Category: Olatunji Ololade

If Governor Babatunde Fashola were man on the street, he would understand what it means for the leader of your dreams to be reduced to an ordinary human sound bite. He isn’t. Thus he does not know what monstrosity afflicts the world of the average Lagosian, in the region where his mega-city dreams are yet to birth.

Now that I may have incited their wrath, this is probably the moment that men who would consider black to be white, and white to be off-white, would counsel Governor Babatunde Fashola to ignore this too as the impotent rant of some poor, desperate journalist pandering to the script of some enfant terrible worrywart.

Yet such men, probably, are hardly around Governor Babatunde Fashola; the “maverick Governor,” I would love to believe, despises the guts of such sycophants and prostitutes to power. Thus hoping that such uprightness, understanding and humanity are positively inured in the glands of the Lagos State Governor, I make good to say that in Lagos, life is still hardly what it’s supposed to be in most parts, even as you read.

Few nights ago, a Volkswagen truck lost its grip on a slippery slope, at the junction forking into Ogundele street off Alhaji Oladipupo street off Emmanuel street, Agege. It backed into a motorbike carrying a painter (the cyclist) and his wife. It ran over the painter’s left thigh crushing it in the spokes and probably fractured his wife’s hip because till I left the scene, she could neither sit not move.

At the backdrop of the mishap, vehicles wreck their bumpers and shock absorbers in unavoidable potholes, craters and mud piles and the residents of the area played host, albeit hopelessly, to a maddening vehicular traffic hold-up at midnight.

It’s a dangerous ride through Emmanuel, Alhaji Oladipupo and Ogundele streets, through Oja Oba bus stop, off old Lagos-Abeokuta highway. The madness gravitates from the road leading to Agege abattoir, through Abule Egba. On this increasingly cratered road stretch, motorists, apparently mentally disturbed, veer off the appropriate lane to face on-coming traffic from Abule Egba.

It’s unnerving to see police officers and traffic wardens of the Police post stationed at the abattoir, watch unperturbedly as such disturbed motorists flout traffic rules in careless abandon to face oncoming traffic thus posing the greatest of dangers to other road users.

It is even more maddening to watch these so-called law enforcers pass on such miscreants while they attempt to forcefully return to the appropriate lane, to the detriment of painstaking and law-abiding road users.

In Ipaja, Baruwa, Ayobo, Ajasa-Command and environ, residents and road users still groan under the weight of very bad roads, heavy traffic, absence of drainages and insecurity. Save the random presence of a police patrol team at the border where Ayobo meshes with Aiyetoro and Itele road, Ogun State; road users and residents in these areas are frequently left at the mercy of constant street elements characterized by roving urchins and armed bandits.

Orile-Agege, Tabon-Tabon, Agbado Kollington, Dalemo, Akera, Ijaye-Jankara, Meiran, Alakuko, Ajegunle, Iju-Ishaga among others, remain disgraceful eyesores. Dividends of citizenship of the fabled “City of Excellence” remain ever elusive to poor, helpless dwellers and travelers within these derelict habitats of Lagos.

Some say it’s because these areas fall within the range of so-called slummy and negligible regions that they are left decrepit, in near collapse. Some say it’s because they are peopled by citizens who fall within the low-income bracket that they are abandoned. Some would joke that it’s because they possess such “hideous” and “local” names.

If you could prove that these neglected areas are indeed, shorn of valuable and estimable citizenry, I would ascribe to you the unrivalled mastery of he who could gather fume into neatly tied bundles, with twine.

Should it even matter, the value of citizenry inhabiting these regions before the Lagos State government accords them their constitutional rights to equity in provision and distribution of amenities, justice and security? Should not these regions be rehabilitated and improved upon as Victoria Island (V.I.), Lekki Peninsula, Ikeja Government Reservation Areas (GRA) et al?

Picture a Lagos where the residents of Ayobo, Agege, Ijaiye, Ipaja, Abule-Egba enjoy the same perks and amenities that lures them all to V.I., Ikoyi, Lekki, Ikeja. Picture a Lagos where residents of Meiran, Alakuko, Agbado-Kollington, Ajegunle, enjoy very good roads and bypasses, along with the conveniences that come with such facilities – like flourishing Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), well tended public parks, cinemas and other leisure and tourist attractions. Wouldn’t it be a wonder to behold and dwell in?

