Category: Olatunji Ololade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only a select few, as Kperogi noted, “are accorded the honour of addressing a joint session of the United States Congress. Certainly no Nigerian head of state has been accorded this honour since Tafawa Balewa.” According to the website of the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, since 1874 when the King of Hawaii first addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, there have been only 112 such privileges granted to foreign leaders and dignitaries.

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

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

The Nigerian leadership today could be likened to men gifted with the mentality of the hyena and the sensibility of the guinea fowl. The same may be said of the Nigerian citizenry. Our lust for unearned riches, acclaim and the west’s approval illustrates the shallowness and weakness of the Nigerian adult’s ignorance and awfully preadolescent mind. It reiterates a very shrill cry for help that’s at once self-seeking, infantile and retrograde. It is what makes Nigerian leaders pilfer and deplete the nation’s treasury to embark on idiotic trips abroad to learn western-european governance styles to be ineffectually applied back home. It is what makes Nigerian leaders throw their doors open to every visiting foreign cub reporter even as they deny seasoned journalists back home, similar opportunities. During such interviews, such characters persistently expose themselves to ridicule, presenting themselves as inveterate idiots by their comportment and utterances which are tailored to glorify the disturbing plots and agenda of the foreign newshounds.

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

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

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

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

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

• To be continued…

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

Life as a freeman is simply unthinkable for a Nigerian nigger. It’s a dream come true and yet an overwhelming reality which bodes too devastatingly for his kind, our kind. We who are ‘free’ do not know how to be free. To our former colonial masters, letting go of the yokes by which they enslaved us renders them open to a culture shock; rapists who were used to predatory living and being waited upon suddenly have to be responsible for their own lives. It’s like a mad experiment pitting medieval apes in the cockpit of 21st century modernism; the effect is awful and redolent of duplicity and base humanity.

But the fault is never with the colonialist; Nigeria has no business blaming Britain for the pitiful husk our fatherland is fast becoming. Neither should we blame America, Asia or the rest of Europe for whatever misfortune becomes our lot.

It’s getting too old now. It’s undeniably tiresome too; that entitlement to victimhood and loser mentality we have learnt to project. Decades after we attained freedom or at least, a semblance of it from Britain, we remain disposable gourds for alien trolls to sip from. What happened to the popular saw about being exploitable to the extent of the customary fool’s willingness to be exploited?

The British Prime Minister (PM) recently threatened to withdraw so-called aids (which are in actuality, chains) from Nigeria if the country refuses to repeal its anti-gay law that stipulates 14 years imprisonment for anyone found engaging in homosexual liaisons. Canada and United States lent their voices to the disgraceful clamour and desperate bid to legitimize psycho-sexual perversions on the Nigerian people. Even more worrisome is Britain’s recent decision to impose a £3, 000 (about N750, 000) visa bond requirement on Nigerians seeking to travel to Britain. They will forfeit the money if they overstay in Britain after their visa has expired.

I do not blame Britain for its decision since the country has every right to determine what laws or criteria facilitates or hampers its immigration system and foreign relations. I blame Nigeria for putting herself in a position that empowers every depraved lecher to defile her from behind and ‘missionary’ style in the full glare of the whole wide world.

Shall we take this too smilingly? Already, the Nigerian leadership has responded in its characteristic fashion threatening to ‘retaliate’ in kind if Britain fails to rescind its contemptuous decision. But even Britain knows that Nigeria’s response is likable to the habitual drunk’s vengeful fart to every callous romp he witnesses of his wife and the bachelor next door.

If Nigeria were to be serious, she would respond by demanding that every British tourist, businessman or expatriate seeking to travel to Nigeria post a bond of £300, 000 before being allowed into Nigeria as a precondition that they would customarily seek not to evade tax, abuse their domestic staff and employees and further, must accept to be paid their salaries only in Naira and into Nigerian banks. But this would be deemed preposterous by Britain and hordes of Nigerians desperately trying to be more British than the Brit.

