The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Dear Ajantala…

    May these words resonate as timeless truths. Let them resound like the crickets’ chirp at dawn. I hope you lean above this page and find it true like the fabled Al Jannah, where every second tarries and every day passes as the finest moment of celestial life.

    Tell me, is heaven truly the perfection of a higher thought? Have you felt hurt, pain and the trepidation of not knowing if you would live till the next second?

    On earth, our lives are fouled by stress and discord. This life you covet is in fact, distraught. And the scenes you find colourful from heaven above are actually tainted by coffee-tan blots of human blood.

    We stir to strife, live in chaos and sleep one–eye open to endless threats of volatile nights. We have left the simple paths with no complications. Today, we coast broadening highways to early graves. It’s a miracle child, our people die young.

    Every year, we survive the mad fires of the ember months to die while January unfolds it finery.

    And having failed at making our own happiness, we seek solace in others’ joy. Guess you snickered at our madding din because a black man emerged the president of America. Our people believed that Obama will change the fate of black Africa – you see, we could be quite silly.

    We are in the era of Muhammadu Buhari thus stealing is now corruption. Yet our people pine for the epoch of former president Goodluck Jonathan, when stealing was never corruption and deified goats were allowed limitless access to ravage our yams.

    Having failed at most things, we smack our lips shamelessly to criticize the status quo forgetting that our lives are what we make of it. Bet you are mortified by Dasuki-gate, Oduah-gate, among other scandals.

    We should rise in virulent protest but all we do is rant on the pages of newspapers. And those of us too poor to afford a newspaper are content to vent every morning, at every available news stand. It’s like the terror of a drunken crew before a virulent storm. Every invective enrages the tempest some more, until it swallows cantankerous crew and ship in a rummy sip.

    We have cursed the times so much that the good times are wary to come by us. I think the good old days may never come our way again lest we turn them as bad as the present.

    I hear those of you in heaven are privy to everything. So tell me, how did Moshood Abiola really die? They said he was killed with the white man’s poison, now they say he was strangled to death. Who killed Dele Giwa, Bola Ige and the Igwe couple? Tell me, who broke into my locker when I was in high school? They stole my N55, kulikuli and a bag of garri. Pardon me for the detail but I suffered too much that very school year.

    I wonder if you have decided your occupation. What role will you play as a citizen of humanity? Will you be teacher, doctor, banker, journalist, policeman, singer or actor?

    I hope you are aware that, these days, it’s hard to come by nobility in every chosen profession. Trust me, as a Nigerian, you have to come prepared.

    If you will be a doctor, better come with no conscience and a modest degree of perseverance. The better you are at ignoring dying compatriots and demanding police reports from accident victims the better for you. Perhaps you will come with a knack for embarking on strike actions and forgetting surgical instruments in helpless patients, sedated to death in hospital abattoirs or Operating Theatre, if you like.

    If you will come as a teacher, please ask heaven for an enormous amount of fortitude. You will need it in seasons of bad spell, when your account is empty and your expenses are mounting; when your kids are crying ‘hunger!’ and your wife is going gaga; when your colleagues in other callings are erecting mansions and you have to sneak into your one–room apartment to avoid your landlord. You will need perseverance when students you taught drive by you in posh cars, while you hop on rickety Danfo and LT trucks. You will need it when students taught by you mature into administrators and yet deny you your salary at the end of every month, and your gratuity at retirement. I hope you understand that unlike the doctors, you will hardly enjoy the benefits of industrial action.

    If you join the police, you will have to decide if you would be good cop or bad cop. Life as a bad cop is quite rewarding. Come with no conscience, no compassion, and no respect for your uniform. Be prepared to raid commercial transporters at illegal check – points. Be prepared to turn a blind eye while compatriots by whose taxes you are clothed and fed are robbed, murdered and molested.

    As a good cop, you will suffer undue humiliation and victimization from your colleagues, superiors and compatriots whose safety shall be your utmost priority.

    You will be forced to arrest AK-47 and Uzi wielding robbers and assassins with faulty pistols and assault rifles. Your guns will be less sophisticated and devoid of bullets.

    You would live in squalor, in barracks fit to house wild hogs and weevils. At retirement, you will watch colleagues slump to death as you fight for your gratuity. You will age dreading that your kids may have to appear with your corpse to claim your benefits.

    If you will tread my path as a journalist, you will have to decide on being conscientious or vice versa. Whatever divide you inhabit, you will be scorned by the masses whose interests you seek to protect. Oftentimes, you will flounder at the crossroads of truth and prejudice. You may choose the latter path goaded by convenient justifications for choosing the dark side.

    As a banker, you will be paid like an armed robber. You will earn too much for doing too little in the interest of your compatriots. You will steal customers’ savings via hidden and unfair charges, and other frauds you will commit in connivance with or at the behest of your superiors.

    Whatever your chosen path, I hope you will think of the collective good. At times, it doesn’t hurt to tread the lighted path. I should know better. I have been around enough.

    Our people are a curious breed. In the wake of our misdemeanours, we desperately seek absolution from pretentious Pastors and Alfas. Although some of us embrace being totally hideous, too many among us purchase a little forgetfulness at the mall. Today, we live for fresh obsessions; it is the era of the Palms Shopping Mall, Shoprite, Just Rite to mention a few.

    Even the poor go there to feast their eyes and titillate their vanities, touching and feeling; staring at luxury beyond their means, in show glasses. I guess this too, is some form of therapy.

