fayemi symbolises yet another hodge-podge of haughtiness and entitlement from Nigeria’s over-indulged ruling class but this hardly takes the depth out of his admonishment to the youth.

    Within the gamut of bitter criticism and scornful reactions to his speech, there is shamefully no true and absolute account of things except the reality and absolutism of the biased and duplicitous. In the flurry, no one is paying attention to Fayemi’s actual message.

    The Nigerian youth are indeed handicapped by piteous streaks of entitlement mentality. ‘But isn’t that the affliction of youth of all epochs?’ Some would argue; notwithstanding, Fayemi’s advise to the youth addresses their most bothersome issues.

    The youth truly need to quit whining and seize their destinies in their own hands. They can’t keep blaming government for their shortcomings and every inconvenience suffered by them while they do nothing to salvage the situation.

    Agreed, their travails cannot be divorced from the hackneyed excuses of inept leadership, policy failures, substandard education and unemployment, the youth owes it to themselves to better their lot often at progressive costs.

    It is painful to watch Fayemi’s ruling class exhibit unpardonable disconnect from the citizenry’s travails. They counsel perseverance while they dwell in luxury often acquired at the public’s expense. They send their children to school overseas to avoid the vagaries of Nigeria’s underfunded and substandard education sector while children born outside their bracket of privilege are condemned to a life of substandard scholarship, policy failure and neglect. It takes ingenuity and determination for the latter to make the most of the country’s disconcerting educational experience.

    Add this to a comatose health sector, insecurity, unemployment and parlous infrastructure and you have a perfect recipe for disillusionment. At the backdrop of this rot, the youth stew in crime, ignorance, low self esteem and corruption.

    The biggest misconception nurtured by contemporary youth is that a hero or heroine will someday emerge from thin air, to liberate them from the clutches of the oppressive ruling class. This lust for heroes and gods illustrates a fable. It is not of latent strength but disintegration. It reveals the weakness and shallowness of the Nigerian youth’s awfully preadolescent mind. It reiterates a very shrill cry for help that’s at once indolent, self-seeking and infantile.

    A jarring lack of progressive values and sense of self-worth further reduces the youth to easy marks to the predatory ruling class and suspicious revolutionaries. Fayemi aptly advocates self-reclamation, perseverance, thirst for knowledge and excellence. He reveals his ascent the ladder of success via devotion to scholarship and honest toil. He was never wrong to advocate a commitment to the collective good in pursuit of self-actualization.

    The youth should ignore spurious plots of his alleged tactlessness and insensitivity to their plight. There is no gainsaying Fayemi’s ruling class constitute Nigeria’s greatest albatross but will the youth adapt his ‘progressive’ blueprint to neuter him and his ilk? Their piteous sense of entitlement  and acute bigotry should yield to the influences of education, humaneness and culture.

  • Expensive faith

    Last year, bitterness was dressed up as a garland of flowers and handed to Goodluck Jonathan, piecemeal, calculatedly; till he got utterly swamped by its scent. Some dandy ‘priests’ sold him a

    triumphant tale of success at the March 28, 2015 presidential election. Their prophecies were convincing. They leapt from forked tongues with extraordinary spunk and fire, seducing the former president and ensnaring him to bogus plots that reality shut out at birth. The prophets lied. Jonathan lost the presidency to Muhammadu Buhari.

    Faith destroyed Goodluck Jonathan. Faith in spurious prophets to be precise. His hankering for unearned ‘grace’ and ‘glory’ ensnared him in a futile, mischievous plot, invented to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Goaded by flawed belief, the former president committed series of flawed actions that eventually showed him up as a pitiful hostage to lust and emissaries of mammon.

    At his defeat, Jonathan awakened to a rude shock: “The prophets lied.” While rumours of a ‘N7-billion-booty-for-heavenly-grace’ rent the air, Jonathan grudgingly accepted that he had been fleeced in an elaborate con reminiscent of Christian Andersen’s timeless plot of the fabled emperor’s invisible garment. Having discovered Jonathan’s lust for power to be irrational and naked, the swindlers sold him a curious talisman for victory, the Most High’s ‘grace.’ But Edumare’s ‘grace’ is never for sale. Hence Jonathan, like the fabled emperor, walked naked in the political square; stripped of glory, passion, integrity and belief in the false ‘prophets.’ The invisible ‘grace’ they sold to him was never of Edumare’s infinite mercies. Eventually, Jonathan did what a man and good sport should do, he accepted defeat and made that ‘epic’ phone call to Muhammadu Buhari.

    In Jonathan’s tragedy subsists timeless lessons for the intuitive. Will Nigeria’s youth emancipate themselves from the shackles of their spiritual daddies and mommies before they suffer worse fate than Jonathan? This applies to both Christian and Muslim youth that are persistently swamped by vapid mysticism, brainwashed and domesticated like dogs on a leash via a curious doctrine that preaches a conflicting canon of Puritanism for faith and profit.

    This dogma is advanced principally by the nation’s Pentecostal pastors and even rogue Muslim clerics. The latter, having witnessed the stupendous wealth enjoyed by their Christian peer, have resorted to equally desperate means to attain heavenly ‘grace’ and bounties.

