Category: Olatunji Ololade

The sun is still rising and dying over the blindsides of our portal of ruined stones – our portal, our ruins. Over the rubbles we make, visages of the world we dream diminish and fade but we continue to shout above the corpses we make.

We bellow just to hear our voices return from the hills. We scream just to watch our fears cascade fresh ravines in order to meet us where everything turns to nothing. What is it that we seek? To shriek our fears hoarse or wish that they stay buried away, far beneath the doldrums of our best kept tragedies? Perhaps we simply need the landscape to repeat us and replenish every rind of logic that absolves our cowardly lot of blame.

But who are we to blame? Who do we hold responsible as our fortune hangs askew, as it did back in the days when we learnt to spit words and eat them? Sadly now, we continue to do the same things in the same ways everyday; although doing the same things the same way hardly ever worked, and will still never work. Nonetheless, we attack the ocean surge with catapults; shall pebble shots repel the storm that ravages and destroys?

Shall we watch helplessly as predators we ennoble with power prey upon us, like the sea brute flaunting its death roll on the tadpole? Cowardice changes everything. It unmade us. It unmakes us, still.

The Nigerian crisis is a human crisis. Therefore, even when we manage to moot and evolve the most practicable solutions, governmental policies and developmental efforts, we fail woefully. The foundation for progress is basically non-existent in the country and that is because the human elements that are meant to foster and perpetuate such everlasting monument are inherently corrupt.

Consequently, we have a ruling class that is basically degenerate and predatory in nature and citizenry that excitedly accepts and religiously fulfill their roles as unforgivably docile and self-flagellating lower brutes.

The dangerously clear imprudence of the Nigerian working class asserts itself in the upward mobility of certain crucial members of the class across our class divide. Increasing wealth, higher status and social affiliations alienates this band of self-styled and circumstantial leaders from those same self-confessed values and politics that stood them out as vanguards of rights of the under-privileged. Likewise, it re-establishes them as simply another muscle group primed to intimidate, stifle and manipulate their less privileged peers overcrowding the lower rung of the social ladder.

Such pitiful waste of potential leaders and emancipators of the breadlines can hardly be overlooked in the working class’ desperate quest to achieve their fabled share of the Nigerian dream – or national cake if you like.

How many Nigerians manage to succeed in real life? To this end, how many definitions of “success” aren’t informed by and deducible by the yardstick of an obscene lust for wealth and the pursuit of money at all cost?

For all our acclaimed vision and depth of perception, the 21st century Nigerian presents a shame and impediment to the Nigerian enterprise. Every Nigerian is degenerate and fraudulent – which explains why there is an oft ridiculous and affordable price tag attached to the average Nigerian, irrespective of class, religion, socio-politics and gender.

In the face of too many social maladies, nothing works. No solution has worked because we persistently apply our practicable and often far-fetched solutions to abstract systems and deteriorating structures even as we consciously avoid addressing the needs of the most eligible recipients of the curative efforts: you and me.

Let us begin to excite and further a winning fight for actual solutions and freedom. Let us not be daunted by the prevalence of socio-political unrest and ineptitude in governance. And let our passion not be overcome by the death of criticism and dearth of broadly cultured men.

It is about time we began to concentrate on our need for true ideals and broad culture as the preservation of our spirit from petty passions and sordid objectives. Let us begin to build that proverbial bulwark of citizenship whose ideal of patriotism is held untainted by wantonness, ill-bliss and the temptations of power.

Let us begin from the grassroots. Let us begin to de-sensitise ourselves of every prejudice and conceit. Let us being to court and patronise the usual objects of our apathy and disdain – like the “inconsequential” park urchin, “hooligan” and directionless muscles for hire on our breadlines, within our campuses of learning and law enforcement agencies.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” it is said; yes, these are desperate times, but it is never a desperate measure to reach out to the park urchin, neighbourhood hooligan and muscles for hire in our campuses and boondocks. This is because there are inestimable benefits accruable from uniting with these oft despised social elements in electoral will and numbers.

It is hardly some desperate measure to pay heed to the riotous yearnings of such human reserve and elements within our battered State; if we seize the initiative now and unite with them in politics and dogma, our alliance will inure us time and over again, against interminable temptations of leadership we loathe and grieve over.

Our hearts are weary; better tomorrow has passed, today is stricken and yesterday has withered with her ridged fundaments at last. Now that fractured hope, on which we sail, has floated down shifting waters to the darkest deep, shall we strap torn will to broken resolve and begin to wade before we sink?