    Tell me, what should I name you? I would love to name you after Malcolm X but he was murdered in his prime. How about Ajantala? Perhaps you would come bearing the full essence and nature of Ajantala – for that is the surest path to taming our sinful world.

  • We will remember karma when it strikes

    Man’s karma travels with him, like his shadow. But karma is nobody’s bitch. The universe’s agent of cause and effect, deterrence and retributive justice, can neither be owned nor placed on a leash. Unlike life, it doesn’t suffer the affliction of mankind’s dubious acquiescence to daunting, menacing bestiality oft attributed to life and summed by the terse, intense statement: ‘Life’s a bitch.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In the karmic scheme of things, not only are the corrupt saved from their just desserts, the worthy and true are punished for their uprightness and industry through unjustly burdensome levels of maladministration, taxation and bureaucratic ineptitude. In the ensuing moral sepsis, the current ruling class treats equality as a moral baseline even as it establishes prosperity and poverty as fortunate and unfortunate draws in Nigeria’s cosmic lottery. Thus public office metamorphoses to moral insult and government officials make concerted efforts daily, to subvert the law of karma.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Gov. Ibikunle Amosun, the people are still not smiling

    •(A reminder to a bungling governor)

    gun State still looms like a gothic platitude of pain and death from its transit townships but the “Gateway State” remains Governor Ibikunle Amosun’s bower of bliss. There, in his stately Eden, Amosun  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. One year and six months after they lost their classrooms to a violent rain squall, 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 lunges for comfort and cover from the ravages of nature, 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.’

     

  • Stink and the Nigerian ‘saint’

    •(Of desperate philanthropists and advocacy gurus)

    There is no odor as dire as that which arises from tainted goodness. I will not deny any bit, the praise that is due to philanthropy, I simply say that we demand sincerity of all whom by their works and lives, pose to be a blessing to the country.

    This is the age of charity. And trust Nigerians, they are desperately exploiting generosity for all its worth. Thus everybody is a philanthropist; even youngsters as green as dug-up spinach have caught the bug – which explains the preponderance of self-acclaimed “youth leaders,” “advocacy gurus,” “motivational speakers” and “philanthropists” afflicting our world like plundering locusts at harvest time.

    A youngster on national youth service constructs tables and chairs for the school in which he’s serving and he pleads with selected mainstream media to mention it; then there is the advocacy guru who donates literature to a school library and pays the mainstream media to report it too, after which she posts it on Facebook and other social networking sites for all to see.

    Both characters among other things elevate and give expression to mankind’s greatest vanity: lust for applause and unearned greatness. In Nigeria, this has become social currency particularly among the youth. Youth seeking instant wealth and acclaim daily exploit the hackneyed terrains of philanthropy and what they perpetrate as “advocacy,” passionately praying and hoping that their exertions attract the attention and “goodwill” of local and international sponsors with deep pockets.

    “There is a clear-cut difference between philanthropy and advocacy,” many are probably jabbering by now. Agreed; but both fields of human endeavour are essentially set to the attainment of similar goals; sustainable development and the improvement of humanity.

    Philanthropy and “advocacy” as currently practiced by Nigeria’s youth is devoid of humanity. It is in essence, a partial and transitory act, projected in constant superfluity until the motives of the philanthropist and advocate are achieved. And what really are the motives? A fat bank account, a posh vehicle, a spectacular mansion, higher status, acclaim and unalterable greatness to mention a few.

    Greatness should be earned. The seekers of unearned greatness and material benefits are merely social parasites, moochers, criminals, who are too deficient in intellect and character to pioneer the oft tasking and spirited march to eminence. Essentially, they are a threat to humanity and the advancements we dream.

    There is nothing as deceptive and neurotic in concept as unearned greatness as it makes a wretch of the individual who seeks it. To substantiate it is in fact, impossible, thus the nation’s youth like her under-achieving ruling class, is caught in the web of such deceitfulness.

    Using ostentatious, indefinable sound-bites of altruism and collectivism as crutch, they struggle to give plausible form to their nameless vanity. Ultimately they seek to anchor it to reality to substantiate their deception to themselves and oft unsuspecting victims.

    Such deception never lasts. There is no short-cut to greatness. The best generosity and “advocacy” subsists in honest work. Be you a lawyer, doctor, accountant, journalist or accountant, your commitment to your calling represents the best form of advocacy.

    If you build a library, toilet or bathroom for your alma mater, why plead with the media to report it? Why package your so-called philanthropy or advocacy for the viewership and applause of all? It is only con-artists and social parasites that do that.

    Heartfelt, repetitive acts of diligence and altruism are sooner remembered and celebrated by the world. The world will accord you a listening ear and pay you the homage you deserve at fate and fortune’s appropriate hour. But a greater number of youth aren’t wired to accept such fact. They would rather seek the shortest cut to affluence. If by towing such path, they achieve their goals, they claim to be “smart,” but if they fail in their quest, they blame the government, their parents, the society and everyone else but themselves for the failures their lives become.

    It is our tragedy today that Nigeria still parades ‘promising’ youth with the heart of a lion and the wit of a hyena. It’s our tragedy that we still talk the talk of champions and walk the walk of cowards. It is infinitely heartbreaking yet amusing to see the Nigerian youth toil to harvest sugarcane where he planted thistle.

    The talk is of ‘seed.’ By every philanthropic act or showy advocacy, the lot of the unfortunate improves, it is claimed. Bet the “unfortunate,” ignorant recipients and audiences of such acts do not know that every such “charitable” act they approve, they applaud no humanity; rather they subject themselves as middling marks for their crafty philanthropists and “advocates” to rip off.

