The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

Beasts of no gender (2)
Today, a creepy trend ensues: the Nigerian man is incidental. He has become disposable means to self-indulgent ends. But the Nigerian woman isn’t; she is hopelessly accidental, even as she giftedly uses and disposes of her men. But she does not know that. That is why, despite their touted talents and depth, the best of Nigeria’s female icons pale irredeemably, against the colourful rainbow of hope and expectations that heralded their emergence.

I will not agonize on the wantonness and serial silliness of successive occupants of office of the “First Lady” yet as their tragicomedy furnishes interesting discourse for another day. Apology to the “First Lady” with substance and the will to be truly humane; if she ever truly exists.

The antecedents and on-going travesty of the Nigerian “female icon,” “alpha female” or whatever, hurts the nation today. It devastates the Nigerian girl-child and woman alike simply by injecting a false and gratuitous default amount of animosity in them towards men and Nigeria’s established patriarchy.

By their politics, they neglect the boy-child, girl-child and woman living in extreme circumstances to burden impressionable females with gifts of obscene chips on their shoulders and axes to grind. These impressionable youngsters breeze through the processes, as you read, internalising every anti-patriarchy psychology they could glean along the way until they learn to give vent to internalised discontent.

Eventually, we have too many women screaming ‘women’s lib’ and professing to protect women’s rights. And we have too many women reading too much meaning into everything and agitating about anything, like the television commercial in which a joyous father of a newborn yells into his mobile phone’s mouthpiece: “Mama na boy o.” To them, such advert constitutes an offensive patriarchal mindset. Such paranoia is wholly enabled by the emergence and practicability of Nigerianised version of Western feminism.

Many advocates of Nigerian women’s rights and greater women empowerment today, comprise what a “discerning” and “assertive” female friend has described as “closet feminists” and “liberated feminists.” Together they seek greater women participation in politics, commerce and other crucial aspects of society claiming development cannot be achieved when Nigerian women have been excluded from the decision making process.

However, not much credit can be ascribed to the few privileged females involved in Nigeria’s decision making process. No thanks to the latter, an anti- female power structure has emerged purportedly for the advancement of the Nigerian woman, but is unable to do so because it is dominated by two cliques of women. The first clique comprises of women married to powerful men and spoilt brats of aristocratic descent. The second comprises ambitious, Ivy-League-trained and dazzling females who have risen to the apex of their careers through meritorious service. Together they constitute Nigeria’s greatest nightmare.

That is because by their citizenship, Nigeria suffers devastating blows to its value system and family structure. This band of self-styled fortune hunters like their male counterparts, conveniently choose to ignore the balancing, nurturing and conscientious roles they ought to play at checkmating the unbridled excesses and terrorism of the male folk.

They shamelessly perpetuate an oligarchic female power formation leveraged on patron-client patriarchal structures – the same structure that incites their revolt. They owe neither moral nor legal obligation to further the ideal of their fellow women rather they exploit their positions and opportunities for economic gains and political relevance. But lest we castigate this new breed of Nigerian female, it is important to acknowledge that they constitute an unavoidable response to the unspeakable insanity and insensitivity of the Nigerian male folk.

Lower down the ladder of this band of fortune bandits however, exists an even more desperate gang of insufferable women advocates. Think advocacy gurus, women’s rights activists and female C.E.Os, students, youth leaders etc.

Their modus operandi involves reading too much into everything and projecting their own neurotic views of reality over far simpler and true reality. They redefine the world upon straw men where there are none and fight needless battles against a ghost army. Yet this fantastic quest of theirs is hardly about maximizing under-privileged women’s lot or improving the lot of the country hence in doing battle with their ghost army of straw men, they alienate their actual allies and indifferent peers – consequently, they attract more blowback to themselves.

The blowback of course, is relative to each feminist and whatever incites her discontent. And as this never-ending discontent becomes the primary source of their righteous victimhood, they desperately lust for and seek to acquire wealth, power, status and any other enablement that would guarantee their comfort and rebellion against the established order.

When they acquire it, they loathe letting go of it and become addicted to it, like junkies. Just like their men. And they will stop at nothing; even if it means adopting both destructive and constructive measures to craft and sustain power in their lives as a dependable safe-guard against the proverbial monstrous man. This breeds a self-perpetuating cycle of hate that keeps such characters unsatisfied and their men, eternally less than.

The consequence is that instead of enjoying life naturally and as each situation peculiarly demands; the new Nigerian feminist reduces her own quality of life by seeing the world through a sexist filter and not as it truly is. This goads a considerable segment of the female folk to pursue whole-heartedly, the perversion of certain established social and universal absolutes that had at one time or the other served as their moral and psychological compasses and comfort zones. Think custom and religion. Asides family, the church is a major casualty of this anomaly as the gospel currently asphyxiates in the heat waves of “expedient evangelism” of Nigeria’s dandy female pastors.

If religion stands no chance, culture doesn’t either. Traditional and divine absolutes of old are of little or no basic worth today; that is why the average Nigerian woman today stands the scripture and tested norms on the head as she spiritedly seeks to emasculate her man and call the shots at home, in the boardroom and even the temples of God.

The central goal of an average Nigerian woman today is to attain self-actualization at whatever cost, often times. This change in ambition is inherently liberating; as it frees a multitude of women from the drudgery of injurious marriages and societal norms. However, this radical change in disposition negatively affects their life arc as a whole; it perverts their relationships, self-esteem, stress levels, pastime, sexual culture, and time and resource allocation – a reality they never actually bargained for.

Driven by lust for financial independence, they seek to achieve every other kind of freedom even as they close their eyes to the tensions and contradictions consequent from the interconnectedness of those freedoms. They choose to ignore the fact that with freedom comes a future that can neither be predicted nor controlled and that changes they seek will oftentimes, negate their heartfelt dreams.

Consequently, they constitute a rehash of a more aggressive trend of radical Western feminism, like a breath of fresh stench in Nigeria’s mortuary of hope and humanity. Female icons we have now are ultimately harmful to Nigeria’s womanhood and State; they are insidiously worse than the patriarchy they seek to eradicate. Why?
- To be continued…
January 29, 2016
Who’s your daddy? (2)

• (Inanities of the Nigerian faithful)

God will not do for the “faithful” Nigerian; paradise lies at the feet of the “daddy.” Thanks to “daddy,” heaven now lies in “spirited” songs, the ones they have learnt to tout as praise worship; there’s bliss to be had in “miracles” and terrifying hypocrisies.

“Daddy” knows how dumb his believers are. A simple lust remains their woe; he knows, thus his desperation to milk their gullibility even as he legitimizes their unarticulated sinful lusts. The problem of the Nigerian faithful is a problem of intellect. The virtue of understanding, which connotes the beauty of mankind has given place to that fount of all ugliness, unquestioning humility.