It’s about time we determined what is real. It is only a matter of language that traps us. Let us begin to seek our niche where achievement overlaps with words. Let us begin to brave the horror of truth unbridled by fickle gospels and platitudes.

Let us create a movement for the youth, by the youth, in the interest of our fatherland. It’s time we throw our might behind the candidate under whose guidance we could learn to walk through this wilderness to the bliss and quiet of our heartfelt dreams.

Everyday still brings with it, a different pain, and a different folly. Still, we brave through the dark to hear the usual platitudes that promise prosperity in the vacuum of the restless dream flailing behind the curtain beneath which dawn seeps, and on cancerous asphalts where our brightest hopes fall by our swords, at the instance of leadership we ought to have done with.

Let us begin to set the stones for the future in which our refineries would overflow, with oil.

We are done aspiring; let us now perspire for the epoch in which electricity would work and associated sectors. Let our glands secrete in the heat of aspirations conceived for the love of the common good. It’s time we become the generation that turned inherited waste to grace.

It’s time we become the vaulted voice that enlivens redundant joy, and hope. Distance is nothing; there is no mileage to the future of our dreams.

We have soared in a lot of things, we have failed in a great deal more; but let’s give no one the right to say we didn’t have guts.

There is nothing more pathetic than a critical mob; gangs of columnists, journalists, hatchet writers and career critics may stir up strife but their efforts eventually pass like the hum of mosquitoes seeking to make a noise like thunder. Like the rest of the Nigerian mob, the social media critic, newspaper columnist and journalist symbolize a tiresome mercenariness of complacency, avarice and inertia. However, unlike the rest of the Nigerian mob, this critical mob epitomizes the tragic manifestations of the pious frauds of citizenship, like microbes hastening the decomposition of corpses.

Nigerians love being conned and the Nigerian ruling class knows that; so does the Nigerian critic. The latter knows that, if you can deceive the citizenry in grand and entertaining styles, you will get away with it more often than you could count thus the continual deception, impoverishment and murder of the Nigerian masses.

Like the masses or totality of the Nigerian mob, the critic suffers exposure to pain and humiliation for too long in the hands of the ruling class thus ending up in a pitiful state evocative of a condition of enthrallment in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer. Careful observation would however, suggest that foremost crusaders of the critical mob variously suffer paralysis of the intellect as does every hypnotized subject; consequently, the latter becomes enslaved to an object, a need, money, a perversion or an idea by which the hypnotizer (oftentimes the ruling class) directs and belittles him at will.

It’s a shame that I belong to the journalistic segment of this pathetic societal divide; as a journalist and newspaper columnist cum social critic, I am not in any way distinguishable from the rot emblematic of my colleagues in the Fourth Estate of the realm. However much I try to absolve myself of blame; the society is wired to see us all journalists as a bunch of unrepentant liars, pawns to tyrants and die-hard fortune hunters.

We essentially epitomize a style of living which cultivates sincerity and is at the same time a fraud. We arrogate to ourselves rights to nobility and free speech by twisting truth into relative truths and true lies in an existence we have learnt to rationalize as gracious and irrevocably necessary. This has to be odious; it is.

Despite the cowardice and duplicity of Nigeria’s critical mob, it is amusing to see other constituents of this mob divide tirelessly chastise and identify the Nigerian journalist as a bane to progress and monumental disgrace to the society. To this, many a journalist and newspaper columnist have responded that the society essentially wishes that the journalist do not effectively fulfill his responsibilities to it. Likewise, I have corroborated such argument claiming that big business and politicians’ ownership of mainstream media gives them intimidating capacities to influence and set the agenda for the media and society in general.

This is an intimidating reality no doubt; it is obscenely silly and self-serving of the Nigerian society to continually muscle in the media’s job and prevent it from discharging its duties effectively and yet turn around to identify the Nigerian press as fraudulent and disgraceful.

However, this does not in any way ennoble the shamefulness and irresponsibility of the Nigerian press. Journalists, unlike the social media critic, delusional citizen or online journalist, press secretary or special media adviser to the ruling class, are expected to fulfill more sensitive and crucial roles to the society.