    By consenting to be deceived, the society establishes and confirms its shameful ignorance and it’s purely illusory foundations.

    This generation considers itself to be more intelligent than the one that came before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it thus its inexorable quest to outclass both bastions of our past and future. It is not clear however, how well it would fare in this arduous quest but many a youth have argued that it’s about time the “wasted generation” moved over.

    They claim that a new breed of Nigerian youth is fast evolving. This breed, they claim, do not seek handouts from the country’s under-achieving ruling class; no, they simply want the government to facilitate an enabling environment in which the youth could engage in gainful industry and thrive.

    By enabling environment, they speak of stable electricity, safe and usable road networks, security, access to free and quality education, free and affordable healthcare, and a corruption-free society to mention a few. I agree that such wonderful environment is overdue in Nigeria, but for what manner of youth should the government create such enabling environment? Resourceful, mean, currency-activated “youth leaders,” “advocacy gurus,” “philanthropists,” “motivational speakers” et al? Should Nigeria become more habitable for such characters and pretenders to humanity to flourish?

    To rebel against the established order, to criticize the current ruling class and in the same breath, court it; to lament the existing reality and confound extravagant hopes of the future by pillaging off the same reality are the common dispositions of a greater number of Nigerian youths. Add self-acclaimed genius to the mix, and you have yourself a perfect portrait of our leaders of tomorrow.

    You need to learn to crawl before you walk. It’s the way the universe is ordered. It’s about time the youth got busy doing honest work. The best advocacy occupies a crucial niche in honest industry.

    There is a sweet tang to success earned following years of slugging it out in the trenches. Career philanthropy and advocacy only encourages you to become a fraud unto yourself and your immediate society. There is no smart or street-savvy path to the good life. If you see certain people living large and amassing fortunes by circumventing honest sweat and industry, they are simply conning themselves off the rewards they ought to enjoy in their twilight.

    You need to be extraordinary at something before you earn recognition for it. Fortune seeks out he who has paid for it in sweat and honest toil but the lust for vanities steer importunate fools to the path to tragic twilight.

  • Lust and prejudice in the time of Buhari

    Fear is the oxygen of change. It is what makes it combustible too. Fear of old iniquities and a pervasive terror of the new, drives many a man or woman to scurry into a hole or pitch tent with the proverbial known evil. There is too much uncertainty with the new.

    The fear of the unknown drove many to pitch tent with Goodluck Jonathan at the last general elections. Fear of old iniquities, the bleak present and an austere future drove many more to put their hopes in Muhammadu Buhari.

    Buhari’s emergence however, complicates our perverse dynamics of corruption. His immediate past predecessor was no revolutionary – 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’ assertion accentuated imagery of his leadership as an intellectual and moral 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, 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.

    While the measure became necessary to check the excesses and criminality of Nigeria’s buccaneering oil cabal and their cohorts in government, the impact is more severe on the citizenry. In the gale of severe criticism that trails the hike in fuel price, flashes of reasoning and spirited arguments in support of President Buhari’s ‘harsh but necessary measure,’ resonate across the social and political landscape.

    This no doubt establishes burgeoning goodwill for the president among progressive segments of the citizenry. It also relates to trust. For instance, it can be inferred from various arguments in the social and traditional media that Nigerians are solidly behind Buhari’s anti-corruption campaign and occasional painful palliatives. Highly opinionated segments of the citizenry declare that they aren’t giving Buhari as much grief as they gave Jonathan because they trust Buhari “not to eat their yam” or leave it for random goats to eat.

    Nonetheless, Buhari’s brazen offensive against institutionalised corruption is seen as unwarranted invasion, trespass and criminal intrusion into the debauchers and debauchees’ sacred space. In pre-Buhari era, immoderate lust for riches was dismissed as priapism of want – like drunkenness and promiscuity, that was the fault of fools and satyrs. Buhari’s animosity against the debauched and his stark polarity of good versus evil canonizes integrity and amplifies the significance of honesty in public service.

    However, his inability to address the degeneracy within his cabinet will be counterproductive to his efficiency as president and anti-corruption crusader. Like this writer intoned in an earlier piece, of Buhari’s ministers, too many are vectors, mortal agents of the worst kind of viruses. Eventually, they will make his government food for worms. From the moment of their appointment, the infestation of Buhari’s administration commenced but Buhari and his political groupies naively maintained that if the head – that is, Buhari – be moral, the body (his cabinet and underlings) too will have no choice but get with his program.

    Buhari confuses their obsequiousness, exaggerated display of loyalty and forthrightness with a heartfelt yearning to serve Nigeria and bolster his campaign to redeem the country from the jaws of his predatory ruling class. He mistakes his capacity to instill fear in the hearts of his ministers as a trait of effective leadership. But fear is never enough. Buhari’s ministers may fear him but they do not respect or appreciate him. They do not buy into his vision for Nigeria because the system that produced them negates Mr. President’s dream of an ideal state.

    It is worthy of note that his ministers’ terror of him stems from their fear of being chucked off his cabinet. Their inability to arrogate authority to themselves and appropriate political celebrity for selfish ends, causes Buhari’s team great dissatisfaction. They consider themselves unduly chaperoned and monitored. Their predecessors, that is, ministers that served with the last administration, consider them Buhari’s parlour pets.