It doesn’t matter the age, learning, wisdom and status of the Nigerian believer, the spirit of inquiry has died in him under the untiring energy and superior powers of the “daddy.” As you read, the Nigerian faithful sinks, without demur, to his place at the bottom of a new pseudo-religious and economic system that consciously shuts him out to any philosophy of life except that advanced by his “daddy.”

The values of humaneness, knowledge and experience are calculatingly stifled in him to prepare him emotionally and psychologically for the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly evolved faith by the “holy daddy.” This conquest of the Nigerian faithful is evocative of the triumph of racist aristocrats and slave masters of old that realized the usefulness of religious propaganda and joyously aided it controlling their slaves within certain bounds.

As it was during the period of tribulation, repression and degradation of the African slave in colonial captivity, religious practice tends to emphasize the elements of the believer’s character which lays him bare thus making him a valuable chump and meal ticket of “daddies.”

Twenty first century faith according to the “daddies,” encourages the faithful to affect unquestioning humility. It seeks to degenerate moral strength into “moral” submission; while it consciously remodels profound human appreciation of simplicity into an infinite capacity for covetousness and materialism.

The Nigerian faithful, in pursuit of his often elusive joy and right to prosperity, eagerly seizes upon the offered conceptions of the “grace,” “extraordinariness” and “holy spirit” of his “daddy” who excites and enables his lust for materialism. This deep religious perversion, painted so beautifully by the “daddy” according to his gospel of the “living faith” breeds, as all fatalistic faiths do, the pathetically vain and idiotic, side by side with the sensualist.

Shock and grief perhaps most clearly depict the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the Nigerian faithful today. With the exception of the purportedly high and mighty aristocrat and upper middle class, the Nigerian faithful dwells in an atmosphere in which his rights and dearest ideals are being trampled upon. He lives in a society in which the public conscience has grown deafened to virtuousness; a society in which all reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are gaining new strength and fresh allies, daily.

Conscious of his impotence and heartfelt pessimism, he often becomes bitter and vindictive; and his religion, instead of worship becomes a complaint and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a mockery rather than a faith as W.E.B Dubois would put it. On the other hand, the self-righteous “daddy” and vendor of faith who is shrewder, keener and more twisted, sees in the hopelessness of the faithful, an opportunity to amass wealth and socio-political benefits. Hence with prophetic virtuoso and sophistry, he ma`rshals his cunning and vanities to turn the poor and unassuming faithful into his helpless prey. Thus we have two pitiful and psychologically reconcilable streams of thought and moral striving; the danger of one lies in idiocy while that of the other subsists in duplicity.

The faithful eagerly deserts God for his prophet, the “daddy”, and the latter is too often found a traitor to righteousness and a coward to spirituality. The faithful nonetheless is excited to the pursuit of prosperity, the whimsical and often impossible rewards of spirituality; his “daddy” on the other hand, keeps smiling to the bank, conveniently forgetting that life is more than materialism and humanity more than raiment. Consequently, blatant lie triumphs over truth and spirituality. The gospel evolves and perpetuates acceptable falsity, irrationality and vanity.

From the faithful, the most valuable thing taken is his thought, and the most abject tragedy suffered is his loss of humaneness and understanding. By this pitiful loss he suffers, his “daddy” prospers. Meticulously and quite lovingly, he strips the believer of intellect and thought, conditioning him via dazzling oration, ostentatious realism and “executive” life-coaching programmes. Basically, he silences his ability to think and wonder “why?”

No degree of “faith” or “grace” can cure the faithful of his pitiful condition and no amount of hope will rid him of his extraordinary capacity to scurry before his high and mighty “daddy” every Sunday, as a caricature of humankind, in order to please, succeed, or climb the long spiral ladder to approval. Eventually, he needs to face the fraud.

Besides it’s obvious theological problems, the gospel according to “daddy” poses a psychological problem in the end, a problem of fraudulent living akin to whitewashed tombs. What Jesus preached was a faith that fostered simplicity, mercy and sacrifice. These humane elements have been perverted by the gospel of the “daddies” to evolve a base and more pocket-friendly version of faith.

The gospel according to “daddy” enhances the capacity to say the right things without doing them. The daddies’ brand of righteousness and faith propagates life without integrity, devotion without humanity and the darkest possible version of prosperity. The modus operandi (MO) of both faithful and their “daddies” brazenly projects a dynamic adaptation of sorcery or what more discerning theologians have termed “charismatic witchcraft.”

A pastor or “daddy” who tries to control his flock or group is thus practicing witchcraft. The Nigerian “daddy” thinks he knows best for his faithful and then tries to force it to happen. Many Nigerian churches are administered and controlled by dictatorial “daddies” for a profit. Thus if you attend a church where the preacher elevates prosperity over everything and anything, it’s time for you to leave. Basically, you are enslaved to your “daddy” who has without doubt formed an unbreakable soul tie with you. Consequently, you have yielded to his control rather than the direction of God in your life. It is time to desert your spiritual “daddy” and his wife, your “mummy,” in order to embrace and honour your God-given parents.

The path to heaven lies at the feet of your parents; whether heroes or villains, the beaming brightness of their heartfelt prayers and goodwill illumines even the darkest pall hovering above the most sinful adherent.

It’s time to renounce your “daddy” and his infinite capacities to bind and cast demons into your life. It’s only in the context of knowing that you have been blessed with astounding gifts of intellect, talent and perseverance, that you can intimately surmount your weaknesses by marshalling your strengths. And what are your strengths? Your God-given intellect, talent and perseverance and humaneness perhaps; basic attributes that your “daddy” seeks to quash.

Forget the gospel according to your “daddy,” it is essentially, the crusade of the neurotic, reminiscent of medieval evangelism, grounded in myth, perverted by whim and a most pronounced tendency to play god.

January 22, 2016
Buhari’s embarrassments

• (The chinks in Mr. President’s armour)

In an ideal world, the incumbent government would be a blight to Nigeria, a regression to coarse civilisation. But there is hardly anything ideal about our world thus we are stuck with a Hobson’s choice. Nonetheless, there is no gainsaying we dodged devastation by the emergence of Muhammadu Buhari as President but profiteers by the old order consider Buhari’s moralist, disciplinarian stance as bad news; a perverse fetish. They believe that Buhari’s touted renouncement of corruption is childish and duplicitous. It isn’t.

Given that the National Assembly is currently infested by shades of poorly, repulsive characters, the nation’s hope rests on the Judiciary and Executive 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 Nigeria, for the good of Nigerians.

