Category: Olatunji Ololade

An Ivy League education without ethics makes a trust fund ‘baby’ an expensive toy without batteries. Substandard education makes the middling youth even worse; it moulds him into a broken toy without appeal. They are both disposable but they enjoy patronage anyway – by the ones Wole Soyinka eloquently described as the wasted generation.

The Nigerian youth is a breed with all the personality of a paper cup. Thus like paper cups, we are used and disposed by men and women unfit to be elders. Yet whatever callousness we are forced to endure, our elders are not to blame. They shall not be blamed, for we made ourselves unbidden offering on the altar of vultures.

It is the malady of this age that the youth are too busy preaching that they have no time left to learn. In Nigeria, we are too busy dumbing down that we barely have time left to grow. It is a sad manifestation of stunted growth that we evolve into foetal adults and spend the rest of our lives seeking the comfort of debilitating “life boats.”

It is even more disheartening to see us adopt as a favourite past time, the pillorying of our elders and the rapacious ruling class. Many a Nigerian youth love to prophesy the worst about our fatherland thus it is never surprising to hear the average Nigerian youth pronounce with emphatic pessimism and relish that “This country is doomed,” and “Nigeria is finished.”

The Igbo youth laments his persistent marginalization from the scheme of things/bounties. He believes Nigeria is skewed to work against him and fellow Igbo because his peers from other ethnic groups are wary of his towering acumen, industry, courage and political savvy. The Hausa youth believes he has inalienable right to statutorily and heavenly accorded rights to reign supreme and lord it over his peers irrespective of merit. And the Yoruba youth, goaded by sentiments of his higher wisdom, towering depth in diplomacy, culture and politics believes that he is entitled to the best the country has to offer, on a platter of gold.

Every youth desperately perpetuates his sense of victimhood and entitlement. The idea is to keep whining until he gets lucky and corners an immense portion of the proverbial national cake – with minimal exertion and at no cost.

We used to be regarded as the promising youth, the gifted generation that would rescue Nigeria from the brink of irredeemable ruin. But that spell of hopefulness has dissipated now. Our “wasted” elders have seen through our noise and bluster. They know we are increasingly handicapped by greed and lack of creed. By creed, I mean a coherent and specific set of goals, a consistent series of norms according to which society is to be remade.

Since we have learnt to blame the ruling class for everything, what is it that we want from the ruling class? We don’t need their permission to make something of the world where they have failed but we still live our lives seeking their permission to evolve positively and maturely.

It takes courage and an enormous reserve of decency to evolve a humane ideology and establish it. We haven’t the courage and the will, and this interferes with our ability to accomplish progressive change. More worrisome are our violent attempts to be radical; eventually they resonate too feebly as a kind of rudderless activism.

We identify all that is wrong with our society but we are never specific about what must be done to correct them. It is relatively easy to join a picket line and tirelessly castigate our elders and ruling class for everything that is wrong with our lives but these actions, while they demonstrate frustration, in some instances even heroism, deal generally with symptoms of· our problems and not the solutions. All the picket lines in the world will not resolve the maladies of fraudulent and impatient youth, perverted values, greed, racism, disillusionment with scholarship and substandard education.

A broad wave of disillusionment and darkness persists above the silver linings we desperately wish to succeed our darksome clouds. Yet with precision and unfaltering devotion, we work ourselves up into such a state that we can only see the volcanic flare of our destructive acts as glitters of grandeur.

We have perfected the art of standing on barrel-heads to spout and be seen, while we engage in pursuit and acquisition of mostly unearned wealth and greatness. Eventually, we luxuriate and spread out like a green forest with sour fruits and severed roots.

Apparently, we suffer a throwback to the 70s – the era that launched a trend in which Nigerians became preoccupied with themselves more than the survival of the nation. Self preservation has become an inexorable obsession of many youths seeking to escape the slow, steady path with its craters of mishap and socio-economic vagaries.

What Joshua Lubin identifies as the “Me” decade has indeed, recoiled inward rather than concern itself with crucial national issues, like national progress and ethical rebirth. Therefore, popular culture attracts dubious labels such as “narcissistic” and “decadent” from critics and the “wasted” older generation.

The Nigerian youth has become so self-involved that almost every action and train of thought perpetuated by him serves as an instrumental resource to situate this generation in historical context, as perfect illustration of the much-hackneyed and over-exploited “Lost Generation.”

Our inordinate quest for self-fulfillment further establishes us as the worst that could possibly happen to a heavily endowed nation like Nigeria.