    Lust, an immoderate hankering for riches, which was an intrinsic trait of the Nigerian presidency is under chains and lock in the current dispensation. This is a good thing for the nation but a tragedy to Buhari’s ministers and the ruling class. Lust characterised the aggressive, predatory cabinet of former President Jonathan thus making it the norm and coda of public service. Consequently, Nigerians imbibed and bought into the culture of corruption. Those that hadn’t the nerve or the connection to profit from the rot, assumed the role of voyeurs, watching as the nation drowned in a quicksand of debauchery.

    As Nigeria mutated into a frightening theatre of politics and blood, Buhari emerged on the stage, donning the cape of a new-fangled alchemist hero. To actualise his fantasy of ‘change,’ he inserts Victorian ideals in a dysfunctional polity. The resultant clash of personal ethics and political culture is instructive. Tragedy morphs with comedy, the banal with lyric, and ideal beauty with the grotesque and obscene. Buhari’s culture and ethic of change soon conflicts with his cabinet’s. His ministers consider his politics a product of naive sentimentality, dubious patriotism and cynical sophistication.

    The fact that Buhari ignores them to seek the ‘wise’ counsel of his ‘closest confidant’ outside his cabinet rankles his ministers. It resonates jarringly to them. They understand that they are highly dispensable and replaceable. Rumours that certain men and women on occasional visits to the Presidential Villa in Aso Rock comprise the president’s preferred replacements to certain members of his cabinet. A few members of his team that sucked up to him and played acquiescent ‘Yes-men’ cum errand boys have come to the sad realisation that, like they used Buhari as a means to their ends, the Retired General from Daura, equally used them as means to his own end. Although they considered Buhari incapable of playing dirty, they found out that the president’s seemingly bland and linear politics is a hybrid of self-fertilising forms.

    Suddenly, they realise that Mr. President is aware that they are dubious change agents that rode into his cabinet on spurious waves of sentimentality, political indebtedness and dirty politics. Certain members of the presidential cabinet know they will not survive the current term or a second term with Buhari. From the president’s body language, they know he simply tolerates them. Buhari’s favourable run of goodwill among the citizenry also poses a grievous problem to them. Unlike the previous dispensation when they easily concocted and marshaled webs of brilliant propaganda against Jonathan’s government, they understand, albeit very sadly, that it is impossible for them to employ similar tactic with the incumbent regime. Buhari has to be corrupt or identifiable as an enabler of corruption for them to succeed with such plan.

  • Citizens’ prayer

    Creator, we have come forth, when heaven lies at the tick of a bomb, when hell blazes in the spoken word. We come for hope and truth’s pure ray. We come to wish our strife away. Life was not what we prayed for under Goodluck Ebele Jonathan – it got worse every hour. It is still not we prayed for under Muhammadu Buhari, every second, it gets harder.

    Jonathan, the boy who had no shoes managed to snatch our dog-eared shoes from our feet. That self-confessed son of a poor fisherman came to snatch the few fingerlings we had in our nets. When we protested, he dished us tadpoles to eat and called it the rarest kind of nutritious fish. The one we hoped would accord us a breath of fresh air emerged to blow as another clean breath of fresh stench.

    We have grown from the era when our grief was of fuel subsidy to the era when our grief is of fuel scarcity. When Ebele baba removed that mythical subsidy we barely enjoyed. Fuel we used to buy at N65 sold at N141, N150, and N160. Under Buhari, we have bought fuel at N150 through N500 per litre. Now, our almighty Minister of State, Petroleum Resources, Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu and company have pegged fuel price at N145/litre. Consequently, a decent meal has become the rarest luxury: vegetables and tubers, palm oil and vegetable oil, kerosene and gas, now sell at abominable prices.

    We cannot afford to fuel our cars: N3, 500 can no longer fill our vehicle tanks, we have to spend between N5, 000 and N8, 500 – or more when the fuel marketers decide to hoard fuel in order to sell it at a higher price. The price of public transport has gone through the roof. Yesterday, we spent N250 from Sango Ota to Ado Odo; today we pay N600 just to get there. Iyana Ipaja, Ikeja to Owode and Agbado respectively now cost N700 to and fro vis-à-vis the initial N300, on our worst days. It’s scarier for those of us who work on Victoria Island.

    Reluctantly, we keep faith in the incumbent regime, hoping President Buhari will remain a man of honour and keep his pledge to rid our lives of debilitating greed and corruption. But as we keep faith in Buhari, we remember how incumbent Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, taunted former President Jonathan’s bumbling oil subsidy and fuel price regime in 2014. Through spasmodic fits of politesse and duplicitous exuberance, he stated that: “Now we should be enjoying cheap fuel if the price of oil has dropped globally…If the price increases in the country when the price of oil goes up globally, then it should also reduce when the price of oil drops.

    “PMS price reduction by N10. Now they listen. Oil the raw material drop (sic) over 50%, N10 is just about 10%. Good try but Nigeria can get a beta deal,” Fashola subsequently tweeted. He has been discomfortingly quiet since the government increased pump price of fuel.

    Today, compatriots are saying that Buhari has forgotten his roots. They claim he has declared war on us whose fates he swore to protect. They claim that like Jonathan, he has chosen to wade deaf, against the storm and current of public opinion. But Camp Buhari would have none of that. Buhari apologists argue that his seemingly savage policies are fundamental to our healing as a people and a nation.

    Do not be deceived by the furor of our hastily conceived citizens’ protests on Facebook, Twitter and the streets of Abuja, we shall tire of the novelty of revolutionary slogans and mass actions very soon. Our backs shall remain against the wall. When Buhari’s policies bite harder, we will simply crawl into the walls like irritating wall geckos.

