The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • The hard way the only way

    Sublime; isn’t it? That a greater number of Nigerian youths have in them the deportment of certifiable adults and the depth of frivolous boobs. Like doped up characters with infrequent lucid intervals, we epitomize the worst that Nigeria has to offer: think desperate youth leaders, overnight celebrities and their credulous, easy to fool peers.

    Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Tafawa Balewa, Gani Fawehinmi…Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe; these among others, are leading lights among a firmament of heroes that have appeared in Nigeria’s history. Some are dead and those still living are lamentably in their twilight. Shame.

    Shame that even at this minute; they are the epitome of cool. Shame that they earnestly symbolize a sense, culture and approach to citizenship that signifies an indifference to vanities and which sticks a defiant swivel-on-it finger towards mainstream society.

    These individual men are less secular stars than quasi-religious figures and their citizenship has so far earned for them a godly reverence that’s at once enviable and unique – little wonder they seem deserving of worship.

    There’s nothing unique, nor indeed unusual about bestowing divine status on mere mortals. History is full of characters who actually encouraged their followers to do so – the Caesars, Aztec leaders, Pharaohs – and, in the modern world, millennial cults are typically led by charismatic figures claiming messianic powers; think 21st century Nigerian Pentecostal pastors or “Men of God” among many others.

    Even individuals who had scorned such attributions, like Bob Marley or Bob Dylan, have been endowed with deistic eminence by fans. Marley had an oracular presence and his songs were infused with Rastafarian prophecy. Dylan perplexed one generation, while inspiring another with his sour condemnations of war and prejudice. Their influence makes their veneration comprehensible but of what worth is the current crop of Nigerian youth leaders, politicians, music and movie stars and other celebrity icons? What is it that makes them deserving of acclaim and hero-worship?

    Their claims to affluence, ostentatious lifestyles and oratory. Add to the mix, their unrestricted access to eminent politicians, bank chiefs, technocrats and you have a “perfect” role model for the Nigerian youth. At the heels of many a loathsome politician, cleric and light-fingered technocrat, the Nigerian youth leader, celebrity and advocacy guru to mention a few, have evolved into some familiar but infinitely worse predatorship than we can ever learn to endure. More worrisome is the fact that they seem to be multiplying by the second.

    The malaise has degenerated to the extent that these current crops of “superstars,” “youth leaders,” heroes,” “role models cum motivational speakers” are diversifying from their usual forte. Some have learnt to perfect the art of profiting by their clueless, dim peers by veering into politics. Many a self-styled youth leader, celebrity and motivational speaker currently serve as henchmen and henchwomen to the most awful band of leaders the country has suffered so far.

    These foetal adults, adept at manipulating fellow youngsters with all manners of anecdotes, celebrity cult culture, mannerisms and clichés attain celebrity status by dint of fraudulence and “hard work.” Eventually, they attain stardom or celebrity status not because they are deserving of it but because they have perfected the art of oratory and deployment of the society’s media apparatus to effectively further their con.

    Having ridden to eminence on the might of a pitifully docile and unquestioning media, these embodiments of wantonness and figments of hack writers’ imaginations intrude the imagination of their fellow youths and influence it; basically they corrupt it.

    And like pitiful retches of human surfeit, suckers for celebrity culture are taken for endless rides; they remain on the receiving end of a barrage of outright lies, true lies and scorn impenitently dished to them usually by their most lovable “superstar.”

    The problem of the Nigerian youth is the lust for undeserved fame; blinded by their yearnings for acclaim or inclinations to worship their favourite superstar, they do not take care to examine and see their favourite peer heroes and celebrity role models for the fraud they really are. But the problem is hardly with the latter for they can’t truly help being what they are; the problem is with their teeming fans and obsessed peers.

    Celebrity worship is measurable; low worship describes what many of us do watching and reading about celebrities. At the other extreme are reverent followers obsessing about celebrity successes and failures. This is the kind of uncompromising and extreme disposition that might be regarded in a different context as inglorious zealotry or fanaticism.

    We must have new names, Marcel Proust presciently noted—in fashion, in medicine, in art, there must always be new names, he said. It’s a very tidy remark, and the fields Proust chose seem smart, too, at least for his time. Now there must also be new names across various fields today. Implicit in Proust’s remark is the notion that if the names don’t really exist and the quality isn’t there to sustain them, it doesn’t matter; new names we shall have in any case. The Nigerian society somehow contrives to supply them.

    It’s amazing to think that think that we haven’t had a major statesman whose statesmanship is timeless and worth emulating since perhaps the death of Awolowo, Azikiwe and Balewa or, to lower the bar a little…nobody!

    But new names are put forth nevertheless—high among them has been those of the current crops of Nigerian “statesmen” and politicians. It is even more amazing to see what manner of “patriots” are today, invested with national honours by the country’s leadership. Year after year, national honours are given out to a myriad of characters, even if so many of the recipients don’t seem quite worthy of them.

    Of the many dubious gifts bestowed upon the nation’s youth by celebrity culture, the most innocuous and pernicious is the rejection of abject reality for the comfort of lies and fantasy. The lust dizzyingly manifests into compulsive fixation that translates into a desperate and lamentable inclination to model their lives after that of their favourite peer icon or hero.

    It will do the Nigerian youth greater good to understand that, that enviable affluence and grandiosity attractively touted as the result of their favourite peer icon or celebrity’s experience doesn’t really work for the vast majority of people – successful or not. It’s time they begin to see their favourite youth leaders and advocacy gurus for the for the fraud they have become – for what promising youth  in their prime would abandon medicine, law, journalism, education, engineering for ‘motivational speaking’ at a fee even before they earned their first keep? It’s the indolent, fraudulent type that does that. It’s the conniving, covetous kind that does that.

    There is no short cut to success. That is why reality show superstars never last. That is why the actress who sleeps her way to stardom as the artiste who sings gibberish to the gallery evolves into a mere flash in the pan. That is why dishonest politicians and youth leaders fade out into infamy and disgrace.

