The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Still on Buhari’s ‘demons’

    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 shortcomings 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.

    However, 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 the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), under the numb chairmanship of Dr. Sam Amadi is determined to inflict greater hardship on Nigerians by increasing electricity tariff.

    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’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.

    Buhari is yet to do anything extraordinary; the ‘steadier’ electricity supply has dropped to an abysmal low and his cabinet’s ineptitude resonates jarringly among the citizenry.

    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.

    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 has Buhari justified the mandate given him so far? 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 is ennobled by widespread admiration and cult worship of him. The danger in the cult worship he currently enjoys however, is that we are setting him up for failure. Certain sections of the press may go easy on him because one or two members of the nation’s fourth estate are in his employ as media aides but the truth need be told to President Buhari from time to time; he is not doing too well at the moment. His performance is below par.

  • This Nigerian dream…

    We belabour the ‘Nigerian dream.’ We abuse the idea that life will get better, that progress is assured if we keep faith, obey the rules and work hard, that prosperity is guaranteed if we continue to tread the slow, steady path to progress and a prosperous future. And in pursuit of these lofty ideals, we pervert the steady, measured, impartial course of the universe; hacking pliant paths to our dreams, from the crossroads where gluttony fosters depravity.

    Eventually, we awaken to a cold, bitter truth: We are being sacrificed. The Nigerian dream we are sold isn’t worth our sacrifice. And the individual dreams we pursue, aren’t worth a smidgen of what we make them out to be. By the time we all struggle to achieve our dreams; Nigeria will be finished. Given that each tribe may finally achieve its dreams of nationhood via secession, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw to mention a few may establish their new nations.

    When we do, the swollen belly of our idiocy and pride shall become clearly visible to us. When it does, it shall suddenly dawn on us that, all along, we had been blindly acting to a script prepared by career predators from Western nations of Europe, America and our ruling class.

    The truth shall become clearer to us in intensity and impact and we shall hopelessly realize that we are being sacrificed. We will all be sacrificed; some of us much quicker than others. As it is now, so shall it be in our new nations, the Biafran youth, Ijaw youth, Oodua youth and Arewa youth to mention a few, shall become disposable indices in the scheme of things.

    But until then, we will continue to have today and squander it on the altar of racism and greed. Today, it’s impossible to see any offspring of our ruling class engage or become embroiled in the familiar tragedies that mar our lives. It’s always the children from the breadlines, struggling middle class and backwaters that are involved. We are the youth divide traditionally expected and required to function and serve as unquestioning muscles and ordinary cannon fodder in the ruling class’ blueprint of pillage and destruction.

    The decline of Nigeria is a story of gross injustices by the ruling class to the citizenry. But that is only an aspect of it, the greatest injustice is that meted out by individual citizen to self – the youth particularly. And this predominant malaise often plays out in our corruptibility and disinclination to foster a more humane leadership and society.

    Today, we suffer declining standards of living, stagnant and falling wages that are hardly paid at due time; we suffer curtailment and absolute denial of our basic wages, long-term unemployment, slave labour, escalating crime wave, among other ills.

    Together, we perpetuate gruesome realities of the weakest being crushed decisively and maniacally by the affluent and strong. Together, we perpetuate a story of unbridled sectarian, ethnic and corporate power that has taken our government hostage, overseen the dismantling of our cultural heritage, societal and entrepreneurial values.

    But if the ruling class, in connivance with predatory nations and institutions from the so-called ‘first world’ is responsible for plundering our natural resources and bankrupting the nation, we, the youth, are responsible for even worse atrocities.

    We serve as the tools by which the ruling class and its cohorts overseas plunder and destroy our nation. The virus of political corruption, the perverted belief that only political and material profit matters, has spread to distort our thoughts and understanding of right and wrong. Today, it manifests in endemic proportions plaguing our communities with religious and political terrorism, economic and cyber-terrorism to mention a few.

    Today, the Nigerian society dies a gruesome death basically because we lay to waste, our youths and we, the latter, by our suicidal actions and thoughts, submit ourselves as hopeless prey to the Nigerian ruling class and their cohorts overseas.

    Everyday encounters with gluttonous gangs of struggling youth reveals among other things, that many of us are the same social products as our peer from the aristocratic divide. Conditioned by life’s harshest vicissitudes to survive at all cost, we lay in wait, striving and bidding our time until we are ably positioned and strong enough to serve or rob the rich whose life we earnestly covet and decry.

    A visit to any night club, party, religious organization or office still attests to this fact. Ambitious and upwardly mobile youth from the breadlines or struggling working class families engage in a variety of excesses to the applause of mates yearning to be in their shoes. Either as advance fee fraudsters, bankers, journalists, accountants, secretaries, factory hands or ordinary clerks, youths from the breadlines daily engages in a bitter, desperate struggle to chance on the shortest possible cut to sudden and stupendous wealth.

    We seem beset by a greater and unexplainable fear beyond the fear of poverty amongst other harsh realities of their lives. Fear plays a greater part than hope: we are infinitely buoyed and obsessed with thoughts of the money that we could make or the possessions that might be taken from us or elude us, than of the joy and value that we might add to our own lives and to the future of our fatherland.

    Most of us, like our more privileged peer crave the best of everything without actually sweating for it. And when we do sweat for it, our industry is tainted by vigorous dashes of impatience and duplicity. In our work, we are haunted by jealousy of competitors, and a fleeting interest in the actual work that has to be done. We spend greater time and passion defending unjust privileges that we are desperate to enjoy.

    Such appalling youth constitute a greater segment of the human element expected to salvage Nigeria from eternal ruin and bloodbath. Consequently, our society becomes more rudderless and unstable and vulnerable, on our watch. Now that Nigeria as our fathers, ‘the wasted generation’ made it, and we the youth, aggravate it, have begun to collapse, we withdraw from the possibility of rebirth, and instead choose to exploit the infinite possibilities in our fragility and predicted collapse.