However, this government 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’s ministers are hardly the man he is. They are no heroes neither are they emblems of the kind of probity epitomised by Buhari. They are inherently flawed in politics, personal ethics and humanity – just like too many of their ilk. They constitute the chink in Buhari’s armour and they are the ones that will sabotage his ambitious policies and plans for the country, if great care is not taken.

Of Buhari’s ministers, too many are vectors, mortal agents of the worst kind of viruses. Eventually, they will make Buhari’s 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 mistook and still 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.

Buhari’s ministers are dubious change agents feigning his moral and growth crusade. Like certain state governors and senators operating on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Buhari’s ministers 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 very naive and incapacitated by his overwhelming desire to grow bananas out of a pine tree.

Buhari must know that many of his ministers consider his touted chastity unnatural and morale-busting. They consider his anti-corruption crusade a swerve from reality and fruitfulness.

Buhari on the other hand, by demanding that they join and propagate his crusade, drifts closer to the silhouette of the eternal romantic or change fantasist, for whom honesty is imaginative perfection. Thus Buhari’s mantra of chastity and change is diametrically opposed to what most of his ministers think of it although they make a great show of being on the same page with him.

In urging his cabinet members to sheathe themselves against corruption by surrendering to his moralist communion, Buhari has been daubed by some of his most trusted ministers as a revolutionary of the comedies. They believe that if he persists in trying to eliminate besmirched society by redeeming morals, Buhari will eventually find himself in political dystopia.

In time, every inch of the country that he saves from corruption, will be lost in the desolate mile of his ministers,’ the senate’s and greater segment of the citizenry’s corrupt nature.

Consider the shameful and scandalous goings-on in some ministries as you read; recent victims of the corrupt system allege that, in some ministries, it’s still business as usual; you simply can’t walk in as an ordinary, tax-paying, law-abiding citizen and expect to enjoy the attention of your minister.

For instance, aides to certain ministers allegedly demand as much as N500, 000 just to help book an appointment with the ministers – it doesn’t matter that the ministers are public servants whose chief purpose is ‘to serve’ Nigeria and Nigerians. Will the ministers claim to be unaware of such shameful proceedings within their offices? Certainly, the rot that destroyed the immediate past government of President Goodluck Jonathan is still very much with us.

When news broke out about the alleged remuneration of members of Buhari’s cabinet, not a few Nigerians applauded the seemingly modest remuneration of the incumbent ministers but the latter’s apologists comprising their underlings and journalists on their cash-leash however, condemned the touted salary regime claiming it’s too poor for public officers of their calibre.

Eventually, speculations about their remuneration were laid to rest with the disclosure that each minister would earn about N14 to N15 million as annual salary and allowances – being the politically-correct figure though. This is undoubtedly poor by all standards to members of the cabinet, some of whom had enjoyed highly lucrative and vulgar spells as state governors and political jobbers before their current appointment.

Progressive and optimistic as it could be to imagine Buhari’s ministers as exemplary men and women whose antecedents, personal ethics and politics are unsullied and inspiring as their principal’s, truth is, the decadence that characterise most of them, will eventually establish Buhari’s anti-corruption crusade as a moral schlock, fostering duplicity instead of uprightness and division where there should be wholeness.

The onus therefore, falls on Buhari, the press and the Nigerian electorate to be vigilant. There is need to monitor how Mr. President’s team set about implementing the government’s policies and programmes. There is need to pay good mind to every detail. If we fail to do so, we would be shortchanging ourselves and future generations.

The incumbent government should be religiously scrutinised and kept on its toes given President Buhari’s incapacities at removing the specks in his eyes even as he labours and makes a public show of sanitising the country’s economic and political Augean stables.

Yes, Mr. President’s anti-corruption campaign is yielding great revelations; we need him to establish positive results from the revelations. Money recouped from Dasukigate saga and other scandalous schemes of former President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration should be applied where the impact would be felt positively and progressively in the lives of the citizenry.

More importantly, the citizenry and the nation’s press in particular, should never shy from supervising and critiquing every policy and action of Buhari and his cabinet constructively. As things are now, Buhari and Osinbajo seem the only individuals in his team, whose citizenship inspires; the rest of Mr. President’s cabinet awaken only fear and an unshakable foreboding of pilfering and misery in the hearts of the citizenry.

Buhari and his ministers are well provided for. Some of the incumbent ministers have amassed obscene wealth from their tenure as state governors; their wives don’t shop in the same market as our wives. Their children don’t attend the same schools as our children. They do not attend the same clinics as we do.

Beneath their platitudinous chants and political correctness, they do not care about us. Hence it is unarguably silly for any Nigerian to mount spirited defense for their oft oppressive and regressive actions. Let us make them account for the trust and destinies committed to their care; let us help them ennoble the public offices they occupy, for a ‘change.’

January 15, 2016
Revolutionary rascals

The gecko thinks if it quits the roof to live in the forest long enough, it will become an alligator. Will practice make the cat roar like a lion? I have seen all sorts of revolutionary marches and I’ve come to the conclusion that the Nigerian revolutionary is an incurable sissy. It doesn’t make a darn bit of difference what his causes are. It’s worse if he’s in his youth – because then he fully immerses into the backwardness into which he has been born, evolving quite brazenly like a barbarian, badgering onto the stage for acclaim, through the trap-door.

The incumbent ruling class will glory in its delusions of power and grandeur, until the Nigerian youth muster sufficient courage to remove it. Perhaps. Until then, we will get the quality of leadership that we deserve.

How can the youth take over? How can government be made to reflect the wishes and soul of the citizenry? The preexisting political structure and party regime is no doubt an albatross to the emergence of a greater Nigeria. This is because the nations’ politics as it is so constituted, is structured to serve the whim and wiles of the predatory ruling class holding the country hostage even as you read.

There is need to evolve a credible opposition party structure particularly as the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) fades out from the political space to resurge as a hydra-headed monster in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). This requires the active participation of the nation’s youth. There is need for the nation’s youth to come together to evolve a credible alternative to the existing political platforms that we have in the country.

But before the youth can embark on such purposeful exploit, this segment of the citizenry needs to come to grasp with certain bitter truths about its incapacities. The conscientious and the just, the honorable, gracious and humane; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but soon it slips from their grasp turning them from leaders of the revolution into victims of the revolt thus their seemingly desperate inclinations to distance themselves from every revolutionary march.

No revolution can be successful if the human elements serving as its force of change are wholly incapacitated to see to the fruitful end, the ideals of the insurrection; which brings me to the quality of youth mooting the revolt.

Revolution is never the rebellion against a pre-existing order, but the setting-up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one. How different could an order anchored by the current crop of Nigerian youth be?

In the daily lives of our youth, fear plays a greater part than hope: they are more filled with the thoughts of possessions they may acquire and that others may take from them. Russell would say “It is not so that life should be lived” but the Nigerian youth could not be bothered even if they knew that much.