But we aren’t actually so bad. If we could look inwards to summon latent will and channel it towards the rejuvenation of outdated mores of morality and simple decencies, our lot might yet change, for better. It shouldn’t hurt to evolve faith and be steadfast in it. If we could discard our sentiments about the lifestyle of Tuface Idibia, we would find in the musician some worthy anecdote about the quality of faith.

Tuface Idibia believed in his dream of stardom. And he relentlessly pursued it through the stark streets of Festac, the wilderness of hunger spasms and institutional adversities to become whoever he is and whatever he is today. If I had used Soyinka, or Late Babatunde Jose, many would claim they grew up when Nigeria neither smothered dreams nor murdered hope. Hence my choice of Idibia, the minion who managed to become a poster icon for generations of Nigeria’s music hopeful.

Yet many would read this and consider it “Pollyannaish.” To this lot, any hearty lunge at hope or belief in a brighter tomorrow manifest as blind optimism and a pathetic attempt to be patriotic even while it’s absolutely idiotic to do so. They would love to see the nation ruin in order to justify their inordinate cynicism and yearnings about the pointlessness of the Nigerian dream. They continually affirm their ill will and prayers of doom for the nation by tirelessly projecting separation and insurmountable bleakness on the Nigerian state. Individually, their contribution towards nation building is virtually non-existent or abysmally low, they are amazingly adept at sowing seeds of doubt and disillusionment amongst their peer and younger generation. But they love to be seen as heroes of truth and the new world.

Chances are that some amply corrupted youth would read this and surmise that the writer is afflicted by a Karmic delusion of sort. Chances are majority belong to such youth bracket and probably think, it would be wrong to aver that all wrong-doing shall be punished, in some future dispensation.

You would probably consider it silly to daydream of a Nigerian epoch in which gross and wanton perversions shall beget the harshest of punitive measures. I would not fault you if you did nor would I deny the fact that this dispensation, as all others, we totally got it wrong.

An “Honourable” Speaker was impeached for embezzlement of public funds; today, that Speaker emerges from the doldrums of dishonor. That thieving “Honourable” of yesterday is today, an informed choice for ministerial appointment. That shameful “Honourable” is exonerated and venerated as a fine stateswoman by the same assembly that dishonoured her.

A party chairman was prosecuted for dipping his hand in the public till and he was issued a sentence that even now resounds as a pat on the back. A thieving Governor robbed his State senseless and he is let off the hook in an astonishing act of political expediency.

A dishonest bank chief was caught stealing poor customers’ savings to service her vanities and those of her rich clients and she was issued a punishment that even now resounds as a modest and enjoyable vacation.

Political thugs, assassins, arsonists, executive fraudsters and murderous public officers are let off the hook in the wake of suspicious plea bargaining with the State. Makes one wonder what virtuousness we mute to accentuate our grotesqueness and disgrace.

Contrary to cheerlessness the cynics accentuate, the end is hardly nigh for the Nigerian dream. This is just the beginning of our descent to infamy and disgrace. Current realities offer the clearest though not the only illustration of decadence of our wholly under-utilised intellect and mind. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: for all our self-righteousness, the Nigerian society today, guarantees mindless profiteering off the State by public officers desperate enough to assure the continuance of wanton pilferage of State coffers to the detriment of the country.

The extent of our perversion no doubt, is sufficiently illustrated in Nigerians’ seeming desperation to substitute virtue for vice and approximate the rewards for uprightness to loathsome ridicule and an insidious susceptibility to witch-hunt.

This is not to imply that certain honest individuals do not subsist in our clime, more often than not, they are wholly repudiated and consumed by the same system they are committed to serve. Nigeria’s culture – despite her claims to probity – in fact, reveals a deeper evil than all that it wishes to repudiate.

It reveals the extent to which pretentiousness, selfishness and greed erodes the average Nigerian’s capacity to grasp the over-utilised concepts of honesty, human rights and associated values. It reveals a culture from which the expectations and realities of humanity has been totally wiped out.

The downside is that public officers we elect to serve as the means to the attainment of our various ends, consequently end up exploiting us as the means to their ends. The greedier we evolve, the more neurotic we become – as elected representatives and electorate – in our practice of leadership and citizenship “for the general good of society,” “for the good of future generations” and everything and anything except actual humankind.

Hence the appalling recklessness with which we acquiesce to bestiality of all kinds, accept betrayal and the most atrocious mode of leadership indefatigably imposed by a treacherous minority on our despicably wanton and degenerate majority.

A unilateral breach of contract characterizes the Nigerian leadership. Governance in Nigeria today, involves the most insidious form of tyranny exemplified by wanton disregard for human life and an indirect use of physical force. It consists, in essence, of one man or a group of men exploiting and monopolizing the material wealth of the entire nation, and then refusing to extend the benefits accruable from the exploitation of such resources – which is a cardinal principle of government by representation – to all.