    It’s about time the Nigerian youth started postponing immediate gratification and endure hard sacrifices, spurred by conviction that the future can be better than the past. Beyond the politics and inanities of our existing ruling class and political parties, we face far more difficult questions at our moment in history: How do we reconcile reality with promises that have been made to us? How do we make the best of our circumstances at the backdrop of indefensible leadership failure and disillusionment of the citizenry?  How do we evolve and nurture to fruition, a new vision to help us deal with our gruesome realities, even as we chart a promising story of the future? How do we divorce ourselves from the pains and disappointments of the past – particularly those that many of amongst us had no stake in but yet internalize and perpetuate unexplainable miseries thereby?

    How do we redefine “Peace, Unity and Progress” with our lust for “Life, Liberty and Happiness?”  How do we become more humane than we are now?

  • Slavery is the disease

    Today, complaint is often made of what we call the failure of the Nigerian dream. We lament how monstrously, forces of society accomplish and fail to fulfill their work. We lament how the ruling class functions in profligacy and chaos. Nigeria laments the insensibility of the ruling class.  But today, as usual, we fail to look inwards. Perhaps because we fear we would find in you and I, the summary of all other failures and disorganisation. A sort of heart, from which every kind of confusion and horror gravitates in our fatherland.

    Complaint was often made that our problems persist because we refused to convene a Sovereign National Conference (SNC). There is the argument that our problems worsen because President Buhari refuses to implement the recommendations of his predecessor’s shady SNC. Perhaps there is depth and a semblance of truth in such frivolous mindset even as it becomes more glaring that a trillion SNCs will not save Nigeria.

    This is because any consensus or ‘practicable solutions’ proffered at the conference would be the result of self-serving efforts of generations of shady characters comprising ex-convicts, hired assassins, treasury looters, armed robbers, advance fee fraudsters, decadent clerics and bloodthirsty political godfathers to mention a few. What manner of humaneness could result from a gathering of crows?

    That we undermine ourselves and underestimate our self-worth are old stories told. Now that we have failed us, we pursue the comfort of blame and cheap consolations. Nigeria hasn’t failed us. You and I have failed us. We are the thorny thickets shielding our shoots from the sunny spokes of daylight.

    There is a tragedy inherent in our customary lamentation every time our conscience is roused with a damning incident or report. Racist politicians and activists tirelessly suggest that we go our separate ways. They tout secession as the only solution to the country’s league of extraordinary problems.

    Secession is the anthem that we should shun. It is the fruit of ‘reason’ that we need to be wary of and I will continue to say this hoping every prospective muscle – the youth – by which the separatists hope to achieve their dreams of dissolution, would listen and let the secessionists risk their hides and children to actualize their platitudes.

    The biggest misconception about ‘secession,’ ‘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 in their dream nation. Astonishingly, youth that ought to know better, buy into their  farce and they begin to dream and talk of the great uprising that would set them free from the living hell Nigeria has become.

    This disillusioned youth engages in bootless pursuits at the end of which he accomplishes too little or nothing. He probably accomplishes some individualized goal – satisfaction of a sentiment or material gain – which to him is everything; but for Nigeria, he accomplishes comparatively nothing.

    Eventually, he morphs into the disgruntled man on the street stereotype; who suddenly realises in his twilight, that he had squandered God’s greatest gifts to him: intellect and talent. Then the smokescreen of youth and hastily prized platitudes begin to peter out and he realises that his miraculous talisman is a paltry plated coin – less suitable for social transaction than a contemptible kobo.

    There is fundamental evil in our souls hence the vileness of our norms and culture. What evils should we set out to abolish in our modern society? To this, I bet very many well-meaning people would answer poverty, even though they ought to answer slavery.

    Face to face every day with the shameful contrasts of riches and destitution, high dividends and low wages, and painfully conscious of the futility of trying to adjust the balance by means of charity, private or public, they would answer unhesitatingly that they stand for the abolition of poverty.

    But poverty is merely a symptom, slavery is the disease. The extremes of riches and destitution follow inevitably upon the extremes of leadership and bondage. We are not enslaved because we are poor; we are poor because we are enslaved.

    Consequently, every attempt to conceive imaginatively, a better ordering of Nigerian society than the destructive, pitiless chaos in which the nation has sunk is by no means modern; it is at least as old as Plato, whose “Republic” set the model for the Utopias of subsequent philosophers and self-styled revolutionaries.

    The secessionists contemplate a new world in the light of an ideal. They claim to feel a great sorrow by the evils that characterise Nigeria, and they claim to be driven by an urgent desire to lead their ethnic groups or race to the realisation of the collective good. It is this desire which has been the primary force moving the pioneers of anarchism and horrid tyrannies – as it moved the creators of ideal commonwealths in the past.

    In contemporary Nigeria, it is incense for suspicious revolutionaries claiming to fight for the interests of Nigeria’s ethnic divides. In this, there is nothing new. What is new and unpardonably offensive is the pretension of such characters to heartfelt sorrow and shared grief in the suffering of the masses.

    This has enabled cynical and anarchist political movements to grow out of the frustrations and hopes of Nigeria’s youth and predominantly impressionable thinkers, whose thought processes and politics are anything but humane. This makes the agitation of the Nigerian separatists worrisome and markedly dangerous to the survival of the youth and the Nigerian nation.

    The process of re-sensitising the youth away from the establishment of chaos and genocide advocated by the secessionists will be greatly accelerated by the abolition of the current political order. However, this can only be achieved by the nation’s youth – who are unfortunately enthralled by the platitudes and desperate politics of Nigeria’s ruling class.

    It is no doubt the stock in trade of the latter to refer to violent uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Iraq, Zanzibar, Tanganyika, India-Pakistan, Mali and parts of Asia among others, as worthy indicators of Nigeria’s need to follow suit. Whenever they dazzle with such informed commentary, tell them to lead the secession they advocate with their wives, children and closest relatives.

    Many activists, youth leaders and self-acclaimed political heroes today have their wives and children tucked away in secure schools and neighbourhoods abroad even as they goad impoverished, clueless youth back home to untimely doom.

