The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Death is still that undiscovered country…

    Death is still that undiscovered country that we shall all visit. In that country, everybody shall be stripped of titles and accumulated wealth. Nobody shall be referred to as “Your Excellency,” “OON, CON, GCON” “Africa’s richest billionaire” and so on. In that country, the truth of our follies and the septic belly of our idiocies shall become even more pronounced and visible to all. Those of us, the billionaires particularly, who send so-called “prayerfully powerful” Alfas on holy pilgrimage to Mecca to seek for Allah’s forgiveness and infinite mercies on their behalf shall realize that they had simply been foolish. No amount of prayers-by-proxy, sacrifices and so on, shall move Almighty Allah to forgive them and grant them eternal peace and paradise if their handiwork is tantamount to evil.

    They shall all die eventually. It wouldn’t matter if they are buried in Victoria Court Cemetery or Atan Cemetery; it wouldn’t matter if their remains are unrecoverable in the event of their demise in a ghastly accident or assassination. Immediately they pass on, they shall begin to pay for their handiwork like the rest of us. They shan’t escape the trials of the grave.

    No priest, highfaluting ceremony of absolution from ‘original sin,” redemption and so on shall ennoble the Christians among us with the “infinite grace” of Almighty God if they remain evil at heart. If they like, let them build as many gigantic Churches and temples as they like, let their offerings and tithe tower beyond the rafters and sky-high, it shall never make them pious before God. May it not make them pious before God.

    No priest or Alfa can intercede with God on our behalf. We shall all die: President, governor, first lady, special advisers, ministers, accountant, journalist, activist, dibias, babalawos and so on. And even our tiniest depravity shall be summoned to witness against us.

    Those who profess to be godly live like they answer to some blind, stupid, and partial god. Almighty Allah is not stupid, silly or blind. Jehovah is neither partial nor handicapped by greed for worship houses, outlandish sacrifices and exaggerated humility. Chineke, Eledumare is surely no perverted wimp that we could corrupt by wile and insincere tokens of sacrifice and worship.

    He will judge us all according to our handiwork. In the face of such imminent reality, it’s amusing to see the ruling class administer our lives like they are answerable to no one. It’s even more bizarre to see our youth lend themselves as willing tools to the antics and designs of the ruling class. Many a self-styled professor of truth and champion of the masses’ rights have become junkyard dog and dunghill mongrel for the same ruling class they used to criticize.

    Talk is cheap really and Nigerians love to talk a good game. That is why everyone: literate, semi-literate and illiterate, display flawless capacities to decipher and summarize the political and socio-economic problems afflicting Nigeria, just for the fun of it or the benefit of applause.

    Besides a few good men and real heroes who have staked their lives and personal comfort to protest the gross ineptitude and bestiality of the ruling class and the society at large, most of us have accepted to remain acquiescent. When we are criticized for being unacceptably docile, we respond that there is infinite wisdom in choosing our battles wisely and keeping our mouths shut.

    Nonetheless, we continue to mount the soapbox in our living rooms, around our dinner tables and in the ubiquitous ‘beer parlours’ criticizing our leaders, casting blames and justifying our pathetic and apologetic existence.

    The tragedy subsists in our customary lamentation about the state of the Nigerian nation; every time our conscience is roused with a damning report, as it is still customary of us, more racist politicians and activists suggest that we split and go our separate ways touting it as the only solution to our league of extraordinary problems.

    There is no wisdom in secession unless it serves to eliminate the same bogeys that make Nigeria a living hell for us. Secession, I maintain, is the fruit of ‘reason’ that we need to be wary of and I will continue to say this hoping every prospective muscle – that is, the youth – by which the separatists hope to achieve their dreams of dissolution, would listen and learn to let the secessionists risk their skins and their lineages to actualize their platitudes.

    Let every political godfather, public office hopeful and so on send their sons and wives and daughters on to the streets to wield cutlasses, guns and bombs. Let the ruling class recall their children from their Ivy League schools and exclusive mansions abroad to march on the streets and hack to death perceived oppositions to their political ambitions. Let every youth from humble background and the breadlines mobilize instead to collectively seek an end to the ruling class’ reign of terror.

    Violence and bloodshed is never the answer. Secession is never the answer to our woes.

    The biggest misconception about separation, insurgence, self-determination or whatever the separatists choose to call it is that it could be peaceful and that the end result would be a conscientious and citizenry-centred dispensation.

    It’s all dirty, greedy politics. The separatists want the youth to fly the flags of their dream nations, they want everybody to brandish a bumper sticker that bellows, “Death to the Federal Republic of Nigeria!” They call anyone that’s anti-war and anti-secession, “pacifist,” “traitor” or whatever colourful adjective suits their rage. Then they promise the youth a prosperous future and better fate under their dream nation. Consequently, youth that ought to know better buy into such farce and they all begin to dream and talk of the great uprising that would set them free from the living hell Nigeria has become.

    Even when we see through the promises of the separatists, we choose to ignore it for the love of paltry inducements and instant gratification. It’s about time the Nigerian youth started postponing immediate gratification and endure hard sacrifices spurred by conviction that the future can be better than the past.

    But we face a far more difficult problem at our moment in history. What do you promise youth who have been told they can have anything they want, who are repeatedly urged to seek the best of all possible circumstances without shedding sweat for it? How do you tell them that “the good times,” as they have known them or heard of them, will definitely come back?

    The Nigerian youth needs a new vision to help them deal with reality, a promising story of the future that helps them let go of the pains and disappointments of the past. We need a grand vision of possibilities that Nigerians may pursue and dream on: the country’s rich socio-cultural and political tradition, the right of all citizens to larger lives. Such dreams should never be about getting richer than the guy next door or accumulating obscene wealth for applause and to show off but the right to live life more fully and engage more expansively, the elemental possibilities of human existence.

    Sophistry and deceit are the springboards from which our civilization evolves. Add mediocrity, mindlessness and greed and you have a perfect representation of the contemporary youth. We were wrong to think it a matter of years and decades that we would improve in citizenship and tact. We forget that true citizenship essentially translates to being an emissary of truth, hope, superior culture and progress to the benefits of the literate and unschooled.

    It should above all be the appendage of that fine adjustment between reality and the growing knowledge of life – an adjustment which discovers the secret of civilization and the solution to its seemingly intractable problems. Insanely, to this end, we apply bigotry in politics and religion. Thus by every manner of faith we commit the worst of inhuman transgressions – like terrorism and mass murder, inordinate acquisition of wealth and acclaim.

  • Hostage to power (1)

    •(Intrigues as Gov. Amosun neglects Ogun State’s death roads)

    Ibikunle Amosun’s dalliance with power projects comic ironies. At his first pilgrimage in its shrine, he was robed and mitred as a messiah. But few days to the end of his first term as Ogun state governor and at the beginning of his second spell in office, he yielded to that proverbial mutation that remains the tragedy of many a Nigerian politician; almighty Senator Ibikunle Amosun a.k.a SIA got domesticated by power.

    Like too many of his peers, the executive governor of Ogun State, ceded sovereignty to power thus he was fatally crushed; like the court jester who dared to joust with a palace guard. Power is indeed seductive. Falling beneath its sway, Amosun lost control. He got tamed and undone by its beauty, like Achilles over Penthesilea and Obakoso over Oya. Mischief makers would say he emasculated himself sipping excessively from the bittersweet nectar of power. Did he?