    Our labour leaders and columnists of note are quietly eating up their words in the wake of ‘crucial’ meetings with the ruling class. Soon, they will tell us to ditch the placards and save our chants till more auspicious hour. Whispers of currency shall smother our rant and the revolutionary cry. At the end, everything will remain the same. Our fates shall bend and break according to the whims of the ruling class.

    Thus we seek the comfort of your infinite mercies against the scourge of our merciless leaders. We pray that you repay our leaders in their own kobo. Dear author and finisher of faith, please rewrite our pitiful fates as the Christians pray. And even though “the pen has been lifted” as the Muslims say, please rework our fates as you do to your most favoured faithful.

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

    Afflict their mansions to tear down the comfort they build to our discomfort. Upset their bellies and purge them of the provisions they gorge like gluttons. As we spend our finest moments in darkness, make their access to light a luxury of the past. Reorder their fates that they too may go to sleep and rise in darkness. Make their wives hiss and fret for want of fresh air like our wives do. Make their kids and grandkids flail and choke in the grasp of unforgiving heatstroke, like our kids do.

    Bless them with noontime heat and bedtime heat even in the rains. And every time they seek from you the mercy they fail to accord us, treat their prayers the way you would, the wantonness of the gluttonous and accursed. Make their prayer points and praise-worship trail off in confusion. Smite their patronizing prophets till they become not much in sight.

    They pledge that money they save from anticorruption campaign and fuel subsidy removal would be used to improve infrastructure, agriculture and health sectors; if they fail to live up to their pledge, make their kids expire to indecipherable sickness and malnutrition right before their eyes, like peasant kids dying in agrarian communities for lack of infrastructure, balanced diet and good primary health care. Deny their trophy wives and newborns of oxygen and the best medical care as they deny kids of poor folk breathing their last, while their mothers are still pushing, in hospital labour rooms and corridors of death nationwide.

    Bless their kids with gifts of patricide and mindless violence like they do to our jobless youth for political gains, every day. Turn their swimming pools to raging deeps to drown their progeny and trophy wives, like the Oke Afa canal that claimed our poor, beloved folk fleeing from death, to their deaths, during the Ikeja bomb blast.

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

    Let them not enjoy the fruits of their labour. Make their Ivy League-trained wards their sources of everlasting sadness. Make them the bad harvest of their inordinate lust for wealth at our expense. Despite their wealth, afflict them with the poverty of good health, peace and contentment. And for every one of them seeking our downfall, we pray: “Faja’alahum ka’asfin m ma” kulin.” Amin ya Rabbi! Amen! Ase Edumare!

  • Nigeria’s scapegoats

    The journalistic cult of poverty has a supreme theme – the morally-deficient journalist. This theme is pitifully projected by journalism’s highly celebrated ambassadors in the corridors of power and the public space. Rather than evolve as heroic shiners of light and purveyors of truth, speaking to keep all savagery in straits, in the true tradition of modern, high-cultivated men of letters, they choose to manifest  like accidents to society.

    Picture a severely skewed news story bearing the newspaper Daily Editor’s byline and the curious tag: “With political intelligence unit reports.” Picture how ridiculous it must be to witness the metamorphosis of presumed intellect into dimwittedness. At first glance, his touted investigation rankles an ominous note. His heartfelt truths wander in logic and polemic like an untamed gypsy, burnishing a world in which he ought to serve as a bastion of love with hate – urging it into bitterness and everlasting darkness. Severely compromised by greed and lack of pride, he served former President Goodluck Jonathan’s propaganda train like a junkyard dog with neither tact nor freewill. His brief was to impugn the name of Muhammadu Buhari now President Muhammadu Buhari. Unfortunately for him, Jonathan lost the elections and the desperate editor shamelessly switched sides to court camp Buhari, in frantic bid to reclaim his mindless and lucrative servitude to the ruling class. As you read, the tedious character is without a brief. Few weeks ago, he was given the boot by his employer. It didn’t matter that he served both the interests of his employer and the ruling class unquestioningly. When time came to play politics and shed dead weight, the desperate editor was cast away, like a disposable integer.

    As you read many more newspaper editors and their reporters are manifesting at the ruling class’ bidding and your bidding, into the stamen that lets down the azalea, the comforters that bring grief, the emissaries of needless hate orchestrated in the interest of the ruling class.

    Today, tyranny attains ultimate refinement in the news columns; this brings to mind that memorable jest by Norman Mailer that “Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.” Journalists are still the butt of the most demeaning jokes and premeditated put-downs in the social arena. Nobody thinks much of a journalist; in the eyes of big business and the ruling class, the journalist whatever his designation or job title, is the manipulable pawn and necessary evil that has to be courted and tolerated.

    This resonates badly for the Nigerian mob; the nation’s critical mob to be precise. Mob culture requires that he who would adorn the cloak of defender of the masses’ rights should be upright and flawless in character, work and personal ethics. Such admirable traits are rarely attributable to the Nigerian journalist manager and the press in general.

    The Nigerian mob, like every other rabble, seeks fulfillment of tyrant fantasies; such fantasies often vary between the destruction of an unpopular government, despot or worn-out civilization. Reality however, affirms the impotence of the Nigerian mob. The latter is continually tamed and kept on a leash by a ruling class that capitalizes on its obvious handicaps: its impulsiveness, insensibility to reason and judgment and overt sentimentality.