    If it is true that there is appreciable number of Nigerian youth capable of powering revolts for ethnic self-determination, the end of which is dissolution of Nigeria, why can’t the same youth power the social regeneration and reclamation of the Nigerian State from the clutches of the predatory ruling class, ethnic bigots and dissolution activists?

    The current political dispensation and acute racial bigotry must eventually yield to the influences of education and culture, if the youth could aspire to progressive ideals. But such transformation calls for remarkable wisdom and tolerance.

  • Mob parable

    Mobs destroy and scarcely create. Be it as wild savages or unthinking herds, it has always been the preoccupation of the mob to tear down. Take the Nigerian mob for instance; by its impulsiveness, lack of forethought and restraint, want of personal and societal ethics, it expedites the destruction of everything and anything – like an unpopular policy or worn-out civilization. Whether concrete or abstract, hard-wearing or fragile, whatever object or subject becomes the fascination of the Nigerian mob is sooner annihilated.

    This devastation persists as a ceaseless cycle and it is amply sustained and accelerated via brutish inclinations that characterize the Nigerian mob. Like primeval savages, the Nigerian mob lives, thinks and acts like creatures of the wild thus its unwritten code of existence: “Every man for himself in our communal jungle where only the strongest survive.”

    Who are the Nigerian mob? This question expectedly excites spurious theories, allegations and conclusions about the breed aptly classifiable and identifiable with mob mentality. While many would readily finger the nation’s ruling class and its horde of loyalists, many more would categorize the impoverished breadlines as the core of the Nigerian mob.

    In the flurry of generalizations, a certifiable crowd is omitted essentially because it constitutes the cult of self-appointed critics, intellectuals, moralists and the socially aware. This crowd comprises the pedestrian and infinitely tiresome breed of Nigerians who never see anything good about Nigeria; their pastime involves logging on to every social media portal with considerable traffic to continually vent and portray Nigeria as a failed enterprise.

    Facebook and Twitter offer wonderful platforms for these interesting breed to say all manner of unprintable things about Nigeria and their fellow Nigerians. Another category of this breed comprises journalists, ‘social commentators’ and newspaper columnists like me. The access we enjoy to means and channels of expression is oftentimes abused by us.

    It is alright to criticize but the bulk of what many of us do is classifiable as destructive sentimentality and hate-mongering. Oftentimes, we engage in sanctimonious whining, blame-casting and character assassination for reasons that border on the infantile and shame logic.

    The utter lack of gumption and foresight incessantly perpetuated by this breed continually offer court jesters and media attack-mongrels of the ruling class innumerable opportunities to lash out, deploying sophistry, ad hominem and juvenile heckling in responding to critics of the ruling class they serve.

    Such characters can treat the Nigerian critic and journalist with contempt given the irresponsibility and mercenariness that characterizes the latter’s criticisms of their principals. Having spent quality time as vocal parts of such crowd, media aides and attack-dogs of the ruling class respond to criticisms from a standpoint of knowledge and towering impatience.

    A Special Adviser to the President or a Governor on Media Affairs for instance, can continually afford to treat their principals’ critics with disdain goaded by the notion that the latter lacks the moral justification to perform such crucial roles in the interest of the collective.

    True, many a government critic on Facebook, Twitter or newspaper column is as despicable as the ruling class he condemns. Racism, gluttony, political harlotry, religious intolerance, sexism, all manners of bigotry and base sentimentality characterize Nigeria’s crowd of social critics. In several instances, members of this breed cheerily present themselves as muscles to the tyrannical ruling class they love to condemn, for a price.

    This breed of Nigerian mob, in its incessant criticisms of the ruling class, conveniently forgets that the incumbent leadership is a reflection of the society from which it emerges. If we are yet to produce honest and conscientious leadership, it’s because our society is constituted by the perverse and corrupt. If bank chiefs, stock exchange bosses and civil servants we parade are more nimble at stealing than performing constructive, developmental roles, it is because the society institutionalizes and celebrates vice. And if the worst of us continually emerge as the best leaders we could ever have, it is because we are innately wired to value and elevate vile above virtue.

    Sadly, rather than engage in active crusade against the perpetuation of such anomalies, the critical mob scurry on to soapboxes we mount in our living rooms, courtyards, pubs and social media to curse our luck and curse the times.

    We are that pathetic part of the Nigerian mob; negligible integers a cynical reader recently identified as “armchair Trotskys.” Unlike the more servile herd whose allegiance to the ruling class is at once wild and destructive, the breed we comprise is even more vicious and symptomatic of the failure of scholarship, literacy and other contemporary advancements in civilization we ought to epitomize.

    At least, the servile herd is actively involved – be it negatively or positively – according to the depth and strength of its awareness; this teeming mass of illiterate, semi-literate, unemployed and impoverished breadlines to mention a few, claim ignorance and poverty as reasons for its blind acquiescence to the tyranny of the ruling class, however, career critics and armchair Trotskys like you and I, given our touted learning and exposure, can hardly make such claims.

    Today, we are shackled by vulgar sentiments of religion, rebellion and ethnicity. More worrisome is our continued enslavement by the ruling class via obscene inducements and gifts of grandeur. Consequently, we capitulate to a system by which we are psychologically broken and confined to dubious segregation and manipulative politics. The sentimental fops amongst us are programmed by rumors, innuendo and outright falsehood to shun the path to progress and tow the fast lane to destruction.

    Exasperatedly, many identify the major problem afflicting us as the dearth of upright leadership mooted and drawn from the nation’s youth divide. This dearth persists due to our inability to selflessly and responsibly apply ourselves to the crusade against corrupt and selfish leadership. A more crucial dearth however, manifests by our inability to fulfill the demands of sterling citizenship.

    A sterling citizenry no doubt provides the humane elements necessary to foster a benevolent leadership but we are too busy casting blames and feathering our own nests that we conveniently forget to become the good citizens we ought to become. The prospective heroes we could rely on have learnt the wisdom of keeping silent. They tactfully scoff at our romanticized wish to abolish the status quo, knowing that, as usual, we would settle for an opportunistic contract between our exploiters (the government) and a part of the exploited (labour and youth leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin aptly identifies as “the original sweetheart agreement.”