    Aides of Amosun would argue otherwise. They would say Amosun plays master to power. They would describe him thus: “Amosun, like our revered sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, is a man that is conscious of his place in history. People like that are men of vision.”

    No doubt, Amosun is no stranger to power. He was elected Senator for Ogun Central district  in April 2003. In April 2007 he made an unsuccessful bid to be elected governor of Ogun State. He vied for the position again in 2011, and this time, he was elected on the platform of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). He currently observes his second term on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC). You could be forgiven for thinking Amosun is no political neophyte but somewhere along the line, he got enfeebled by power. This sudden change, paralleling the finale of his frail leadership, has become his life pattern. It shades his history with a dark tan.

    Nonetheless, zealous underlings would describe Amosun as the best thing to happen to Ogun State. They would stress that he is a man of uncommon mettle and foresight. Anthony Storr, late British writer and psychiatrist would term this one of the many delusions that render Ogun state’s ugly reality justifiable for Amosun’s zealots, and as such, jealously defensible against all assaults of reason.

    Under Amosun’s government, calamity and death runs Ogun roads amok. Like blood-dimmed tide loosed upon a grassy plane, tragedy splashes about the ‘Gateway State,’ drowning lives and innocence in a passionate, intense swirl of ghastly auto accidents.

    The world would never forget in a hurry, the poor, helpless souls that thrashed out and gave their final gasps in grotesque, bloody accidents on Ogun’s bad roads – on Amosun’s watch. Omolade Ogunnoiki, 17, was a 100 Level History student of Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU). Together with her friend, Funmilayo Pampam, 18, and Olatunji Dairo, a 2014 Physics graduate of OOU,  she was crushed to death. They were casualties of an auto accident involving a truck carrying an unlatched container and their Lagos-bound passenger bus, on the Ilishan- Sagamu highway in Ogun State. The accident claimed nine other undergraduates and the  driver of the bus.

    Omolade and Funmilayo probably nursed dreams of greatness. Dairo too. Their parents laboured to educate them,  they wished they would grow to become the pride of their families and their comfort in their twilight. As you read, those dreams lie six-feet under red earth, with the crushed teenagers and Physics graduate. In bid to avoid bad portions on the road, the driver of the truck reportedly drove against the traffic until its container fell off its hinges, crushing to death the two friends, Dairo and nine other OOU students. At the time of their demise, Ogunnoiki and Pampam were 17 and 18 years old respectively.

    Cut to a hodgepodge of mutilated and bloodied innards at Owode-Ijako junction, Ogun State: a beloved wife and mother, departed home with her three children only for them to be brought back as mangled corpses to the deceased’s husband. The victims perished in an accident caused by bad portions of Owode-Ijako junction. Lest we forget Baba Prince, the septuagenarian who was brutally crushed and torn to pieces, by a reckless truck driver who veered off the road to escape a deep crater, at the deadly Owode-Ijako junction.

    Overzealous aides would rail against this piece and many others. They would call it a ‘tiresome campaign’ that should be done with already. They would wonder why this page contains yet another account of bloodshed and deaths on Ogun State’s cratered roads. Some would term this an affront to “His Excellency,” an inexcusable slight to a man who truly loves and values the lives of Ogun citizens.

    If Amosun truly values the lives and safety of the people of Ogun State, he will stop ignoring the incessant deaths and bloody accidents caused by craters dotting the state’s famished roads. If Amosun truly loves the people of Ogun State, he would stop ignoring the misery and tears of parents and grandparents dying like stray fowls even as they experience the untimely deaths of their sweet, innocent children, on Ogun’s bad roads.

    He wouldn’t be having a blast expanding his mansion and beautifying it, while the citizenry’s infant sons and daughters are crushed to death at Owode-Ijako’s cratered junction. He wouldn’t scoff at news of the hot death suffered by the young native, who got burnt in a fire that started from a fallen tanker and extended from Owode-Ijako junction, into his home.

    If Amosun is truly the people’s messiah, he wouldn’t ignore the death traps on Ijoko, Agoro, Ijako, Iyana-Ilogbo, Ilepa, Lafenwa and Itele roads. He would stop ignoring the bloody ravines dotting Alade, Elekunmefa, Imise, Onihale, Singer, Iju, Lusada, Atan-Ota and Igbesa to mention a few. At Toll-gate junction, Joju, Temidire and environ, mucky pools still stagnate in perilous craters along the bypasses because these scenes of deadly accidents are inconsequential to Governor Amosun.

    Eighteen pages of hastily placed advertisement couldn’t drain the ink of this writer’s pen. It is an open secret that The Nation was never deemed worthy of advert patronage by his government until this column started to project the ugliness of his administrative incapacities.

    Journalists and media houses should never stop reporting the carnage on Ogun State’s famished roads, on Amosun’s watch. Let journalists be guided by the rhetoric: “If I lose my wife, children and grandchildren to accidents on Ogun State’s famished roads, what would I do?”; “If Omolade 17, Funmilayo, 18 and Dairo were my children, would I hail Amosun?” And shall we excuse Amosun’s neglect of Ogun’s death traps simply because they are ‘federal roads?’ Why can’t Amosun take lessons from Governor Akinwumi Ambode on how to rehabilitate bad ‘federal roads?’

    And would all of Amosun’s underlings, loved ones and associates excuse his continued neglect of Ogun’s deathtraps, if they had lost wives, husbands, grannies, infant sons and daughters on those bad roads?

    Now that Governor Amosun has mastered the fine art of ‘buddy sessions’ and ‘political statement’ with President Muhammadu Buhari on social media, will he urge Buhari to assist with the challenges that actually matter?

  • Amosun’s ‘Gateway of shame’

    •Yet another reminder to a bungling governor

    Lies are the oxygen of Governor Ibikunle Amosun’s ‘Change.’ This time last year, the governor’s media aide called to plead on his behalf. He said the governor has promised to hearken to his people’s cry and make the state more habitable for them, in the spirit of good governance. But Amosun seems incapable of ‘Change’ and good governance. Hence his jarring mediocrity and excruciating performance. Amosun has mended some roads, built new ones and constructed bridges. Among other schemes, he has initiated a ludicrous 15-unit model school project. But tempting as it is to paint a glowing portrait of his administration, the purpose of this piece is to draw his attention to the maggots of neglect, arrant duplicity and underdevelopment still infesting his government and the state, like a mind tumour.

    Tumour has been known to cause its victims to hallucinate or descend into psychosomatic degeneration until death, particularly if located in the brain. But Governor Amosun of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has never been diagnosed with any such affliction, physically or metaphorically but like an ill-fated administrator, leading a government afflicted by nerve and ideological tumour, Governor Amosun is incapable of fulfilling the promise of his party’s philosophy of ‘Change.’

    This moment, Amosun’s version of ‘Change’ resonates as a corny phrase he had to chant to achieve an epic sweep at the polls. No doubt, it worked for him. After all, he remains His Excellency, Governor Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun State for a second term. It’s however, interesting to see him  bluster through his second spell in office, chanting ‘Change’ yet denouncing it in conflicting tenor and undertones.