    The slow steady path remains the surest path. Everybody has to pay his dues. It is the way the universe is ordered. The greatest fraud is he who would die to get ahead rather than doing what is right – like following the slow, steady path of honest industry to progress.

     

     

    • To be continued…

  • The usual scapegoat

    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.

    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 we orchestrate.

    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 often 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. In fact, very few journalists command the respect of the society.

    The descent and humiliation of the journalist however, begins in the hands of his employer; very few media today are paying fairly. Many are not paying at all and among the few establishments that pay, salaries range from N15, 000 per month at entry level to N70, 000 per month at managerial level. Just three media houses endeavour to pay fairly and across the three; journalists are oft treated as vermin by administrative/human resources and advertising staff. While just three newspapers may claim exceptionality in this respect, the reality is known to the government, big business, advertisers and general public that the Nigerian journalist is an endangered species, haunted by his employer and tormented by the public he serves. These sad realities lead to daily exodus of skilled and promising hands from journalism and a daily influx of quacks into the profession.

    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, poverty of soul and intellect, its irritability and overt sentimentality – which are undeniably characteristic of beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution, like savages and carnivores.

    Despites it 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 shamelessly 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. I am a journalist and I shamefully acknowledge that my clan and I hardly epitomize hope to our world. Not yet. Rarely does our work signify hope, self-sacrifice or a promise of future honesty and gallantry in the interest of all. 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. Our failure as journalists indicates severance from a progressive and moral culture while we institutionalize bigotry, lies, depravity, base sentimentality and pitiful fantasies.

    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.

    The only profiteers from the status quo are those skilled in the art of manipulation but this despicable band can rarely function without the support of the journalist hence the urgent need for the Nigerian press to retrace his steps. Journalism will thrive and Nigeria will prosper if we neglect the culture of the news spectacle to focus on progressive pursuits, like development and socially responsible journalism.

    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 intellectualization that characterizes our news culture, posterity will judge us by how truthfully we fulfill our roles as conscience and watchdog of the society.

  • This shameful thing that is still happening…

    As you read, a shameful thing is recurring; men in their teens are meeting to determine the fate of the Nigerian State. Apology to teens, for many a teen have been proven to possess the intellect and soul of a man of 40 and above. It is amusing to see the so-called best amongst us: career youth leaders, activists, journalists, actors, musicians, artisans, professional associations and so on, court the devils we swore to divorce.

    Today, such characters parade themselves as representatives and spokespersons for the Nigerian youth. They are meeting with representatives of the ruling party and its rivals. They meet to chart a game plan; an almighty formula by which the ruling class may enslave us, for the umpteenth time.

    That has to pale in the face of logic; it does. Things are supposed to be different now but they aren’t. As the 2015 elections draw near, familiar trolls are joining hands with the devious and sly amongst us; their intent is to use us against us in their customary plot to rob us silly. The end result of course, can be better imagined.

    Money changes everything. It vitiates the soul of the Nigerian youth. Although the need of it makes us human, loving it could be practical but an obsession with it drives us to the brink, it shows us up, upside-down and inside-out; as men of vulpine souls and intellect, eternally forsworn to despise honour for the love of mammon and associated luxury.

    Many have argued that we can never sell out by playing muscle to the ruling class. “We are only enjoying our share of our collective wealth that they steal from us,” they claim, even as we get ready to be courted and plied with easy money and other inducement, by the same politicians that habitually treat us with disdain, until the elections approach.

    Whatever justification we choose to give to it, a bribe is a bribe. And more often than not, it changes relations. Once accepted, it vitiates a large chunk of the essence of the recipient, making him inferior, like a man who has paid to lie with a skunk the same way the impotent pays to be sodomized by a horse, thinking it would cure him of his impotence and aid him to sire by a woman, a blessed child.

    The folly of our ways shall soon dawn on us, as it did, few days after we installed the current dispensation. The meek and humble leadership we thought we had installed evolved to become one of the worst tyrannies Nigeria would ever produce. It’s worse than any other, given Mr. President’s manipulability by the murder of crows he has surrounded himself with.

    A brilliant tyrant could be trusted to a certain degree of depth and capacity to lead but a manipulable tyrant is infinitely more dangerous, as he cannot be trusted beyond his blandness, intellectual handicaps and devious plots of his coven of cronies, advisers and kitchen cabinet.

    Sadly, in the corrupted currents of the world such men have foisted upon us, we can only devise more alluring ways to play dumb and project our generation as easy marks for the ruling class to exploit. The current liaisons between the ruling class and the so-called representatives of the Nigerian youth portend an ominous development.

    It presages the continued enslavement of the Nigerian youth and our incapacitation by obscene inducements and gifts of grandeur; the perpetuation of a system in which the youth are psychologically confined and broken by financial inducements, dubious segregation and manipulative politics; a situation in which the sentimental fops amongst us are programmed by rumors, innuendo and outright falsehood to shun the path to progress and tow the fast lane to destruction.

    Many argue that the major problem afflicting Nigeria is the dearth of inspired leadership drawn from the nation’s youth. A converse view advances the presence of eminently capable persons out there, many of whom have failed to altruistically and responsibly apply themselves because like every other Nigerian, they are too busy looking out for themselves. Potential heroes we could rely on have learnt the wisdom in keeping silent. They tactfully scoff at our romanticized wish to abolish the status quo, knowing that, as usual, we would settle for an opportunistic contract between our exploiters (the government) and a part of the exploited (labour and youth leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin aptly identifies as “the original sweetheart agreement.”

    I recommend as usual, peaceful revolt guided by probity and a conscious quest to achieve the collective good within the ambit of fairness, equity and unflinching morality. Without such humane attributes, every measure we adopt will fail. Policies and practicable solutions are mere words on paper; they can only be activated by our conscious efforts to actualise them.

    Mr. President, the National Assembly, the judiciary, our 36 State governors and political parties are indisputably worthless and impotent without the support of the Nigerian youth. These societal creatures depend on our goodwill to survive. It’s about time we stopped playing disposable muscles and junkyard dogs to them.