    Thus we resign to the tyranny of the ruling class, courting and maligning it often in the same breath, while we anticipate and wish doom upon Nigeria. If we look inwards, we would find that the intellectual aptitudes, will and individuality of many of us are strained by disillusionment, cowardice, laziness and abject failure in our roles as patriots and citizens of humanity. Several self-styled leaders of the critical mob are currently in the jailhouse of mammon and sociopolitical expediency. Consider the case of several critics turned presidential aides for instance; yesterday, they were mob heroes; today they carry on like minions enslaved to power and perpetually drunk on their own saliva.

  • This fugitive quirk we have no word for

    If I should hesitate to say these things, it will not be because they are untrue but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my imperfection. Let us leave religion out of humanity, the Nigerian heart confounds even evil. We have become that fugitive quirk we can find no word for.

    How curious a land this is? Like a veteran virgin with a history of abortions, our hearts and privates are full of scars – scars of tragedy, scars of laughter, scars of luxury, scars of want…every scar a luscious testament to our poverty of life.

    Nothing ever changes. Nothing ever gives. Beneath the parks and groves we lay out, within our mansions, shanties and worship houses, a lot we do is sordid, a lot we do is forced; a certain feverishness and unrest varnishes our world. And all our show and tinsel are built upon a groan.

    Lest you begin to think that I’m inclined to spurious generalizations, I have searched carefully and I find that there is nothing barbaric and savage about anyone in this nation except that everyone gives the title of barbarism to everyone else and every thought that are not in consonance with truth, as they would like to see it.

    Goaded by such erroneous belief, every Nigerian considers himself the quintessential patriot capable of the fairest truth and reason. And from this perception emerges the contemporary Nigerian with the perfect politics, perfect economics, perfect religion and the most exact and accomplished approaches to all things.

    Thus our nation abounds with perfect tyrants and looters, our homes with perfect batterers and paedophiles; our industries pulsate with perfect quacks and the slovenly, our schools with perfect dullards and numbnuts. Lest we forget the perfect rapists, kidnappers, hooligans and assassins prowling our streets, baiting the unforgiving second, when ruthless neurosis pulsates with will, for a price.

    Our much vaunted norms have begun to peer above our ego. The harder we flaunt, the more carelessly we reveal the swollen belly of our pride. Our talk is of the Golden Fleece; goaded by greed and spurred by desperate tendencies to stand out, we traverse our land and foreign lands spreading degeneracy, insolence and vile.

    In search of the Golden Fleece, crime has become our cotton field; it sprouts frightful stamens of violence and blood. Thus this minute, a gubernatorial hopeful pounds a day old child in a mortar for goodluck charm. Next minute; a European widow will lose her life-savings to a street-smart, internet-activated Nigerian kid. The widow will slit her wrists and her scammer would retire to the blessings of his parents and family pastor.

    Our factories die but crime remains a major industry in Nigeria. That is because it’s the surest path to the Nigerian dream. But what is the Nigerian dream? Swift, sudden reprieve from all that pathos, all that bathos ever gave? Comfort taken for granted because it comes too easy and cheap?

    For whom is the good life? The insane market women of the sidewalks? Child-thugs and teen-rejects dying to be park thugs? The veteran who becomes drunkard and jester in our court of random realities? Perhaps the faithless who keeps the empty store on the lonely road, by the crossroads where the best of hopes lay famished. Maybe the privileged for whom the paths turned rose-beds, ever before they startled to a second pat.

    What would you do for the good life? Everything and anything that gets you to sleep at night happily and fulfilled, perhaps. Now that everything and anything amounts to nothing, we do everything and anything to sustain the life that pleases.

    We who have become treasury looters, armed robbers, advance fee fraudsters, mediocre teachers, unconscionable journalists, doctors and law enforcers, have learnt to espouse morals birthed where deeds run afoul the mouth.

    Every Nigerian is a moralist even as we sow sodden seeds of decadence at sunrise through sunset. And still we manage to misunderstand the true essence of our mystery; the tragedy of the picture, and all that treachery as well as folly ever gave.

    We who couldn’t handle the truth profess to seek it. Here is the shadow of truth: our dreams have murder in the eye and we fete murder in the heart claiming to be “only human;” as if being human requires that we are inhuman. And thus is the kernel of our folly; that blind, savage, ghastly unreality that inspires our maddened souls to debris.

    Nothing works still, because we are incapable of making anything work. Politicians make hard calculations in the interest of the ruling class; multinationals depart our killing fields for lack of security, basic infrastructure, and desperately sought “excellent” returns.

    Capital and operating costs belie hope and prosperity as we have learnt to have it. But even doom has nuances. In our motherland, it has a thousand layers of meaning. Hence we cry for separation, true federalism and insurgencies contrived where the blood froths hottest.

    Forget our platitudes; many would die not to be part of the bloody revolutions they incite. I moot no bloodshed folks for it is hardly the path to the epoch of our dreams. For all our troubles, it is the tenor of our thoughts that sickens. We seem to be defective in reason. And the solutions we propound can neither loosen nor bind tragic knots we blow on the threads of history…our history, back when it used to be golden.

    Now we trust our hopes to prevail violence and malevolence we espouse even as you read. Truth has become a cliché, when it’s spoken, our ears hurt. Truth has become what we wouldn’t say to get our hearts to lighten. And so do our hearts harden.

    Bet you are beginning to wonder: “Where are his solutions to our crises?” Let it be known at this point that, I seek to profess no mean truth neither do I portend some wild and infernal analysis; the solution we seek defies logic and grit as we have learnt to flaunt it.

    Education is the only thing that should wholly never fail but we have learnt too little and we have too little to pass on, save Ivy League mediocrity, insolence, and greed. For all the honours we flaunt, the knowledge we affect is shorn of insight.

    Until we mature in grace; until we learn to live the cliché and 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 and humanity’s sake? Shall we begin to affect the honesty to which we pay lip service? Shall we begin to reject the same old intrigues, same old analysis, every minute, every hour, everyday?