    Amosun camp parades him as the people’s governor, a humane leader, yet he is stonily deaf and conveniently blind to the townships’ grief and the peasants’ sighs. There is a death trap at Owode junction, just before you get to Ifo; recently it claimed lives and property in ghastly vehicle accidents. And poor, helpless residents of Ijoko, Agoro, Ijako, Iyana-Ilogbo, Ilepa, continually die, slowly and accidentally, from the perils of plying their muddy and badly cratered roads.

    There is devastation in Alade, Elekunmefa, Imise, Onihale, Singer, to mention a few and to residents and traders of Lusada, Atan-Ota and Igbesa in the Ado-Odo/Ota Local Government Area of the state, the roads leading to their communities are nightmarish and inimical to growth.

    At the point where the Lagos ghetto of Ayobo meshes with Ogun state, a hideous kind of filth palpitates. There is ugliness in Lafenwa, Aiyetoro, Olugbode and various communities along Itele road. More roads present an eyesore at Oju-Ore, Ilo-Awela and Oke-Aro. At Toll-gate junction, Joju, Temidire and environ, mucky pools still stagnate in devastating craters along the bypasses because these hotspots and scenes of multiple deadly accidents are allegedly inconsequential to Governor Amosun. Really?

    Lest we forget the people of Ewekoro who are dying slowly from the dangerous fumes persistently discharged into their communities by neighbouring multinational cement company, LafargeWAPCO Plc. Persistent reportage of LafargeWAPCO’s dangerous commercial activities in the area have been randomly scorned and condemned by the incumbent government of the state in the past, until a five-part series by The Nation spurred the government to stage a theatrical intervention that has so far, produced a remedy that barely addresses the health and developmental challenges incited by LafargeWAPCO in the area.

    A certain Barr. Taiwo Adeoluwa, who identifies himself as Secretary to the Ogun State Government, in an article published on September 5, 2015 by online medium, Opinion Nigeria among others, enthused that: “Of course, it is impossible to list the achievements of our government within this limited space. I must add that, Amosun, like our revered sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, is a man that is conscious of his place in history. People like that are men of vision who will devote their all to the welfare of their people.”

    Governor Amosun is incapable of living up to the full measure of Adeoluwa’s hyperbolic cant. It’s about time the governor and his peers, stopped misappropriating substance by channeling it from the exploits of late Obafemi Awolowo. Is it so hard for Governor Amosun to become an icon by his own terms? It needn’t be too difficult for him to aspire to greatness by his handiwork, good deeds to be precise. Until then, no quality of spin or PR blitz would dull the jarring notes of sorrow and the portraits of death presented by Ogun State’s neglected townships, on his watch.

    It is even more heartbreaking to see schools in the state deteriorate rapidly. Governor Amosun will do right by devoting greater attention to public schools on the decline. Consider for instance, the sad case of Salawu Abiola Comprehensive High School (S.A.C.H.S), built in 63 hectares of land in Osiele, Abeokuta; it is ironical that Governor Amosun continually commemorates the life and death of the school’s founder, late Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (M.K.O) Abiola on June 12 of every year, even as the school founded by the late politician and philanthropist, withers away in abject neglect.

    It need be said that while Abiola was alive, he traveled with friends and family on his birthday, August 24th of every year, to celebrate with students of the school. That day also happened to be ‘Abiola Day,’ a day set aside for rewarding outstanding students of the school with prizes.

    As you read, S.A.C.H.S is virtually dead. The hostels are derelict and the classrooms and school laboratories are severely impaired. Yet Amosun plays to the gallery, celebrating Abiola’s life and politics every June 12.

    There are other public secondary schools like S.A.C.H.S deserving Governor Amosun’s urgent intervention. While alumni of Abeokuta Grammar School, Baptist Boys Secondary School and African Church Grammar School (of which Gov. Amosun is an alumnus) to mention a few, have been staging progressive interventions to rescue their alma mater from neglect,  S.A.C.H.S alumni have fared terribly in this respect. The latter’s intervention would have been a saving grace for the school since the Abiola family apparently considers it the government’s burden, and Governor Amosun conveniently neglects it and other diminishing schools, to actualize his mega-schools fantasy.

    “Hundreds of school buildings have been renovated, but the governor will not waste the scarce resources of the state to maintain buildings that ought to be demolished…We will not deceive our people with cosmetic changes,” stated Adeoluwa in his fawning piece on Amosun’s model school project. No doubt, Adeoluwa and his principal, Governor Amosun, need to visit S.A.C.H.S, Egba High School, Egba Odeda High School, Methodist Grammar School, Arigbajo, and other schools within Abeokuta, Ijebu and the outskirts of Ogun State to determine if they are actually worth saving or not. So doing, both Amosun and his underling may see the error, wastefulness and pitiful grandstanding in expending millions of tax payers’ money on building new ‘model schools’ while several schools in the state suffer excruciating decline.

    No one wishes that Governor Amosun deceives the citizenry with what he and Adeoluwa considers “cosmetic changes” but since he is been paid handsomely with tax payers’ money for running the state, he is duty bound to provide cost-effective education with justifiable infrastructure, good roads and safety of lives and property in the state. It is a way to fulfill the promise of “Change” we can believe in and prosper by, that he made to the electorate at election time.

  • Amosun’s ‘Gateway of hell’

    •(A reminder to a bungling governor)

    Ogun State looms like a gothic platitude of pain and death from its transit townships but the “Gateway State” is Governor Ibikunle Amosun’s bower of bliss. There, in his stately Eden, he lives immune and insensate to the ravages of ill-will and pent-up fury tearing the natives apart from inside out. Governor Amosun must be having a blast inside the Government House at Oke Mosan. He does not have to rise and retire to his bed everyday wondering if he would die along the deadly stretch of Lagos-Abeokuta highway, particularly at the spots where innocent children, mothers, fathers – dependants and breadwinners – die like stray fowls, accidentally or by installments, in his administrative landmine.

    Governor Amosun’s loved ones are extremely lucky; unlike the mother who left home with her three children only for them to be brought back as mangled corpses from an accident, caused by bad road, to the deceased’s husband. Amosun is certainly favoured by the ‘gods,’ unlike the bereaved families who sent their wards to school only to receive news that they had been crushed to death by a steel container in a gory accident along the Sagamu-Benin expressway. Is Governor Amosun neglecting that death trap because it is a ‘federal road?’ If that is the case, is Governor Amosun solely remunerated from revenue he makes from Ogun State or from the ‘federal purse?’

    Governor Amosun is one lucky dude as he does not have to live up to the promise he made to the poor, hopeless pupils of the Community Primary School, off Agoro road, Owode-Titun, Ota, Ogun State. It’s almost two years since they lost their classrooms to a violent rain squall, yet most of the 740 pupils have been learning with tears, under a crooked shed held together by wooden poles and corrugated iron sheets. The school’s Parents Teachers Association (PTA) constructed the shed last year when it was clear that the state government will not come to the children’s rescue. Although Governor Amosun promised to rebuild the school when his campaign train visited the area to seek re-election, he has since forgotten his promise and the area.

    Thus through scorching sun blaze and violent rain squalls, the pupils huddle together helplessly, in futile lunge for comfort and cover from the ravages of nature and Governor Amosun’s ill will, tearing at their fragile frames. For the only public primary school in the community, the descent into decay started in May last year, when a rainstorm blew off the roof of the block of six classrooms and the staff room. The storm also tore off the entire side of the building. Yet Governor Amosun conveniently forgets the sad fate of the poor pupils of Community Primary School in Owode-Titun, Ota.