    Money and other inducements they dangle before us shall be exhausted sooner than we can ever imagine. If we are indeed serious about installing visionary leadership capable of steering us from the threshold of ruin to the portal of hope and social renaissance, we have to start now.

    The Nigerian youth needs a platform. We need a more concrete forum than Facebook and Twitter. We need to create a rallying point by which we could sit to determine a bloodless path to a promising future. Yes, the current leadership won’t relinquish power easily hence our need to act. Let us identify and vote into power that particular breed whose idealism and pragmatism capably understands our painful silences and heartfelt dreams in order to speak and actualize them.

    Let us begin to ignore those who would desert us no sooner than they regain their hold on power. I speak of men and women that would recoil into their exclusive homes in Banana Island, Lagos, their palatial estates in Abuja, and fashionable neighbourhoods in Europe at the barest sign of chaos. There, they isolate themselves from the tragedies that mar our world by indulging in unrestrained hedonism and extravagant consumption of their ill-acquired wealth. We, the suffering masses are however, repressed with greater ferocity every time we protest.

    Our resources are being depleted; soon they will be exhausted. And then our hollowed-out edifice will collapse. Impoverished and severely robbed of optimism, we, the hopeless masses will rise against the ruling class in a premeditated and very savage strike – of which we shall suffer the worst consequence.

    Like in all such uprisings, Nigeria will plunge into a canyon of blood and maniacal murders, in the name of the “revolution.”  The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in A Short History of Progress, “…extremists, or ultraconservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.” This is how all civilizations ossify and collapse.

    Today, we tow a similar path.

  • ‘Niggers’ with attitude

     (Portrait of the Nigerian as a ‘black’ ant)

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Only a select few, as Kperogi noted, “Are accorded the honour of addressing a joint session of the United States Congress. Certainly no Nigerian head of state has been accorded this honour since Tafawa Balewa.”

    According to the website of the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, since 1874 when the King of Hawaii first addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, there have been only 112 such privileges granted to foreign leaders and dignitaries.

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

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

    The Nigerian leadership today could be likened to men gifted with the mentality of the hyena and the sensibility of the guinea fowl. The same may be said of the Nigerian citizenry. Our lust for unearned riches, acclaim and the west’s approval illustrates the shallowness and weakness of the Nigerian adult’s ignorance and awfully preadolescent mind. It reiterates a very shrill cry for help that’s at once self-seeking, infantile and retrograde.

    It is what makes Nigerian leaders pilfer and deplete the nation’s treasury to embark on foolhardy trips abroad to learn western-european governance styles to be ineffectually applied back home. It is what makes Nigerian leaders throw their doors open to every visiting foreign cub reporter even as they deny seasoned journalists back home, similar opportunities. During such interviews, such characters persistently expose themselves to ridicule, presenting themselves as inveterate idiots by their comportment and utterances which are tailored to glorify the disturbing plots and agenda of the foreign newshounds.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Some wonderful class narrative

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

    Consequently, we suffer poverty in character that manifests as mean-spiritedness. It’s akin to that patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours the motorist at the police checkpoint, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the public officer on his perch – this patience belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts its prey.

    Oftentimes, it manifests in uncontrollable spasms that have seen us bury our best and elevate our worst in abject negation of the cycle of the universe and morality. But who needs morals in a nation where fair is foul and foul remains fair?

    As you read, many a Nigerian of commonplace roots live through each day without ever contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanising squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate thus exhibiting no conscious effort to better their lot beyond what their immediate circumstances dictate.

    Almost as impulsively as the beasts of the wild, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought and consideration that by sufficient endeavor, they just might improve their living conditions. However, a certain percentage – comprising men and women of privilege – guided by personal ambition, consciously strive in thought and will to attain higher status but very few among these are concerned enough to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves. This explains the number of self-centred and treacherous human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists and columnists parading our streets.

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

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

    This is because more unfortunate sections of the Nigerian population are hopelessly ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and disillusionment, apprehensive through the imminent danger of instantaneous chastisement by the holders of power, and morally defective owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To excite among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort in pursuit of general improvement of the status quo proves basically a hopeless task, as antecedents of such efforts have proven.

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

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

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

    Apparently, we possess an overwhelming and oft-convincing inclination to self-destruct thus our lack of a coherent and defensible political ideology essential to the evolution of a progressive leadership and state.

    The average Nigerian is no more electable than the leadership he endures yet he loves to speak truth to power even as he functions simultaneously to smother his own voice in the riotous gabble of his exultation of the same ruling class whose end he claims to pursue. No matter who is elected, the demographic and economic realities of Nigeria will persist, and there is a very limited range of politically-viable solutions for dealing with them.

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

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

    The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be tirelessly reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advance — problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life – and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization must be resolvable largely by an average member of the working class by reason of his exposure and constitution.

    This informs a greater need for study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes in the journey towards the reduction to the barest minimum, the possibility of future foibles. The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.

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

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

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

    • To be continued…

  • If ‘press boys’ were patriots…

    This year, our practiced clasp may gather into a punch, if we let it. This is the year in which we accord our leaders their rights to everlasting madness – that they may see the bite of the frost against their naked butts, as much as they feel it.

    This year, we birth the truth, or learn to silence it, as usual. I could plead that we summon our will to defend the interests of our people and State but that would be tantamount to imploring the pirate to pilfer riotous raindrops from the Pacific, wouldn’t it?

    This year, our practice lumps together, two crucial yet haunting questions into some tiresome rhetoric: (a) As the polls approach, what should our values be? (b) Who should be the beneficiaries of such values? Predictably, we pervert the first to foster an even more insidious perversion of the second, as usual.

    Thus we evade the task of evolving and defining a rigid code of moral values that we could be led by. Hence the appalling immorality, chronic injustice, gross double standards and the insoluble conflicts and contradictions that plague journalism practice in the 21st century as it does the Nigerian society, under all questionable variants of leadership and altruist ethics.