    Perhaps we would learn to refine the subtleties that would make the Nigerian dream something more than the dream of thieves, prostitutes and looters. The Nigerian dream: dream of assassins, arsonists, urchins, human parts dealers, child traffickers, religious fanatics, ethnic warlords, internet fraudsters…hypocrites.

  • Parable of the grifter calling the con-artist, fraud

    A cursory look at our families excites the creepiest form of marvel. The Nigerian family unit today parades the worst form of savagery. Mothers are mightily pleased to see a child hurt an annoying neighbour’s dog or cat; and such wise fathers we have now that consider it a notable mark of martial spirit when they see their son domineer his weaker peer. And there are those whose parents raise righteously, breeding them in their images, to conform to and perpetuate the worst forms of religious bigotry and inhumanity, according to the holy scriptures.

    Ultimately, our parents look upon it as a sign of great wit and astuteness to see us cheat and oppress our peer by some malicious treachery and deceit. It gladdens their hearts to see us evolve into ‘lovable’ brutes at a tender age. They claim it’s a worthy demeanor for the very tough world out there.

    Thus from adolescence through adulthood, they greet every dishonesty we perpetrate with cheer, as long as it translates to stupendous wealth, higher status and the comfort of knowing that their children are “smart” and inured in the ways of the world. These are the true seeds and roots of cruelty, tyranny and treason. Our parents nurture vile in us and we perpetuate it in attitude, learning from their misconduct, till we start procreating and perpetuating within our lineage, grosser forms of grotesqueness and bestiality.

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

    Such wards, dutifully trained to circumvent the straight, moral path to progress and self-actualization, eventually mature into foetal, perverse adults. All through their lives, they navigate the depths and shoals of challenging realities with the courage of a weevil and the wit of a hyena, if I may insult the poor animals by comparing such with them.

    Eventually, the seeds of indolence and monstrosity sown in them grow to prodigious bulk, cultivated by society and custom; at the end, we have brutes and savages running our lives and determining our future. At this juncture, I guess, many would dispute, claiming such shameful lot constitute just a minor fraction of the country’s 170 million-strong families or thereabouts.

    I whole-heartedly disagree but if they insist, I hereby reiterate that, such wonderful families we have now that blesses us with the current ruling class. Such wonderful families we have now that blesses us with thieving bank chiefs and corrupt law enforcers.

    Such wonderful families we have that blesses us with slothful civil servants, light-fingered bank clerks, desperate, treacherous journalists and lawyers. Such wonderful families we have that blesses us with prostitutes, armed robbers, Yahoo boys, and currency-activated clerics to mention a few.

    One degeneracy gravitates into the other and we have for ourselves, a nation of finely bred brutes, idiots and foetal adults, pitifully programmed to self-destruct. I do not apologize for my abrasive choice of words. Were it acceptable, I would depict the average Nigerian with more colourful choice of words. We are very, very bad people.

    Driven by greed, selfishness, indolence and appalling inclinations to play “God,” we embark on a never-ending quest to ruin Nigeria… righteously. The argument that it’s the lack of good leadership that forces us to be corrupt does not hold much substance anymore; let each one of us be accountable for his actions.

    How many leaders do we have? If we count the number of politicians and every hoodlum plaguing our industries, politics and occupying our seats of power, will they add up to a million? Let’s assume that they add up to a million; there are 170 million Nigerians or thereabouts, of this lot, should a paltry million lead about 169 million astray?  Is the fault not with the 169 million?

    Our nation perishes by our gluttony and lust for fleeting and perishable vanities. It was greed and a disgraceful strain of cowardliness that drove our touted “men of god” to endorse former President Goodluck Jonathan’s candidacy, claiming his emergence was sanctified by their “god.” It was gluttony, cowardice and an unconquerable strain of prejudice that drove millions of Nigerians to troop to the polls to endorse the worst form of the ruling class.

    Bestiality, like blood, seems to run perpetually in the veins of the Nigerian ruling class. It is not that the working class is any wiser. Age is of no value within our clans, likewise experience. Our old have no important advice to give to our young. Their experiences have been so partial and fraught with fraudulence that at the end, they pass off as miserable failures.

    Indeed, it is good to be bad and bad to be good in contemporary Nigeria. Let us consider for a moment the caliber of leadership we have; the Nigerian ruling class tirelessly appropriates for itself what is meant for the benefit of all. Likewise, the poorest constituent of the breadlines is capable of meaner grotesqueness were he opportune to play with money and power. As it is with the rich, so it is with the poor. Poverty and affluence brings out the worst in us.

    Every Nigerian considers himself the quintessential patriot capable of the fairest truth and reason. And from this perception emerges the contemporary Nigerian with the perfect politics, perfect economics, perfect religion and the most exact and accomplished approaches to all things.

    Thus our nation abounds with perfect tyrants and looters, our homes with perfect batterers and paedophiles; our industries pulsate with perfect quacks and the slovenly, our schools with perfect dullards and numbnuts. Lest we forget the perfect rapists, kidnappers, hooligans and assassins prowling our streets, baiting the unforgiving second, when ruthless neurosis pulsates with will, for a price.

    Every Nigerian is a law breaker. The rich believe they are above the law and the poor believe they could sneak under it, through it and away from its grasp. I would like to believe that the worst of our kind constitutes just a minor fraction of 170 million of us but as you read, our ruling class is busy pilfering our coffers even as it plays Russian roulette with our lives. The rich still connives with the ruling class to impoverish us further. The poor still curses the ruling class and curse the times even as they die daily to serve the whims of the ruling class.

    As you read, parents are purchasing seats and liberties to cheat for their wards at JAMB and SSCE “special centres.” Our bankers are pilfering our accounts 50 kobo, N1 to N1000 by the second. Motorists are hastening off their normal lanes to face oncoming vehicles on the wrong lanes. Public administrators are stealing pension funds meant for elderly retirees. Journalists are receiving money to doctor and tilt stories according to the whims of shady politicians, business class and criminal masterminds. Doctors are forgetting surgical knives in helpless patients; lawyers are twisting the law to serve the whims of the worst creatures ever and you are reading this thinking I am just another ‘grifter’ calling the con-artist, ‘fraud.’