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

    As utopian fantasies go, these are noble expectations of the journalist but the Nigerian mob ignores the cultural shift of the society from conventional morality to unbridled hedonism. It assumes, hypocritically, that the press will continually give it honest and developmental news even as every segment of the society strive to unmoor the journalist from his role as a crucial appendage of the nation’s critical mob. The public, comprising big business, the government, and civil societies among other mob segments, vilify any journalist or news medium that seeks to educate and engage rather than entertain and perpetuate their biased definitions of reality.

    Contemporary Nigeria embraces the emotional pageant that has turned news into paid publicity and mindless entertainment and the journalist in response kowtows to lusts and vanities of modern society. Beneath the mindless glamour and cultural decline however, an insidious reality festers in the death of hope and incandescence of tragedy. Prevalent socioeconomic tragedies necessitate the emergence and elevation among the citizenry of the bungling and sadistic, and the beginning of a differentiation cum tyranny of social grades.

    At the centre of the turmoil is the journalist whose fate is so critically bound with the country’s but he obviously does not know that hence the cluelessness, treachery and brazen recklessness that characterizes his work. Consequently, the Nigerian journalist manifests as an accident to society. He perpetually loses his grasp of the issues at stake; fundamentally hollow and benumbed to valor, he resigns to the powers that be, blaming the tyranny of the ruling class and the proverbial ‘system’ for his inability to fulfill his professional and moral obligations to the society.

    Rather than pose a challenge to the system that domesticates and enslaves him, he chooses the easiest way out and plays junkyard dog to tyrant cabals and the predatory bunch constituting the nation’s ruling class. He assumes the role of a poseur and pretends to fight for the interest of the public. This sad charade is continually perpetuated across esteemed leader-writers’ polemics in foremost newspapers’ columns.

    The contemporary journalist trades in all manners of truths, deploying sophistry and shades of impressive fallacies in the interest of whatever social divide fulfills his lust for relevance and economic survival. We can blame the society and advance all forms of isms and ostentatious arguments to justify our descent the steep slope of amorality and socioeconomic expediency – it wouldn’t excuse our treachery to our calling and the Nigerian citizenry.

    If Nigeria chooses to exist as a land of savages, it’s our responsibility to nudge her back on to the path of humanity and progress – for only in such clime can we positively evolve and prosper.

    The traditional, conscientious journalist is going extinct today along with true, dependable news culture because Nigeria obsesses and migrates to the pseudo-reality of the internet and reality shows. It is no doubt ironical that the masses would turn around to blame the press for not fulfilling its roles to the society.

    It’s about time we stopped narrowing the debates and spotlight to the shenanigans and petty differences of the ruling class and instead aspire to serve as a true voice to the voiceless. There is no magical antidote to our decline and death as a crucial part of the nation’s critical mob.

    Real progress will manifest in the country when we start demanding that the ruling class march in virtual lockstep with promises they make. Whatever the tone and dialect of intellectualisation that characterizes our news culture, posterity will judge us by how truthfully we fulfill our roles as conscience and watchdog of the society.

  • Money ruins everything (2)

    Money ruins many men. It impairs the moral fibre thus making the average human inhumane but that is because man often fails money. The Nigerian man in particular, fails money and so doing loses his right to lord over it and own it.

    Money, like a wild mongrel needs to be tamed. It requires firmness, chariness, deliberate conservatism and modesty of a full man to tame it, own it and control it. But that is hardly the case. Too many men are owned by  money. The Nigerian man, woman and society in particular, are owned by money – that is why contemporary Nigeria worships money.

    Like fire, money becomes a bad master due to our incapacities at taming its flare and controlling it. Consequently, it consumes us. Money corrupts the brightest among us and renders the most promising man and woman worthless. It consumes all who would do anything and everything to acquire it, whatever the consequence.

    Hence the domestication of yesterday’s ‘heroes’ and corruption of the shrewd – men and women by whose citizenship and wisdom we aspired to freedom and progress have being tamed, house-trained, like hunt dogs and pastoral cattle. Eventually, we suffer the transmutation of such established, self-acclaimed defenders of the people’s rights into despicable lapdogs, attack dogs and junkyard dogs of the ruling class.

    Little wonder Sunday of Isabo, Abeokuta, Ogun State, ditched his noble job as foremost columnist and chairman of a national newspaper’s editorial board to become attack dog and junkyard Labrador for former President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration. Many of his readers and fans bemoaned his ‘betrayal’ but from Sunday’s perspective, it is unarguably selfish of anyone to expect him to cling to the drudgery and emptiness of his former job and scorn a-chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of Nigeria’s high-society – be it as errand boy or disposable ‘bingo.’

    Who would have thought that the unrepentant critic of inept and oppressive ruling class would dump his pen and cape of honour to become an attack dog for the ruling class that erstwhile incited his vitriol? Through his spell as former President Jonathan’s media aide, Sunday spoke from every side of his mouth. He patroled Aso Rock corridors as the greyhound would the premises of its master. It must be lucrative being an errand dog.

    In Sunday’s descent subsists the irony of a contrived metaphor; the former columnist’s desertion of his sanctimonious high ground and renunciation of his self-touted activism and crusade for justice, government accountability and morality aptly illustrates contemporary Nigeria’s self-love and enslavement to mammon.

    Add that to the contemporary ruling class desperate politics and their philosophy of public office and power as means to systemic fraud and embezzlement of public funds and you have a perfect portrait of the Nigerian in the vice grip of money.

    An inordinate lust for money drives this generation to self-destruct. Having perverted the natural order that places man above money, the animate cowers to the inanimate. Nigeria submits to mammon, and science, technology, power, property and other bastions of materialism own and controls us. The consequences are rampant and discernible for all to see.