    Some cratered meters from the school, the stars are still a backdrop for the inhuman condition at Owode junction, just before you get to Ifo. Is Governor Amosun waiting for that expedient moment of disaster or road mishap of immense magnitude to occur before he swoops in with a bereaved mien and overzealous aides, to misappropriate anguish where he feels none?

    The natives of Ijoko, Agoro, Ijako, Iyana-Ilogbo, Ilepa, Ijoko, Alade, Oju Ore, Ilo-Awela, Elekunmefa, Imise, Onihale, Singer, Lusada, Ewekoro, Atan-Ota and Igbesa to mention a few, are still dying slowly and accidentally, from the perils of plying their muddy and badly cratered roads and there is still ugliness in Lafenwa, Aiyetoro, Olugbode and various communities along Itele road.

    From a distance, the piercing and indiscriminate glare of sunlight and moonshine desecrate these townships like tombs slipshodly carved along the graying highway that leads to Abeokuta, Ogun State’s capital city. Closer, the people and houses in the communities take shape like a stream of accidental shadows, their hard noises striking one’s face and making the senses numb with jarring clarity. It is their noiseless undertones that however, evoke intense feelings of awe and curiosity. Sad desperate glances of the natives inspire a thirst for buried narratives that they miserably learn to endure as unreal jests made by death.

    Guess his Excellency in Ogun State, has learnt to glance without flinching at the straggle of human suffering emblematic of the pale ghost of his “Gateway State.” Wonder if he is unaware of the deaths and squalor across the townships; wonder if he knows that there are schools with better structures, histories, progressive and ideological foundations that deserve as much attention and support as he is currently giving his model schools’ phantasm; wonder if he simply chooses to ignore the descent of the tourist tracts where decay and death spit venom at the hapless citizenry, like Siamese cobras every day.

    Governor Amosun is probably unmoved to affect heart-felt responses to the malaise. Perhaps he is making spirited gestures even as you read to extend citizenry-centred governance cum democratic dividends to the disillusioned natives of the state. Perhaps he just doesn’t know how to go about it.

    Ignorance is not an excuse for denying the citizenry good governance and their fundamental human rights. It is no longer tenable to hoodwink the citizenry by chants of ‘Change’ and platitudinous avowal to abolish squalor and foster general prosperity; time has revealed what section of the citizenry such ideological ‘life boat’ solutions are meant to deceive. It shall no longer be “politically expedient” to neglect a class of the governed just because, by will or circumstance, they inhabit parts of state the ruling class would rather not lose sleep over; except at the time of election or re-election.

    Governor Amosun is spending his second term in office which makes it even more dangerous for the APC to maintain dominance in Ogun State if he fails. When the party eventually presents its candidates for public offices in 2019, what glowing achievements will it point to as Amosun’s legacy and reasons why it should be given the people’s mandate again? The oft over-hyped and derided bridges and roads in Abeokuta? Or the equally contentious model school projects? These familiar arguments have gotten too old now and they are infinitely strange to the poor citizenry braving the perils of the state’s townships every day.

    Life in Ogun State’s townships is in grave decline. Together, these neglected tracts constitute an ambiguous ‘sick rose’ accentuating Ogun State’s descent into a food for worms even as you read. Though a sick rose, Ogun State is manouvered to mimic a growth cycle in the hands of Amosun and amid the rabid PR blitz launched and managed by Camp Amosun.

    That is why the state government will do nothing even if foreign investors  cum fortune hunters like cement giant, LafargeWAPCO Plc, subjects its host communities to terminal death, by its dangerous production activities, in desperate pursuit of profit. (It is instructive to note that LafargeWAPCO perpetrates in Ogun State, atrocities it wouldn’t dare commit in France and other European nations but that is a discussion for another day.)

    Ogun State’s manifestation as a sick rose satirizes Governor Amosun’s preferred portraits of it as a bower of bliss. It reveals an inner hostility; the governor’s flirtatious art of concealment necessitates that truth’s approach must take the form of a rape. If not, the people of Ogun State will continue to die by the onslaught of the conqueror maggots of hypocrisy, neglect, arrant betrayal and underdevelopment afflicting the state.

    Does Governor Amosun, like too many of his peers, consider truth as he hates to see it, as a perverse fetish? Does he believe that any critique or contradiction of his gospel of ‘Change’ is a swerve from goodwill and fruitfulness? If so, his much celebrated ‘Change’ project is diametrically opposed to the APC’s gospel of ‘Change.’

     

  • Healers or dealers? (2)

    •Bedside hostility, forced circumcision and criminal extortion at General Hospital, Oke-Odo, Agege, Lagos

    Few Lagos tragedies fully measure to the grotesque proceedings at the General Hospital, Oke-Odo, Agege, Lagos. Even as you read, the travesty of healthcare and humaneness persists like the tragic nuance in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The tragedy at the hospital is hardly the finale to the morbid serials staged across the coastal city’s General Hospitals but it unarguably represents an obscene, poignant burlesque characteristic of the incumbent administration’s health policy.

    Is the state’s Commissioner for Health, Jide Idris, aware of the organised fraud being perpetrated at the General Hospital, Oke-Odo, Agege, among other state hospitals? Is he aware of the bestial treatment meted to pregnant women and other patients calling in at the public health centre? Does he know of the subtle and brazen extortion methods perpetrated by the clinic’s authorities, like ‘over-prescription’ of drugs and medical provisions? Too many husbands are often forced to purchase more than the drugs and medical provisions they need for their pregnant wives’ treatment at the hospital’s dispensary. At the end of their ordeal, clinic staff persuade husbands of newly delivered mothers and relatives of convalescing patients who are about to be discharged, to give up the excess drugs and supplies. Then they sell to new patients at prices too close or similar to the dispensary’s.

    Is Jide Idris aware of ‘Megalek,’ an agency within the state’s General Hospital, forcefully recommended by the hospital authorities to perform circumcision on newborn sons, against their mother’s wishes. For the unsolicited service, mothers are forced to pay N4, 000. And no mother’s heartfelt complaint to the hospital’s Medical Director could protect her from the insolent tentacles of the internal extortion ring.

    Does Jide Idris know that, after reading the first part of this article, the Medical Director, General Hospital, Oke Odo, summoned an emergency meeting whereby the fraudulent charges on circumcision and other deceptive fees were promptly cancelled – at least till the noise blows over?

    The Lagos health commissioner is probably aware that there aren’t enough beds for pregnant women and other patients in the hospital’s crowded wards. And he probably knows of the several travesties being perpetrated in the hospital’s wards, he is simply too busy to care. Perhaps because the victims are far removed from the elite segment of Lagos’ high society.

    In fairness to the personnel of General Hospital, Oke Odo, Agege, they, like their colleagues across the state’s General Hospitals, have to function in parlous conditions. They are forced to ration fuel for electricity power generators because the state refuses to provide adequate budget for electricity supply. The hospital, like all others, is understaffed, and plagued by boorish staff with atrocious bedside manners. The medical staff  and auxiliary teams are overrun by a flippant, disgruntled, desperate breed. Save a very few whose respect for life and human dignity is borne of good breeding from childhood, self taught or acquired under the tutelage of Nigeria’s vanishing league of true health practitioners – zealots of a golden medical era –  the General Hospital, Oke Odo and so many others would become too hellish for comfort.