  • 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 avoidable 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 end he claims to pursue. 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 foibles. The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.

    It’s about time poor, struggling members of the nation’s working class learned to scorn the maxim that holds that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains; the paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood. That proverbial better society that we seek calls for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the low income earners and ambitious middle class emancipated by training and culture.

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

    Hence they would be able to understand that the much clamoured social enterprise and gesture towards change must be mooted and achieved by the working class itself in further substantiation of the working class’ capacities to assimilate the culture and refinement of humane civilization; a veritable step towards such reality is to vote the incumbent administration out of office

  • These organs will kill us

    •(The curious tragedy of the Nigerian executive and legislature)

    There is a joke in moral circuits that when brigands and outlaws copulate, their incestuous liaison produces the lawmaker – the Nigerian lawmaker to be precise. If you would excuse the ribaldry therein, you would find that the contemporary lawmaker hardly epitomises unimpeachable humaneness and civilization which are prime essentials of the legislature. Neither does the legislative chamber symbolise the conurbation of nationalism, detribalised evolution, altruism and high art oft associated with evolved species of humankind.

    In Nigeria the lawmaker sticks out like metastasized tumour; a priapism of vice and nuisance to be endured, like varicose veins or ethno-religious bigotry.

    A surfeit of base politics and exaggerated high jinks perpetrated on the floor of the country’s Senate and House of Representatives further establishes the National Assembly as a coven of adult delinquents.

    One week after a male senator was forced to apologise to his female colleague for dealing her a blinding slap, a chairman and deputy chairman of a House of Representatives committee got locked in a fight with the deputy chairman, a woman, dealing the chairman several blows.

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

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

    Six years after the disgraceful incident, one of the major characters whose dress was torn to shreds as he got beaten to a pulp, has made the news again. The controversial senator’s name will not be mentioned on this page lest it desecrates this column and offends the sensibility of decent folk. The hilarious character in a fit of decadent rage allegedly threatened to beat up and impregnate a fellow senator.

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

    In the National Assembly, institutions and culture fade into irrelevance as the ‘honourable’ legislators mutate into insuperable problems of the country and impediments to progress; more worrisomely, they are currently engaged in feverish quest to tame and woo the executive into a romance of mutually rewarding incestuous relations.

    But President Muhammadu Buhari would have none of that; the retired General from Daura, Katsina, nurtures a different view of governance. He would rather stick to his carrot and stick approach. Mr. President derives greater comfort perching on a three-legged stool of contrived supremacy and invincibility to onslaughts by antagonists in the Judiciary and the country’s Eighth National Assembly.

    Buhari seeks to eradicate diseased plants from the nation’s fields of enterprise even as he sows sickly seeds under the roof of the Nigerian barn house. Crucial appointments he made and wanton concessions he approved of, apparently in the spirit of political expediency, ultimately neuters the impact of his anti-corruption crusade. And his antagonists in the legislative and judicial arms of government are ever quick to finger the specks in his eyes.

    Now a desperate thing has happened; gangs of hoodlums masquerading as the country’s esteemed lawmakers and custodians of morals and culture, are threatening to impeach President Buhari – simply because he seeks to unmoor their holy place of sleaze from the country’s bastion of law and ethics. Lawmakers loyal to the embattled senate leadership consider the ongoing trial of  the leadership, a slight on the honour and the integrity of the country’s National Assembly.

    Many of the aggrieved lawmakers claim President Buhari is trying to tame and pocket the National Assembly. They believe he seeks to castrate them and place them on a leash and thus turn them into glorified slaves and puppets in cassocks of nobility.

    According to them, Mr. President should desist from his quest to unseat the incumbent senate leadership. A slight on one is a slight to all, alleges the upper and lower legislative chambers.

    Perhaps if the National Assembly had overtime established itself as a body of honourable men and women truly involved with the citizenry and attuned to their pains, needs and fundamental human rights, the Nigerian electorate may be more sympathetic to their cause. But is the senate leadership truly innocent of the charges leveled against them? Are the characters involved truly deserving of the citizenry’s empathy, respect and protection by the same law they allegedly flouted?

    There is no gainsaying the National Assembly is currently infested by shades of poorly, self-centred characters thus the nation’s hope rests on the Executive and Judicial arms of government – the Presidency in particular as most state governors personify the worst of Nigeria’s political predators. Buhari and his deputy, Yemi Osinbajo, cut a portrait of hope and prosperity for the nation given both men’s alleged and fairly established distaste for corruption and their predilection to truly serve.

    But this government still rides on a great deal of presumption and moral baggage. While Buhari signifies hope, prudence and inestimable opportunity for redeeming our badly worn and bastardised social and political institutions, his team becomes the bane to the successful attainment of our ideal state.

    Buhari himself is conflicted in personal and administrative ethics hence the catalogue of failures and inaction already listed in his wake. For instance, he is being accused of nepotism. His recent employment of the Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) scribe as boss of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) is termed one such piteous decision. Will Mr. President survive his current rut?

    His ministers are dubious change agents feigning his moral and growth crusade. Like many state governors and lawmakers operating on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and People’s Democratic Party (PDP), they epitomise a moral, philosophical duplicity. They negate and reject the strife of contraries by which true, positive ‘change’ evolves.

    President Buhari of course must be aware of this bitter reality. If he isn’t, then he must be truly naive and incapacitated by his overwhelming desire to grow bananas out of a pine tree.

    As it is now, the Nigeria is caught in the vortex of dysfunctional public institutions and organs of government. The executive and legislature crush the hope of the citizenry and stifle the birth of progressive vistas of the future, in a cycle of incestuous cannibalism enacted by male and female tin gods, who attack and retreat in obsessive rhythms of attack and counter-attack, victory and defeat.

    In the crushing, bloody symbolism, the Nigerian citizenry is cast as a babe, persistently dragged, and violently exchanged by ogres who nail her down upon a rock, bind iron thorns around her head and waist, pierce her palms and feet, and cut her heart out to make it feel the heat and frost of their inordinate hankering for riches and bloodlust. The executive and legislature live on the shrieks and cries of the babe. They nourish from her blood and forcefully suckle from its unformed tits.