    Our lust for money has put paid to that staunch historic adherence to a cultural value system that supposedly distinguishes the Nigerian in the larger comity of nations and universal citizenship. Gone are our touted values – incontestable code of personal and societal ethics that supposedly humanizes the average Nigerian and moulds him into a fuller and better breed of mankind than any other in Africa and across continental divides.

    The current generation, the youth especially, manifests a dissonance with future bliss and progressive leadership anticipated of it. This generation is not only the most knavish but also the most effeminate of all generations; I will not bother over the shortcomings and atrocities we inherited from preceding generations lest I tow the oft beaten path and glamourize our claims to victimhood and base sentimentality. If the Nigeria we inherited is truly shorn of values and promises of a brighter tomorrow, must we aggravate the circumstances that foist upon us such hopelessness?

    One of the most curious kinks of this generation is its sustenance and obeisance to the cult of the ruling class. Consider the former administration of President Jonathan for instance; men and women that erstwhile professed to champion the people’s rights united to defend Jonathan’s ‘honour’ and justify the unceasing ineptitude and mindlessness of his administration.

    They conveniently forgot that the administration’s insensitivity, clumsiness and gluttony cost Nigeria thousands of lives and public fund till date. Evidences of the government’s incompetence and tactlessness abounded in its appointment of men and women unfit to run a roast corn kiosk to man the nation’s finance, aviation, health, defense, foreign affairs, education, works and housing ministries to mention a few. The citizenry’s election of shady men and woman into the nation’s legislative chambers and their defiant justification of the emergence of such individuals in the country’s hallowed chambers was equally instructive in the nation’s descent the steep slope of institutional corruption and decadent culture. Inefficiency of such characters fostered corruption, violence and deaths across the country.

    This anomaly periodically incites harsh criticisms and disillusionment among the citizenry. However, as had always being the case, the leading critics take no part in the pursuit and actualisation of majority will beyond lip service. Nonetheless they proceed with the most vulgar extravagances courting power and projecting it, irrespective of the nature of men and women that wield it.

    It is incontestable that many of such men, including the former president’s media aides functioning as attack dogs, attracted to themselves, too much of every ill that lies on the threshold of psychosis and common crime. Like the minority parading themselves as Jonathan’s apologists – even as you read – they cackle like a coven of crooked enthusiasts that see every illicit and sentimental act of bestiality as cause for political theatrics and hysterical spinning.

    Renowned turncoats like Sunday of Isabo for instance, are very useful to the ruling class – wobbly in intellect and infinitely handicapped by greed, they repeatedly parade themselves as pirates amenable to crimes and accessible to venal enterprise. These purchasable characters eventually shed their pretensions to heroism and honour to unite with the ruling class in its savage war against the citizenry.

    We have fought many wars in Nigeria. Wars for Biafra and the soul of the Niger Delta. The ongoing war for and against the soul of the northeast currently asphyxiating in the grip of terrorist sect, Boko Haram. And the never-ending war against thieving governors, legislators, and a corrupt judiciary. These wars are ultimately triggered by our failures with money and its innumerable material vestiges. Yet these wars are never enough. Everyday, we embroil in fresh wars for self-actualisation but the wars of the underdog, Nigeria’s impoverished lot, has a greater significance than all of the others.

    This daily battle for the soul and survival of the struggling working class and barely existent middle class is merely an episode of the universal war that constitutes the true nature of humanity and history of the world—the war of good against evil, ruling class against working class, the haves against the have-nots.

    These wars however, are lost on all fronts even before the masses march on to the battle field every day. This is a consequence of the knavery of men entrusted to serve as our moral sentinels, custodians of culture, value and hope for a brighter tomorrow. These men, contrary to their touted crusades in the interest of the citizenry, unconscionably mutate into more savage destroyers of hope and forms of life than the ruling class they were known to despise.

    But rather than call them out as the savages and murderers of hope that they have become, the Nigerian masses continually rationalise their betrayal arguing that they were only being smart. Perfidy and greed thus become noble enterprise in the Nigeria of our dreams.

  • Money ruins everyone…everything (1)

    Money changes everything. It changes everyone. Every hour, it turns thousands who could have overcome its darkness into eternal addicts to the base and inane. For the love of a lousy buck, many have died. For the love of the naira, thousands more lose their souls and their lives every day. Man and woman, father and mother, son and daughter, privileged and pauper, are felled in pursuit of money and the good life, even as you read.

    That President Muhammadu Buhari is persistently ridiculed and condemned as a failure even before his second year in office, is a direct consequence of his inability to uphold the corrupt but highly lucrative systemic bazaar of the past. Although Buhari’s leadership suffers the affliction of crooked men and women, his glamourised aversion to corruption and his ongoing anti-corruption inquiry, resonates dangerously to the country’s crooked divide. Too many men and women accustomed to pocketing and spending money that they didn’t earn are suddenly aghast and petrified by their inability to conduct ‘business as usual.’

    That former President Goodluck Jonathan took God for a fool also attests to the plague and degenerate sway of money. Jonathan, in abject desperation for acceptance and goodwill of Nigerian masses, travelled from the presidential villa in Aso Rock, Abuja, to stage a dramatic communion with God, on his knees, before Enoch Adeboye, a respected cleric.