    Notwithstanding, a visit to the medical facility is like a journey to hell. Besides the inadequate medical facilities, staff shortages and its tiny car park, a dark pall of fear and uncertainty settles on patients and their relatives every time they call in at the hospital. Ask Citizen Afolake who had to wait 24 hours, in painful labour, on a wooden chair, to get a bed space that she lost as soon as she was wheeled into the hospital’s labour room. Ask Citizen Mo who was almost killed by the hospital’s medical staff because her vitals were taken by hospital cleaners posing as nurses while she attended antenatal clinic. Ask those who have lost loved ones to the hospital’s dysfunctional system but whose miseries are too inconsequential for the state to care about.

    Governor Akinwumi Ambode has definitely got his work cut out for him. He should know that budgeting N46.9 billion to the health sector in the state’s 2016 budget is never enough to emphasise his commitment to the alleviation of the citizenry’s health problems and elevation of the state’s cancerous health system.

    “The Y2016 budget of N662.588bn will enable our government focus on the present challenges of security, traffic gridlock resolution including physical and social infrastructural developments which have thrown up new challenges quite different from our past experience,” said Ambode while presenting the budget at a brief but impressive ceremony at banquet hall of the Lagos House.

    He called it his administration’s article of faith with Lagosians and promised that the budget would be faithfully implemented in line with his determination to make Lagos work for all, irrespective of age, gender, tribe or status.

    It is about time Ambode made Lagos truly work for Lagosians. It is about time he heeded the birth and death cries of mothers and underprivileged Lagosians respectively, who are persistently subjected to the serrated blades of the coastal city’s dysfunctional anti-citizenry health system.

    Of course, overzealous aides and cronies would readily tell Governor Ambode to dismiss this piece as yet another rant by a journalist seeking to make a noise like thunder over the city’s calm waters, but the Lagos governor would be doing himself a lot of good by paying good mind to the issues raised by the first and second installment of this piece.

    The Lagos health sector is comatose and in great deal of financial and administrative aid. Governor Ambode should rededicate himself to the sanitation of the state’s health facilities. Given that a greater segment of the state’s citizenry fall within the bracket too poor and unable to patronise the overpriced health services of the state’s boutique specialist hospitals, Governor Ambode should endeavour to take more active interest in the state’s health sector.

    Currently, tragedy plays a desperate game across the state’s public health centres – a game invented by the government’s administrative clumsiness thus blunting the incumbent governor’s overhyped competence and devotion to the state’s vulnerable divide.

    The battle for the soul of the state’s floundering health system can only be won by a governor who is ready to march in virtual lockstep to his claims of competence and empathy without airs. Nigeria is currently afflicted by the scourge of turncoat governors and other public officers who have betrayed the trust and exhausted the hopes of the electorate whose goodwill and votes earned them their cozy seats and mansions across the country’s political landscape.

    It would be really nice and refreshing to see Governor Ambode truly rise up as a man and defender of the rights of the poor, helpless folk whose votes, goodwill and passion for real ‘Change’ got him into power.

    Let him not act like his peer who got too drunk and blinded by power soon after their ascent the seat of power. Too many of Ambode’s peers skew stewardship by their disruptive relation with power and the citizenry’s trust. These are the tragic freaks and hostages to power. They are less moral and humane than the quintessential statesman. Their will to power is naked. Their actions are mired in chthonian cloud. They are a conduit of the irrational, exposing governance to mutations of the barbarism that the All Progressives Congress (APC) swore to shut out at its birth.

    Let the case of the General Hospital, Oke Odo, Agege and other state public health centres become Governor Ambode’s vehicle for testing and purifying his mettle and much hyped competence, before it renders his government yet another tragedy that Nigeria is trying to correct.

  • Healers or dealers? (1)

    •Bedside hostility, forced circumcision and criminal extortion at General Hospital, Oke-Odo, Agege, Lagos

    The depravity of its ‘excellent’ nature is coastal Lagos’ dirty secret. Despite its haughty  claim as Nigeria’s “Centre of Excellence,” Lagos groans under the tedious weight of mediocrity and its tragic sense of life. There is no gainsaying the commercial hub of Nigeria profits by a hard-worn, romanticised imagery of brilliance, bracing industry and entertainment. At the backdrop of this fantasy and specious proceedings however, Lagos pulsates in hazardous ugliness.

    This ugliness resonates across the coastal city’s landscape; it subsists in its neglected bad roads, cratered by-passes, hostile state agencies, infinitely devious and overzealous staff. It seeps through the mediocrity and crass inhumaneness of establishments like the General Hospital, Oke-Odo, Agege, Lagos.

    At the hospital, bestiality dons a joyful sneer and saunters through its hostile wards and administrative offices, every day. The General Hospital, Oke Odo, sets itself up against the true nature and essence of the Hippocratic Oath, by descending into infamy and organised extortion. Medical and administrative staff of the hospital seem driven by bile and institutionalised aggression. Thus every patient suffers a cruel and unusual form of punishment simply by calling in sick, appearing for consultation or birthing a newborn within the cold ambience of the public health centre.

    As you read, Citizen Afolake, a teacher, is still traumatised following her nasty experience in  the hands of the hospital’s insouciant staff. On her first day in the hospital, Afolake suffered a gruesome birthing process; she was made to labour in extremity. She experienced no reprieve from pain. No medical staff came around to offer kind words to her and fellow pregnant women even as they were forced to sit through the night on a hard wooden chair while they queued for ‘bed space.’

    When the pain became unbearable at midnight, Afolake, like her peers, had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. She could not leave the hospital because it was dark and she could not stand from her seat lest she loses it to another pregnant woman craving a seat while waiting for the ever elusive ‘bed space.’

    Impatiently but with calm resolve, Afolake braved through the night, praying that a ‘bed space’ became available to her by daybreak. But none would be available to her at dawn. Thus she writhed in agony from 9 am on Monday, October 10, 2016 to 9 pm on Tuesday, October 11, 2016 when she eventually found ‘bed space.’ It is instructive to note that Afolake, like her pregnant mates, waited on the hard wooden chair for 24 hours.

    After she put to bed, she had to wait on a long queue to bath herself and her baby. She also had to put up with very hostile nurses and flippant cleaners. Thus after delivery, Afolake could hardly wait to escape the hospital’s human and structural extremities. But Afolake would experience more misery by the hospital’s staff as they insisted that she let ‘Megalek,’ an agency within the hospital, perform circumcision on her newborn son, against her wish. For the unsolicited service, they forced her to pay N4, 000.

    Predictably, Afolake protested; “I told them I didn’t need them to circumcise my son. I told them we have a family doctor who does the circumcision on male children in my family but they ignored my explanation,” she lamented.

    Thus Afolake sought the hospital’s Medical Director (MD) and complained to her but to her chagrin, the MD said she (Afolake) must pay the N4, 000 even though she did not want the circumcision done on her son. “I had already paid N29, 200 as medical bill but she said I must pay an additional N4, 000 for an unsolicited circumcision which I declined,” said Afolake.

    The hospital staff made her understand that, if she failed to pay the N4,000, she would not be discharged. But Afolake was too eager to leave the hospital. Before she put to bed, she had been sleeping on a chair and immediately after delivery, she was forced to share a narrow bed with a heavily pregnant woman because she lost her ‘bed space’ immediately she was wheeled into the labour room.