Many whose lives ought to be fruitful to them, to their friends, and to the world in entirety are hardly inspired by hope and sustained by joy; they seek in imagination the vanities that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence.

Ultimately they choose the path of decadence. In their private relations they are pre-occupied with the inane lest they should lose such affection and respect as they receive; they are engaged in giving affection and respect at a price and the reward often comes by their desperate quests.

In their work they are haunted by jealousy of competitors, and are least concerned with the actual task that has to be done.

In politics, they spend time and passion defending unjust privileges of their benefactors, godfathers, class or ethnicity, even as they make their world less happy, less compassionate, less peaceful, more full of greed and compatriots whose growth is perpetually dwarfed and stunted by oppression.

A spectre is haunting the Nigerian youth. Knowingly and unabashedly, they have entered an unholy alliance with the ruling class. They do not constitute formidable opposition to keep the ruling class on its toes neither do they offer invaluable support to keep our leaders on track.

Their approach to politics complicates the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, the ruling class and the working class; the proverbial middle class got lost somewhere at the crossroads where the bourgeoisie swallows up the proletariat.

Though youth does not really have the means to stop the economy, the ruling class dreads the youth, as was discernible when a wave of panic seized the Nigerian government by the jugular in the wake of the defunct Occupy Nigeria protests. What do they fear? It’s without doubt the frequency and the potentials of youth mobilizations. Massive youth mobilizations were taking place across the globe and with often grievous and far-reaching consequences in the affected nations; the Nigerian leadership no doubt dreaded a Nigerian manifestation of the Arab Spring.

The fear of the Nigerian leadership was however hardly far-fetched given the radicalism of the Occupy Nigeria movement.

In a violent society that has no future to offer them, the Nigerian youth have very little to lose thus their lack of hesitancy in confronting the State. The wish to abolish status quo was widespread among the nation’s youth as they romanticized the idea of a revolution as the protests dragged.

In spite of the youth’s passionate struggle against the incumbent leadership’s utter insensitivity and cluelessness, the eventual result was basically, an opportunistic contract between the exploiters (the government) and a part of the exploited (labour leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin would call “the original sweetheart agreement.”

This revealed a lot about the Nigerian youth’s revolutionary potential. Eventually, the nation’s youth were written off and their grievances dismissed as the crazed rant of a pathetic mass of revolutionary impostors. The youth were eventually dismissed as essentially hopeless and misdirected.

Most of the time, youth mobilizations and revolutionary movements attract sympathy from the workers and the population, as if the youth were saying loudly what the majority couldn’t afford to say. Thus, in many instances, youth mobilizations restore to the social camp the confidence in the masses’ ability to resist; and in some cases other working sectors engage in mobilization, following the youth. The Nigerian youth however, presents a contradiction to the benefits of such relationship of trust.

He is accustomed to keep his head down like one eternally doomed to be adept in all the arts of the beggar. He even presumes a little upon the possession of talents which, as he ought to know, can never compete with cringing mediocrity; in the long run he comes to recognize the inferiority of those who are placed over his head, and when they inflict greater hurt upon him, he becomes refractory and shy, turning round to crawl into the wall when he is backed against it. This is hardly the way to get on in the world but very few Nigerian youths are conversant with the words of Voltaire: “We have only two days to live; it is not worth our while to spend them in cringing to contemptible rascals.” But what if “contemptible rascals” also qualifies a greater percentage of the nation’s youth?

January 8, 2016
‘Press boys’ and Buhari would hate this…

Picture Femi Adesina as President, Federal Republic of Nigeria and Muhammadu Buhari as his Special Adviser on Defence or Agriculture; I believe a President Reuben Abati would have fared better commanding Goodluck Jonathan as a Clerk in the Ministry of Agriculture’s Forestry unit. It’s quite heartwarming too to imagine an Eni Akisola as Governor of Ondo State while Olusegun Mimiko serves as a director in the state’s health ministry. If roles were swapped, do these bastions of Nigerian journalism possess the superior wisdom, intellect and charisma to lead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last year, the Nigerian ‘press boy’ like the Petrarchan lover, fancied himself deliciously powerless vis-a-vis a domineering society and media owner. Goaded by his sodomised sensibility, he accentuated his ethical contusion by seeking sufficiency in loot accorded him by the ruling class.

Last year, as all others, the journalist was insanely reactive; fettered by grinding poverty, institutional bias, dubious professionalism and imperious principals, he became a parody of masculinity whose words and deeds boomed as cloying mime of every criminal and politician’s desire. How can such character effectively discharge his role as watchdog of the society or defender of the masses’ rights?

Let this be the year we stopped enabling the journalist to betray us; the journalist as ‘press boy’ will never serve us. Nigeria deserves a press that would look Buhari in the eye and tell him that the honeymoon is over, while stifling the din of sentimental fops spiritedly chanting ‘Sai Buhari!’ to all of the president’s unforgivable gaffes.

Buhari isn’t expected to magically redeem the damage caused by his predecessor’s locust years in power, but it’s 2016 and we are done listening to drivel about how his predecessor (s) squandered the country’s resources and destroyed the nation’s economy. Nigeria deserves a press that would tirelessly remind Buhari of such fact; a press that would firmly and maturely make him understand that he isn’t the best that we have to offer but the country’s timely answer to the darkness and monstrosity foisted on us by his generation.

Buhari’s much-hyped calmness in face of provocation has gotten too old now. Nigeria does not need him to respond to gnats like Fayose, Metuh, Fani-Kayode and company but the country certainly deserves his coordinated and progressive response to maladies of recurrent fuel scarcity, insecurity, unemployment, substandard healthcare and education, brain drain and so on. Nigeria deserves a press that would tell him that his ridiculous reduction in fuel price from N87 to N86. 50 smacks of duplicity and desperate lust to be cuddled.

The joke is on him if he fails to live up to his campaign promises; he needs to know that whatever loot he recoups from his predecessors in power should be judiciously applied to the betterment of the nation where the impact would actually be felt in the lives of the citizenry.

This year unlike all others, the Buhari we give is the Buhari we will get. Let Buhari groupies stop using the press to cuddle Buhari. Let the press start telling it as it is. Who says Mr. President can’t bear the heat? Remember, he is Muhammadu Buhari and his second spell in power is encore.

January 1, 2016
President Buhari, beasts of ‘Naija’ etc…

Another year gone; let us begin to intuit its truths. Are we different from what we signified and who we were? We have President Muhammadu Buhari. He is the shining beacon of our hope. With Buhari, we hope to cross our threshold of tragedy, death and plunder, come 2016.