There is need to develop other parts of Lagos as it is been done in the so-called choice neighbourhoods of V.I., Ikoyi, Lekki, Ikeja. The logic is to make the so-called “remote” and “very local” areas of Lagos habitable to all.

This would no doubt check the desperation of most Lagosians itching to relocate to V.I., Ikeja, Lekki Peninsula, Banana Island as they appreciate in status and affluence. It would also reduce over-population of so-called highbrow area of the Lagos metropolis.

Governor Fashola perhaps understands the lunacy and dangers inherent in the migration of every upstart, upwardly mobile, wealthy, class-conscious or order-loving citizen to the choicest parts of his mega-city dream – the latter would sooner than expected, become greater purlieus of squalor and dereliction than anyone could ever imagine.

It wouldn’t hurt Governor Fashola to best his first term record and thus accord Ipaja-Ayobo, Ijaiye, Meiran, Alakuko, Ajegunle, Ajasa-Command among others, more than the passing tribute of a lifting platitude and a sigh. The benefits accruable from such venture are no doubt limitless which probably explains why Governor Ibikunle Amosu of Ogun State, recently visited the cratered terrains of Sango Ota. Moved by the wanton ruin and dereliction of the transit township, he promised to do something about it and true to his pledge, rehabilitation works commenced in the area at midnight. Perhaps Governor Amosu would ensure the rehabilitation would be more than ordinary road patches for the sand and gravel would wash away sooner than expected in the rains.

Perhaps he would extend such conscientiousness and humanity to the state’s many derelict areas like the road linking Itele, Ogun State with Ipaja-Ayobo, Lagos; and then Owode-Ijako, Agoro road, Dalemo-Toll Gate, Ijoko, Ita Elega, Onikolobo, Ilepa, Ota, Ilo Awela road, to mention a few.

And maybe Governor Fashola would affect even greater humanity than his Ogun State counterpart and thus transform Lagos into the city of everyone’s dream. This is not some veiled attack on Governor Fashola but an importunate plea that he hearkens, knowing that the true worth of a leader lies not in some of his deeds some of the time but in all of his deeds all of the time.

Let’s hope his self-confessed loathing for the degenerate and verminous translates to more good roads, functional drainages, conscientious law enforcers, pedestrian foot bridges, law abiding citizenry, equity, justice and peace particularly in the oft abandoned parts of Lagos.

If he could graciously make manifest such heartwarming and responsible leadership, eons from now, when generations of Lagosians remember Lagos State’s golden years, they will remember when Babatunde Fashola was Governor.

 

No one could teach humanity to our callous clan. Nobody could teach reality to a land that dies of dreams of plunder. Who could teach direction to a people that thrive on monstrosity and misdirection?

As we approach 2015, we enthuse about the possibility of rebirth. Our talk is of a new dawn but if we look closely enough, we shall find that there is no light in the skies yet. Last sunrise – at the beginning of the current dispensation – the sun betrayed a hint of tiredness. It seemed to have withdrawn into some new distance – like the North Star that suddenly discovers the unworthiness of our pirate ship for its guiding light. We are still that great ship with no certain commitment to compass and outlast our course’s most hideous storms.

As we approach 2015, every moment uncoils as that in which we return to sup on yesterday’s vomit, like starved greyhounds. We are recycling the same old faces, same old politics, same old hurt. Every minute passes like that in which seedlings and crop shoots fear the late and early rainstorms. Our young expects too little, still; and our old still indulge in pleasurable reminiscences even as they discover no logic to justify that which they had forsaken and squandered.

Come 2015, we expect that things will change for the better. But nothing will change for the better because we have appointed career undertakers to midwife our new dawn, again. Come 2015, more promises will be broken and fear’s moonflower will spread and attain full blossom, till our proverbial dawn illumines as familiar dusk of compromise. And that is because we have refused to change.

An in-depth scrutiny into our psyches would reveal the depth of our affinity to leadership we have. Our thoughts, politics and actions, while lacking in philosophy and conviction betrays on one hand, wanton inclinations to aid and abet our current leadership, and on the flipside, an excessive confidence in our personal judgment and contempt for the advice and criticism of others.