    Eventually, Afolake paid N4, 000 for a circumcision that was never performed on her son. A separate receipt was issued for the unsolicited service while another was issued for her medical bill. Both receipts bore the logo and name of the General Hospital, Oke-Odo, Agege, Lagos.

    With a heavy heart, Afolake left the hospital ruing the complex yet methodical network of extortion foisted on her by the hospital. She lamented the hell she went through birthing her son at the public health centre and wondered how the hospital’s medical and administrative staff mutated into such pitiless characters.

    No doubt, Afolake is luckier than Citizen Mo. In 2011, the latter almost lost her life even after losing her child due to the negligence of the medical staff at the General Hospital, Oke-Odo, Agege, Lagos. Citizen Mo, a journalist, was rushed to the clinic after her blood sugar level hit the roof. She had been attending antenatal clinic at the hospital but all along, the hospital assigned cleaners to attend to her and her pregnant peer. Unknown to her, the menial workers who had been taking her medical records, had virtually no knowledge and training about how to run an antenatal clinic, yet they attended to her and other pregnant women. Eventually, they committed serious blunder recording wrong details of Citizen Mo’s health vitals. Consequently, she didn’t get the treatment that she actually deserved.

    Citizen Mo was rushed to the hospital when her blood sugar level skyrocketed with devastating impact on her health. She was seven months pregnant. At the hospital, the doctors did not discover that she was having contractions until dusk. Even so, there was little they could do; they wheeled her into the theatre and delivered her of her child prematurely. Subsequently, discrepancies caused by wrong administration of drugs and medical aid caused Citizen Mo to slip into coma. She was in coma for two days because the doctors treated her based on wrong vitals (medical information) taken of her, by the hospital’s cleaners and other menial workers. Sadly, Citizen Mo stirred from coma to a tragic reality: her child died because there was no functional incubator in the hospital’s labour room. There was no incubator at the General Hospital, Oke-Odo, Agege, Lagos.

    More severe cases abound of unpardonable acts committed by the hospital’s medical staff. But the fault is never entirely the fault of the hospital’s medical personnel. Like several other health facilities across Lagos, they are forced to function with a lean team and mean resources. Thus the hospital’s ‘bed spaces’ are never enough among other inadequacies.

    But that is no excuse for the hospital staff to mortgage patients’ health and risk their lives on a whim. For a state allegedly presided over by a ‘no-nonsense’ governor, the state of the General Hospital, Oke-Odo, Agege is an eyesore. Governor Akinwumi Ambode projects himself as a revolutionary in the saddle. His media team works assiduously to establish him as a grassroots politician and statesman with a heart that skips for the interest of Lagos’ poor, vulnerable divide. Yeah, he is rehabilitating bad roads and building new ones but does he have the courage, and administrative will to save lives?

  • ‘Press boys,’ politicians and cow dung

    It’s still a blast picturing Femi Adesina as President, Federal Republic of Nigeria and Muhammadu Buhari as his Special Adviser on Defence or Agriculture. I still believe a President Reuben Abati would have fared better ‘commanding’ Goodluck Jonathan as a clerk in the Ministry of Agriculture’s Forestry unit. It’s heartwarming too to imagine Adejuwon Soyinka as Governor of Ogun State while Ibikunle Amosun serves as a clerk in the state’s Ministry of Environment. Picture Eni Akisola as Ondo governor and Olusegun Mimiko as his Press Secretary. If roles were swapped, do these bastions of Nigerian journalism possess the superior wisdom, intellect and charisma to lead?

    Would the ‘elevated tact’ they offered in their news columns be enough? Would the relative truths and morality they projected on their pages and that endeared them to their teeming readership and patrons among the ruling class, guarantee their election into the esteemed and very demanding public offices?

    Or would they need devilry and measured insensitivity to succeed, like the predatory ruling class they are part of? Would they, like their principals manifest as everything but a boon to the Nigerian state, in time? Would they need journalists to evolve into ‘press boys’-  vulgar, grotesque aberrations of the journalist as watchdog? Would they also treat journalists like cow dung?

    Nigeria savours the vulgar and sexually grotesque no doubt thus her fascination with the amoral beauty theme, the deformed beautiful boy to be precise. In this festering theme, the journalist suitably features in the machinations of a decadent and predatory ruling class. He becomes journalism’s dark answer to the society’s sinister lust for the beautiful boy – and so we have the journalist as the attractive ‘press boy,’ open to all manners of twisted, criminal and strange ventures.

    Last year, we did strange things. ‘Press boys’ within and outside the country’s corridors of power gave the journalist a slatternly sensitivity. Thus the press boy manifested on Nigeria’s psyche, like a provider of degenerate pleasures, a commercial sex worker to be precise.

    I hereby apologise to the wiry of the pack, the gentlemen/ladies of the press; the crusader breed that painstakingly burnt the hours, doing ‘legwork’ and anchoring reportage that impacted and changed lives, however nominal the impact. Apology to the editors and media too, that devoted pages and priceless hours to publish the news and investigative features that continually suffered the public’s apathy because they were too didactic and devoid of bias.

    Last year, journalism fell to mob tyranny. I speak of that age-old tyranny of the mob that severely skews newspaper cover stories thus establishing the descent of the fabled press’ intellect into dimwittedness – no thanks to the journalist that mutated like Castiglione’s courtier, without the latter’s vaunted athleticism or social savvy.

    Last year, the ‘press boy’ affected citizenship and justice with misty emotion, flaunting docile intellect, bearing and gestures of a mutt on the leash of a predatory ruling class. He was essentially a deformation of the courtier – his conduct was likable to that of the celebrity hairdresser, boudoir confidant or presidential lounge lizard perpetually nodding in affirmative to the caprices of his principal, the president, or every patron with deep pocket.

    Last year, the press boy constantly groveled at the feet and filth attic of his principal in apparent affirmation of the truism: “He that pays the piper dictates the tune.” Flattery and malice leapt from his forked tongue as he attacked his principal’s perceived detractors with relish. Like the medieval, Italian male harlot, his shameless self-abasement was unmanly and amoral. He elevated bum over forelock in a flagrant rite of socioeconomic and political sodomy.

    Last year, the journalist misappropriated the warrior spirit; ‘press boys’ among us paraded themselves as leopards but chirped like crickets gone nuts, in dubious indignation at the whirlpool of tragedy that has become the Nigerian dream. The African Independent Television (AIT) for instance, went to war with reason, ethics and decency as reflected by its damaging , irresponsible broadcasts about candidate Muhammadu Buhari during the presidential elections.  Last year, the ‘press boy’ was the ruling class’ beast of burden; he made sensibility a prelude to dog-eared masochism. This unfortunate reality was predetermined by his innate sensitivity. The ‘press boy’ suffered a moral concussion, a consequence of his perverse manifestation as a beast of moral grayness.

    Outside the loop of power, he was the quintessential moralist, the unsolicited arbiter in matters of equity, nationhood and justice. In the loop of power, he became Reuben Abati to the ruling class’ Goodluck Jonathan.

    And the journalist that suffered the misfortune of being unacceptable to the incumbent power structure, hovered and loitered about the corridors of power, seeking the proverbial moment when fortune would smile at him and accord him wiggle room in the country’s theatre of base, bloody, political intrigues – think Dele ‘name-dropper’ and company.