Until then, our roads will remain cratered and ditched with death. Our youths will remain unemployable and bereft of hope. Our hospitals will remain corridors of death. Are our schools functioning yet? Are our lawmakers mature now? Has the executive grown in wisdom, the judiciary too? Have we wizened with age and grief as a people?

Change is here, and at its dawn we encounter truth as we hardly knew it. What really is the tenor of the truth? Our truths? Shall we continue to weep like the fanatic, over our dying dreams and the faded fantasies we struggle to forget? Shall we begin to rejoice despite all odds, in spite of misery and death; our lives’ constant staple?

There is not yet a Nigeria of defined, stable boundaries, and economies. There is not yet a sense of shared destiny save our unity of the downtrodden and the damned. The most prescient portrait of the Nigerian character and our ultimate fate as a nation shamefully played out over the last few months and in the last few days. It plays out even as you read; the persistent fuel scarcity and outrageous hike in pump price of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), reveals our murderous obsessions, violent impulses, moral bankruptcy, our hubris and inevitable self-destruction.

The tiresome avarice and predatory lust that drove proprietorships of filling stations nationwide to hike fuel price from N87 to N500 per litre at the twilight of former President Goodluck Jonathan’s regime recalls very sadly to mind, that violence of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the public officer in his plunderous perch – this violence belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts its prey.

In the last few days, of his administration, it manifested in uncontrollable spasms that saw us brutalise the helpless and enable our worst. As the fuel scarcity persisted, Nigeria gradually sputtered to a standstill, businesses shut down, banks cut short their work hours to midday, families starved – particularly those whose livelihoods depended on daily use of PMS- and the queues got longer like photographs of civil death in our homegrown dystopia.

It became clearer at some level that Nigeria was gradually hitting rock bottom, many of us groaned that we were damned—just as some of us know that our citizenship culture founded on a national enterprise that survives on corporate greed, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of crude oil is doomed.

The most frightening facets of the horror story unfolded in our filling stations and spilled over to our streets and neighbourhood mini-marts, utility service providers and grocery stores. As fuel station managers hoarded fuel and closed shop in desperate bid to make a killing by selling it at outrageous prices to helpless motorists and folk whose survival depended on it, the neighbour next door on whom several families and businesses depended for supply of certain crucial products like cooking gas, kerosene, engine oil and so on, joyously inflated prices of the essential products, to the chagrin and discomfort of patrons in need.

Consider for instance, the case of a notable pastor and gas dealer in Agege; the family promptly closed shop and hoarded gas for two days even as neighbours and friends thronged their doorstep pleading with them to resume business and sell gas to them. Of course, they did after effecting a hike in price of the product. The ‘godly’ family dispassionately sold gas to friends and neighbours at N6, 000 per gas bottle. That was an astonishing hike from the product’s initial N3, 000 price before the fuel scarcity.

Friends and neighbours of the family grumbled under their breath as they paid for the product; those that couldn’t recoiled to seek kerosene, accusing the pastor and his family for their ‘lack of sensitivity,’ ‘amorality’ and fraudulent claims to godliness. Of course, pastor and wife responded in kind, claiming that they were duty bound to separate business from holiness. “Na holiness we go chop?” said the pastor. The latter, a Lagos State civil servant erstwhile paraded himself as a noble businessman and compassionate ‘man of God.’

There is little difference between the family’s bestiality and the savagery of the ruling class and fuel station managers who accentuated the scarcity by hoarding fuel in order to sell it at N500 a litre. While their variously savage peers may advance arguments to support their monstrosity citing certain dreadful norms of commerce and industry, it need be told and understood that it is desperate, savage acts like theirs that ruins nations and enable the perpetual dominance of the haves over the have-nots.

A similar malady manifests even as you read as fuel station managers persistently hoard fuel to sell at higher pump prices despite President Buhari’s directive that PMS pump price remain at N87 per litre.

What is happening in Nigeria is a precursor to a dreadful war between the country’s elites and the impoverished, a war caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment and underemployment, overpopulation, declining crop yields caused by climate change, and rising food prices; capital and operating costs belie hope and prosperity for industry. The unfolding doom has nuances, put precisely, it has a thousand meanings.

A recent Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) report generated ripples over its summations on Nigeria. No thanks to the Economist magazine’s sister publication, the Nigerian newborn may arrive knowing he has come where the sun dies everlastingly for the bliss of the fig. The EIU report ranks Nigeria 80th out of 80 countries assessed in its ‘Where-to-be-born’ index.

The 2014 Human Development Index (HDI) report ranked Nigeria amongst countries with low development index at 153 out of 186 countries that were ranked. Life expectancy in the country is placed at 52 years old while other health indicators reveal that only 1.9 per cent of the nation’s budget is expended on health; 68.0 per cent of Nigerians are stated to be living below $1.25 daily while adult illiteracy rate for adult (both sexes) is 61.3 per cent.

”As the population is growing, the resources that we all depend on, the food, energy, water, is declining. The demand for these resources will rise exponentially by the year 2030, with the world needing about 50 per cent more food, 45 per cent more energy and 30 per cent more water,” noted Dr. Aisha Mahmood of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

She said: “In Nigeria, there is the issue of youth and employment; 70 per cent of the 80 million youths in Nigeria are either unemployed or underemployed. We are all witness to what happened recently during the immigration recruitment exercise and this is simply because 80 per cent of the Nigerian youth are unemployed.”

This will inevitably lead to a class war as the deprivation of the working class will eventually morph into violence. In the background, a severe and scarier grotesqueness emerges; it is the acquiescence of presumably humane folk to the bemusement of prosperity. This blunts the sense, inflates the ego and inspires disdain for the less privileged. It is the affliction of the ruling class, fuel station managers and the gas-dealing pastor and his family.

December 25, 2015
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 that characterised public office before his emergence.

At his assumption of office, this writer thought President Buhari would affirm his touted Spartan discipline by scorning the presidential villa at Aso Rock. It seemed a foregone conclusion that President Buhari would frown at the vulgar luxury and wastage of public fund characterised by the State House and thus set about to institute a new standard of service and leadership by stripping the villa of obscene opulence – he could have simply departed it for more Spartan abode while he redistributed Aso Villa’s insane lavishness to shore up sectors of governance lacking adequate ease and provisions.

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

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

If Buhari grants them such right, then he would be legitimising their corrupt acts and he would by default, have supported and applauded the mass murders 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.

Perhaps such increase would be taken in good faith if power supply were indeed steady. But it isn’t and all Amadi could base his planned increment on is a convoluted technical and financial mumbo-jumbo deliberately obscured to confuse and overwhelm poor, hapless citizenry afflicted with the ill-luck of a predatory NERC and private electricity entrepreneurs.