The Nigerian government should be able to pull this off knowing we do not need Britain but Britain desperately needs us – just as the whole of Europe needs Africa to survive. Should every continent shut its doors to the other and look inwardly to chart its path to the prosperous future of its dreams, the African continent would stand in greater advantage, with the right attitude, conscientious leadership and citizenship but this is a discuss well suited for another day and another forum.

Today, let’s deal with Nigeria’s constant humiliation in the hands of Britain and the rest of the world. We are to blame for every humiliation we are forced to endure at home and abroad. And this is because we have failed to evolve. Many have argued that it is only fair that Nigeria experiences such humiliation given the quality of local and global citizenship of the average Nigerian. Unemployment, pervasive poverty and terrorism at home force many Nigerians to scramble for safe havens abroad but how really safe are the safe heavens abroad? What if the so-called ‘lands of greener pasture’ decide to repatriate every Nigerian immigrant in future?

A few eggheads have recommended practicable solutions to Nigeria’s recurrent malaise of bad leadership but more often than not, their wonderful and highfaluting solutions and theories of progressive change, reverberate as blandishments to Caucasian wisdom – which further establishes the fact that many a self-styled intellectual revolutionary and paper tiger is substantially a colonial apologist still smitten by the vaunted wisdom and altruism of the so-called ‘first world.’

The crises in modern Europe and America: financial meltdown, unemployment, mediocre youths, sexual perversions, state-sponsored terrorism, the elevation of might above morals and simple human decencies and racism among other things, reveals their ordinariness and punctures farfetched arguments of their invincibility, impeccable humanity and wisdom. Hence there is no point elevating the Caucasians above every vile or ill that makes the Nigerian spite and wish the worst on his fatherland.

The task before us is clear enough. Let us seek to be good. Without the beaming brightness of the simple decencies and morality that makes a rustic village tower higher than Elysium, Nigeria will continue to set adrift. Good people produce good leaders. Bad people produce and ennoble bad leadership. The attitude of the Nigerian mind towards citizenship, democracy and other political measures of self-determination should be divested of the prevalent conceptions of government.

Some of our greatest problems in this country, besides corruption, are racism and greed. We need not be handicapped by these. The future of Nigeria lies in our hands. Sovereign National Conference or not, no solution will work under the leadership and citizenship of unrepentant racists and self-aggrandizing characters like you and me.

It is time to heal. It is time for the Nigerian youth to take his rightful place in the scheme of things. In order to heal, the Nigerian youth need to create and unite under a socio-political platform immune to and jealously guarded against the madness of materialism, racism and intractable wile characteristic of the current ruling class.

We need to identify the demons that drive the ruling class and dispossess our minds of every vanity that makes us habitable to similar fiends. The tragedy of our generation subsists in our seemingly uncontainable prospects and our desperation to be lorded over and contained, at a price. If we are indeed more endowed in intellect and humanity than the current ruling class, let us stop being disposable pawns in its politics of bitterness and plunder.

The Nigerian youth, irrespective of personal politics and tribe, should learn to live and strive, united in common effort, in pursuit of a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in matters of politics and individuality.

The choice is ours to make; we either choose to remain a bunch of fools and clueless agitators forever, or we could choose to leave the current leadership to the madness it perpetuates while we chart fresh paths to the future of our dreams.

• To be continued…

It is not what you call him, but what he answers to that matter most. This minute, another innocent child is born into the world of the Nigerian nigger. He will grow up pitifully, as just another poor black ant. His parents shall name him Clinton, Dave, Cregg, Oliver, Richard, Lovett, Colet, Da Silva, Humphrey, Jackson, to mention a few. His real names: Akanbi, Chiedu, Chimaroke, Isichei and so on shall become his “native names” or “middle names;” names he shall grow to loathe and be ashamed of. At a tender age, he shall be taught to despise anything and everything Nigerian, by parents who will persistently bemoan the erosion of the Nigerian culture.

That impressionable child will be enrolled in schools that teach the superiority of western civilization. He shall be taught to think of Africans, Nigerians in particular, as an inferior race. He shall be psychologically defrauded and taught to accept his place as member of a hostage race and generation. As he grows up, he too shall learn to evolve a masochistic appetite for alien norms, unearned riches, undeserved acclaim and everlasting humiliation. Time and over again, he shall learn to assimilate and project “imported condescension” as the next best palliative to his innate malaise.