Our pains are of substandard education, mass unemployment, sky-rocketing inflation, pervasive poverty, insecurity, crime, high infant and maternal mortality, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) epidemic, cyber –fraud, institutional fraud, etc. To these, we have proffered countless solutions.

We have suggested population control. We have suggested greater government support and presence in the Niger Delta claiming that since it is Nigeria’s only reliable source of national income, the federal government ought to devote greater time, money and other resources to the region.

We have suggested that we paid more attention to our ailing agricultural sector. We claim it would do us great good if we could revivify our dying cocoa industry, collapsed groundnut pyramids and struggling oil palm sector. Not to forget our persistent rant about our abject neglect of our tourist attractions. It’s amusing to see us mount the soap-box in fickle fits of contempt – in our liquor and rant-activated pubs, living-rooms, courtyards and pages of our sensational newsprints. We have perfected the art of lamentation, bandying angst and pitiful punch lines to bemoan our rudderless politics.

What’s your poison? Nigeria’s leadership problem? Pervasive poverty? Endemic corruption? Religious upheavals cum perversion of faith? What is it that causes riotous incense to course through your brain? The abject rot of the Onyeama Coal Mine? The collapse of Ajaokuta Steel as well as other appendages to Nigeria’s steel sector? Our underperforming oil refineries and Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN)? What excites your grief? Our conduit-built and corruption-activated ministries?

Nigeria ruins and stagnates like cocoyam sodden in a mud field and we continue to articulate textbook remedies to problems that are best resolved by truth, honesty and impeccable character. Today, we suggest a sovereign national conference or referendum to provide the forum by which we could redress the state of the union. What manner of redress do we seek? Many have suggested that we break-up. They claim we shall do better if we go our separate ways.

Now picture the dissolution of our 53-year old union; what plenitude could it bring? What manner of peace, justice and stability could we derive from a relapse to humanity’s often wildest and best-forgotten enterprise?

What would be our role in the new order? Shall we reinvent the millipede by calling it, ‘snake?’ Shall the lion cub become tomcat simply because it is kept as a house pet? We could reinvent ourselves as much as we like; we could secede by our terms as many times as we like; we could quote Nietzsche, Plato, Disreali et al and re-echo the idiosyncrasies of our favourite columnists for as long as it gets us to justify our cynicism and grief; nothing will change.

Our lives shan’t get better. Nigeria won’t become the land of honey and milk we wish it would become until we change.

It’s a fundamental nature of our society that we accept abnormality and debauchery as incontestable parts of our nature. Yet if we did not indulge in such abject perversions and pitiable evasions as our principle of moral agnosticism which imbues us to be tolerant of anything and everything, we could have matured enough in intellect and psyche to know how and why not to compromise between truth and falsehood, reason and irrationality.

We could have attained such maturity that would enable us to understand that the values we project become the essence of our socio-politics and being – whether we like it or not. Every utterance we make, as our most humane and inhumane actions and reactions, intensify the simplicity or degeneracy of our individual perceptions, as well as the rationality and otherwise of politics we choose to scorn or celebrate.

It needn’t be so hard to be good. But it is – simply because despite our touted morality, wisdom and predilection to evolve a quintessential civilization, we have lost direction. Knowingly, we scorn both our glaring and latent abilities to discern that proverbial path to the realization of the essence and undeniable benefits of being good. Consequently, our culture and our lives disintegrate for our lack of character.

When we ennoble double-speak and refrain from praising men’s virtues and condemning their vices, our fraudulence declares and we foster the corruption of our larger society. No practicable and highfaluting panacea could resolve our most hideous realities until we attain the essence of goodness without being self-righteous.

Simply put, there can be no compromise, however exquisitely couched, between us and the depravity we tolerate. Aiding and abetting corruption in the spirit of socio-economic and political expediency is hardly a compromise but a cowardly surrender to the elements that disintegrates and make bleak.