And even though he vowed to crush Boko Haram by December 2015, it is clear that President Buhari won’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.

Like I intoned few weeks ago, Buhari is yet to do anything extraordinary; the ‘steadier’ electricity supply has dropped to an abysmal low and the Ministry of Power and Works is reportedly planning to reintroduce toll gates on the country’s bloody and badly cratered roads. It is in fact amusing that Buhari would permit such unfairness while the citizenry brave untimely death, handicap and stress traveling the country’s perilous road networks.

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 Nigerian State begins to sentence looters of public office to severe jail terms.

Buhari needs to divorce himself from sycophancy, vanities of power and decadent luxury emblematic of Aso Villa if truly he possesses the morality and Spartan discipline frequently ascribed to him. And contrary to claims that he has a great team to work with, he doesn’t. Among his ministers, we have one that allegedly jetted out of the country to celebrate convocation of his ward at an overseas university while his state’s university withered in the stranglehold of strike action and neglect by his government.

We have characters that had been embroiled in scandalous cases of corruption and administrative ineptitude. 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, we 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 Nigeria needed Buhari hence the beauty of his emergence as President via the March 28 elections. 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 the citizenry’s admiration and cult worship of him. The danger in the cult worship he currently enjoys however, subsists in the fact 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.

December 18, 2015
Rethinking Buhari and Osinbajo’s pitiful life-boat

How many hearts filled with grief will balance an offshore account? How many homes – cold, poverty-stricken, scam-activated, shall balance ill-acquired “executive estacode” and “constituency allowance?” How do we measure progress on the watch of men given to scams and plunder?

Despite the misery doled unto us, piecemeal…savagely and in large chunks, we are yet to affect appropriate rage and displeasure. We have evolved from the people that made the hare-brained determiners of our life course to become the decadents whose fortunes hang askew because we have learnt to enjoy our tragedies as sport; like the mother who gets off by watching the father sodomise the son.

President Muhammadu Buhari, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and company, represent our only hope even as you read; yet the purportedly Spartan President and Vice President frantically radiate desultory sparks of moonshine and call it the great sun beams of a prosperous future.

How can Buhari and Osibajo’s purported frugality and uprightness compensate for the scary, conniving, creepy characters we have in the nation’s upper and lower legislative chambers? How will their much hyped and oft exaggerated morality dull the misery inflicted on us by a corrupt judiciary and civil service?

How can these two men quell the inferno of greed and inclinations to pilfer burning through the souls of our executive governors, local government chairmen and so on? They are just two men after all; there is too little Buhari and Osinbajo can do to assuage our pains and institute a truly humane leadership and citizenship in the country.

Buhari and Osinbajo are mere humans; they are no deities nor are they vicegerents of our Supreme Creator hence it will be foolhardy to expect too much from them. Both men irrespective of whatever innate yearnings they profess to fight corruption and foster a prosperous future for Nigeria, ultimately constitute their own handicaps. The frills and thrills of high office have apparently dulled their consciousness to the actual miseries plaguing the citizenry. Ensconced in their high offices, President Buhari and Vice President Osinbajo are immune to the ravages of infrastructural lack, declining naira, power outage, insecurity, unemployment and endemic poverty snuffing lives out in the suburbs and backwaters, gradually.

That is why they can persistently harp on their determination to live up to their campaign promise by paying N5, 000 monthly to impoverished families in the country.

Speaking on the initiative in the run-up to the March 28 presidential polls, Osinbajo stated that the initiative is meant to support 25 million of 119 million extremely poor Nigerians who earn less than N200 a day to take care of their families. The vice president added that the fast way of dealing with that is the N5,000 monthly Conditional Cash Transfer Programme.

“We will give N5, 000 to the poorest 25 million over a phased period, if their children are enrolled in school and participate in immunization…So we are actually doing two things; we are giving stipends to the very poorest and ensuring that in order to earn that stipend they certify two conditions,” he said.

Osinbajo said that the party decided on the 25 million figure because that is what they can deal with in the first phase, adding that “we are looking at phasing it over a period because it will cost about N1.35 trillion to do so if we do all 25 million at once.”

He said the N1.35 trillion they are proposing for the Conditional Cash Transfer Programme’ is not so much compared to the AMCON bailout of “persons who are in debt, many businesses and businessmen and it cost N5.7 trillion to do and that is a bailout of the relatively wealthy.”

Recently, Vice President Osinbajo has been responding to criticisms by opposition party goons that the initiative is unrealistic. According to him the government will make good its pledge. While the initiative may be in tandem with similar practices around the world, one wonders how the APC would run the programme at the backdrop of unreliable national statistics; how will the APC identify those that are actually in need of the palliative without turning the scheme into a scam and cesspit for political discrimination and patronage? How cost-effective and realistic is the venture in the face of systemic corruption and at a period that the country grapples with depressive economy?

At this point, it is important to stress that such spurious palliative introduced by the duo was not booed during their campaign for the presidency lest the witless PDP misappropriates it as weaponry in its arsenal of vitriol and inarticulate drivel en route the recently concluded presidential elections.

Nigerians do not need the much hyped N5, 000 alms rather the citizenry needs Mr. President and his deputy to man-up and take pragmatic steps to correct the persistent social and economic ills plaguing the country. Of course, the country suffers no dearth of corrective and progressive ideas, what had always been lacking is a courageous leadership, daring enough to tackle the countries monstrosities head-on and conquer them, for the benefit of the citizenry and successive generations.

The incumbent leadership should know better than assault our hearing with far-fetched narratives of monuments they will establish in our interest. They seem to forget that greatness is basically achieved by the productive effort of a man’s heart in the pursuit of clearly defined, visible and rational goals. Nigerians will no longer be taken by their ornamentally couched life-boat palliatives and hastily conceived monuments they desperately put up.

It’s about time President Buhari and Vice President Osinbajo understood that Nigerians have become more wary of the public officer bearing gifts and promises of bliss. We know he is usually the one seeking to win our hearts that he might get to break it, for the umpteenth time.

We shall no longer be deceived by the appalling recklessness with which they campaign and project “government with a human face. Oftentimes, the hallmark of such “humanitarian” campaign is the advocacy of some limitless grand scale public goal or initiative, without regard to context, costs or means of achieving it.

Nigerians would like to see Buhari and Osinbajo validate their promises, touted ethics and projections by the best of dependable philosophies and deeds of human existence –the citizenry need a great deal more than “life-boat” solutions like the N5, 000 stipend. We do not live for the mercy of “lifeboats,” such base and patronising palliative is hardly fertile earth in which to sow and harvest our fruits of hope, ‘Change’ and metaphysics.