    By their gospel, worldly success has become the major indicator of spirituality and “God’s grace” hence their subjugation of the divine spirit of the soul to the pursuit of riches. Thereby, they succeed in brainwashing daily, their oft submissive and unassuming “fishes” and flock, mostly youths, turning them into hapless preys in their pursuit of material wealth and paralysis of asceticism.

    In the mix, it becomes very easy for politicians to co-opt the help of these false prophets to brainwash and mislead the youth in the pursuit and attainment of their selfish political ends. It is undoubtedly easy for so-called General Overseers (G.O) to instruct his ‘fishes’ and ‘flock’ to lean towards a particular power bloc and cast their votes for a particular politician irrespective of the recipient’s qualification for such benefits.

    Strange thing, faith. It has wiggled its way to befuddle and rob too many Nigerians clear of substance and reality, till they become not much expression in sight. In pursuit of salvation and “His Grace,” the faithful “believe” quite laxly and live less humanely, even as their passion pales as their faith increase, by their pastors’ “holiness and grace.”

    It doesn’t matter that the truths the preachers preach, as their deeds, reveal an insufferable perspiration towards ridiculous and yet shared goals: a mansion, a choice car, a huge bank balance and an intimidating fortune with limitless possibilities to exploit.

    But if no one could read in between the lines, at least everybody gets to see truths they incessantly bandy in dazzling and yet ugly manifestations. By their lifestyles, their truths are at once disputed no sooner than they speak it: expensive suits; huge, bullet-proof black jeeps with sirens to announce their presence; well appointed mansions; trigger-happy armed escorts and a wanton lust for the fleeting epitomize their righteousness and grace.

    In essence, their messages revolve around wealth. To the poor, they offer deliverance and the banishment of poverty. To the rich, they offer salvation and the perpetuation of wealth undiminished. It doesn’t matter how the latter come by such wealth. It doesn’t matter if in acquiring such wealth, they keep the Commandments of God. What matters is for both the poor and the rich to “sow seeds” in the name and temple of God.

    Everybody affects the transcendence of faith but nobody wishes to fulfill the demands of faith. The pastors lied; true devotion demands total abhorrence of the worldly and steadfastness in faith. But what is faith? What manner is everyone’s faith? Kind of a trick question, isn’t it?

    Nobody wishes to observe the rigorous dedication and humaneness characteristic of faith. Everybody wishes to eat their cake and have it. That is why some desperate bank chiefs could indefatigably steal from poor, struggling publics to indulge their wantonness and yet scurry to their pastors to purchase absolution and a first class cabin to Paradise at offering time.

    And that is why our equally errant and desperate pastors always manage to “intercede” on their behalf in the presence of God that he may for their sake, disable his Commandments and forgive his “children.”

    Ill-gotten wealth acquires superfluities of “His grace” only. Money is never required to hinder retribution and acquire salvation. Why scurry downward to our dullest perception always and praise it as “wisdom?”

    The gospels being appreciated rob too many of intellect and thought. That is why they are inclined to categorise men who are one-and-a-half-witted as geniuses despite their disabilities because they have been brainwashed to appreciate only a third-part of their wit.

    The gospel of prosperity-at-all-costs wholly negates the doctrine of control by conscience which requires rigorous honesty and fastidiousness. In simple terms, the Nigerian cleric vehemently contradicts and rejects the ascetic view that covetousness and lust for material wealth should be shunned as preached by the valid and true scriptures.

    Equally duplicitous and yet vulnerable to deceit, these loyal congregants pander to their gospel of prosperity thus substituting simplicity and honesty with a new brand of spirituality that invests materialism and covetousness with high moral significance.

    Both clerics and adherents rampantly engage in capitalistic pursuits not only for the expediency of making a living but in the expectation that such activity would amass for them a fortune. In this regard, they recklessly pray and intone: “It is my right to be rich! Heavenly father, you have promised me so! I bless you father because I am rich!”

    A major effect of this belief is that the modern faithful seeks to accumulate wealth with an earnestness of purpose that ridicules the very foundations and admonitions of faith as illustrated by the case of few notable bank chiefs who were recently sacked and prosecuted for gross acts of financial fraud and abuse of office by the EFCC.

    Such an approach to monetary gain is strikingly encouraged by their uniformly fraudulent, greedy and indulgent pastors whose gospel of materialism constitutes a moral habitus that burdens the seeker and possessor of money with a bandit’s obligation towards his loot.

    Thus today, we have celebrity pastors ogling wealth like a filthy fantasy. Today, we have such pastors buying up every available hectare to build ostentatious worship houses and schools far out of reach of the commoner.

  • Magic and Buhari (2)

    Power is indeed seductive. Ask Muhammadu Buhari. He knows it is not necessarily just and kind. It is rarely patronising. Power is ravishing no doubt. But also a tad capricious and infinitely cruel. Power nurtures distaste for morality. Thus when a moral man like Buhari assumes power, he becomes incidental the moment he hearkens to the wisdom of political expediencies. This minute, every heady swill he takes of power, becomes a fog that muddles his morals, leaving him stupefied.