Whether we like it or not, there can be no compromise or wanton sophistry acceptable on basic principles and fundamental issues. It’s time we desist from every conscious quest to improve the status quo from the deceitful springboard of compromise. The change we seek subsists in random and premeditated acts of goodness that we have learnt to forsake: like a citizen’s resoluteness to respect the traffic light and a local government chairman’s immutable passion to improve life at the grassroots – particularly when the world isn’t looking.

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

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

That has to pale in the face of logic; it does. Things are supposed to be different now. But they aren’t. As the 2015 general elections draws nearer, familiar trolls are joining hands with the witless amongst us; their intent is to use us against us in their usual plot to rob us silly. The end result of course, can be better imagined.

Money changes everything. The need of it makes us human. Loving it could be practical but an obsession with it drives us to the brink, it shows us up, upside-down and inside-out – as men of vulpine souls and intellect, eternally forsworn to despise honour for the love of wealth.

Many have argued that we can never sell out by playing muscle to the ruling class.

“We will only be enjoying our share of our collective wealth that they steal from us,” they claim, as we get ready to be courted and plied with easy money and other inducement, by the same politicians who customarily treat us with disdain until the elections approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I recommend as usual, uncompromising passion and will to act, guided by probity and a conscious quest to achieve the personal and collective good within the ambit of fairness, equity and unflinching morality. Without such humane attributes, every measure we endeavour to apply will fail woefully. Policies and practicable solutions are mere words on paper; they can only be activated by our conscious efforts to attain actualize them.

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

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

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

Let us begin to ignore those who would desert us no sooner than they regain their hold on power. I speak of men and women like the current ruling class; today they recoil into their secluded compounds in Banana Island, Lagos, their palatial estates in Abuja, and exclusive neighbourhoods in Europe. They seek to isolate themselves from the tragedies that mar our world. So doing they indulge in unrestrained hedonism and extravagant consumption of their ill-acquired wealth. We, the suffering masses are however, repressed with greater ferocity every time we protest.

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

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

Today, we tow a similar path.

We belabour the ‘Nigerian dream.’ We abuse the idea that life will get better, that progress is assured if we keep faith, obey the rules and work hard, that prosperity is guaranteed if we continue to tread the slow, steady path to progress and a prosperous future. And in pursuit of these lofty ideals, we pervert the steady, measured, impartial course of the universe; hacking pliant paths to our dreams, from the crossroads where gluttony fosters depravity.

Eventually, we awaken to a cold, bitter truth: We are being sacrificed. The Nigerian dream we are sold isn’t worth our sacrifice. And the individual dreams we pursue, aren’t worth a smidgen of what we make them out to be. By the time we all struggle to achieve our dreams; Nigeria will be finished. Given that each tribe may finally achieve its dreams of nationhood via secession, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw to mention a few may establish their new nations.

When we do, the swollen belly of our idiocy and pride shall become clearly visible to us. When it does, it shall suddenly dawn on us that, all along, we had been blindly acting to a script prepared by career predators from Western nations of Europe, America and our ruling class.

The truth shall become clearer to us in intensity and impact and we shall hopelessly realize that we are being sacrificed. We will all be sacrificed; some of us much quicker than others. As it is now, so shall it be in our new nations, the Biafran youth, Ijaw youth, Oodua youth and Arewa youth to mention a few, shall become disposable indices in the scheme of things.

But until then, we will continue to have today and squander it on the altar of racism and greed. Today, it’s impossible to see any offspring of our ruling class engage or become embroiled in the familiar tragedies that mar our lives. It’s always the children from the breadlines, struggling middle class and backwaters that are involved. We are the youth divide traditionally expected and required to function and serve as unquestioning muscles and ordinary cannon fodder in the ruling class’ blueprint of pillage and destruction.

The decline of Nigeria is a story of gross injustices by the ruling class to the citizenry. But that is only an aspect of it, the greatest injustice is that meted out by individual citizen to self – the youth particularly. And this predominant malaise often plays out in our corruptibility and disinclination to foster a more humane leadership and society.

Today, we suffer declining standards of living, stagnant and falling wages that are hardly paid at due time; we suffer curtailment and absolute denial of our basic wages, long-term unemployment, slave labour, escalating crime wave, among other ills.