Nigerians need them to resolve the conflicting characteristics of our tribal mentality even as they validate and attain a worthy equilibrium between, say, the expediency of wiping off our slums vis-à-vis the desirability and affordability of beautifully planned cities and suburbs.

Buhari and Osinbajo should be done evaluating and projecting our given concretes by their abstract principles, it is time to gauge the most probable if not practicable outcomes of their promises, in the throes of ruthlessly objective and rational processes of thought.

We need the incumbent leadership to actualise its blueprint for the provision and sustenance of good roads and electricity, standard health care and security, stable economy and quality education among others; we are done lusting and living for their life-boat and oft futile palliatives. The N5, 000 monthly is certainly one such venture. Buhari and Osinbajo need to get more creative and humane.

December 11, 2015
Metaphor of the round leather (2)
• (The burden of journalists as European soccer groupies)

Some would level to their dullest perception always and praise it as common sense. Even as it becomes clearer by each passing second that the dullest perception is only ever common; it hardly gets to make sense. But sense too, like the gospel truth is always relative, according to the temperament of the individual that is trying to make sense.

Brings to mind an argument I had with some Nigerian youths recently; the passionate soccer lovers see nothing fascinating about the Nigerian Premier League (NPL), rightfully so too. In an exclusive section of a popular elite bar, the youths comprising a doctor, two lawyers, an accountant, a PR consultant and four journalists – excluding me – derided Nigeria’s soccer league.

Their derision was heartfelt and yet devoid of the barest pang of lamentation. And there in subsists their tragedy. Had they, despite their acerbic wit and mockery, betrayed even the slightest twinge of regret about the deplorable state of the country’s soccer league, they could be excused for their unapologetic disdain for Nigerian soccer.

They didn’t and according to them, they cannot for the love of Nigeria, subject themselves to the agony of supporting the Nigerian league. “The coverage is poor, the pitches are the worst and it parades no stars. I would rather watch the English Premiership than waste my time,” noted a journalist. Few days earlier, colleagues in a Lagos newsroom had espoused vitriol about the Nigerian league. Their disdain was predicated predictably on very bad pitches, poor coverage and absence of world class stars.

When a colleague stated that he would rather support Enyimba FC of Abia state, he was smothered by die-hard groupies and fans of European soccer teams. They dared him to mention five players of Enyimba FC but they did not wait to see if he could; then they went on to tell him that they would rather invest their time, passion and money in supporting star-studded teams across Europe.

They do not care that the coverage of the Nigerian league is poor because journalists and soccer lovers like them will never endeavour to see and report a match at the nearest stadium. They do not care that issues of bad pitches, corrupt sports administrators, insecurity and fans’ apathy among others are aggravated by such disposition as theirs’ to Nigeria’s ailing soccer sector.

They conveniently forget that there was a time Nigerians were truly crazy about the Nigerian league.

With remarkable enthusiasm, they understate the potentials of the local league that paraded Kanu Nwankwo, Celestine Babayaro, Stephen Keshi, Rashidi Yekini, Daniel Amokachi among others, for their beloved Arsenal FC, Chelsea FC to mention a few, to exploit.

Indeed, no amount of persuasion or ideological protestation could convince such characters to cultivate a smidgen of the love they profess for Chelsea FC, Arsenal FC, Real Madrid et al for local teams like Enyimba FC, Nassarawa United, Gateway FC and Ocean Boys.

The Nigerian journalist, apparently, is not left out in the mad scramble for escape from his societal insanities, however temporal. Thus he devotes quality time on and off work to European soccer while he scoffs at his severely underreported local league.

Like other fanatics of European soccer, he seeks to forget infinitely, that he is no different from the proverbial wretch who rejects his penis because his Caucasian neighbours’ seem bigger; with whose shall his wife scion his kids?

Thus is the tragedy of the Nigerian soccer fanatic. It gets more interesting when he is a journalist. Then, his mystifying love for European teams as his barbed vitriol against the NPL attains a perplexity of sort; oftentimes he attempts to intellectualize the unintelligible.

He desperately engages in the pursuit of happiness like a bliss-bandit seeking joy where he has sown none. Thoreau would equate this to seeking safety in stupidity whereas Lord Byron would dismiss such passionate disdain for one’s heritage as the petrifaction of a plodding brain.

This is the predicament of the Nigerian journalist and other European soccer groupies. Perhaps it’s because he is only human. Were it that he would dedicate a similar amount of time and effort as he commits to the coverage of the English Premiership, a “reality TV” show or shenanigans of Lagos and Abuja’s “high societies” for instance, on one NPL soccer match at a time, the fortunes of Nassarawa United, Dolphins FC, Wikki Tourists to mention a few, may eventually improve.

It’s not a shame to seek entertainment by the sportsmanship and fortunes of a European champion like FC Barcelona or popular English club side like Manchester City; it is, when a Nigerian, particularly a journalist, does so believing that his nation is incapable of elevating soccer to such fantastic height.

Such journalist without doubt, is irredeemably less than. Measured with and without his vanities, he presents no exception to the Nigerian human social anomaly; he is essentially a perpetuation of it. Thus if you are a Nigerian journalist in your youth and you are reading this, chances are that you epitomise a similar state of mind. You are probably contemptuous to everything Nigerian.

Chances are that you do not believe in the possibility of a star-studded Nigerian soccer league. Chances are that you do not believe that Nigeria could eventually become a Mecca of sort for international soccer players and pundits seeking to make a fortune and a name. Chances are that your inferiority complex cuts deeper than that. You probably consider Nigeria incapable of greatness of any kind. Chances are that you do not believe in the evolution of a truly conscientious Nigerian leadership and citizenship.

Chances are that you do not wish to be judged by the same standards by which you judge others. You probably don’t believe in the continuity of the Nigerian project. You are probably reading this with undisguised contempt and you definitely wouldn’t admit that you personify all these and much more.

Such is the temperament of a Nigerian journalist. He represents an abject negation of the vision, fortitude and sincerity he ought to embody. He hardly seeks to set an agenda or elicit positivity thus contradicting the agenda-setter cum social responsibility theories of the press.

“No government or nuclear weapon is as powerful as the press,” it is said. This saw is definitely not about the Nigerian press; not because it’s bereft of such formidable power but because it has programmed itself to seldom exploit it.

Recently, I asked that if the Nigerian journalist in his youth is assessed by the same standards by which he judges others, would he be adjudged as excellent, conscientious and honorable? Not a few colleagues bellowed an unconvincing “Yes!”

When I suggested otherwise, someone claimed that I had made a sweeping statement. Another queried – albeit mischievously – that what is the yardstick for determining a distinguished journalist; he said: “Is it by winning a CNN or Nigerian Media Merit Award?”