    This year was supposed to be different, but the Nigerian ‘press boy’ like the Petrarchan lover, fancies himself deliciously powerless vis-a-vis a domineering society and media owner. Goaded by his sodomised sensibility, he accentuates his ethical contusion by seeking sufficiency in loot accorded him by the ruling class – particularly in these hard times.

    This year as all others, the journalist has been insanely reactive; fettered by grinding poverty, irregular salary, institutional bias, dubious professionalism and imperious principals, he becomes a parody of morality whose words and deeds boom as cloying mime of every criminal and politician’s desire even as you read. How can such character effectively discharge his role as watchdog of the society or defender of the masses’ rights?

    This was supposed to be the year in which we stopped enabling the ‘press boy’ to betray us. Nigeria deserves a press that would look Buhari in the eye and tell him that the honeymoon is over, while stifling with truth, the din of sentimental fops spiritedly chanting ‘Sai Buhari!’ to all of the president’s unforgivable gaffes.

    Nigeria treats her journalists like cow-dung. Politicians, technocrats, civil servants, clerics and even the jobless, directionless youth on the street laments society’s affliction by ‘rogues’ and ‘dimwits’ masquerading as journalists – they forget that the journalist reflects the society he serves, in culture and persona.

    As a journalist, I am at risk of such random dehumanisation. The best I could do is tailor my practice against the tide of diseased journalism. Journalists are in part, Nigeria’s problem but despite our ugliness, we cannot be wished away nor can we be weeded out by violence or bloodshed. It’s about time we aspired to something more than the monstrosities standing in the way of civilization, progress and common decency.

    Today, we see the death journalism because we are desperate enough to demean its essence and powers playing errand ‘boys’ to every party chieftain and thug occupying public office. Thus we pimp and syndicate grandiose articles, “Special Investigations” and “Truths of the matter” that are as relative as our inclinations to play dumb. Does anyone still listen to us? Whose lives do we impact by our pretentious lines and mercantile intellectualisation?

    It’s about time we addressed media grotesqueness by expansion in breadth of practice, reason, catholicity of will and culture. Our native aspiration as enablers of men who loot our coffers to feed their greed must not be encouraged any further. Nor should we persist in pitiful complacency and acquiescence to their boorish enterprises, for the love of a token.

     

  • Life on a sweepstake

    We speak in several pitiful tongues. Every tongue reels a different story of identical loss and misery; and so, one comes to callousness, a savage ruthlessness and culture of protest that drives us to ruin our world: dateline Boko Haram, Niger Delta Avengers, Ombatse and the complex bigotry, avarice and bloodlust characteristic of all.

    Yet this page will not contain the genocide, amorality and grotesque body count we have learnt to perpetrate, not because they are too horrendous and unwieldy to keep tab of, but because there is neither wisdom nor tact in rehashing the consequences of towering idiocy and bloodlust.

    We blame the older generation for everything. We claim they created a very difficult world for us to live in; a world that is rigged to booby-trap our efforts to survive and that is why many of us fail. We also accuse the ruling class of keeping us unemployed, prone to corruption, exploitation, crime and the devastation of our economy and social infrastructure. We accuse them of denying us access and right to the Nigerian dream.

    What have we done with such world that they have given us? What are we doing to make it better for you and me and the generation that will succeed us? Nothing. Rather than evolve in thought and attitude, we choose to rant impotently and wallow in self-pity. And when we choose to productively engage our faculties, our conscious quest is marred by our inclinations to self-destruct.

    If our world is ruined, we are to blame for it. This is because we are major actors in every tragedy and perpetrators of every calamity that accentuates our ruin. We are the hoodlums causing chaos at random, according to the whims of criminal and benevolent godfathers. We are the policemen mounting road blocks to fleece hardworking compatriots of the little money they make, everyday. When they refuse to cooperate, we simply shoot them to death.

    We are the bankers pilfering the lifesavings of the poor. We are the bank chiefs stripping Peter to pay Paul and robbing the downtrodden to feed our wantonness and greed. We are wives to the thieving governor, and gigolo to the rogue bank chief. We are the journalists who sold out, the watchdog who became lapdogs and then, dung-dogs. We are armed robbers and thieves. We are the activists exploiting the downtrodden to perpetuate our grand schemes of greed.

    No matter the ills visited upon our generation, we lost the right to howl and cry ‘foul!’ the moment we agreed to do everything and anything to make money, including serving as instruments for the attainment of the perverse goals of the criminal ruling class.

    Shame, that we have to look unto the same generation that we accuse of ruining our world to take measures necessary to save our world. The current ruling class won’t save us. They can’t. And that is because like you and me, they are held captive by greed, irrationality amongst several base immoralities.

    Every generation considers itself uniquely challenged like we do and each generation truly is, in different ways. But I don’t buy into over-generalizations and self pity. Like we accuse older generations before us, successive generations will accuse us of ruining their world claiming we had better chances to resolve our crises and recreate the world that they would inherit from us.

    Our sense of entitlement goads us to believe that we are entitled to a good, fair life but for the ruling class and older generation that thwarts our dreams of bliss. When the older generation claims that we are ill-educated and unemployable, we respond in kind, claiming that they render us so with visionless leadership and substandard education. Truth is, school is a bore to many of us and artisanship doesn’t quite do it for us. We breeze through school and apprenticeship unenthusiastically, thinking that somewhere or somehow, something would give and we would chance on bliss.

    Notwithstanding, some of us enter the labour market thinking it wouldn’t hurt to be exploited a little. Having being raised on the mantra that “Slow and steady wins the race and tiny drops make an ocean,” we subject our will to the grindstone and stoically tread the path of obedience and honest labour. But the path of industry and honesty hardly ever pay off in the long run.

    Eventually, we realize that the system is designed to thwart our dreams while enabling the dreams of the exploitative one per cent at the top, and we get mad. We get mad because our leaders do not see us as human beings with cosmic value and rights anymore. But despite our dissatisfaction, we keep them in power and keep asking them for handouts. Our rage and rant hardly ever articulates our towering need for realistic opportunities.

    We do not choose to be treated with dignity. That is why the government and our employers become entitled to take away our dignity. That is why we are entitled to expect nothing from our politicians anymore. We should be ashamed of our sense of entitlement. We should be embarrassed by our failure as a generation. We should be ashamed that we go through life thinking the world’s a sweepstake.

    We believe the world is for the taking by a lottery; this is understandable as a carrot on a stick that the top one per cent – comprising government and big business – perpetually dangle before us. Thus the Nigerian dream has evolved from a promise and belief that every Nigerian will get to have a good life, a job they enjoy, a generous paycheck, affordable housing, healthcare and transportation and a secure retirement, into some reality show fantasy and a pipedream.

    Today, the Nigerian dream comprises a tall fantasy that every Nigerian will get to live a charmed life. It offers attractive fantasies of palatial residences in exclusive neighbourhoods home and abroad; fancy cars, easy money, consequence-free indolence, sex, fraudulence and violence to mention a few. The Nigerian youth consider these perks their birthright and they heartily pursue them on the streets and now ubiquitous reality TV shows where parents and their children from relatively humble backgrounds engage in funfest of foolishness and inordinate lust for unearned riches. The tragedy of this development resonates in the number of ‘has-beens’ and reality show runners-up still loitering the red carpets for the barest chance to hug the limelight for no justifiable reason or attainment.