This privileged few ceaselessly appropriating by force and wile, the nation’s wealth to themselves can be likened to commonplace and contemptible fraudsters. The Nigerian leadership commits grievous acts of fraud and extortion utilising variants of an indirect use of force; which consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or other forms of unconscionable deterrents to any citizen courageous enough to challenge them and demand his constitutional right to equity incessantly promised as core dividend of democratic governance.

Consequently, many Nigerians in desperate bid to be socio-politically correct, have perfected the art of moral subterfuge; the hallmark of which is the perverse inclination to aver that a thieving Governor actually means well or a light-fingered Speaker couldn’t help defraud the nation of hard-earned billions and dip his hand in the public till – because they were helpless pawns in the manifestation of a monumental rot the nation should be done with.

There is no moral difference between a 20-year-old who resorts to armed robbery or advanced fee fraud to actualise his dream of owning a yacht, an expensive bar, penthouse and state-of-the-art Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV), and a Governor, legislator or President who in desperation to amass wealth and operate a Swiss bank account, advocates some grand scale public goal, without regard to context, costs and means – which are usually enshrouded in dense patches of venomous fog to hide the fact that millions of lives are devastated and national growth, grievously stunted, in the actualisation of such public goal.

There is no excuse however, to justify the selfishness and greed of a Nigerian populace that persistently yields to cravings and temptations by which it loses its right to fair government and it’s much sought epoch of peace and abundance. Progress can only be achieved by a conscious effort to challenge the status quo and demand that among other things, a country’s leadership live up to promises it made at election time.

Picture by what leaps our lot would improve if Nigerians did not involve in such abject perversions and evasions that spur them to delude that some criminally-minded and power-thirsty politician is motivated by patriotic concerns for the “public interest.”

Picture what realities the nation could approximate if every citizen desisted from bartering their mandates for chicken-feed, rationalising and driving their minds into states of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that their favorite public officers are actually, mistaken or evil.

The current generation of Nigerians will continue to plug away and die in preventable misery if they continue to wait for the plenitude incessantly promised by our democratically elected representatives who pleaded for our votes that they may afflict us with poverty and unmitigated misery.

Democratic tyrannies and corrupt governments continue to thrive wherever the general populace chooses to barter their chances at change and progress every time opportunity beckons for the oppressed to improve upon the leadership they have, by changing it. We had our chance in April 2011 and squandered it. As 2015 approaches, let us not articulate misery and dissent like ones eternally programmed to self-destruct.

Think continuously of those who are truly great, men and women who by their deeds fight for fairness and the good of all; think of those who wear on their hearts’ sleeve and domicile in the inner recesses of their souls, irrepressible zeal to make our lives better and worthy of our dreams …there are no such men and women alive, are there? For if there are, Nigeria would be 21st century version of Eden or Al Jannah; and men and women on whose watch our country so evolves and appreciate would be everything and even gods.

Our people are quite inane, they wouldn’t know how to create a heaven or sustain the like of it but they create gods by the dozen. I do not speak of divinity that manifests only in far-fetched miracles and dreams; I speak of men and women, boys and girls that we quite desperately and misguidedly deify as our vanities dictate.

Being rich is the closest you get to being god in Nigeria. Add an impressive root and very intimidating academic record to the mix and you have yourself a 21st century hero or god. Of what calibre are our idols? Who really is the Nigerian god? Who is an example of a quintessential idol? Allison-Maduekwe? President Goodluck Jonathan? Sanusi Lamido Sanusi? Reuben Abati? Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala? Do their deeds make them worthy of hero-worship or blind deification?

To what would these individuals owe our reverence of them? Some would say it is their brilliance and extraordinary achievements in their chosen callings. Anyone could be brilliant from time to time but intelligence is what we have to affect all of the time. How intelligent are our ruling class? How intelligent is President Goodluck Jonathan? How intelligent is Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala? How intelligent is Sanusi Lamido Sanusi? How intelligent are they and every other character we continue to endure in the Nigerian ruling class?

The answer lies as much in their utterances as their deeds. Alas! Transcendent moments and heroic acts are rather deeds of an exalted intelligence, something which Nigeria’s incumbent ruling class pitifully lacks. But despite its protests and dissatisfaction with the status quo, the Nigerian citizenry equally lacks that towering immensity of intellect and strength of character that remains prime requirements in the constitution of a progressive race.