Together, we perpetuate gruesome realities of the weakest being crushed decisively and maniacally by the affluent and strong. Together, we perpetuate a story of unbridled sectarian, ethnic and corporate power that has taken our government hostage, overseen the dismantling of our cultural heritage, societal and entrepreneurial values.

But if the ruling class, in connivance with predatory nations and institutions from the so-called ‘first world’ is responsible for plundering our natural resources and bankrupting the nation, we, the youth, are responsible for even worse atrocities.

We serve as the tools by which the ruling class and its cohorts overseas plunder and destroy our nation. The virus of political corruption, the perverted belief that only political and material profit matters, has spread to distort our thoughts and understanding of right and wrong. Today, it manifests in endemic proportions plaguing our communities with religious and political terrorism, economic and cyber-terrorism to mention a few.

Today, the Nigerian society dies a gruesome death basically because we lay to waste, our youths and we, the latter, by our suicidal actions and thoughts, submit ourselves as hopeless prey to the Nigerian ruling class and their cohorts overseas.

Everyday encounters with gluttonous gangs of struggling youth reveals among other things, that many of us are the same social products as our peer from the aristocratic divide. Conditioned by life’s harshest vicissitudes to survive at all cost, we lay in wait, striving and bidding our time until we are ably positioned and strong enough to serve or rob the rich whose life we earnestly covet and decry.

A visit to any night club, party, religious organization or office still attests to this fact. Ambitious and upwardly mobile youth from the breadlines or struggling working class families engage in a variety of excesses to the applause of mates yearning to be in their shoes. Either as advance fee fraudsters, bankers, journalists, accountants, secretaries, factory hands or ordinary clerks, youths from the breadlines daily engages in a bitter, desperate struggle to chance on the shortest possible cut to sudden and stupendous wealth.

We seem beset by a greater and unexplainable fear beyond the fear of poverty amongst other harsh realities of their lives. Fear plays a greater part than hope: we are infinitely buoyed and obsessed with thoughts of the money that we could make or the possessions that might be taken from us or elude us, than of the joy and value that we might add to our own lives and to the future of our fatherland.

Most of us, like our more privileged peer crave the best of everything without actually sweating for it. And when we do sweat for it, our industry is tainted by vigorous dashes of impatience and duplicity. In our work, we are haunted by jealousy of competitors, and a fleeting interest in the actual work that has to be done. We spend greater time and passion defending unjust privileges that we are desperate to enjoy.

Such appalling youth constitute a greater segment of the human element expected to salvage Nigeria from eternal ruin and bloodbath. Consequently, our society becomes more rudderless and unstable and vulnerable, on our watch. Now that Nigeria as our fathers, ‘the wasted generation’ made it, and we the youth, aggravate it, have begun to collapse, we withdraw from the possibility of rebirth, and instead choose to exploit the infinite possibilities in our fragility and predicted collapse.

It’s about time the Nigerian youth started postponing immediate gratification and endure hard sacrifices spurred by conviction that the future can be better than the past. Beyond the politics and inanities of our existing ruling class and political parties, we face far more difficult questions at our moment in history: How do we reconcile reality with promises that have been made to us? How do we make the best of our circumstances at the backdrop of indefensible leadership failure and disillusionment of the citizenry?  How do we evolve and nurture to fruition, a new vision to help us deal with our gruesome realities, even as we chart a promising story of the future? How do we divorce ourselves from the pains and disappointments of the past – particularly those that many of amongst us had no stake in but yet internalize and perpetuate unexplainable miseries thereby?

How do we redefine “Peace, Unity and Progress” with our lust for “Life, Liberty and Happiness?”  How do we become more human than we are now?

• To be continued…

Posterity will remember Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo. Our descendants shall remember Gani Fawehinmi, Obafemi Awolowo, Tafawa Balewa and Nnamdi Azikiwe. Tomorrow, while our children’s children and their great-grandchildren recollect Nigeria’s golden age, they will say it was when such leaders of thought and men were alive.

They shall effortlessly forget “the boy who had no shoes” and yet emerged to become “President.” They wouldn’t think much of him and his cohorts in the ruling class even if they tried. Posterity shall remember the incumbent ruling class as the lower brutes that survived on the blood of the working class. They shall remember the working class as much lower brutes – forgettable elements in the annals of the Nigerian state.