    Morality is never enough to occupy the seat of power, expedient morality to be precise. It is never a sturdy rampart against the storm of vanities incited by a nation of over 250 ethnicities and religious perversions.

    We think Buhari is a magician and expect him to save Nigeria. We expect him to rid us of corruption. But even Buhari deserves salvation, likewise his All Progressives Congress (APC). I do not say Mr. Buhari is corrupt but how does one make sense of his dalliance with the corrupt? This minute, Buhari wades deeper into murky waters; he burrows out of the morality ‘jailhouse’ he constructed for himself even as he collapses in moral dystrophia. Buharists will term this ‘political sagacity’ or ‘political expediency’ if you like. But I would call it ‘pitiful hara-kiri.’ At the backdrop of this calamity, Buhari’s ‘change’ gets tempered into a corny lie he had to tell, to earn electoral votes and a shot at Aso Villa.

    Yet I believe Buhari didn’t lie about his mission to ‘change’ Nigeria for better. He simply overestimated his abilities. Now that he is Mr. President, he looks back on his past condemnation of his predecessors and exaggerated moral crusade to heal Nigeria, as the tantrums of a child who swore to become everything but his father, only to grow up and become everything like his father. There is no gainsaying Buhari’s ‘change’ agenda has been hijacked and weaponised by his super ‘change’ team into a monstrosity of sort. Yet Buhari watches with disinterest, the happenstances that will eventually rid him of his stature as a moralist and positive ‘change’ agent, all for the love of power.

    In the wake of glaring misdemeanour and machinations by elements within his team to rob Nigeria silly via suspicious budgetary allocations, Buhari remains discomfortingly quiet. Equally disappointing is his silence over the persistent murder of peaceful citizenry across the country by rampaging herdsmen from the north. Buhari does not see anything wrong with a situation whereby gangs of herdsmen swoop on rural communities to maim, kill and rob the natives, in bid to claim their victims’ land as grazing patch for their cows.

    Buhari will not lift a finger in defense of the poor, helpless peasants brutally hacked to death by kinsmen from the north but he got jittery and instantly swung to action immediately Enoch Adeboye, General Overseer (GO) of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), urged his congregation to get more involved in politics in the tenor of civilised revolt, come 2019.

    Soon after he was forced to step down as RCCG overseer courtesy a new legal requirement by the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) that leaders of all religious organizations observe a maximum leadership of their organisations for 20 years, Adeboye told his congregation: “Some people believe that RCCG is becoming too influential and we’re going to be more influential. When you get home, tell members to join a political party. Join a party and become a card-carrying member of any party. Just join any party. We shall decide issues right from the ward level.”

    Buhari considered Adeboye’s utterances as a veiled threat and admonition to Christians to vote against his 2019 ambition, thus he sacked Jim Obazee, the FRCN officer allegedly responsible for the enforcement of the law. He didn’t stop at that, he reconstituted the agency’s board and suspended the controversial law.

    This aspect of Buhari’s personality is no doubt enlightening to closet dissenters of Buharism even as it enriches the arsenal of the anti-Buhari and anti-change movement. Predictably, comical Governor of Ekiti State, Ayodele Fayose, among others, has ridiculed Buhari for his apparent cowardice in the face of Adeboye-led RCCG antagonism. He said, “Obviously, their attention is more on 2019, not on justice and any love for the sustenance of Christianity in Nigeria. Mind you, they have only suspended the implementation of the regulation, they did not abrogate it. It is obvious that they have an agenda. And if you look at the president’s pattern of life, he is a sectional leader, whose appointments reflect sectionalism and nepotism.”

    Governor Fayose’s drivel no doubt exemplifies the tenor of outrage and mockery of Buhari’s intriguingly swift and decisive action in respect of the FRCN/Adeboye drama. And in desperate bid to be considered a man of his words, Buhari and his ‘change’ agents claim they have begun the implementation of his N5, 000 lifeboat or stipend if you like, to Nigeria’s most impoverished. This no doubt deserves applause, according to zombie-Buharists.

    Agreed. But how did Buhari come by the database by which he determines folk deserving of the stipend? How were the beneficiaries mapped out? How did Buhari arrive at a figure of the actual number of recipients of his anti-poverty lifeboat? How has he ensured that the initiative is not hijacked and diverted to the villainous schemes of corrupt elements within his ‘change’ team and APC? Not by the spurious and pathetic explanation given by his spokesperson, I believe.

    Lest we forget his shameful reluctance to reprimand his close cronies among APC governors for gross acts of incompetence, insolence to the electorate and god complex; Buhari probably considers the rot in various states as manifestations of APC’s gospel of ‘change.’

    Buhari’s government has become food for maggots and carrion for familiar scavengers but all hope is not lost. There is still room for Mr. Buhari to right his wrongs and reclaim his honour. He could still actualise his romanticised fiction as the odd one out among Nigeria’s predatory ruling class.

    Buhari should simply stand like a man. His current stoop and sway to the rage and wile of tempestuous and corrupt beings contradicts every value he used to symbolise. Buhari and his automatons would recall that at the beginning of his administration, this writer lamented that he had peopled his cabinet with the shady and inept; and that in 2017, he would have cause to sack these characters and unburden his cabinet of their excess garbage. Well, Buhari is at the verge of sacking the shady and inept among his ministers. He is simply too embarrassed to acknowledge so.