Our lust for heroes and gods illustrates a fable; it is not of latent strength but disintegration rather it reveals the weakness and shallowness of the Nigerian adult’s awfully preadolescent mind. It reiterates a very shrill cry for help that’s at once selfish, infantile and retrogressive. Put precisely, we are incapable of creating such super humans or elements worthy of being called gods of unconditional love and compassion. All we are capable of are gods of impoverishment and gods of war.

If we are to be judged by what Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, deems the human measure of all things, shall we fare excellently or not? Things have gone on decadently for too long; that is why idiots as fragile as clay toys have evolved into outsized heroes and gods, on our watch.

The Nigerian hero is a human sound bite. He is essentially a half-formed mammal, animal to be precise. Take for instance gods and goddesses we have created as our ruling class; they are no longer exclusively Nigerian or humane. Rather they have been turned upside-down and inside-out; they have been scrambled, corrupted and fertilized by ghastly manifestations of self love, tribalism, wantonness, perverted education and sense of worth.

This abnormality is accentuated by the citizenry’s lack of courage and inclination to dither when the situation calls for decisiveness and fearlessness in determining the course of our affairs. “All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours,” says Aldous Huxley, English writer.

Truly; the manner in which the Nigerian electorate worships its ruling class and celebrates its mediocrity makes it impossible for the latter to affect the necessary humaneness, tact and humility that are prime requirements of occupants of exalted public offices. Having made super humans of them, they begin to delude that they are untouchable and unquestionable. They begin to parade themselves as gods and see the electorate on whose strength they ascended to their exalted positions as lesser creatures.

They seek the exaggerated safety and coziness of fortresses they build around themselves to protect their ill-gotten wealth and ostentatious lifestyles. Suddenly it becomes taboo for them to hobnob with the working class. It becomes abominable for their wives, daughters and cooks to visit the same grocer or shop in the same market as the masses.

Shamelessly, they clear our public coffers of our collective fund without any inhibition and in response; we celebrate them and grovel at their feet for crumbs of what is rightfully ours. Whenever they intrude our world, they leave behind pungent memories and pains. Whenever they come to town, we must be kept in traffic for them to move freely; whenever they are ‘guests of honour’ at our functions, we are treated with little or no honour. Apology to Kayode Oteniya.

The chief quality of a true leader is the apparent sincerity in his manners. The speeches he makes are never mere platitudinous enterprise and his developmental programmes are never extraordinary elephant projects; his politics and humanity are not only heard but concretely seen and felt.

Really there is prime merit in everything about him, and his life generally, radiates truth. His life is what we may call a great sober sincerity. A sort of temperate authenticity that is not only blunt but uncompromising. His fervor is undomesticated, bordering on the wild and forever wrestling naked with the elements that be for the love of the good and the truth of things. In that sense, there is something of the savage yet humane in him like all great men.

He is one in whom one still finds human substance. He relishes no opportunity to tell any colourful story of himself anywhere; usually, he stands bare and grapples like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things. ‘That, after all,” according to Thomas Carlyle “is the sort of man for one.”

And such is the type of man we should value above all others. He is the man who as Norman Mailer, an American writer, puts it, would argue with gods and awaken devils to contest his vision. When he dies, his death would be felt nationwide as something more than a historic calamity; women would weep and men would fight back tears as if they had heard of the death of a very dear friend or Saint.

The creation of such honorable man and god would be our noblest work. But we seem incapable yet of such honorable task. We could start by stripping ourselves of the greater vanities and portentous contradictions. Unhappy the land that has no heroes, says Andrea; No, unhappy the land that needs heroes, responds Galileo in Bertolt Brecht, late German playwright and poet’s “The Life of Galileo.” Regrettably, the meaning is lost on us all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the exception of the purportedly high and mighty aristocrat and upper middle class, the Nigerian faithful dwells in an atmosphere in which his rights and dearest ideals are being trampled upon. He lives in a society in which the public conscience has grown deafer to virtuousness, and that all reactionary forces of prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining new strength and fresh allies.

Conscious of his impotence, and heartfelt pessimism, he often becomes bitter and vindictive; and his religion, instead of worship becomes a complaint and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a mockery rather than a faith. Apology to W.E.B Dubois. On the other hand, the self-righteous “daddy” and vendor of faith, shrewder and keener and more twisted too, see in the hopelessness of the faithful, an opportunity to amass wealth and socio-political strength. Hence with prophetic virtuoso and sophistry, he marshals his cunning and vanities to turn the poor and unassuming faithful into his hopeless prey. Thus we have two pitiful and psychologically reconcilable streams of thought and moral strivings; the danger of the one lies in idiocy, and that of the other in duplicity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forget the gospel according to your “daddy,” it is essentially the crusade of the erudite neurotic; much like medieval anti-witchcraft campaign: grounded in myth, perverted by whim and a most pronounced tendency to play god.