    Observe the indecency of what characteristically, passes for our moral judgement and the consequences today: self-acclaimed democrats and looters who rigged their way to power, political thug-fathers and gangsters who shot their way to power and then, out of it – having amassed their fortune by looting state coffers, are enabled and patronised by us as the next best elements to happen to the Nigerian state. Even so, we ignore the promising aspirant who gives up the pursuit of peace and fulfilment in order to support our dreams of bliss and realisation of it. Such an aspirant is regarded by many of us as a hopeless radical; a tiresome irritant to our democratic process.

    Ultimately, we label wearisome tyrants and desperadoes, beacons of hope, while explaining unspeakable atrocities they commit as their altruistic contributions for the love of the good and the benefit of all. Observe what this leadership and beneficiary criterion does to the life of the average man on the street. The first thing he learns is that morality is his enemy. He has nothing to gain from it as he can only lose in his pursuit of it. And were he to challenge the system by seeking to pursue such ideal or propagating it, self-inflicted loss, agony and the gray, debilitating pall of an incomprehensible citizenship is all that he gets.

    Were he to hope for that proverbial leadership that might occasionally sacrifice itself for his benefit as he endeavours, grudgingly, to attempt likewise in the interest of others, the shortfall will foster ceaseless agony and resentment instead of pleasure and gain.

    If we could endeavour to rise to fulfil the duties characteristic of natives of the Fourth Estate, we could among other things, assure our poor and helpless compatriots that even though citizenship they endure hardly provides them with benefits of nationality and an automatic form of survival, we – that is, natives of the Fourth Estate – could serve as the means to the attainment of our proverbial vista of progress and abundance.

    If we could rise to truly observe our role in Nigeria’s democratic process, we could teach the citizenry to discover among other things, the fraudulence implicit in such politics as our redefinition of President Goodluck Jonathan as a true democrat; an impractical sloth as a brilliant Statesman.

    It’s about time we taught the citizenry to identify the fundamental moral differences between leadership that seeks its effluorescence in rampant corruption, treasury looting, politics of death and institutionalised violence vis-à-vis leadership that has the interests of the poor hapless masses at heart.

    We could teach Nigeria to understand that the evil of such soulless leadership hardly subsists totally, in its bid to perpetuate itself in power eternally but also in what it considers as its interests for doing so; it lies not in its tenacious cling to the reigns of power but in its practice of the science and art of leadership at a sub-human level.

    In the flurry of currency-activated campaigns and shallow-talk, we could shun the envelopes that bind to pay good mind to the issues that matter. We could acknowledge our premises and inclinations for or against every aspirant as the products of our inherent values and evasions and thus understand that the electorate in turn chooses its values by both a conscious and probably more hyper-active subconscious process of thought and acceptance by default.

    This is oft predicated on some form of social osmosis or blind imitation thus the urgent need to educate the electorate to fashion the measures by which the patriot-leader we seek shall emerge. It is the simplest measures that get to count, like the institution of the primacy of rule of law and frank talk.

    Shall we now institute a worthy flagship with platform upon which we would challenge our self-appointed Messiahs, drill them, analyse them and beam as much of their adroitness as their incapacities through the country, across the continent, to the whole wide world.

    So doing, we could teach the nation to support our dreams of bliss and its realisation by no other means but dint of our heartfelt efforts. We could help natives of our failing state to understand that the politics that leadership we loathe and endure seek to perpetuate permits no view of us except as clueless bums and sacrificial lambs, hapless victims and parasites; that it permits no concept of beneficent co-existence with us.

    We could educate the electorate to understand that among other things, the reasons for our dumb acquiescence to cynicism and despair and rebel against them: cynicism, because we neither practice nor accept the incumbent leadership’s debilitating inhumanness and  despair, because we lack the courage and will to reject it.

    We could inspire Nigeria to rebel against such devastating evil by urging the citizenry not to be deceived by promises of unblemished altruism for if anything, the advocates of such altruism are often times and right now, still unable to base their ethics and projections on any dependable philosophy of human existence and politics. For instance, President Jonathan still offers “life-boat” solutions as lifelines from which to derive his philosophy of governance and moral conduct even as he pays lip-service to his much-publicised bid to actualise our most unrealistic fantasies.

    For all our vaunted ability to challenge the worst of tyrants and speak truth to power, we are yet to get the hang of it, although we love to beat our chests that we do. If we do really, then we would have enlightened the electorate to identify the candidate whose politics deserve our mandate and patronage. If we do, we would have alerted the electorate to those expectations and demands we are meant to enshrine and perpetuate in the flurry of political campaigns primed wholly to befuddle and entertain.

    It is time we affect such dauntless courage, professionalism and understanding of our socio-politics, that we may in good time teach the nation to explore the politics and soul of at least one candidate in order to trust him.

  • Nigeria never forgets (2)

    • (Tragicomedy of Ngozi-Okonjo Iweala and her voodoo economics)

    Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy was speciously misjudged as a supreme intellectual. She is a dismal headliner and fame junkie no doubt; but if indeed, she possesses at least, a smidgen of economic genius, as she purportedly does, her very presence in President Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet makes it crucial to admit that by accepting to serve with the incumbent presidency, she successfully neutered herself – a theory bolstered by her depressing economics. By accepting the job, Okonjo-Iweala had also attained immense power, which cuts both ways: if she became dissatisfied with her role or the administration’s policies, she could implode like a time-bomb within the presidency.

    Pity she chose not to implode; today, Okonjo-Iweala betrays no such awareness or grit. In fact, as the incumbent administration fumbles on, it has become clear that the former World Bank senior executive is unaware of the magnitude of her office and the true responsibilities before her. Perhaps Okonjo-Iweala is doing exactly what she is expected to do by her former employers, the World Bank – she is aggressively remodeling the Nigerian economy to suit the global money lender’s “third world” ridiculous economic therapy.