    I would rather he sacked every member of his kitchen cabinet and start afresh with a more competent team but folk will say: “That’s rash and suicidal.” What manner of leadership did he think he would provide working with a team that lacks character?

    There is no super remedy or almighty formula he could adopt in order to become the leader of our dreams. Buhari should simply man up and determinedly appoint the men and women truly capable of manning Nigeria’s crucial public offices. Given his incapacities and shortcomings as a leader, he should seek established professionals and technocrats to man his team. His 2017 budget is an eyesore, he should investigate and prosecute the duplicitous characters involved in ‘padding’ the budget.

    Buhari should allocate greater resources to education and manpower development. He should reduce salaries and perks enjoyed by public officers by 40 per cent to reflect the ongoing recession. He should revivify the nation’s vocational education culture. Buhari should rid Aso Rock of familiar bogeys masquerading as lobbyists and friends of his government. He should quit distorting his character to fulfill dubious expediencies and political correctness. Buhari should quit doing the ‘done-thing’ building bridges and cementing relationships with the filthy rich and influential in the spirit of expediencies.

    He should quit the rat race for re-election in 2019. If he is able to resolve Nigeria’s gravest systemic and infrastructure woes, he would have no cause to engage in such desperate, shameful quest for re-election before the end of his first term.

  • Magic and Buhari

    Again, we find ourselves at the desert end of our green pasture. There is no one left to lead the charge for our world’s lost splendours. Except Muhammadu Buhari. The incumbent President seems our best hope of snatching Nigeria from the jaws of decline and devastation. But he won’t save Nigeria. Someone else will. Buhari can only prepare us for the one who will lead the charge for Nigeria’s lost splendours. The retired General from Daura cannot tease our practiced tremble to affect the bounteous tumult. This is because he has lost the battle against the elements he swore to neuter. This minute, Buhari, our romanticised revolutionary, functions as manipulable integer in the designs of masterminds he swore to get rid of.

    Buharists will frantically condemn this. They will say: “Are you saying there is no progress under Buhari?” “You are only writing what you have been paid to write.” I can only respond with silence to such hideous blather. There was a time I heartily rooted for Buhari. I wanted him to succeed. I still want him to succeed. He will succeed quite alright. But not as our hope for the future but as the man who would help usher in one of Nigeria’s most effective leadership. Sadly, the leader we seek is not a part of Buhari’s ‘change’ movement.

    Buhari and his All Progressives Congress (APC)’s victory at the last general elections was no doubt cathartic, a resounding response by the Nigerian electorate to 16 years of misrule by the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). But rather than serve as a clean breath of fresh air, Buhari’s leadership offers a mean draft of fresh stench. Rather than take us on a voyage from myth to truth, plunder to plenitude, Buhari and his APC takes Nigeria on yet another hazardous odyssey from old myth to new myth, familiar ugliness to fresh grotesqueness. The 2017 budget, like Nigeria’s previous budgets, presage revolting realities and fulfills unpleasant stereotypes.

    Buhari’s “Budget of Recovery and Growth” is expected to imbue Nigeria’s plummeting economy with sustainable growth. It should be his government’s manifesto of prudence and probity. Alas! these intrinsic traits that were used to vigorously market candidate-Buhari to the electorate during the elections have assumed creepy mutation.

    According to the budget, President Buhari will spend N53 million to drain the septic tank in Aso Rock Presidential Villa in this year alone. Thus he intends to spend about ?145,000 daily to drain human waste. Former President Goodluck Jonathan budgeted ?5 million for the same purpose in 2015. In 2016, PMB budgeted ?6 million. This simply means the excreta charge went up by 1050% compared with the 2015 budget, and 850% when compared with the 2016 budget. Apology to Nubari.

    Buhari also earmarked N43 billion as State House operational cost although Jonathan budgeted about ?23.5 billion in 2015 for the same purpose. Yet he budgeted ?77.5 million for Aso Villa rent although Nigerian tax payers own the residence. Two years ago, the rent was ?22.5 million; in 2016 it was pegged at about ?28 million. Nigerian tax payers built the lodge, yet Buhari, like his predecessor, extorts us for its rent. He is making us pay for the house we built.

    But rather than pander to trending anti-Buhari sentiments, this writer will take a leap of fate and aver that Buhari was never aware of the gross, dubious and brazen attempts to ‘pad’ the 2017 budget and siphon public fund to suspicious drainpipes. But this also implies that the President has no clue about goings on in his office and that, his super ‘change’ team is hardly the band of progressives he touted them to be.

    As you read, certain members of his team are embroiled in one nasty corruption scandal or the other yet Buhari takes pride in telling critics to stop tarring his ministers with the brush of corruption without facts. When you criticize him for his glaring inadequacies, he laments that it is corruption that is fighting back with big money and dubious media. Buhari scorns criticism from local media but he is always too eager to scurry to the foreign media to ‘tell his story.’