    It’s about time we reversed the cycle.

     

  • Portrait of the Nigerian as a ‘black’ ant

    We live to a devastating stereotype. Like fattened ducks, we waddle against the walls of institutionalized pigeonholes as the ram thrashes in its soul at the descent of the butcher’s jackknife. But we are no ducks neither are we cattle of any kind. We are humans, learning to live as livestock, because we think it’s shrewd and fashionable to do so.

    Freedom has a thousand charms to show, that slaves, however contented, never know, writes Cowper and quite truthfully too. The tragedy is in the details. And the details are all around us, in our past glories and defeat, infinite quirks and measured sobriety. It is in our fabled heritage and defunct humanity, colourful history and grand inadequacies. It’s what separates our mistakes from what we term fate. And what symbolizes our mental inferiorities and political expediencies.

    But necessity, like William Pitt the Younger would say, is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants and the creed of slaves. Slaves like the Nigerian nigger.

    A 27-minute video among other things, distinguishes a select few of Nigeria’s pioneer statesmen from the gangs of glorified eejits – if I may insult poor eejits by comparing them to the country’s ruling class – that currently occupy the country’s corridors of power. The video is of the July 1961 visit of Nigeria’s first Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, to the United States of America (USA).

    Great thanks to Farooq Kperogi, a Nigerian scholar resident in the USA; after he stumbled on the video on the website of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, he promptly shared it with friends on Facebook. The video is intense with charm and instructive with lessons in manhood, desirable pride, poise and refinement epitomized by the league of extraordinary statesmen that served Nigeria at independence.

    Between July 25 and 28, Kperogi, enthused and it could be confirmed in the video, the late Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and a modest entourage of about 10 key government officials visited the United States on the invitation of the late President John F. Kennedy during which Tafawa Balewa visited major historical landmarks in representative parts of the United States and addressed a special joint session of the United States Congress that was convened in his honor.

    Only a select few, as Kperogi noted, “are accorded the honour of addressing a joint session of the United States Congress. Certainly no Nigerian head of state has been accorded this honour since Tafawa Balewa.” According to the website of the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, since 1874 when the King of Hawaii first addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, there have been only 112 such privileges granted to foreign leaders and dignitaries.

    Watching the video was as enchanting as it was delightful; Balewa’s address to the joint session was persistently “punctuated” by thunderous, standing ovation. In all the cities he and his entourage visited, Americans came out to wave at them hospitably, and U.S. government officials bowed very respectfully when they shook hands with the Nigerian Prime Minister. Thus was the depth of respect the pioneer Nigerian leader and nationalist inspired in 1960s America.

    Men like Balewa and his contemporaries at the period in the persons of the late Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe to mention a few, personified the infectious grandeur, unimpeachable character, progressiveness, patriotism, depth and self-assurance that remains the prime requirements of statesmanship that Nigeria and the African continent deserves. These men, despite their shortcomings, were no Nigerian niggers. The same can hardly be said of incumbent Nigerian leadership and citizenry.

    If you separate President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osibajo from the herd, a greater section of the incumbent leadership could be likened to men gifted with the mentality of the hyena and the sensibility of the guinea fowl. The same may be said of the citizenry. Our lust for unearned riches, acclaim and the West’s approval, illustrates the Nigerian adult’s ignorance and awfully preadolescent mind. It reiterates a very shrill cry for help that’s at once self-seeking, infantile and regressive.

    It is what makes Nigerian public officers pilfer and deplete the nation’s treasury in order to finance reckless trips abroad, to learn Western-European governance styles. It is what makes Nigerian leaders throw their doors open to every visiting foreign cub reporter even as they deny seasoned journalists back home, similar opportunities. During such interviews, such characters persistently expose themselves to ridicule, presenting themselves as inveterate boobs; by their utterances which are tailored to glorify the disturbing plots and agenda of the foreign newshounds.

    The citizenry is guilty of the same inanity as indicated by the widely broadcast documentaries on Niger Delta militancy, the insidiously “professional” and manipulative “This is Lagos” and “Law and Disorder in Lagos” documentaries on Lagos which glorifies the city’s shanty and street urchin (area boys) culture and malaise. Such media fare reveals contemptible plots to fulfill derogatory news agenda to the delight and pitiful acquiescence of the news subjects.

    I am yet to see a Nigerian journalist travel abroad for instance, to enjoy similar courtesies and lack of common sense from the countries’ leadership and citizenry. It’s even more worrisome to note that the incumbent Nigerian leadership has never enjoyed and will never enjoy the kind of respect accorded the late Tafawa Balewa, Obafemi Awolowo and their ilk at independence. It is impossible for the average Nigerian to enjoy such courtesies and honor given the inexplicable greed, complacence, degeneracy, shallowness of thought and character characteristic of majority of the Nigerian people.

    The kind of inferiority complex projected by the ruling class and passed down to generations of Nigerian youth affirms the western belief that we are not as mentally proficient as they are. Consequently, they see us as irredeemably ignorant, inept, corrupt and susceptible to inexplicable violence and inferiority complex. Unfortunately, the average Nigerian’s sociability and prodigal nature manifests to further serve as evidence of a collective idiocy and inferiority complex of a crude race that recognizes and accepts its intolerable limitations.

    That we are very accommodating and hospitable like Akin Akindele rightly notes shouldn’t make us “bend over backwards to impress any white or yellow man more than we would any other ordinary person.” But the import of such admonition is lost on us; mediocre and highly incompetent foreigners come to Nigeria and are immediately regarded as ‘expatriates.’ Yet many brainy and exceedingly talented Nigerians are treated with contempt and suspicion at home and abroad. Abroad, they are despised for being Nigerians based on bigoted generalizations about the average Nigerian’s fraudulence and deadliness. At home they are despised for being different and capable of evolving the process that would lead to that progressive and prosperous socio-economic system that we seek.