The Nigerian journalist should be the hero that perpetually cramps himself into demanding roles of watchdog. It is shameful however, that the contemporary journalist takes unpardonably dense and gruesome human elements for gods and worships them as such; by enslaving himself to such characters, the journalist is duly taken for some idle, nondescript human integer, extant in the world to entertain tyranny and have a few naira and demeaning errands thrown at him that he might get to enjoy a taste of the good life or a semblance of it.

Be it as Special Media Adviser to the President, Chief Press Secretary to the Governor, Personal Assistant to the MD, Corporate Affairs Manager or any other title created for an enslaved press intellectual within public or private sector, the journalist shirks his role as societal watchdog; he becomes lapdog, dung-dog or junkyard dog of the ruling class. In the strict slave system in which he works, there can scarcely be such a thing as crime; whatever his principal does is fair and justifiable – his ultimate aim is to keep his employer happy and thus guarantee the security of his meal ticket. It is no surprise therefore that the journalist and newspaper columnist who ought to serve as a check on the bestiality and excesses of the ruling class eventually become the defender and justifier of such vile.

Those who are not yet lured into the loop of schemes and largesse of the ruling class painstakingly become gadflies to the ruling class. They taunt and condemn every measure, utterance and action of the country’s leadership in desperate bid to bully whatever government excites their greed and duplicity till they include them as recipients of crumbs of the proverbial “national cake.” Eventually they are deployed by all manner of characters to perpetuate a My truth is truer than yours’ mentality.

As crucial appendage of Nigeria’s critical mob, the press has mutated into a contemptible factor, trollopy in conduct and pitifully cast in the stormy waters of Nigeria’s sociopolitics. Far flung in the murky waters, many have drowned, a paltry few struggle to swim against the tides while many more hang suspended, to be forced up or down by the chance currents of a sleazy, vicious world. How can such human elements fulfill the roles of watchdog and moral compass of the society?

For too long, the Nigerian journalist has tirelessly fulfilled the role of criminal constituent amid the nation’s critical mob divide. So doing, he becomes blamable for every ill and any ill symptomatic of the country’s steady descent the slope of amorality and currency-activated self-destruct.

What is however, true of the journalist is peculiarly true of other human elements of the Nigerian society; contemporary happenstances attest to the fact that the current generation of Nigerians, the youth in particular, is afflicted by an intense tumult of self-interest, gluttony and intricate trashing of spirit that destroys whatever nerve could be mustered in pursuit of truth, personal and societal progress.

Poverty and job insecurity are ascribed as our reasons for betrayal; true, the society betrays the journalist by the hour but it’s about time we stopped repaying perfidy with perfidy. It’s about time we evolved dependable and practicable means of creating and instituting a leadership, society and media practice we could trust.

We could begin by ditching our familiar whining and blame-mongering to evolve a culture of truthfulness and conscientious citizenship. It is no longer permissible to contend that the journalist is only a reflection of the society he serves. By advancing such argument, we box ourselves into straits of sophistry and frantic rationalizations. This is unacceptable of purported men of letters and conscience of the society.

Truth is what we should speak. Truth is what we should be guided by. But what manner of truth should be the watchword of the Nigerian journalist and critic?

This is scorched earth; a temenos where neither hope nor humaneness will grow again, if we do not change. In moments of introspection, when my thoughts drift to the imminence of a Nigerian dystopia, where anarchy manifests to replace historic laws and mores that keeps the beasts in us tame, I cringe in fathomless fear.

I am frightened of what villainy we are capable of and what grief may come in its wake. I am afraid of what blight we could become to the world and what impediment we may constitute to our survival as a race in the universal order of civilizations and natural selection.

My fright accentuates in the heat of our acceptable realities; these realities constitute what is being vigorously marketed as the new Nigerian reality. In the perpetuation of this new social consciousness, the youth becomes a powerful force in its propagation – oftentimes serving willingly, without demur, in the actualization of morbid fantasies of thieves, looters and blinkered murderers constituting corporate Nigeria, national and international ruling class.

The Nigerian dilemma is substantially ideological and structural. Our predatory ruling class knows this hence it desperately and decisively rips asunder any political permutation and cultural incarnation that has the potential to ignite a citizenry-centred revolt.

The ruling class is aware that the latent will is there, as always. It sees the tragic indices clutter the ranks and realities of the oppressed working class and unemployed youth of the backwaters. It knows that, eventually, the realities will aggravate and ignite like tinder of strife and citizenry revolt. The ruling class is thus essentially committed to thwart any such rebellion by us, the oppressed.