    It is about time Buhari understood that no matter how adroitly he cartwheels or somersaults before the foreign media, their narrative will always fulfill the nuances and politics of their governments’ agenda or ‘enlightened self-interests’ against Nigeria and his government. Why is he desperate to earn the foreign media’s approval? His frantic attempts to tower positively in their ratings, reduces him in stature and sullies the office of the President, Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    Rather than waste quality time and tax payers’ money, doing PR waltz to the damning opus of foreign governments and media, Buhari should accept his shortcomings as recounted by objective local analysts and take conscious steps to correct them. Agreed, his team of media nullifiers and sycophants will always tell him to ignore local narratives, dismissing them as part of the devious plots of his political detractors. But were his political ‘detractors’ responsible for padding the budget in very suspicious manner? Are his so-called ‘detractors’ responsible for his inadequacies and failed promises? Are they responsible for his barely disguised contempt for the ‘average Nigerian?’ Are Buhari’s detractors responsible for his groupies’ vicious barks against differing opinions and criticism of his shortcomings?

    It is never okay for him to dismiss his critics and the average Nigerian as ‘incorrigible’ elements desperate to sustain the country’s culture of corruption. His government too is corrupt. A cursory glance at his cabinet for instance, evokes unavoidable revulsion. His government should stop whining about his predecessor’s devastation of everything. He chanted ‘change’ and promised to halt the country’s spiral of death. He was even daring enough to outline measures and give timelines in which he would rescue Nigeria.

    Of course, some of us knew he was simply grandstanding, playing to the gallery. But we hoped he would honour his words. It is tragic to see him mutate from an ardent critic of corrupt systems to a perpetuator of similar system. Buhari takes one step forward and 19 steps backwards with his anti-corruption fight – no sentences, no prosecutions, just politics.

    Just recently, he awarded crude oil deals to a select few Nigerians. Inadvertently, he has created yet another band of billionaire oil magnates with pitiful entitlement mentality – a glance at the list of beneficiaries will repulse you. What he has done contradicts his promise to rid the oil sector of corruption and reactivate the country’s moribund refineries. On Buhari’s watch, the usual culprits have been licensed to commit the same sins for which he crucifies Jonathan’s government.

    If Buhari could ditch his premature and ill-advised campaign for a second term and actually commit to the actualisation of the promises he made, Nigeria will be better by it. More importantly, he would have no need to recruit familiar sycophants and sirens to engage in subtle, contrived crusade for his re-election, come 2019.

    It’s about time he honoured his promises of ‘change’ – progressive change to be precise. How wonderful it would be to see Buhari resolve the nation’s electricity woes, infrastructure inadequacies, persistent insecurity, among others. It can’t be done overnight. Indeed, Buhari is no magician. He only pretended to be one.

    To be continued…

  • The stink of Buhari’s ‘change’

    In the run-up to the last general elections, Nigeria’s former ‘first lady,’ Patience Faka Jonathan, described her husband, Goodluck Jonathan’s arch rival, Muhammadu Buhari, as ‘brain dead.’ She undoubtedly perverted truth in manic, uncouth rage at Buhari’s candidacy via the All Progressives Congress (APC). Buhari was not and has never been brain dead. He is simply incapable of genius. This is surely interesting given the APC’s shrill marketing and presentation of Buhari as the best thing that would be happening to Nigeria in a long while.

    Yeah, Buhari happened to Nigeria. He defied the odds and emerged president in a keenly contested election. At his emergence, a great segment of the citizenry, this writer inclusive, heaved rhythmic sighs of relief. Everybody waited devotedly to experience Buhari and the APC’s gospel of ‘change.’ Having sacked Goodluck Jonathan and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP), not a few Nigerians believed the country would eventually be rid of corruption, mismanagement and a legion 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 Buhari and his APC inflicts on Nigerians even as you read, if he fails to acknowledge the flashes of competence betrayed by Buhari and his bumbling government. 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 barely 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. This does not excuse the fact that the Nigerian military still suffers the affliction of saboteurs, inadequate funding, lack of essential weaponry, among other ills.

    Buhari also promised to rescue Nigerians from the moral failings of his predecessor’s leadership. He hasn’t. And it is impossible for him to do that while his cabinet reeks as a cesspit of individuals with damaged character. It is no doubt heartrending to see the president discard his cloak of sanctimoniousness to wine, dine and sing the praises of men he earlier identified as corrupt and unworthy of public office.

    Sycophants and Buhari groupies would deem his radical mutation as a happenstance borne of political expediency. They will tell Buhari that “In politics, there are certain compromises that you have to make…Occasionally, you to wine and dine and hawk your soul to the devil (s).” And Buhari, has undoubtedly, mastered the art of such political expediencies.

    Governing Nigeria is vastly more complicated than Buhari thought. All kinds of things can go wrong. A lot of things have gone wrong. If Buhari understood his limitations, he has done too little to cushion the consequences on the citizenry. Besides peopling his government with ‘milk men,’ characters whose chief expertise subsists in milking the proverbial cow even as they are grossly ignorant and inept at nurturing the cow and preserving it, he has failed in several spheres of governance.

    Despite taking several months to seek out his ‘winning, extraordinary team,’ Buhari ended up afflicting Nigerians with ‘over-recycled characters’ many of whom came with hideous baggage around their necks.