    If we are to be judged by indigenous mores of morality or what Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, deems the human measure of all things, we shan’t fare excellently well, not by a smidgen. We have fared diffidently for too long; that is why local and international idiots as fragile as clay toys have evolved into outsized heroes and gods, on our watch. To the rest of the world, we are just a bunch of contemptible niggers; still.

  • ‘I will come when quilt warms my cradle’

    •(From Ajantala to prospective father)

    Forgive me for tarrying with my response. It is beautiful up here and I couldn’t bear to smear heaven’s beauty with earthly haste. Such pleasantness shouldn’t be sullied by the ugliness of earth. I am coming to earth father. I will weigh 11 pounds at birth, having stayed two extra weeks in the womb. Do not fret if I come starry-eyed, blame it on wonderment. I will come flabbergasted, aghast at the depth of your infamy, on earth.

    Even as I write this, my heart thumps precariously. My head aches with fantasies of your world. My thoughts grope with harsh, cold realities you wrote about, like cherubs wrestling mischievous sprites off the Elysian playground.

    The tone of your missive is frightening. On the flipside, it stresses and illumines the dark, crevices of earth’s wild. It enlightens me. It imposes the weirdest feelings on my infant husk and mind. Some angels I know said I am experiencing ‘earth jitters.’ They called it the burden of humankind. And that its best cured arriving stillborn – thus I could fast track my life and departure from your wild, wild world.

    As an alternative, they recommended generous doses of ‘Aiye Bitters.’ When I asked them where and when I could get the alternative bitters, they concluded that I was ready to be human. I shouldn’t be curious about ‘Aiye Bitters.’ I shouldn’t be having such feelings; having them means I am ready to be part of humankind, they said.

    Every day, I peep through blue firmament, to see the old, shimmering nothingness you call life. Green scaly moosewoods attract me, tenants of the lost Eden. Tell me, why isn’t your world as picturesque as paradise? Why do you behave strangely on earth?

    Tell me, why are your lives fouled by stress and discord? Why have you left the simple paths with no complications? Why do your people die young? I worry because very soon, your people will become my people and heaven help me if, like you, I have to “stir to strife, live in chaos and sleep one-eye open to endless threats of volatile nights.”

    At times, I trouble that your words might be true. Most times, I think you are just trying to scare me from coming. Perhaps you shirk your responsibilities to me even before I am born. How pathetic.

    Every second, earth folk arrive heavenly gates. Some make it through. Some never do. Many struggle to return almost as soon as they arrive. They say they have unfinished business. We call them wretched souls with unfinished lives. It’s their stories that fascinate me.

    Contrary to your expectations, I cannot tell you how Moshood Kashimawo Abiola died. I can’t tell who killed Dele Giwa, Bola Ige and the Igwe couple neither can I tell you who stole your N55, kulikuli and garri back when you were in high school.

    I can’t tell you what my calling will be or what role I would play for humanity. Up here, we are bound by certain confidentiality clauses. I have to honour the codes of silence.

    Like you, I ask my own questions. If you must know, I am yet to see Eledumare.

    To humour you, I will write answers to your questions on an almond nut and I will come clutching it as I arrive on earth through the moist, pink pathways of my intended vessel, your wife.

    Better still, I could cram the answers and scream it as the doctors pat me to cry but I doubt if you understand baby-speak. Tell me baba, do you speak gibberish?

    I have learnt some bits about your world, from what the earth folk often tell us. I have learnt that in your world, kids desert their parents as they grow old. They leave them to suffer till death. When they die, they spend millions throwing parties and carnivals. They say they are celebrating their parents’ lives.

    I have learnt that parents find it difficult to pay their children’s medical bills and school fees although they find it easier doling out money for aso ebi, the acquisition of new wives and other wasteful ventures.

    I have learnt that your leaders are wary of building schools; they would rather build prisons to incarcerate and destroy youth who may have turned out better had they enjoyed the right to quality education.

    I have learnt that husbands subject their wives to treatment they would never let any man mete to their daughters. They love to ruin the lives of other men’s daughters while they seek the best among men for their girls. I have learnt that wives spend their lifetime domesticating and enslaving their men by crook or diabolism, only to become monster-in-law to their prospective daughters-in-law. No woman wishes her type as wife for her son.

    I have learnt that being a good wife does not necessarily translate to being a good mother. These days, earth women fail at both, and their husbands and kids are the worse for it. When they fail as women, the society is the worse for it.

    I have learnt that money rules your world and the lack of it makes a man an aberration to his kind. I seek the noblest of roles for humanity but you have scared me from the noble callings. To be a teacher you say, is to sign an oath of poverty. To be a doctor, you warn, is to lose my conscience. To be a cop is to become an armed robber. To be a banker, you say, is to become a fraudster and to tread your journalistic path, you claim, is to commit eternal professional and emotional hara-kiri.

    I wish I could caress your ego and become a journalist but oftentimes, I have seen you flounder at the crossroads of truth and injustice. Most times, I fear you would opt for the dark side but painstakingly, you choose the path of light while you wither in want and the darkness of everlasting grief.

    These days, I can’t tell what I would do. Would you mind if I come as a politician? Rumour has it that they enjoy the best of earth spoils. Wish I could tell what becomes of them in yonder. But you need to be dead to find out. Here in heaven, they are separated from the pack. Word on the street is that they are judged very differently. Who cares though?

    Eager as I am to grace your household, I fear what fate may befall me at my arrival in your homestead. You talk of the great plague but I hear of several great plagues: HIV/AIDS, Poliomyelitis, Leukemia, Stroke, Human Ebola, Tomato Ebola, Diabetes, and so on. They say some are transferable from mother to child. Will you test mother to be sure she carries none? Would you test yourself to be sure you aren’t a vector?

    Just so you know, I would like to come when your farm swells with lush and tuberous burdens. I would like to come when quilt and satin warms my cradle. I would like to come when schools offer the best education and moral guidance. I would like to attend public school for I hear the best of earth folk attended free schools.

    Under the thick beams of our mustard tree, heavenly cherubs are clustering. I see them huddle in together, hopes alight, fire at heart. Their talk is of humanity. I hope to join them soon on the earth-journey but these days, it’s hard to be keen for mortality.