    Okonjo-Iweala would need more than her impressive résumé and touted savvy as a global economic strategist, which has so far revealed her need for more than a few lessons in Nigerian economics and sterling citizenship. Perhaps, if like Lula of Brazil, she had come into Nigerians lives from a paradigm of shared tragedies and values, she would probably sound off as more humane and in tune with the country’s most gruesome realities however far-removed she is from them.

    Bet not a few Nigerians thought she only had to report in office, wave her magic wand and thus stimulate a landmark turnaround of the Nigerian economy. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala possesses no magic wand. No matter her touted genius or intimidating stature she flaunts, Nigeria’s incumbent finance minister is simply another farceur in the country’s annals of administrative misadventures.

    The finance minister’s economics brazenly perpetuates an unjustifiable god-complex in the face of dehumanizing realities. She attempts to overcome this by throwing lots of smart mathematics at her irrationality, in desperation to make her fantasy seem more scientific and realistic. Her economics creates an illusion of precision where none exists; consequently, unquestionable belief in her touted panaceas has led to all manner of mischief and economic failures.

    Okonjo-Iweala has got the presidency and her fans locked onto an economic theory that inherently makes them tone deaf to arguments of the other side, even when those arguments are quite valid. Okonjo-Iweala and company in effect, have become soldiers for doubtful causes which are hardly predicated on careful observation and empirical findings.

    “We will focus on those sectors that affect the common man. That is why government is focusing on the development of power…Whatever government is going to do with the economy would be geared towards pro-jobs growth,” she stressed at the beginning of her misadventure, adding that the country’s total debt stock stands at $39.7 billion (about 20 percent of GDP), out of which $34 billion or about 17.5 percent of GDP is accounted for by domestic debts. This translates to about N5.2 trillion and $5.3 billion in external debts.

    Consequently, the government would be paying closer attention to the country’s debt profile, with a view to reducing borrowing from local sources. To this end, Okonjo-Iweala favours accumulation of more foreign debt thus her recent facilitation of a $550 million loan from her former employer, the World Bank among other gaffes.

    That Okonjo-Iweala was instrumental to the country’s freedom from the Paris Club debt in 2006 isn’t contestable; what is contestable however was Nigeria’s payment of a whopping $12.6 billion to realize an $18 billion debt write-off. Today, Okonjo-Iweala’s brilliant economics recommends that Nigeria could incur more foreign debt.

    Her ceaseless misadventures with State fund predictably, escalate this year with spurious allocations in the 2015 budget. Unscathed by austerity, the National Assembly was allocated N150bn yet again in 2015; up from N49.89bn in 2005. The National Judicial Council (NJC) gets N73bn while the Universal Basic Education Fund is getting N76.3bn, up from N70.47bn in 2014.

    According to BudgIT analysis, “A quick peep into the books of the Federal Ministry of Works seems to beg questions. Capital allocation is slashed by 89.4 percent from N106.3bn in 2014 to N11.23bn in 2015; the ministry’s overhead is up from N19.77bn to N20.7bn. Given that the Ministry of Works has fewer projects to oversee, why is its overhead costs rising? Why is a ministry, whose output is expected to be N11.23bn (as Capital Allocation) with N28.35bn (made up of Personnel costs of N7.64bn and Overheads worth N20.7bn) given that amount as overhead? Many will question why the Presidency is spending N174.19m to purchase canteen and kitchen equipment, yet the Akure-Ilesha Road gets a lesser N125m for its construction.

    “The Nigerian Army is taking a cut in its overhead cost from the 2014 level of N10.7bn to N7.85bn. Also, the Nigerian Police Formations and Command overhead cost is down from N8.49bn in 2014 to N5.895bn today. Interestingly enough, the Nigeria Police Formations and Command has a capital budget of N17bn (If the 2015 budget is anything to go by) while the Nigerian Army will run with a Capital budget of N5.22bn,” notes BudgIT.

    Why is the Presidency planning to spend N1.92bn on travels and N56.58m on the procurement of crested crockery (plates and spoons) in an austere clime? Why spend N61.03m on household and catering equipment and make available N387.11bn for Capital Expenditure, which is 9% of the entire expenditure? Can’t the N826.69m the presidency is spending to upgrade the villa’s facilities wait till next year?

    The budget is markedly more austere on the working poor and have-nots. More worrisomely, Nigeria is already running short of revenue targets as the oil price at $46 per barrel is already well below the benchmark price. The Excess Crude Account, in 2007, was $24 billion; today, it has been depleted to about $2 billion on her watch even as speculations abound particularly among the state governors that the account is empty. In 2007 without an economic coordinator, we had zero % foreign debts; at present we have over $9 billion debt and we continue to borrow. Thus, what exactly has she coordinated?

    Yet Okonjo-Iweala is quick to point out that Nigeria’s economy is growing at 7% rate; she excitedly claims that Nigeria is experiencing economic growth even as she is conveniently silent on the fact that her coordinating machinery perpetually generates severe poverty and inequality.

    Providence is the nemesis of pretenders, and hubris is the bane of all demagogues. Enabled by a bumbling president, Okonjo-Iweala Was been re-invented into a swash-buckling Czarina enhanced with messianic frills and compromises of all sorts. Alas! It was garbage in, garbage out; she couldn’t give what she never had. Her bearing clearly depicts the politician in Nikita Khrushchev’s parable of the politician. Going by the quality of her stewardship and former CBN Governor, Prof. Charles Soludo’s recent exposé and clinical retort to her juvenile rants, Okonjo-Iweala is no genius; she is undeniably bland. That has to be sad; it is.

  • Nigeria never forgets (1)

    • (Tragicomedy of Ngozi-Okonjo Iweala and her voodoo economics)

    It wouldn’t be fair to say that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has a patriot’s heart and the soul of the Nigerian ruling class. Whatever that translates to, this is not to trash Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s Finance Minister but to mourn the flightiness of genius within the footholds of power.

    Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was supposed to be that unsullied force of hope that would endow Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s presidency with the elusive humanity it still lacks. The alumnus of Harvard University and M.I.T (U.S.A) was supposed to appreciate in stature and candour until she becomes one of Nigeria’s near perfect choices for leadership.