    The real test of his Presidency came with the continued fall in oil prices and the fall in the value of the naira. Buhari’s reaction was predictable: he sought to defend the naira by keeping its official exchange rate relatively low even as the currency fell irretrievably in the black market.

    Inflation sky-rocketed across the country causing hardship that permeated class boundaries. Businesses collapsed, banks executed mass retrenchment of staff, sole proprietorships floundered and suffered gruesome, excruciating death. At the backdrop, PDP and Buhari’s APC governors owed salaries even as they threw extravagant parties across the seas.

    Buhari and his ministers enjoyed the luxuries and entitlements of office while they preached cold, bitter truth to Nigerians screeching: “You need to suffer now to make amendments for the wastage of the past; Jonathan and the PDP destroyed everything; PDP is the cause of your hardship; Things will get better in 2017 only if you persevere.”

    Buhari also failed to deliver on his lifeboat palliative; that is, the ridiculous N5, 000 pittance promised to the unemployed and impoverished at election time. He has also gone back on his promise to employ 500, 000 unemployed graduates as teachers. His government recently announced that these teachers would be trained under its social welfare scheme to serve as voluntary teachers.

    His brazen offensive against institutionalised corruption has yielded to his targets’ immoderate lust for riches and priapism of want. Even his ‘change’ agents are currently tarred with these perversions widely regarded as the fault of dupes and satyrs. As you read, President Buhari’s much professed anti-corruption campaign is being interpreted in several quarters as arrant posturing. Till date, Buhari and his anti-graft missioners are unable to see to a fruitful end, the prosecution of established looters of public fund among other perpetrators of corruption.

    His inability to address the degeneracy within his political party and cabinet has become counterproductive to his efficiency as president and anti-corruption crusader. The APC has become a cesspool of Nigeria’s dreaded elements. Like this writer intoned in an earlier piece, of Buhari’s ministers and ‘compatriots’ in the APC, too many are vectors, mortal agents of the worst kind of viruses. They have made his government food for worms.

    From the moment of their acceptance into the fold, the infestation of Buhari’s administration commenced but Buhari and his political groupies naively maintained that if the head – that is, Buhari – be moral, the body (his cabinet and underlings) too will have no choice but get with his program.

    He is either naive or duplicitous to dream of transcendental reforms and recourse from the country’s plummet down the ravine of corruption while he hobnobs with vectors of corruption.

    Is Buhari like his ministers, a dubious change agent feigning a moral growth crusade? Unlike certain APC and PDP governors and senators, Buhari and his ministers were expected to epitomise a moral, philosophical rampart that will continually uphold the strife of contraries by which true, positive ‘change’ evolves.

    Sadly, they aren’t. Thus the incumbent APC government manifests as yet another disease of governance and civilisation. Yet 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 forgets that nature and history only cares to identify individuals as intrinsic part of species and never as a lone genus.

    Buhari’s mantra of chastity and change is diametrically opposed to the realities of his politics and mutating ethics. Our president has diluted his moralist communion with toxic liquor. Thus he evolves as a revolutionary of the comedies. He won’t eliminate besmirched society by redeeming morals with the amoral. Our Buhari has eventually lost himself shying from the pathway of moralist dystopia.

    Let’s hope he rediscovers his groove in 2017. Our Buhari, the presumed ‘change’ agent, may yet pamper us with ‘change’ we can believe in and prosper by.

  • The other class narrative

    The democracy we declared has recoiled into a spent shadow. Sixteen years on in the grip of blood-drenched mascots, it steals from our sweetest fantasies like the proverbial slut making a surreptitious exit with her drunken lover’s wallet.

    Consequently, we suffer poverty of character and this manifests as mean-spiritedness. It’s akin to that patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours the motorist at the police checkpoint, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the public officer on his perch – this patience belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts 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 the universe and morality. But who needs morals in a nation where fair is foul and foul remains fair?

    As you read, 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 thus exhibiting 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. This explains the number of self-centred and treacherous human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists and columnists parading our streets.

    Very few men are indeed capable of that humaneness that drives martyrs to persistently rebel against glaring social evils in the interest of less fortunate members of the society. But there exists a few however, that are truly bothered by the impoverishment of their fellow citizens regardless of any risk or discomfort it might attract to them personally.

    These few, driven by compassion tirelessly seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape; some new system of society by which life may become richer, more joyful and devoid of avertable evils that mars the present. But surprisingly, such men oftentimes, fail to curry the support of the very victims of the injustices they wish to remedy.

    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 holders of power, and morally defective owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To excite among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort in pursuit of general improvement of the status quo, proves basically a hopeless task, as antecedents of such efforts have proven.

    Thus despite our claims to modernity, higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian society have failed woefully to achieve better living conditions and a better society even in the throes of rising demand for more radical intervention and reconstruction of the social order.

    It is no surprise however that the Nigerian working class has persistently proved a dismal failure. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: Nigerians have a problem with differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate political behavior.  That is why the nation’s democratic experiment like any other system of governance practicable by us was doomed from the start.