Do not prescribe my culture as some souvenir to suit some moralist craze. Nothing vile ever beats the humane way. Apology to Osadebey; let my demons themselves resolve. I will play with the white man’s ways; I will work with my African brain. Then I will choose neither above the other. I will live my own way. Then may I rise in spirited rebirth from the ashes of our ‘good old days.’

I have seen the tragedy of our race. It stares back at me in the mirror at the break of dawn. At noon, it afflicts my psyche from the tongues of hateful compatriots, twilight portends to be worse. Your ‘wizened’ peers stare down at me from Aso Rock. From their summit, they glower with contempt.

Such disdain besmirches the paradise our lives should become. In time, we see more tragedy. We feel it. The gods allow it. God may never prevent it. Every day, he watches the antics of we mortal lot. If it weren’t below him, I would say he bemuses to see us spread camwood on our chests to cure the cancer within our hearts.

Would folklore soothe the pains of denial? Would fattening rooms entrap the pangs of hunger when they strike? Why do we give to illusions and deceit? Are we still ‘Proudly Nigerian?’ Our maidens kneel when they greet, our young men prostrate. We say it’s a sign of respect. It was, back in our ‘good old days.’ Is it, still? These days, the young ones hardly care, and the old ones too.

Times have changed. Now we know that age is just a number, a mere counter to the moments we have left. It hardly comes with wisdom. If it does, the Stormy Petrel couldn’t have confessed of the ‘wasted generation.’

Perhaps he saw the wantonness of our foolery. Perhaps he understood that fool becomes he that elevates folklore, panegyrics, fashion modesty, age, subservience, and respect for the elderly as defined by us as the finest of mores.

These are hardly the way to live. We live by the gun and survive by the blades of blood-stained machetes. That is our culture. We starve our parents to death and when they die, we throw a gala to celebrate their lives. Every decade we throw a feast in their honour and call it ‘Remembrance of a life well spent.’ That is our culture.

We wish death upon our truth-seekers and humour the falsehood of the worst of tin gods. Now that is our culture. We rape our baby girls before they mature, we sell our maidens into prostitution and breed our sons into militants and crime lords. That is our culture.

We deny our kids quality education and leave them to their own devices. When they harden, we jail them or execute them behind the stench lines of over-crowded prisons. We forget or conveniently ignore the fact that they are the product of our decadence, the future of our pillage. No society that holds its future dear would leave its young ones to plunder and to rot. But we do. That is our culture.

We have lost the elements of high civilization if there ever was one. Every civilization flourishes, then decays until it comes in contact with a superior other. That which is spontaneous rarely occurs, save in our dreams, save in the epoch of Egypt, Arabia and Babylonia. Save the era of the Greeks, and the renaissance of Persia, Western Europe and Asia.

Would the great ages be great without the contributions of certain individuals? If Shakespeare, Galileo, Beethoven, Marx, Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Graham-Bell et al had died in infancy, wouldn’t the world we inhabit be vastly insecure?

If Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Ahmadu Bello had died at birth, wouldn’t our lives be worse than it is? Everything we are, we owe to the past. We owe our survival to the heroes of yesterday. What have we done with ourselves today? What are our contributions to humanity? How have we changed the face of civilization? Do not speak of the brightest of us in Diaspora I charge you; it is said they flourish because they fled from us?

Of all things, we have perfected the art of war. We mature into decay and propagate ideals not consistent with our innate sensibilities. Every day we slaughter reason on the altar of religion and morality too. The more we pray the greater savages we become.

Decades since we won our right to self-rule, we disappointedly remain a perfect study in the human propensity to self-destruct. Having won back our freedom, we have become wholly incapable to own it and sustain it. This explains why we are yet to use the ballot intelligently and quite effectively.

We do not understand how to channel that proverbial power we are believed to possess nor have we been able to discern the possession of a power so great that it could compel the more privileged and politically conscious elements amongst us to educate, enlighten and thus emancipate the less privileged and ignorant to its clever use.

We have become laughing stock in the comity of nations. We who claim to be Giants of Africa are less than termites if I may insult the poor insects. I think our talk is of size. What is size when the citizenry can barely survive? What is size if the mildest of culture we can scarcely evolve?

We aren’t the future of Africa. We have become a jest unto ourselves and the continent we hold dear, if truly we ever hold it dear. Forget our adventures in the forests of might, despite our peace keeping efforts, we are still a minion.