Time will come when the Nigerian ruling class shall pay with blood, melancholia and despair. From six-feet under and grisly jail cells, they shall lust for life, desperately seeking a second chance with a kind of humble defeatism. Within that same breadth of history, the Nigerian working class shall pay with more tragedy, more misery and blood even as they whine and lust for a better tomorrow.

Until then, we shall continue to have “today” and yet fail to make the best of it. Now more than ever, we enumerate that pitiful lack of wisdom and aversion to freedom. Like the ruling class, we suffer a lack of intellect and knowledge – useful knowledge to be precise.

Thus even if spurred by inexorable courage to topple the elite and change our stars, our tragedies shall persist in frequency and extent. After we inter the bones of the last of the ruling class, we shall raise our heads to seek our next best hero only to find none.

That is because we who shall survive are as savage as the worst of the ruling class. Left to our own devices, we display an unforgivable lack of humaneness and character. Hence even if we could successfully seize power from the ruling class, we shall manage to remain not much in significance and sight. Simply put, were our dreams of change realizable, we shall always remain the next awful alternative.

Sophistry and deceit are the springboards from which much of our civilization evolve; add mediocrity, mindlessness and greed; and you have a perfect representation of the Nigerian youth.

We were wrong to think it a matter of years and decades that we would improve in citizenship and insight. We are unaware – like our base and iniquitous elite – that true knowledge essentially translates to being an emissary of truth, hope, superior culture and progress to both the literate and unschooled.

We forget too that the true essence of learning, that is, both intellectual and vocational learning is never simply to teach breadwinning, furnish teachers for the public schools or be an epitome of polite society. It should above all be the appendage of that fine adjustment between reality and the growing knowledge of life; an adjustment which discovers the secret of civilization and the solution to its seemingly intractable problems.

Insanely; to this end, we apply religion and milk it, we even get to abuse it. Thus by every manner of faith we commit the worst of inhuman transgressions – like playing God, terrorism and mass murder, lust for flesh and money.

Today, we lack that broad knowledge of what the world knows and strive to know of progress – which we could youth besides food, shelter and clothing is knowledge. For without it, we become basically unequipped and sorely handicapped to satisfy our need for food, shelter and clothing.

Thus the need to evolve and painstakingly propagate practicable knowledge and culture in unexploited and infinite capacity. Until we attain a broad, busy abundance of such understanding, not all the finest flavours of the proverbial national cake – be they oven-baked or sand-baked – can save us from our lusts and the affliction of the Nigerian ruling class.

The knowledge we flaunt is basically a ghost of human education that yet despises the enlightenment and empowerment of the masses. Under the foul stench of every form of slavery, we fight a lost battle for survival within the tainted air of social strife and entrepreneurial selfishness. The progress we seek is impeded by our lust for cynicism and delusions of grandeur. We starve and die for our lack of honest and broadly cultured men.

Patience, humility, good breeding and taste, comprehensive high schools and kindergartens, universities and polytechnics, industrial and technical colleges, teacher training colleges, literature, tolerance and tact – all these spring from proper learning and culture.

It’s time we engaged in pursuit and dissemination of knowledge devoid of loose and careless logic – like the type that produced and still produce a good number of the Nigerian ruling class. And the final product of our training must be neither a medical doctor nor journalist, but a man. And to make men, our learning process must be replete with ideals as well as broad, pure, practicable and inspiring ends of living – not desperate, sordid, money-grabbing sound bites. The end product of our educational process must have learnt to work for the glory of his calling, not simply for pecuniary gains. The intellectual must think for truth and progress, not for fame or the applause of the gallery.

And all these are attainable via human endeavour and yearning; by a conscious quest for learning; by founding the primary school for the secondary and the comprehensive high school for the polytechnic, university and teacher training colleges. If we could successfully weave such a system, we could finally establish an educational system and not a distortion of it; we could finally midwife multiple births and not ceaseless series of abortion.

To bring about such bliss requires the presence of substantially gifted men of courage and culture – a principal prerequisite we seem infinitely handicapped to fulfill. Thus we have shadows of men constituting the Nigerian ruling elite and youth. Consequently, we have learnt to live off the attainments of men of stature accessible now in history and diminishing daguerreotypes.