    Cut to another hodgepodge of the ex-president on his knees, before Ayo Oritsejafor and other self-appointed “men of God” in faraway Jerusalem, Israel. Jonathan in flagrant disregard of religious tenets advising that man’s communion with his Creator should be personal and unpretentious, deserted his abode in Abuja to embark on a spiritual jamboree of his self-styled ‘humility’ and communion with God across the country and overseas.

    Predictably, psychologically and materially-impoverished loyalists cum the ex-president’s media aides argued that he simply loved to ‘lead by example’ thus politicizing his “humility” and “love of God” to the fascination and appreciation of all. It is however, unclear by what standards they will prove that heartfelt prayers muttered by the former president on his knees, in the corners of his room, would have been less significant than his theatrical communion with God.

    Were these spiritual shows emblematic of Jonathan’s unpretentious love of God or were they symptomatic of a desperate wish to perpetuate him in power for the attendant fiscal and material perks? Cut to Stella Oduah, aviation minister’s N255 million bullet-proof automobile scandal Sambo Dasuki’s $2.1 billion arms purchase scam and Abdulrasheed Maina, former pension boss’ N21 billion pension fund racket to mention a few, and you have an interesting picture of the Nigerian ruling class’ inexorable lust for money and other material things.

    There is the oft-repeated logic and inclination to blame this persistent malaise on capitalism; however, attractive as such sophistry may resound, the impulse for acquisition, pursuit of gain and money in fact, has nothing to do with capitalism – it is merely a symptom, like perverse capitalism, of the society’s steady descent the slope of the decadent and grotesque.

    Max Weber, the late German economist and social historian would say it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all cultures of the earth but I would say that the Nigerian malaise is brought about by the absence of an enduring moral code.

    This deficit manifests in deficiencies of personal and societal ethics – the consequence of which is the preponderance and regeneration of eejits, tyrants, greedy-guts, fraudsters, narcissists, murderers and bloodhounds of all kinds and of all nature, across the country’s landscape.

    The trials of Nigerians’ moral degeneration as exemplified by the citizenry’s inordinate lust for money, the country’s recurrent tragedies and propensity to self-destruct, reveals an overarching tendency to savour short-term greed and relief over long-term prosperity. Despite a protracted and tumultuous history of impoverishment and bad leadership, Nigerians continue to look for quick fix solutions thus mortgaging the country’s present and future for short-term benefits.

    Through decades of moral perversions and self-inflicted disasters, Nigerians continue to bemoan their tragic fate. While many argue that the country ruins because the youth are too weak and too selfish to spill as much blood as is required to rid the nation of every human and institutional affliction, many more contend that the country’s woes will disappear immediately poverty is eradicated by the ruling class.

    Today, the fear of poverty as the irrepressible lust for money, drives too many to commit gross acts of dishonesty and irresponsibility. Personal greed is pervasive and poverty is endemic. It represents the triumphal punch delivered by the proverbial system against the country’s poor, hopeless masses. Nigeria suffers the consequence of the supremacy of money. Money rules the Nigerian society. It elevates and ennobles the possessor of it; whatever the nature and import of the rich’s membership of the society, as long as he has money to flaunt and throw around, nobody cares what value he adds to and denies the society.

    Thus the pardon and acquittal of several corrupt politicians and deposed bank chiefs; even after insurmountable evidences were marshaled against them by prosecution, they get off too easily with court sentences that were tantamount to a pat on the back. The poor, on the other hand, epitomise more of what is wrong and contemptible with the society. They represent that segment of the society that is easily swayed, viciously condemned and trodden by the power of money.

    The power of money is indeed frightening and overwhelming. Like Okwudiba Nnoli notes, it uplifts and crushes, enhances and debases, exhilarates and disenchants, dignifies and dehumanizes, enlightens and blinds, unites and divides. Under the influence of money, humaneness and the quest for the collective good are ferociously smothered by disruptive and selfish considerations. Materialism is fostered and greed is ennobled in the mad dash for money. Consequently, justice, freedom, equality, dignity and other human rights, are sacrificed on the altar of the perennial rat-race for the accumulation of money.

    More worrisome is the reality of the poor in Nigeria being unquestioningly docile to the power of money. This impoverished lot is hardly impressed by humaneness and promising leadership. To them, these are manifestations of weakness. Their loyalty and sympathies are reserved for tyrants that treat them like dogs on a leash. It is to these latter that they exhibit the greatest obsequiousness and erect the greatest statues.

    While it is true that the poor would often trample maniacally on the despot, who by a poetic twist of fate – be it by class politics or masses revolt – gets stripped of his power and authority, they do so because having lost his strength, the despot becomes relegated to an ignoble spot among the weak and repressed, who are to be loathed and not feared.

    This is emblematic of Gustave Le Bon’s philosophy of ‘The Crowd,’ which was valued not only by Pareto, Freud, Mussolini, and de Gaulle, but even by Horkheimer and Adorno. Le Bon contends that the type of  “hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instills them with fear…Should the strength of an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from servitude to anarchy.”

    The Nigerian poor, like Le Bon’s crowd, are incapable of progressive will and thought for any length of time. Like a servile herd, they are incapable of coping with the humdrum and vicissitudes of their lives without a master. Democratic ideas are therefore in profound disagreement with the psychology and experience of the Nigerian poor. It is unsurprising then, that materially and mentally impoverished folk would distrust democracy and its promise of collective good, to covet and pursue the vain and ephemeral perks of sociopolitical harlotry.

  • Death will be that undiscovered country…

    Death will be that undiscovered country that we shall all visit. In that country, everybody will be stripped of titles and accumulated wealth. Nobody will 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 will 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 won’t 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 lust for wealth and acclaim.