    Her current charge as Nigeria’s finance minister is to represent every faction of the socio-economic divide but whatever decision she’s making even as you read, Okonjo-Iweala isn’t coasting along Nigeria’s stormy clime, she is cruising outside it.

    She is gutsy though. Quite brash too. And Okonjo-Iweala never sells herself short. While her peers treaded predictable and dishonorable paths into the presidential cabinet, Iweala meandered along two parallel tracks: one befitting a celebrity and the other, designed for a messiah. It is often hard to tell where one stops and the other begins yet nothing was as lucid as the bulky Minister of Finance’s self-assuredness.

    That towering bust of over-confidence however, becomes her Achilles heel. Okonjo-Iweala believes she is a realist even as she sounds off as the most unrealistic of fantasists. Inifinitely enabled by the President, Okonjo-Iweala brims with mystifying narcissism that’s at once dictatorial, dull-witted and condescending; consider for instance, her participation in the fuel subsidy removal. In the wake of the exercise, Okonjo-Iweala assured that Nigerians would derive clear and quantifiable benefits from the measure.

    Some of the benefits she promised Nigerians included construction, completion and rehabilitation of refineries, rails, federal highways, ICT and water projects. She promised that the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P), an offshoot of the subsidy removal scheme would provide for an efficient and more effective mass transit network, artisanship training scheme for youths, improved public works and social services, health care etc. She said government would provide 1,600 buses to cushion the effects of fuel subsidy removal and in the face of 70% unemployment and 70% poverty rate, Okonjo-Iweala brazenly claimed, recently, that the government created 1.6m jobs in 2013. Really?

    In the face of contradictory realities, Okonjo-Iweala stubbornly maintained that the country’s economy was in good shape. She substantiated her claims using the country’s recently rebased Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of about $432 billion compared to that of South Africa which stood at $370 billion at the end of 2013 thus touting Nigeria as the biggest economy in Africa.

    Now that the economy has collapsed with the fall in oil prices, can it be correctly inferred that Okonjo-Iweala is a liar? Nigeria’s economy has declined from bad to worse and the country’s currency suffers continual devaluation. In desperation, the finance minister announced recently, her measures to halt Nigeria’s economic decline; these include reduction in budget benchmark, special tax on luxury goods, a $2bn withdrawal from ECA, etc.

    Okonjo-Iweala promises to diversify the economy and stabilize the currency but how can she achieve these without a functional conscience, mechanized agriculture, cutting-edge technology and viable industrialization? Recently, the 2015 budget was presented to the National Assembly and in its wake, BudgIT, a financial intelligence services group and Premium Times’ contributor, maintains that the 2015 budget projections appear overly optimistic. “Technically, it costs $21.06 to produce a barrel of Crude Oil in 2014 under the JVC agreement (Joint Venture Corporation), up from $11.31 per barrel in 2009 – while the average operating cost of getting a barrel of Crude oil from the ground, which was previously at $6.38 in 2009, is now $9.94. Nigeria appears to be gradually out-pricing itself from the Crude oil market and urgently needs to review its petroleum laws. Nigeria has also not been able to optimise revenue from the oil and gas industry because its pricing model is outdated and without the PIB, bold reforms have not been adopted.”

    According to the October 2011 Central Bank Monetary Policy Committee Document , “A substantial part of oil production (about 40 per cent) is currently in deep offshore wells. Based on the terms agreed in the 1990s when oil price was under US$30, royalty from oil wells deeper than 1,000 metres is zero per cent and the nation is paid only 20 per cent of the profit by oil companies after deducting their expenses. As a result, the country has had limited benefits from high oil prices and increasing output, with most of the gains going to multinational oil companies under an inequitable fiscal arrangement.”

    Recent estimates, stresses BudgIT, showed that Nigeria produced an average of 1.902million barrels per day in December 2014 with over 35m cargoes still unsold. The Economist magazine puts the operating cost of extracting shale oil at $10-$20 per barrel for large fields. If the price war is anything to go by, the conventional oil producer will be looking at keeping oil below $50 per barrel and hoping the Shale oil lobby in the USA does not have its way with subsidies. As it is, the Crude oil price is already trading below the budget estimates through fiscal year 2015, pegged at $65 per barrel.

    Current realities establish that the fundamental deficiencies that plague our economy can’t be corrected through Okonjo-Iweala’s entrenchment of IMF prescriptions of structural adjustment, with one eye on fictitious growth projections that have no relevance to the lives of the citizenry. Okonjo-Iweala’s penchant for ignoring a people-centred development agenda in favour of shallow, simplistic prescriptions founded on cutting spending (spending to cut spending is what she does actually); removing support for social services – education, health, etc. while increasing cost of basics such as power, fuel and piling up more debts for the country is akin to motion without movement; a recipe for disaster.

    Yet, the illogicalities of fuel subsidy removal are incalculable and Okonjo-Iweala and company can still offer no convincing explanation – statistical or otherwise – to show that Nigerians had always enjoyed fuel subsidy while it lasted or its removal. They forced upon Nigerians such harsh irrationality even in the absence of more sensible and humane options like revivifying our refineries, checking monumental corruption within the NNPC, PPRA and the government in general.

    Funny how Okonjo-Iweala wouldn’t advise or ‘order’ Mr. President to slash the outrageous salaries and expenses of Nigeria’s serving state officers – the two of them inclusive. Funny how she awed him to submission and acceptance of the dangerous illusion that once subsidy is removed or the downstream sector is deregulated, the Nigerian economy would begin to thrive. In her extraordinary and World Bank-informed economics, the effects of the subsidy removal would be proactively cushioned by instantaneous palliatives or safety-nets spread over the long term.

    Today, Okonjo-Iweala’s genius and patriotism is in doubt; the eerie coincidence and vicious intensity of the government’s desperation to remove fuel subsidy which festered in cahoots with the World Bank’s fabled position on issues of subsidy resonates quite worrisomely even as you read. Yet Mr. President is unperturbed even as her presumed genius, crippled by untenable economics and hubristic yearnings is unleashed over 160 million Nigerians.