The ruling class couldn’t be bothered if our educational system is wrecked beyond redemption; the philosophy of its intransigence is discernible in its greed and brazen disregard for the future even as Nigeria shamelessly treads the trail of erstwhile educationally-challenged neighbours in Africa.

The politics of greed and incompetence of the incumbent administration demands that it neglects the core issues militating against the success of the Nigerian education enterprise – like inadequate funding, poor research facilities, inadequate infrastructure, outdated lecturers and teaching methods, obsolete libraries and laboratories and the degenerate politics of discrimination between Nigeria’s polytechnic and university enterprise.

Hence the fraudulence and apparent cowardliness of the incumbent administration in addressing Nigeria’s unending educational crisis – simply because the final products end up to be you and me and every minion unfortunate to belong to the Nigerian working class.

It is therefore, the duty of every constituent of the Nigerian working class to see that in the future competition for our mandate, the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the humane, unpopular and true.

• To be continued…

There is a patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours, the police constable at an illicit checkpoint, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the public officer on his perch – this patience belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts its prey.

Today however, a terrifying thing has happened; of the ubiquitous prey, a more frightening ogre has evolved: the contemporary Nigerian youth. And by his emergence, we suffer a throwback to the most terrifying of humanity’s savage past. His emergence portends a physical and mental conundrum of sort; the consequence is seen and felt all about us.

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

Today, the Nigerian youth live through each day hardly contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanizing squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate – thus they exhibit no conscious effort to better their lot.

Almost as impulsively as the beasts of the wild, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought that by sufficient endeavour, they just might improve their living conditions.

However, a certain percentage of the nation’s youth guided by personal ambition; consciously strive in thought and will, to attain more privileged status that remains the exclusive preserve of more fortunate members of the society. But these very few hardly worry to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves. This explains the number of self-seeking and treacherous ‘human rights activists,’ ‘women’s rights activists,’ journalists and columnists parading our streets.

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

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

More unfortunate sections of the Nigerian youth are hopelessly ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and disillusionment, apprehensive through the imminent danger of chastisement by the holders of power, and morally defective owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To excite among such youth any conscious quest to improve the status quo proves basically a hopeless task, as antecedents of such efforts have proven.

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

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

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

It’s the way we are programmed to live. I’d say we possess an overwhelming and oft-convincing inclination to self-destruct, thus our lack of a coherent and defensible political ideology essential to the evolution of a progressive leadership and state.

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

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

There is an urgent need for the Nigerian youth to consciously evolve in thought and will, in pursuit of a more balanced social order. Such conscious evolution can only be achieved by a re-orientation in scholarship and purification of thought and action.

The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be clinically reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of work and wages, families and homes, of morals and the true value of life. These problems must be resolvable by an average youth by reason of his constitution and exposure. This informs a greater need for study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes in the journey towards the avoidance and reduction to the barest minimum of future foibles.

The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.

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

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

Hence they would be able to understand that such social enterprise and gesture towards change must be mooted and achieved by the youth themselves in further substantiation of their capacities to assimilate the culture and common sense of modern civilization, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to posterity.

• To be continued…

Death will be that undiscovered country that we shall all visit. In that country, everybody shall be stripped of titles and accumulated wealth. Nobody shall be referred to as “Your Excellency,” “OON, CON, GCON” “Africa’s richest billionaire” and so on. In that country, the truth of our follies and the septic belly of our idiocies shall become even more pronounced and visible to all. Those of us, the billionaires particularly, who send so-called “prayerfully powerful” Alfas on holy pilgrimage to Mecca to seek for Allah’s forgiveness and infinite mercies on their behalf shall realize that they had simply been foolish. No amount of prayers-by-proxy, sacrifices and so on, shall move Almighty Allah to forgive them and grant them eternal peace and paradise if their handiwork is tantamount to evil.

They shall all die eventually. It wouldn’t matter if they are buried in Victoria Court Cemetery or Atan Cemetery; it wouldn’t matter if their remains are unrecoverable in the event of their demise in a ghastly accident or assassination. Immediately they pass on, they shall begin to pay for their handiwork like the rest of us. They shan’t escape the trials of the grave.