To this end, the Nigerian state meticulously denies the citizenry access to both tangible and intangible infrastructure needed to actualize our dreams of progress and prosperous nationhood.

In its frantic lunge for self-preservation, the ruling class seeks the perpetuation of the status quo despite its attendant ills of political and socio-economic insecurity. Rather than initiate dependable measures to resolve our inestimable afflictions, the Nigerian leadership fosters a dystopian culture of plunder, hatred and bloodletting.

Within this worrisome state of affairs, it’s amazing to see politicians and corporations deploy the media, entertainment industry and social institutions as if we can afford to perpetuate our sovereignty and civilization on a culture of prejudice, imperceptible growth, decadent leadership, excessive consumption and a fast-depleting crude oil endowment.

To justify such delusional frame of mind, they deploy the media particularly, to nourish our collective mania for hope at the expense of truth. Thus evolves the new Nigerian reality – insidiously parasitic, self-delusional and fuelled by communal psychosis. The ruling class – constituted by the politicians and corporate titans – meanwhile, is aware of the imminent dystopia and is manically preparing for it hence their wanton acquisitions of properties in exclusive districts abroad and the relocation of their families and assets therein.

While they prepare for the imminent political and socio-economic apocalypse, the Nigerian citizenry chooses to engage in the pursuit of the good life. Of the citizenry, the most crucial enthusiasts of this fabled dream severally called the ‘good life’ or ‘Nigerian dream’ is the youth. As youths, even though we suffer complete evisceration of our most basic civil liberties and crass insensitivity to our plight by our leadership, we seek escape in entertainment and false reality. Thus is the tragedy of the new Nigerian reality, or put more precisely, the reality of the masses or mob reality.

Our reality becomes a pornographic parable of reckless lust, sinister politics, fraudulent economics, consequence-free violence and sex. In our new cultural order, pagan idolatry triumphs; it accentuates our conceit and pretensions to righteousness or morality.

In this contemporary reality of ours, we perpetuate a ritual culture of ethnic and religious bigotry, wanton sexuality and lust for unearned greatness. Consider for instance, our inclinations to accept and institutionalize decadent cultures of easy money, life-on-a-sweepstake, homosexuality, same-sex marriage and bestiality as approved by decadent and predatory nations of the so-called ‘first world’; this moral torpedo of ours, defies the universe’s due process even as it establishes our cowardliness in the face of life’s vicissitudes and grotesque imperialistic designs from abroad.

Our contemporary pagan cult of self-worship, political correctness and social idolatry epitomizes inordinate mutations characteristic of ritual victims ripped apart by the ‘modern’ dagger of evolution and 21st century neo-colonialist agenda.

As in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, the Nigerian youth, caught in a swirl of conflicting cultures of socialization, evolves, tormented by the internal presence of another being illegitimately enwombed like a daemonic fetus amid clutters of puppy fat symbolizing decadent socialization and stagnant adolescence. Thus we have men and women in their prime eternally stuck at the impressionable age of 13, vying to occupy drivers’ seats in our bumpy ride to the good life and future of our dreams.

The poet Leon Staff advocates the healing balm of poetry from the Warsaw ghetto but can poetry be the incense that fires the courage of the Nigerian youth? Can introspective verse excite latent will that we have learnt to smother in pursuit of the good life?

What is the good life? Gold plated doors and sofas? Plastered walls and Venetian glass? Platinum pumps and home theatre? Spring locks, expensive cars and wine cellars? An intimidating bank account, trophy wives and concubines? Appearance on Forbes’ shortlist of the world’s filthty rich? Frequent trips for leisure and acquisition of expensive properties at home and abroad?

It is only those blessed with a gift of the mind’s eye as well as an infinite capacity to harness the limitless possibilities of the imagination that can go to bat in the interest of posterity and the collective. Only these few may find the courage to peer into Nietzsche’s molten pit of human maladies. There is no gainsaying however, that the Nigerian elite arrogate to itself this crusader role. So far, this seemingly intuitive band have established their mental and psychological capacities to resist; they however, fail woefully in establishing their physical capacities for defiance or mount what is romantically extolled as revolt.

It is about time we revolted. I hereby advocate no bloody rebellion or premeditated targeted killing in the name of thinning out the predatory ruling herd in the interest of our oft preyed-upon mass. This is because for such bloody pogrom to manifest, it must be actualized by a social divide driven by anarchical precepts and bestiality of the mob.