    • To be continued…

  • Through the looking-glass

    • (To the ‘press boys’ or ‘Gentlemen of the press?’)

    Now, the truth has fewer moments. History is as we tell it and every day, we fabricate new histories with sore rhetoric. Our fitful dalliances tender fresh traceries of chaos in cataclysmic garments we love to adorn as needle points, on the pasty bosoms of our motherland.

    Fangled stitches, in-bred strife and hate-entanglements resonate in our news pages, on to the streets, into our strife-torn yards. And so we re-enact towering tragedies on impulse, fabricating new beginnings from no ends and disastrous endings from bogus beginnings.

    All these because we crave a new car; because we lust for a trophy wife, ‘nouveau riche’ status and concubines. Our lust for money pushes us to do several hideous things. 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 a Nigerian journalist dies, everyday.

    The Nigerian journalist will sell his closest friend and colleague, and the entire Fourth Estate out at the blink of an eye.

    Now, everybody stares at us with contempt. Naked in the storm of their maddening glare, we have grown to know insult; now we love and understand it as inseparable part of our calling.

    Nothing distinguishes us from dispensable hooligans-for-hire save our obsequiousness to serve, albeit with remarkable élan, and our desperation to function as anything and everything, including a soundboard for clichés and sham realism –innate essence of our socio-politics. We have become the stamen that lets down the azalea, the comforter that brings grief, and the emissaries of needless hate.

    One hundred and fifty six years of print journalism and 56 years of broadcast journalism yet we are still that pitiful band with no lasting legacy save all that could be termed loathsome and fundamentally offensive.

    The grammar of our language has since been fathomed by those whom we seek to chaperon. The tenor of our thinking, owing to our customary habit of allowing each sentence trail off in sophistry and confusion, tears at our reasoning and cochlea meaning nothing, substantiating naught and denoting only calumny, deceit, greed and all that cowardice and double-speak ever gives.

    Our lamentations are of bad leadership but even now that we are in position to unlearn every perfidy that we have learnt and denounce the hypocrisies that drives us to beatify shams and delusions as the soundest of truths while we canonise reality as the genesis of farce, we dither.

    We do not inform. We do not educate. Not enough anyway, for every story and analysis we have run till date beclouds every parameter that we have set, to identify and challenge true leadership when it wavers in our face.

    We are still the watchdogs desperately playing lapdogs and regretfully, junkyard dogs of the ruling class. Our “fearless” barks still resound like the chatter of enfant terrible rodents crisscrossing our dilapidated rooftops.

    We do not speak to power although we love to beat our chests that we do. If we do really, then we would have enlightened the electorate to the candidate whose politics deserve our mandate and patronage; we would have alerted the electorate to those expectations and demands we are meant to enshrine and perpetuate in the face of political campaigns primed only to befuddle and entertain.

    If we are truly as visionary as we claim to be, we wouldn’t find much substance in such issues as the religious inclinations of Muhammadu Buhari nor would we find much to interest us in incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan; we would not find much to project as the likely benefits of keeping President Jonathan in power come February 14.

    We would rather be bent on reflecting the citizenry’s insistence that their mandate counts in the election of the proverbial candidate whose leadership will titillate measure, while his deeds become the thrust of timeless odes and narratives.

    If we truly possess dauntless intelligence, professionalism and understanding of our socio-politics, we would teach the nation to explore the politics and soul of at least one candidate in order to trust him.

    We would have set the agenda for every manner of campaign that every manner of “messiah” would incorporate and propagate. We would write through decadence and filth to silence the neurotic tick-tock of midnight before it smothers totally, the sunny whispers of dawn.

    Were we as patriotic and professional as we claim to be, we would endeavour to become something more than disposable pawns in the designs of political parties and candidates with the most hideous plans; we would write not what we have been paid to write but what we honestly ought to write.

    If we are truly as honourable as we would like to be addressed, we would strip every candidate and their apologists of the smokescreen that deceives, like the leverage of incumbency, wealth, power and deceitful imagery we continually launder and foster; we would present each candidate in the light of his vanities, idiosyncrasies, politics and citizenship of humanity and every time, we get to interview him – no matter how desperate he is to be portrayed as the best president or governor Nigeria would ever have. We would, among other things, ask the questions that reveal and infuriate, not just because it is trendy and impressive to do so but because it is those questions they labour to avoid that matter.

    If we are truly the statesmen we pride ourselves to be, we shall desist from profiling the candidates that emerge in the light of vanities we seek to satisfy, like our desire to own a house, acquire a posh car, join an elite club, foot education bills and increase our bank accounts; all these things we shall hopefully acquire under the leadership that improves and furthers, if we could take the pains to install it.

    Today, we see the death of chivalry and reason because we are desperate enough to demean the powers of our Fourth Estate. We have chosen to play errand boys to even the least honourable political public office holder, party chieftain and thug.

    That is why for all the bluster we muster, pimping and syndicating highfaluting articles, “Special Investigations” and “Truths of the matter” that are as relative as our inclinations to submit and play dumb, we remain among other things, emissaries of distrust and rancour and pitiful pawns in the designs of every contestant and godfather with a deep-pocket.

    We do not get it, still; although we think we do just because we manage to pretend to do so. We are still as impotent as our words. Beneath our bloated affectations of high character, our lives remain sketchier than we wish they are but our people do not know so. Thus some of them read us and listen, still.

    But who is it that actually listens? Who are those whose lives we impact by our pretentious lines and mercantile intellectualisation? The trodden perhaps or could it be our benefactors in power? If only we could understand our strength and substance, we would know that there is no true activist except us; we would know that there is no powerful kingmaker than we could ever become. Perhaps we do, we are just too selfish for

     

  • Some truth you might love to hate

    Some say Muhammadu Buhari is a sentiment; who isn’t? Perhaps Goodluck Jonathan, they would say. Let’s not be trivial and given to hogwash, President Goodluck Jonathan is an unjustifiable sentiment gone wrong.