    What exactly has democracy offered? A 4-1-9 progressive plan that booms circumspectly like it had been doctored as part of a cold-war era propagandist scheme? But despite our self-righteousness and persistent cynicism with the current order, we really cannot explore a more worthy alternative than what we have now. The average Nigerian can’t bear to be led by a truly honest, visionary and accountable leadership. That explains our choice of the incumbent 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 functions simultaneously to smother his own voice in the riotous gabble of his exultation of the same 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.

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

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

    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 an average member of the working class by reason of his exposure and constitution.

    This informs a greater need for study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes in the journey towards the 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 divides learned to scorn the maxim that holds that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains; the paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood. That proverbial better society that we seek calls for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the low income earners and ambitious middle class emancipated by training and culture.

    Such human elements would no doubt be conscious of the fact that not even the sustenance of oil subsidy, higher wages and a fairer economic system could protect its members from the usual handicaps and monstrosity constituted by the incumbent and predatory ruling class.

    Hence they would be able to understand that the much clamoured social enterprise and gesture towards change must be mooted and achieved by the Nigerian 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 humane leadership. But to achieve this, the Nigerian youth would have to establish a more youthful, brilliant, truly progressive and detribalized political platform.

  • This year…as all others 

    •Portrait of the Nigerian journalist in 2016

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

    This year, we quoted Nietzsche, Plato, Disreali among others to garnish our columns while we did all we can to silence true-born dissent on our news pages and news networks, lest we incur the ire of irate benefactors.

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

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

    This is the year we feted the northern mafia, eastern cabal, western gerontocracy, and south-south uprising, as usual, even as they undermined our collective dreams and everything that nationhood and ambition had ever bestowed us.

    Beyond our elegant words and brazen manifestations of high character, our practice is modeled after some greedy few’s cartography of citizenship than by any internal dynamic of allegiances. Hence our misinterpretation of the social contract between the Fourth Estate and every other estate charged with the administration and supervision of our nation-state.

    Thus this year as all others, we hid behind interviews, ‘big interviews,’ to abdicate our responsibilities to the Nigerian public. This is the year we taught the public to feast and digest perversion because we believe it’s what they love to do best; because we know if we treat them to more depravity, they will become more willing participants, and we would get more adverts and keep smiling to the banks.

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

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

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

    This year, we affirmed those dreadful points our internal and external publics love to make; that we have become inept, mediocre, irredeemably shorn of truth and uprightness in our work. This year, we affirmed that we are amoral and somewhat intellectually challenged by our ethnic and intellectual bigotry.

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

    This year as all others, I make a case for re-sensitization of the Nigerian media. It is time we dismembered our clan of the shameless breed. I speak of the almighty charlatan who believes that the status quo should be sustained ad infinitum because characters like him deserve the right to unquestionable practice.

    I do not wish that the press be gagged; I suggest no such arbitrariness – even if I do, it would hardly matter because we go through the practice, gagged.

    We are our worst enemies. In spite of everything, we choose to play god. That is why “dogs don’t eat dogs” in our Fourth Estate although it’s okay if we choose to eat the entrails of a few ordinary Nigerians and almighty benefactors, like the unfortunate adulterer caught pants down even as we underreport thieving bankers stealing from wretched folk to enrich their privileged peers.

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

    If we could passionately and conscientiously monitor our affairs daily that we may not digress and put to shame our practice, wouldn’t journalism be much better? Were we humane enough to improve our welfare and conditions of service, wouldn’t our journalists be dignified and our practice nobler?

    It’s time we asked: “Who is a journalist?” and aspire to an untainted definition of it. It’s time we redefined what level of knowledge, qualification and professionalism is expected of a journalist. It’s time we ascertained what manner of passion channels the direction of our news practice.

    It’s time we refused to humour such society that continually disrespects us and treats us as disposable pawns in its grand scheme of themes. Come 2017, shall we continue to service the depravity of folk for whom our pens write maladies at the expense of melodies impoverished folk would die to have us write about – that they might fare better?

    Will 2017 mutate like today and our immediate past? Shall we remain intellectual hit men of every hoodlum with deep pocket? Shall we become cliff-hangers to take the portrait of every looter and celebrity nincompoop with a promising smile? Shall we remain the media managers that pay poorly even as we label expatriate firms, slave-drivers?

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

  • Still on Buhari’s lingering ‘demons’

    •Hazards of cult worship of a struggling President

    There is an epiphany of morality in President Muhammadu Buhari, a vision of hope and romanticised ‘Change’ that the severely exploited and hapless citizenry would die for. Buhari rode to power chanting change and promising a radical, progressive departure from the pilfering and profligacy that characterised public office before his emergence.

    Buhari’s emergence however, complicates our perverse dynamics of corruption. His immediate past predecessor was no revolutionary – Goodluck Jonathan was no hero and he never pretended to be one. He was not interested in upsetting the status quo or ridding the country of sleaze. He understood that Nigeria throve on vice thus he simply played the role of passive leader and enabler. His infamous ‘Stealing is not corruption’ declaration accentuated imagery of his leadership as a moral and intellectual aberration.

    Enter Muhammadu Buhari, the redeemed dictator, self-proclaimed martyr and moral crusader. Buhari’s publicised distaste for corruption incites the separation and tension between moral and amoral personae. The attendant backlash from profiteers from the corrupt order, further accentuates the thrill of seduction and revolt against the incumbent president’s  anti-corruption campaign.