No priest, highfaluting ceremony of absolution from ‘original sin,” redemption and so on shall ennoble the Christians among us with the “infinite grace” of Almighty God if they remain evil at heart. If they like, let them build as many gigantic Churches and temples as they like, let their offerings and tithe tower beyond the rafters and sky-high, it shall never make them pious before God. May it not make them pious before God.

No priest or Alfa can intercede with God on our behalf. We shall all die: President, governor, first lady, special advisers, ministers, accountant, journalist, activist, dibias, babalawos and so on. And even our tiniest depravity shall be summoned to witness against us.

Those who profess to be godly live like they answer to some blind, stupid, and partial god. Almighty Allah is not stupid, silly or blind. Jehovah is neither partial nor handicapped by greed for worship houses, outlandish sacrifices and exaggerated humility. Chineke, Eledumare is surely no perverted wimp that we could corrupt by wile and insincere tokens of sacrifice and worship.

May he judge us all according to our handiwork; He shall judge us all according to our handiwork. In the face of such imminent reality, it’s amusing me to see the ruling class administer our lives like they are answerable to no one. It’s even more bizarre to see many of us, the youth particularly, lend themselves as willing tools to the antics and designs of the ruling class. Many a self-styled professor of truth and champion of the masses’ rights have turned into junkyard dogs and dung dogs for the same ruling class they used to criticize.

Talk is cheap really and Nigerians love to talk a good game. That is why everyone: literate, semi-literate and illiterate, display flawless capacities to decipher and summarize the political and socio-economic problems afflicting Nigeria, just for the fun of it or the benefit of applause.

Besides a few good men and real heroes who have staked their lives and personal comfort to protest the gross ineptitude and bestiality of the ruling class and the society at large, most of us have accepted to remain acquiescent; when we are criticized for being unacceptably docile, we respond that there is infinite wisdom in choosing our battles wisely and keeping our mouth shut.

Nonetheless, we continue to mount the soapbox in our living rooms, around our dinner tables and in the ubiquitous ‘beer parlours’ criticizing our leaders, casting blames and justifying our pathetic and apologetic existence.

The tragedy subsists in our customary lamentation about the state of the Nigerian nation; every time our conscience is roused with a damning report, as it is still customary of us, more racist politicians and activists suggest that we split and go our separate ways touting it as the only solution to our league of extraordinary problems.

There is no wisdom in secession unless it serves to eliminate the same bogeys that make Nigeria a living hell for us. Secession, I maintain, is the fruit of ‘reason’ that we need to be wary of and I will continue to say this hoping every prospective muscle – that is, the youth – by which the separatists hope to achieve their dreams of dissolution, would listen and learn to let the secessionists risk their skins and their lineages to actualize their platitudes.

Let every political godfather, public office hopeful and so on send their sons and wives and daughters on to the streets to wield cutlasses, guns and bombs. Let the ruling class recall their children from their Ivy League schools and exclusive mansions abroad to march on the streets and hack to death perceived oppositions to their political ambitions. Let every youth from humble background and the breadlines mobilize instead to collectively seek an end to the ruling class’ reign of terror.

Violence and bloodshed is never the answer; secession is never the answer to our woes.

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

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

Even when we see through the promises of the separatists, we choose to ignore it for the love of paltry inducements and instant gratification. It’s about time the Nigerian youth started postponing immediate gratification and endure hard sacrifices spurred by conviction that the future can be better than the past.

But we face a far more difficult problem at our moment in history. What do you promise youth who have been told they can have anything they want, who are repeatedly urged to seek the best of all possible circumstances without shedding sweat for it? How do you tell them that “the good times,” as they have known them or heard of them, will definitely come back?

The Nigerian youth needs a new vision to help them deal with reality, a promising story of the future that helps them let go of the pains and disappointments of the past. We need a grand vision of possibilities that Nigerians may pursue and dream on: the country’s rich socio-cultural and political tradition, the right of all citizens to larger lives. Such dreams should never be about getting richer than the guy next door or accumulating obscene wealth for applause and to show off but the right to live life more fully and engage more expansively the elemental possibilities of human existence.

 

• To be continued…