    Shall we write-off Buhari, just because…stuck in the intricate webs of our internalised and yet collectivised perversions, we are desperate to make a Hobson’s choice? Shall we continue to compromise and seek the consolation of wonderfully wrought intellectualisations just because it is socio-politically correct to do so?

    If not Buhari, who? Goodluck Jonathan? Show me the candidate without a splodge to his name. Of all the charlatans we launder, show us the self-acclaimed Messiah without some murder, pillage or unsubstantiated and yet uncontested allegation of fraud or corruption to his name, save Buhari.

    And so may I in response to those who consider President Jonathan as Nigeria’s only hope, aver in Rand-speak that there can be no compromise between a property owner and an intruder; offering the intruder a single teaspoon of one’s silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender – the recognition of his right to one’s property.

    Simply put, there can be no compromise, however exquisitely couched, between us and the looters we tolerate; offering them a jolly ride to our corridors of power in the spirit of socio-political expediency would not be a compromise but a total and cowardly surrender – the recognition of their right of ownership and monopoly over what is essentially ours.

    Whether we like it or not, there can be no concession or wanton sophistry acceptable on basic principles and fundamental issues. There can be no compromise between truth and falsehood, reason and irrationality. Imagine a compromise between food and poison, isn’t it death that would win?

    Nothing corrupts, nothing disintegrates a culture or a man’s character as the principle of moral agnosticism; that is, the idea that one must be morally tolerant of anything and everything and that ingenuity consists in never distinguishing good from evil and taking sides. It is obvious who profits and loses by such a precept, isn’t it?

    Even as so many of us indulge in the propagation of political claptrap in the interests of Goodluck Jonathan, it wouldn’t hurt to heed the subtle warnings of our individualised and wholly subjective realities. It couldn’t hurt to heed the caveat of objective reality.

    Given that we put ourselves on trial every time we think a thought and speak it, it is only fair that we seek to institute, however difficult it seems, a measure of checkmating every propaganda and irrationality we so desperately project. It is only in our peculiar culture of amoral cynicism, subjectivism and hooliganism that we arrogate to ourselves the freedom to utter any sort of irrational judgement and expect to suffer no consequences like pitiful presidential court jesters, Femi Fani-Kayode, Doyin Okupe and company persistently do to our chagrin.

    In as much as we seek to impeach every other candidate but our preferred candidate on the basis of their antecedents in governance and outside it; in as much as we have chosen to play the biased judge and jury with such impunity that teaches the just to recant, so should we expect to be judged and impeached by every judgement we pronounce.

    You see, the things we condemn or extol actually exists in the objective reality that is open to the independent appraisal of others. The values we project become the essence of our socio-politics and being. Every utterance we make, as our mildest insinuations, presents the clarity or absurdity of our individual perceptions as well as the rationality and otherwise of every politic we choose to celebrate or repudiate.

    If we did not indulge in such abject perversions and pitiable evasions as the argument that some contemptible liar “means well” – that a mooching bum “can’t help it” – that an unrepentant murderer “needs understanding” or that a desperate, power-thirsty politician is driven by concern “for the public good,” the history of our past few decades would have been different. And even today would offer ceaseless practicalities to compose the best odes by.

    In the light of ceaseless hardships and evils foisted upon us by President Goodluck Jonathan and company,every man who struggles not to acknowledge that his administration is pernicious to Nigeria’s wellbeing will find it very much dangerous to identify goodness in whatever form. To such character, a person of virtue presents a threat capable of exposing and toppling all his perversions and evasions.

    Can we now identify and root for the candidate capable of resolving the conflicting characteristics of our tribal mentality? Can we identify the candidate who can 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?

    Can we identify the candidate who can evaluate and project our given concretes by an abstract principle while exacting the most probable if not practicable outcomes in the throes of ruthlessly objective and rational processes of thought vis-à-vis his enfant terrible gut-feelings or hunches?

    Do we know the candidate capable of instituting such blueprint that would guarantee the provision and sustenance of good roads and electricity, standard and affordable health care, security, stable economy and quality education among others?

    I guess we know the candidate undeserving of our mandate right now; that candidate is Goodluck Jonathan. Let Fani-Kayode and his fellow harpies know that the cult of sophistry they project would never succeed by their sneaky and open rebellion against reason. Let them know that their negation of reason would never amount to some sort of superior reasoning nor would their most brutal rebellion stifle morality or metamorphose into a superior kind of virtue.

    The cult of sophistry they perpetuate approximates nothing but the ugliness of muted confessions and a plea for blanket forgiveness for Goodluck Jonathan – despite Boko Haram, the missing Chibok girls, declining economies, devalued naira, dying industries, unemployment, and thousands of innocent deaths by Boko Haram’s bomb blasts to mention a few.

    The depth or shallowness of each candidate and his political form is further accentuated in the following joke currently trending in Nigeria’s social media:

    1. APC: We will ensure power stability.

    1. PDP: Where is Mrs Buhari?

    2. APC: We are going to fight corruption

    2. PDP: APC tried to hack INEC computers

    3. APC: We are going to fight terrorism

    3. PDP: Some APC elder statesmen are garage touts

    4. APC: We will invest in agriculture

    4. PDP: S/South will collapse the economy if Jonathan loses

    5. APC: We are going to upgrade standard of education

    5. PDP: I will expose failures of our ex heads of state

    6. APC: We will curb degradation of environmental pollution

    6. PDP: Buhari doesn’t know his phone number.

    7. APC: Nigeria’s wealth must be enjoyed by all of us

    7. PDP: Buhari put Umaru Dikko inside a crate

    8. APC: We will encourage rural development

    8. PDP: Buhari cannot use a computer.

    Camp Jonathan no doubt epitomises philosophical default, the intellectual bankruptcy that teaches promising hearts to exist in a vacuum of sort, like a paradise of weaklings and the perverted in thought. Pity this truth will be ignored by some, come February 14.