A good newspaper, supposes Arthur Miller, is a nation talking to itself; a good journalist, I suppose, is a patriot, pricking his nation’s conscience. Funny how convenient it is to loathe the proverbial looking glass by which we screen others and decry their faults. Guess we dread the reflection we might see.
- To be continued…
December 4, 2015
Metaphor of the round leather
The rambling youth who abandons his farm to seek greener pastures on his neighbour’s land is never as manly as the starving cow which kicks over its food bucket, leaps over the barnyard fence to run after its calf at milking time. Even the maternal cow commands greater respect than the Nigerian youth. Even a plough-wearied bullock tilling barren land excites greater dignity than the youth who passionately maligns Nassarawa United, Rangers of Enugu and Gateway FC to worship A.C Milan, Manchester United among others.

Some would rave that I have made a sweeping statement but the tragedy of the Nigerian youth at home isn’t any different from that of his peer in Diaspora. A pitiful lust remains their woe; it’s a hankering for undeserved luxury, base sentimentality and unearned greatness. It is what drives a 38-year old Masters Degree holder and soccer enthusiast in the United Kingdom to call Super Eagles’ John Obi Mikel, a failure even though he, the 38-year old, washes the anuses of mental patients in a low budget geriatric home in the UK and Mikel earns about £80, 000 a week playing soccer or sitting on the bench for Chelsea Football Club in the same country.

The 38-year old soccer buff was pissed with Mikel and his team mates’ performance at the recently concluded African Cup of Nations (AFCON) and at the ongoing FIFA World Cup qualifiers. He thinks they constitute monumental disgrace to Nigeria. And he painstakingly states so on his Facebook social networking page. Some would claim he has every right to criticise and condemn the Nigerian Super Eagles, like every other Nigerian who loves to see, breathe and talk ‘fantastic football.’

But this is hardly about the ignorant youth’s debatable logic or Mikel’s deep pocket, it’s about the rabid inclinations of the Nigerian youth and soccer enthusiast to criticize and condemn everything Nigerian within and outside the exciting world of soccer. It was fascinating to see the nation’s youth unite in condemnation and virulent abuse of Nigeria’s Super Eagles over their perceived lackluster performances at international soccer tournaments. It doesn’t matter that the hastily constituted squads were meant to use the tournaments to fine-tune in depth and strength. No sooner than the tournaments begin than the Nigerian soccer enthusiast began to fantasize of the team’s incontestable right to excellence and invincibility even though it was ill-prepared to function and gel as a team.

It took Clemens Westerhof four years or thereabouts to build the excellent squad that served Nigeria for well over a decade but the Nigerian youth and soccer enthusiast wanted former Super Eagles coach, Stephen Keshi, to parade a perfect team in three months, at the 2013 AFCON. When the team drew against Zambia and Burkina Faso, not a few of their peers cursed and demeaned them as the worst things to ever happen to Nigeria. When they beat Ethiopia 2 – 0, their peers at home ridiculed them endlessly, claiming they shamefully managed to win by penalties. However, nothing compares to the ill-will accorded the team as it prepared to face the Ivorien team.

The “Super Chickens” will fall to the might and soccer prowess of Didier Drogba, Yaya Toure, Africa’s former best footballer and their Ivorien team mates, claimed the Nigerian press and other soccer buffs. Eventually, the Super Eagles put a lie to prophecies of doom by their peers at home and abroad; they simply outclassed and dominated Drogba, Toure and team mates from the first blow of the whistle to the end of the match. The Super Eagles beat Ivory Coast 2 – 1.

It hardly mattered what final fate awaited the Super Eagles at the tournament – which they eventually won – what truly mattered was their spirited disavowal of the abject disloyalty and rabid sentimentality of Nigeria’s soccer loving youth.

Currently, Nigeria is afflicted with youth irredeemably dim and misty in persona and worth; like spent shadows, they incarnate an insensible perspiration towards the sun. Their contempt for Nigeria extends beyond their disdain for Nigerian soccer. Like the beautifully dull and half-witted, this generation of youth encapsulates an inordinate contempt for everything Nigerian. They would dump the Nigerian dream for scraps and crusts of the American dream, British dream, South African dream, Malaysian dream, Ghanaian dream and even the Malian dream to mention a few.

One cannot pontificate enough – even by unrelenting self-righteousness –to lay a foundation of true understanding and compassion for their plight. I speak of the unrepentant critic forever mounting the soapbox in his living room, courtyard or public bar to curse our leadership and curse the times even as he does nothing to improve the times.

It’s even more tragic to see a journalist in his youth incarnate such pitiful citizenship despite expectations that he ought to know better. Such character that will play muscle to the most hideous politician for the paltriest fee often turn around to blame politicians for everything that is wrong with Nigeria. Such young members of the nation’s Fourth Estate espouse more bleakness and disdain for the Nigerian dream than their contemporaries from other professional and class divides.

I speak of rich, spoilt brats acquiring the best of Ivy League education abroad with money pilfered from our coffers by their parents in the ruling class. I speak of Nigerian youth and self-styled intellectuals washing the anuses of the senile in geriatric homes and hospices abroad, even as they return home to belittle the impoverished teacher and farmer burning out under the worst living conditions, with dignity.

I speak of postgraduate alumni from Nigeria driving cabs, cleaning public toilets, robbing, scamming and trafficking their sisters, daughters and mothers to foreign brothels for a fee. Then I speak of the very successful living abroad and yet propagating as much venom as bloody solutions to every problem in our fatherland.

Lest I forget the maddening horde of Nigerian youth whose clamour for change is meticulously smothered no sooner than they gain access to vulgar privileges they whole-heartedly condemn as the excesses of the ruling class. With this shameful lot, the average youth brazenly casts his lot every time he incites cheerlessness and contempt for everything Nigerian.

What pleasure is there to be derived from ridiculing one’s heritage just for the pleasure of doing so? The one who derives his thrill from doing so, himself becomes an everlasting jest, oftentimes to his great loss. The Nigerian youth who does so besmirches the essence of true citizenship and grace. But aren’t we all identifiable with such character?

To this, many will vehemently object but it still doesn’t belie the fact that left to our devices, we shamelessly espouse and glamourise degeneracy. Little wonder, the hue and cry over the removal of fuel subsidy abated to a burp. Little wonder the profligacy and sleaze of the Nigerian ruling class became acceptable to hordes of cowardly revolutionaries that threatened to “Occupy Nigeria.” Little wonder several misguided youths have joined the campaign of calumny against President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption campaign.

The infinite cowardice in our hearts will continually betray our mutinous battle cries against the corrupt ruling class. The Nigerian youth is undoubtedly a researcher’s delight; every hour he substantiates the fraudulence of grief and the revolutionary march on this side of the divide.
- To be continued…
November 27, 2015