Let the Nigerian youth unite around noble goals, on a common platform, to beat back the claws of the incumbent ruling class. Let us now institute that uprising we tirelessly and annoyingly advocate on soapboxes we mount in our pubs, intellectual gatherings and courtyards.

Let the Nigerian youth begin to seek the actualization of change we can believe in and sustain over the long haul. To this end, we have had such inspiring initiatives like Gbolahan Macjob and company’s Nigerian Youth Congress (NYC); so do we have Pan Atlantic University, (PAU)’s School of Media and Communication’s PT5 Media Class’ IPDC – Nigerians for Change initiative. But despite their promise, they haven’t the life and possibilities they ought to exemplify as platforms for progressive change. And the reasons are hardly farfetched.                                            • To be continued…

There is no perfect nation to be born yet Nigeria is the worst nation to be born, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) report. 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.

Predictably, the report has inspired and incited all manners of conspiracy theories and affirmation of doom; foremost newspapers and columnists have written editorials affirming the report and the poor fate of the Nigerian child; child advocacy groups have regrouped to re-strategize in order to fleece international children foundations off grants that would never get to its touted recipient, the Nigerian child.

Within the din of socio-politically correct and self-righteous vituperation, a crucial voice dies slowly, painfully but certainly; it is the voice that goes to bat for the Nigerian child. Foremost newspapers may have affirmed the EIU’s claims but very few newspapers would publish as their cover stories, the plight of teenage sex workers or child urchins across the country, unless there is a mass death involving the minors. Such media fare is never strong enough to upstage news of political party intrigues and permutations. And if you examine closely the child rights campaigns, you will find that they have always been meal tickets to duplicitous and avaricious advocacy gurus and groups.

Nobody actually speaks for the newborn. Nobody speaks for the Nigerian child. And nobody truly speaks to the only human force capable of exciting the future in which the Nigerian newborn may arrive assured of a prosperous fate and a better life; the Nigerian youth.

There is a tragedy inherent in our customary lamentation every time our conscience is roused with a damning report and as it has become customary of us, more racist politicians and activists have suggested that we split and go our separate ways touting it as the only solution to our league of extraordinary problems.

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

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

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

Truly, it is a sad thing for us as a nation to be afflicted by such youth whose eyes cannot see and intellect cannot detect the hideous manifestations of the vulpine intellect characteristic of the Nigerian separatists. Thus the Nigerian youth wastes his passion recycling hackneyed criticisms and fomenting trouble in the name of all manners of political godfathers, minority group leaders, human rights activists, tribal rights activists, youth leaders to mention a few.

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

Eventually, he grows into the prototypical average, disgruntled man on the street, who suddenly realizes in his twilight that he had squandered God’s greatest gifts to him, his intellect and talent – then the smokescreen of youth and hastily prized platitudes begin to peter out and he realizes that his miraculous talisman is a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass in the shops as a contemptible kobo.

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

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

In contemporary Nigeria, it is incense for suspicious revolutionaries claiming to fight for the interests of Nigeria’s ethnic divides. In this there is nothing new; what is new and unpardonably offensive is the pretension of such characters to heartfelt sorrow, shared grief and relation in identity and ideal to the present sufferings of the Nigerian youth and breadlines.

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

The process of re-sensitizing the youth away from the establishment of chaos and genocide advocated by the secessionists will be greatly accelerated by the abolition of the current political order; however, this can only be achieved by the nation’s youth – who are unfortunately taken by the platitudes and poetics of Nigeria’s band of self-serving ruling class and racist emancipators.

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

Many activists, youth leaders and self-acclaimed political heroes today have their wives and children safely tucked away in secure schools and sociopolitical climes overseas even as they goad impoverished and clueless youth at home to their doom.

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

The current political separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influences of education and culture, if the youth could endeavour to be truly civilized. But such transformation calls for remarkable wisdom and tolerance.

• To be continued…

Bloodthirsty Shekau will not be the final nemesis of the Nigerian State nor would his terror-mongering Boko Haram terrorist sect and its faceless masterminds. And our nemesis hardly lies in President Goodluck Jonathan and company. The portentous ruin we dread do not entirely subsist in the shenanigans of Mr. president and senior citizens with whom he contrived the inglorious national Confab; men and women hastily contracted at a sullied N12million each, to hazard worthless remedies to our timeless tragedies.