True strength lies not in the ability to war, greater is the nation with the best of genii. Little wonder Ghana is seen as the future of Africa. See you not how wisdom and tact replaces the best of brawns? “Our best brains have left our motherland. Every day, they depart in droves,” we lament. But if truly they are the best that we have, why would they leave? Would genius abscond because it gets tough?

Our best of brains reside with us. The best of patriots traverse our beaten streets. Every day, they wake up to the struggle, every day they stir to daylight thinking, “today will be better.” In the haze of our debauchery, the shining light illumines from the faith of those that are left behind, in the hearts of those that would stay behind and survive come what may. These are the cultured.

From the exertions of such folk, we should find our culture, our redemption. Where are such folk in the wilderness of our state? Every time I look around, I fail to see that man, woman, boy or girl that gives hope.

We could re-educate ourselves but our best years have passed us by. We should educate our kids. We could breed them to become our saving grace. Bland as it seems, there are no better alternatives, unless we wish they continue as drug dealers, armed robbers, fraudsters, wife beaters, political thugs among others. There are no bypasses unless we wish that they inherit the waste we have become.

 

 

This piece too could easily be signed off with some bleak and wholly glum conclusion about Nigeria and its affliction by the Nigerian factor. I attempt no lamentation of such tenor neither do I seek to project any highfaluting panacea that is self-serving and ego-activated. Yet, one really can’t make the words too strong; we are still the brutes in our recurring nightmares.

A simple lust is still our woe and neither sophistry nor brutishness would obliterate the fact that you and I are as culpable as leadership we loathe for horrors we suffer and let exist. The sooner we accept this fact, the sooner we understand why President Goodluck Jonathan, for all he exemplifies, is probably the most loved man in Nigeria today – and perhaps the most hated.

And the quicker we appreciate in understanding of the intrigues and extreme relativities that makes “the son of a poor fisherman” as well as our band of Governors, legislators and all other public officers hardly the next-best-thing to happen to the Nigerian polity.

This dispensation, among other things, presents an epochal narrative of the story of Nigeria – if it fails, Nigeria itself has failed. The onus not to fail the country although rests on the shoulders of over 150 million Nigerians, its crushing weight bears burdensomely on the shoulders of President Goodluck Jonathan and company.

On the flipside, it is instructive to note that the stewardship of President Jonathan and company, their rise to eminence as well as our seeming desperation to deride, eulogise, condemn and apologise for their politics aptly constitutes the epilogue and prologue to Nigeria’s descent and ascent into the doldrums and out of it respectively, and vice versa.

Now that we have made the worst of uninformed choices or probably the best of informed choices by voting them in, a greater responsibility lies with them to discountenance whatever foolishness, or inclination to self-destruct that spurred us to accord them untrammeled ride to our plinth of power.

Thus today, the greatest struggle before President Jonathan and company is to rehumanise public office cum leadership in the country. They probably don’t know yet that the positions they occupy requires of them, greater responsibilities than they could ever imagine.

Most important is for them to affect courage or look inwards to summon it if they are yet to attain a full grasp of it. This is because official responsibilities and platitudes they hawked last April requires that they be constituted as men capable of revolt yet to be heralded on the African continent.

Prevalent realities reveal a whole machinery of indoctrination that is at once retrogressive and perverse in the country – particularly among the nation’s ruling class. This perversion which actually accompanies almost every Nigerian from childhood inures in our psyche, feeble resistance to the grotesque and evil.

It excites in us impotent protestations and affectation of tact, immeasurable wantonness, fickle-mindedness, acquiescence to tyranny and the corrupt and other abominable inclinations that serves to perpetuate the join-them-if-you-can’t-beat-them politics.

We have perfected such dastardly perversions that drives us to perpetuate an endless narrative which stirs our 150-million strong populace basically, as helpless, hopeless victims of a paltry 10, 000 villains or thereabout.

This same thought process blinds the ruling class to endless misery they wreak on us and goads them to believe that despite their misdemeanours, they are born to impose upon us misrule without the least inhibition of imminent backlash.

Thus we have a society without any heartfelt moral doubt, workable rhetoric, rule of law, reward system and change process capable of guaranteeing an improvement of the status quo. To rebel against such an anomaly as we foster currently, proves hard, if not extremely hazardous. Yet rebel, we must – particularly leaders we entrust to steer the current dispensation to the bight of pleasant realities.

Mr. President and company owe Nigeria as a duty to rebel against so devastating an evil that the Nigerian leadership unashamedly epitomises. However, to do this, they have to rebel against its basic premise.