    Each generation has a responsibility to wisely develop itself and become indispensable to the world despite all odds. It is the only way we could equip ourselves to take over the country’s leadership and use the resources and power available to us to provide this generation and the next, a secure, sustainable country that will be stronger than the one inherited.

    We need to stop whining and begin to take action now to reverse the rapid decline of our country. If we wait until we are older, it will be too late. Life in the future will be worse.

    It’s about time we seek our Nigerian dream not because we are ‘special’ but because we truly deserve it.

  • The integrity of brutes and eternal wildlings

    Nigeria is not the greatest country in Africa. ‘It’ is not the greatest country in the world. ‘It’ is a creature borne of incest. But it is hardly the ‘contraption’ frequently alluded to by generations of revolutionary poseurs and armchair Trotskys – it is piteous and ideologically shallow of them to wish our problems away simply by calling for an end to the ‘forced marriage’ of cultures and ethnicities, an enterprise which blame they lay solely at the feet of the country’s colonial predators.

    Nigeria fails as a nation because we fail as a people and progenitors of African civilisation. Rather than project a superior culture of nationhood and society, we choose to curate the worst that our forebears dared espouse, coating it as the ‘Nigerian factor,’ and our flamboyant code of conduct.

    Thus we covet an incestuous relationship with self – the dark, chthonian parts of our innate nature. We mould our clan where racial foolery fraternizes with vile. Senior citizenry molest our young in a never-ending cycle of sleaze and moral pedophilia. But the young are hardly the prey we think they are. Every second, they morph from starry-eyed victims to eager participants in our dehumanising ritual of violence, mental and biological aberration.

    Ours is a classic tale of Darwinian waste and mayhem, the squalor and rot of Nigerianness; a distortion of African civilisation. But we block the true import and consequences of this hideous cycle on our psyches and our future as a nation, that we might retain our integrity as brutes and eternal wildlings.

    Western science and cultural aesthetics predictably become apparatus in our frantic attempt to revise the Nigerian horror into imaginatively palatable form. Notwithstanding our frantic lunge for substance and acclaim on frontiers where the world’s more advanced civilisations project their race and oneness, Nigeria remains hideous in name and status. While we make exaggerated gestures in fields of space science, information technology, industry, sports, and so on, Nigerian children die at birth and thousands of mothers die in painful labour. The youth are unemployed. Public officers loot public coffers with impunity and disregard for Rule of Law. Law enforcement officers turn violent affliction on the citizenry and society they are meant to protect. The executive, legislative and judicial arms of government mesh in a fetid whirl of strife and plunder. Anarchy rules our hinterlands and metropolitan Nigeria.

    Within such stew and stink, Nigeria ranks 152nd of 188 countries in the 2016 African Human Development Index (HDI) according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Thus we are back at the crossroads of vile and extinction. There has been no improvement in our plight.

    While this piece too, resounds as hackneyed howl and lamentation; a regurgitation of grotesqueness we inflict on our fatherland and the towering monstrosities we have become.

    Our ultimate nemesis is the Nigerian youth. The youth epitomise the nub of discord and deathly rally ripping the tide and march to progress of our fatherland. But why do promising youth evolve like brutes and loathsome trolls? How did our once incandescent spokes of dawn erupt in moonshine?

    Many have attributed the afflictions of the Nigerian youth to bad leadership, nonstop dominance of the predatory ruling class and tiring recalcitrance of the younger generation to engage in communal and national politics in a beneficial manner. Many more would readily diagnose the maladies of the nation’s youth to structural banes and the perverse culture of citizenship by which they are weaned and ushered into adulthood.

    In the wake of plausible and often farfetched analyses, too many ‘patriots’ conveniently excuse themselves from the nexus of blame and severally propound the sad realization that Nigerians are innately incapable of self-determination and self-governance. Many have recommended the American example, the British palliative, the Chinese abracadabra and Malaysian ingenuity to mention a few, as the ultimate measures to resolve the nation’s ills. How?

    These arguments have overtime, attained a language of their own and thus evolved as a dialect of dissent and exaggerated self-abnegation. The nation’s academic elite, political and economic ruling classes frequently marshal clashing precepts as solutions and justifiable putdown of the ruling class and the lower working class as their politics dictate.

    A more damning view identifies the breadlines’ persistent ‘claims to victimhood and sense of entitlement’ as whiny and symptomatic of a dense and irresponsible citizenry. Between the conflict of hyperboles and sentimental vituperation, Nigeria suffers the affliction of intellectual miscreants and promising youth-turned-foetal-adults.

    As youths, the coordinated tragedies afflicting our consciousness daily append the only real structure to our lives as impoverished Nigerians. The burdensome reality of fast slipping youth, the recurrent rites of bigotry and ethical quandary of coping with the strict moral code of adulthood and ideal society, obscures our understanding of life’s ultimate purpose and meaning. It spurs millions of misguided Nigerian youth to engage in a mad, desperate pursuit of fast and fleeting riches even as ripples of their actions keep hundreds of millions more in the doldrums and binds of despair.

    Consequently, the revolutionary dissent that sprouts from oppression is pitiless and unbending. It radically splits our world into ‘insensitive ruling class’ and ‘clueless lower class,’ ‘elite’ and ‘downtrodden,’ ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ It fosters even more fragmented discord that continually pits Nigerian Christians against Muslims, Hausa against Igbo, Igbo against Yoruba, Yoruba against Ijaw. It fosters spurious segmentation of our society into moral and amoral,  good against evil, and apostates versus believers. Within this poisonous clime, the Nigerian child is born. If he survives birth hour, he is violently thrust into adolescence and misshapen adulthood.

    From Boko Haram and Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) terrorism, internet fraud, cyber-terrorism, financial/bankers’ terrorism and political terrorism emblematic of the ruling class, recent developments in the country present a sad prologue to a heinous and wider conflict between the nation’s rich ruling class and the impoverished majority of the breadlines and disappearing middle-class.

    A bloody and protracted war thus ensues: this war, caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment, substandard health facilities, rising food prices, big business and government conspiracies against the Nigerian state, manifest at alarming proportions daily and by the second.

    Thus our society is flung rudderless on a seething sea of sleaze. Now that our world as we have made it, begins to collapse, we withdraw from the possibility of rebirth, and choose to exploit ‘infinite possibilities’ in our fragility and doomsday predictions.

    The youth predictably become prominent actors in the theatre of ruin and discord. They become the muscle to actualise the ruling class’ blueprint of collapse. But if we consider our plight deeply enough, we would find that no child of the ruling class is co-opted in the drama of violence and bloodshed. They are tucked safely abroad.

    Picture the NDA, Boko Haram, MASSOB, IPOB, OPC, and so on without youth drawn from the breadlines and society’s boondocks. Will our governors, legislators, the presidency and aristocratic divide people these groups with their sons, daughters and wives?

    It’s about time we shunned the politics of retrogression, spurious militancy, bloodshed and devastation to embrace growth and immense possibilities achievable in progressive endeavour, like a youth movement cum political platform mooted by the youth, for the youth and Nigeria’s future.

  • Fantasy of thieves, looters and blinkered murderers

    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 history and civilization 54-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?

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