Our ultimate nemesis is the Nigerian youth. Youth we have now manifest as the kernel of that inveterate ruin and eternal damnation cunningly marketed to us and surreptitiously programmed in us by global ‘super powers’ and aid merchants we have learnt to trust, often to our detriment as a nation and potentials as leader of the African race.

In this premeditated lunge for Nigeria’s jugular, the nation’s youth that ought to serve as the bridge and bastion to our prosperous future, sadly, become the nub of discord and deathly rally currently ripping the tide and march to progress of our fatherland. But why do promising youth evolve like brutes and loathsome trolls of a dark order? How did our once incandescent dawn erupt in moonshine? Why is the Nigerian youth, like the proverbial doornail, half-dead from the top?

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

A more damning argument is however, advanced by neocolonial niggers pretending to be Nigerian. This pitiful band of colossal disgrace, having acquired PhDs among other choice honours in esoteric and professional fields; having secured plum jobs in global conglomerates or multinationals, turn around to glower at their roots and its recurrent ills with contempt even as they identify Nigeria’s problem as a recurrent affliction of the African race. In the wake of their sometimes, plausible and often farfetched analyses cum diagnosis of the Nigerian malady, they conveniently excuse themselves from the nexus of blame and severally propound the sad realization that Nigerians are innately incapable of self-determination and self-governance. Clinically, they recommend the American example, the British palliative, Chinese magic wand and Malaysian ingenuity to mention a few, as the ultimate measures to resolve the nation’s ills. How?

These arguments have overtime, attained a language of their own and thus evolved as a dialect of dissension and exaggerated self-abnegation. The nation’s academic elite, political and economic ruling classes frequently marshal its precepts as justifiable putdown of the lower working class and breadlines’ persistent claims to victimhood and sense of entitlement which they at once identify as whiny and symptomatic of a clueless and irresponsible citizenry. Between the latter and former segments of the citizenry however, Nigeria suffers a preponderance of intellectual nitwits and promising youth turned foetal adults to the detriment of the Nigerian state.

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

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

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

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

Consequently, our society is flung rudderless on a seething sea of sleaze and we flounder vulnerably, horror-stricken waiting with baited breath for that defining moment when we will drown in the storms of our self-wrought perversions. Now that our world as we made it, have begun to collapse, we withdraw from the possibility of rebirth, and choose to exploit ‘infinite possibilities’ in our fragility and predicted collapse.

In this turbulent clime, the ruling class predictably retreats into their illicitly acquired mansions and safe-houses in Europe, Nigeria’s Banana Island and other palatial havens in Abuja and Lagos. There, they indulge in unchecked hedonism, vulgar display of ill-acquired wealth and extravagant consumption. Outside the walls of their palatial mansions, the suffering masses are repressed with greater ferocity. Resources of the collective are depleted and misappropriated for the privileged few until they are virtually exhausted. And then the hollowed-out edifice collapses.

At the backdrop of this festering national catastrophe, presumably ‘well-meaning’ neighbours cum ‘global super powers’ like the United States of America (USA) in premeditated fits of exultation predicted the end of the Nigerian enterprise, touting a dismal and inescapable end to the country’s recurring tragedies in 2015. Several disasters since the USA’s worrisome and very suspicious prediction, the country maniacally nurtures and perpetuates forms of madness and grotesqueness that basically substantiates the USA’s ‘heartfelt’ cry and doomsday prophecy.

The USA, just like every other nation possesses inalienable rights to visions of doom and delusions of grandeur – it would have been better though if the country chose to look inwards and focus its gift of clairvoyance in resolving its burgeoning sociopolitical and human crises spanning immigration/border problems, terrorism, economic depression, endemic poverty, escalating gun violence – a record 280 million of its about 300 million population are gun wielders – to mention a few.

The opinions of the US or any other so-called ‘super power’ is at the end, inconsequential to the survival of  Nigeria; the best they could do is progressively advise us or assist with true aid, twin-good which they are fundamentally and inherently programmed to avoid, but the pitiful bands of Nigerian niggers do not know that. Sadder that these pathetic gangs of intellectual and sentimental fops latch on to every touted ‘insightful analysis’ and ‘security report’ from abroad on the Nigerian state and feverishly glamourise and actualise its predictions of doom in a desperate play to a script of global conspiracy and home-spawned plots to devastate and bury the Nigerian dream.

• To be continued…