    In the ensuing melee, hard choices have to be made and unpopular decisions taken, often to the detriment of the nation’s longsuffering citizenry. Although there are estimated benefits in the long run, very few Nigerians are ready to accept that the obnoxious hike in pump price of Premium Methylated Spirit (PMS) from N87 to N145 for instance, was a necessary evil amid the country’s bordello of chaos and institutionalised corruption. And a fewer number of Nigerians, including Camp Buhari, are willing to accept a further hike in fuel price.

    Many more have lost patience with Buhari’s apparent incapacities at steering the nation to safe waters from its current abyss of strife and corruption.

    Notwithstanding his seeming incapacities, you can’t help but admire Buhari’s his valour and resolve to recoup the country’s looted funds from public officers that served in former President Goodluck Jonathan’s highly corrupt and disgraceful administration.

    But like I averred in recent past, President Buhari’s touted anti-corruption fight should only be taken seriously when culprits get sent to jail to serve sentences that befit their crimes. Nigerians should neither accept nor entertain any attempt at granting looters of public fund the luxury of ‘plea bargain.’

    If Buhari grants them such right, then he would be legitimising their corrupt acts and he would by default, have supported and applauded the mass murders and impoverishment committed by every public officer and their associates caught with the country’s looted funds. President Buhari ought to realise that looters of public fund are mass murderers.

    For instance, money that could have been used to arm the military to crush terrorism, repair damaged roads and fund the country’s ailing health sector have been embezzled by miscreants in power. Consequently, thousands of lives have been lost to terrorist attacks, ghastly accidents on bad roads, poor health facilities.

    The deaths of these hapless souls brutally hacked down in their prime by terrorists, bad roads and health sector, are blamable on the men and women that conspired to divert fund initially earmarked to resolve these problems.

    There is no gainsaying Nigeria is still afflicted by political profiteers comprising the ruling class and various segments of the poor, struggling masses. In the ensuing degeneracy of politics and cultural ethos, the hero we know today may morph into a dreadful monster. Given that power is the brandy of the turncoat, there is need to persistently scrutinize President Buhari uncompromisingly.

    For instance, his touted anti-corruption fight remains noise-making at the moment. When the ‘corrupt’ get prosecuted and sent to jail for their misdemeanor, Nigerians will believe him. And despite his touted reduction of his salary and that of his deputy, President Buhari is not working pro bono. He is being paid for the work he does. And it’s an open secret that his cozy allowances among other frills of being President and living in Aso Rock are the stuff the finest fantasies are made of.

    Buhari has been cuddled enough, by the media and his most ardent supporters. Nigeria needs him to work now. And no matter the floweriness and duplicity of spin accorded his performance so far, very little has changed since he became President. It is sad to note that the steadier electricity supply oft cited by his diehard apologists as a dividend of his leadership has since petered out. Electricity supply has become worse and despite the increase in electricity tariff, Nigeria currently runs the risk of a total blackout according to the Minister of Works, Power and Housing, Babatunde Fashola.

    And even though he vowed to crush Boko Haram by December 2015, it is clear that President Buhari didn’t achieve any such feat hence he should learn to be more tactful and modest in making future pledges. The military and police’s recent fiasco with the Shiite Muslim sect elicits greater apprehension among the citizenry – many are worried that President Buhari and his re-invigorated military might have sown the seeds of another bloody, villainous insurgent group masquerading as Muslims.

    While we acknowledge that his touted honesty and integrity exerts reasonable pressure on corrupt individuals and institutions to do a cartwheel away from corruption, it need be reiterated that his anti-corruption stance and ‘government with a human face’ propaganda will continually resonate as a desperate, corny lie, until the judiciary begins to sentence looters of public fund to severe jail terms.

    Buhari needs to divorce himself from sycophancy, vanities of power and decadent luxury emblematic of Aso Villa if truly he possesses the morality and Spartan discipline frequently ascribed to him. And contrary to claims that he has a great team to work with, he doesn’t.

    He has characters that have been embroiled in scandalous cases of corruption and administrative ineptitude in the past. Nigerians accepted him (Buhari) and his team not because they are the best that we could ever produce but because they represent that excusable part of our cancerous bulk that could pass our body.

    The citizenry see the ruling class as a primitive tribe of predators grossly inured in corruption. On the other hand, some love to see Buhari as our saviour. Contemporary boondocks legend paint a portrait of him as a warrior in wolf-skin vest, brandishing a shield of steeled morality and a stone-axe forged to hack down monuments that the corrupt ruling class built to entrench corruption.

    There is no gainsaying his emergence as President via the March 28 elections was a welcome development. But besides his bid to recoup looted funds from corrupt officers of the last administration, how does he fare as an administrator?

    Buhari’s touted morality was ennobled by widespread admiration and cult worship of him. The cult worship is gradually petering out. Nigerians, just like this writer warned, had set him up for failure. More sections of the press and the citizenry have stopped cuddling him. The truth dawns like eternal damnation; Buhari is not doing too well at the moment. His performance is below par.