They have to wholly discountenance that time-worn politics that permits no view of men except as preys and predators. Then the twin evil of selfishness and corruption they have to exterminate. In doing this, the first step is to institute a moral code and recognise the need to respect its guidance in the fulfillment of their statutory responsibilities to the country.

Guided by such moral code, as supported by their personal politics and improvised in the nation’s constitution, Mr. President and company could finally attain such statesmanship that permits no view of the populace as guinea pigs and sacrificial lambs, and themselves as profiteers on sacrifice.

They could become capable of such politics that permits much sought benevolent co-existence among Nigerians as well as the enthronement of equity and justice. Then there would be no need to imagine or explain the reasons for the abject cynicism and corruption in which most Nigerians wallow and die.

There would be no need to wonder why President Jonathan and company’s inauguration speeches accorded Nigerians neither a roadmap nor destination point. There would be no need to wonder if Sankwala, Cross River State; Gembu, Taraba State; Olugbode, Itele, Lafenwa, Ota in Ogun State and Ipaja-Ayobo, Meiran, Ajasa-Command, Alakuko in Lagos to mention a few, would be left derelict were they endowed with infinite gold deposits or played host to the ancestral home of a few high-ranking government officials.

There would be no need to wonder how patriotic or disillusioned President Jonathan and company would be with the quality of leadership and governance they offer if they were ordinary men on the street.

The degree of perversion of the Nigerian leadership is quite endemic that that any heartfelt attempt to undo it would be akin to dousing a decomposed corpse in expensive fragrance to hide its stink.

The extent of the moral inversion in Nigerian leadership’s prevalent view of government remains a perpetual eyesore. Instead of being a guardian of the citizens’ rights, the government has become their most unapologetic violator. Instead of guarding both economic and political freedom, the government is establishing slavery

Instead of serving as the instrument of equity and justice in human relationships, the government is establishing a fatal, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of unequal laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats. And instead of protecting the citizenry from oppression and injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of boundless imperialism and whim.

Thus we ruin and stagnate in a state of critical perversion that guarantees the government unlimited right and freedom to do as it pleases, to the detriment of mostly poor, helpless citizenry. Today, we have perfected the rejuvenation of the darkest periods of human history – the stage of rule by brute force.

Little wonder that in spite of our enviable arsenal of human, mineral and capital endowment Nigeria is yet to attain any comparable degree of socio-economic and political progress. There is no solution. There is no workable solution save a wholesome embrace of that proverbial moral state preached and clamoured for by all and yet wholly despised and repudiated by all.

Tyranny is brought to 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.

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. The latter conveniently forget that without the editorial staff, they will be jobless. More worrisomely, in the few newspapers that exist, senior editorial teams collude with administrative staff to maltreat journalists in their employ. While The Nation Newspaper, Punch newspaper and perhaps one or two others 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 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.

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.”

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?

 

• To be continued…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus we resign to the tyranny of the ruling class, courting and maligning it often in the same breath, while we anticipate and wish doom upon Nigeria. If we look inwards, we would find that the intellectual aptitudes, will and individuality of many of us are strained by disillusionment, cowardice, laziness and abject failure in our roles as patriots and citizens of humanity. Several self-styled leaders of the critical mob are currently in the jailhouse of mammon and sociopolitical expediency. Take Reuben Abati for instance, the foremost critic turned presidential aide;  yesterday, he was a mob hero; today he carries on like one enslaved to power and perpetually drunk on his own saliva.

–To be continued…

This year as all others, will our hopes die with fantasy-fitted fears? Shall we dream our way to the future like the drunk’s feeble strut towards the closed liquor store? The future we dream smell of unheralded bliss and surreal life forms but the paths we chart reek of human entrails and cadavers of dreams that died young. This freedom we flaunt is useless to us; if you examine it closely, you will see it manifests as free doom. When you taste it, it stings like badly brewed beer; having drunk too much of it for too long, we go through each day in a perpetual hang over.

After 54 years, there should be nothing left. But we stand somnolent in a persistent hang over; dreaming of a better Nigeria and a better future even as we entrust our heartfelt dreams to familiar undertakers. But that is simply one way to look at us. We are the nation of excellent technocrats and desirable intellectuals who entrusted our destinies to President Goodluck Jonathan and company.

Guess it will simply not do to deny the promise and intimidating potentials of President Goodluck Jonathan anymore. Who knows, President Jonathan may unexpectedly become that proverbial revolutionary that Nigeria so badly needs. Perhaps it is certainly not fair to crucify President Jonathan for damages wrought over preceding years of bad leadership.

He is not a magician, is he? Neither is he a “lion,” a thug, “Pharaoh,” or autocratic army general. But he is, despite everything, Executive President and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, Federal Republic of Nigeria. By virtue of his office and the expanse of his territory, President Goodluck Jonathan is to the African continent what American President Barack Obama, believes he is to the world. But he does not seem to know that yet. That is why he may never chart that remarkable roadmap that would see us evolve from the sleeping giant of Africa to an intercontinental super power.

It’s amazing what colourful definitions we ascribe to Mr. President. Agreed, it is hardly a good time to be President but is there ever a good time to be Mr. President? Goodluck Jonathan could never have it as easy as he would like it to be. Governance is never so easy; not in any part of the world. It takes a real man to rise to the demands of leadership particularly within the worst of abnormal climes and political culture. Is Goodluck Jonathan such a man?

He is the President Nigeria currently deserves, no doubt about that – but the most conscientious jury will certainly falter on the necessity of a President Goodluck Jonathan as the C-in-C of the Federal Republic of Nigeria beyond this moment in history.

Can President Goodluck Jonathan tame tragedy and rewrite it into bliss if by a horrendous twist of fate, he is re-elected or rigged back into power come 2015 general elections? Can he cultivate history and command it? Can he become the solution to Nigeria’s most pressing problems? How?

In his independence anniversary speeches; in that familiar bland, platitudinous style characteristic of Nigeria’s ruling class, he waxes lyrical, sentimental and tough. In one of such speeches, he said: “I value all Nigerians. I see our youth who are looking for jobs and yet remain hopeful. I see the farmer, and fisherman, toiling everyday to earn a living. I see the teacher, working hard, to train our future generations, with much sacrifice. I see the market women whose entrepreneurial spirit helps to generate income for their children and families… I see every single profession and vocation, making positive contributions to national progress. I value you all!”

In his recent New Year message, he claims, “Our national budget for 2014 which is now before the National Assembly is specifically targeted at job creation and inclusive growth. We are keenly aware that in spite of the estimated 1.6 million new jobs created across the country in the past 12 months as a result of our actions and policies, more jobs are still needed to support our growing population. Our economic priorities will be stability and equitable growth, building on the diverse sectors of our economy.”

President Jonathan’s utterances are at once a contradiction and barely disguised attempt to poke fun at over 150 million Nigerians. And that is merely a way to consider it. President Jonathan would do better if changes and progress he excitedly recounts and promises are in any way felt and discernible to the unemployed youth, farmer, fisherman and market woman whose plights he claims to be concerned with.

There is hardly anything worth the excitement and hope of the purported recipients of his message. This is because Mr. President’s economics complicates the ease in easy. Even as Economics is erroneously adjudged one of the soft sciences, it is indeed one of the “soft” sciences without easy answers.

Yet President Jonathan will have us believe that “We are witnessing a revolution in the agricultural sector and the results are evident” and that his 7.8 per cent growth rate is the best thing that would ever happen to the unemployed youth, farmer, fisherman and market woman.

How? At what cost and to whose disadvantage? In economics, the only rationally accessible truths manifest at the individual or organizational – that is, the microeconomic level. For instance, it is clearly the case for the individual that more will be demanded, subject to the law of diminishing returns, if the real economic costs (prices) are less, all other things being equal. Only at the individual or organizational level can all other things (ceteris paribus), be held equal.

At the macroeconomic level however, nothing can be held equal, so no real truths can emerge. It is at this point that facts become sacred and yet ultimately violable, and history becomes malleable. We know that there are great efficiencies to be gained by an improvement in the growth rate of a country’s GDP.

But we also know that the micro and macro-economics of such growth process, particularly in Nigeria, translates as balderdash to its common recipients even as it fosters the incongruities that makes such advancements persistently indulgent and accommodating to the greed and several excesses of the Nigerian ruling class.

It’s a harsh life for the unemployed youth, farmer, fisherman and market woman of the sidewalk among so many others. Let President Jonathan desist from his obscenely casual and expedient lip-service to their plight. No matter how well-meaning he is, he will be judged by how humanely his government improved the quality of lives.

Bet this is where his unrepentant loyalists will argue that it is not the duty of government to put food on every Nigerian’s table. True. In fact, the virtue of statesmanship and industry demands that every man pursues honest livelihood within legitimate and sustainable means, to his benefit and that of the society.

Today, President Goodluck Jonathan is seen in a new light; as a facilitator or violator of that inalienable right. He is a Messiah to his kinsmen and party loyalists and a team player to his ruling class. But to the poor, ordinary middle class and breadlines, who is Jonathan?

•To be continued…