Like his forbears, he will get too impatient for his daily dosage of indoctrination and imported disdain and thus quit gawking at celebrated perversion on cable TV, social media and foreign news publications to be part of it. He shall doggedly sweat his way through standoffish, ill-bred and disdainful foreign customs and immigration officials in order to enjoy his share of dishonor and racial profiling abroad. Abroad, he shall labour to be part of what kills him. Like hordes of Nigerians slaving away abroad, he shall strive and try the patience of reluctant Caucasian hosts with his recalcitrant corruption and doggedness for eternal humiliation.

He shall crowd the sidewalks of New York, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and London, sweeping the streets, doing the dishes and washing the anuses of elderly Caucasians with the shameless carriage of “a nigger who would rather die than return home.”

And if he is fortunate to come from a privileged background at home, abroad he shall dwell, enabled and hampered by the lowliness of his mental skies. He shall desperately seek to impress caucasian course mates and neighbours with extravagant parties and insane acquisitions. He shall traipse the largely well kept streets – by immigrants like him – of London and New York in his desperate quests to purchase monumental forgetfulness at the mall. The over-celebrated malls of America and Europe shall continually whet his yen and titillate his airs. They shall become heaven to the ‘hellish’ markets of Ajegunle and Oyingbo ‘Ibo-made’ products.

He is everything that is wrong with the black race. So pronounced is his inferiority complex that the tragedies of his civilization perpetually wail in its littlest details; take for instance, the contemporary Nigerian’s obsession to host extravagant wedding ceremonies and birthday parties abroad to the benefit of the host state and loss of valuable revenue abroad.

It is even more amazing to see him obsess about foreign football leagues while the local football league suffers a slow, gruesome death. Like tadpole in Iju-Ishaga road crater, he believes if he could wade in the puddle for so long, he would grow scales and scissor-tail like an alligator in the English wild.

An inelegant ‘mumu,’ he keeps pretending to channel joy and fulfillment from the attainments of another land while he bemoans the “poor leadership” that’s “killing Nigeria.” In response, he seeks escape by renouncing his roots. He conveniently forgets that, no matter how long the tabby cat pretends to roar like a lion, it will forever remain a cat…a whiny, pitiful parlour pet.

The Nigerian youth has learnt to justify his moral claim to the successes of western civilization. He has learnt to intone that the so-called “first world” was built from the blood and sweat of his slave ancestors thus his right to a stake in the “first world.” Thus today, the average Nigerian continually celebrates his cultural graduation from the servitude of slavery to being verbally nettled condescendingly as a “third world nigger” and subsequently distinguished by association with his perceived level of evolution.

The Nigerian nigger no doubt personifies the imagery of the black nigger in Chika Onyeani’s “Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success: A Spider Web Doctrine.” He suitably illustrates Onyeani’s depiction of the black race as a consumer race and not a productive race. “We are a conquered race and it is utterly foolish for us to believe that we are independent. The Black Race depends on other communities for its culture, its language, its feeding, and its clothing.” “Despite enormous natural resources,” he says, “Blacks are economic slaves because they lack the ‘killer-instinct’ and ‘devil-may-care’ attitude of the caucasian, as well as the ‘spider web economic mentality’ of the asian.” Onyeani calls for economic liberation through hard work, self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and fiscal discipline; he advocates building of better black neighborhoods instead of moving to hostile white neighborhoods; he appeals for unity, because “When spider webs unite, they can be a lion” (Ethiopian proverb). Onyeani condemns self-destructive behaviors such as ethnic warfare, dictatorship, black-on-black crime, and slavery in Africa.

But fitting as it is to the Nigerian malaise, Onyeani’s literature is just another version of Johann F. Blumenbach’s human racial classification in which the “caucasian” is at the top of the hierarchy and the black is at the bottom. Capitalist Nigger is also reminiscent of the French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s “primitive” or “prelogical mind,” which he originally attributed to the Africans; and Hegel’s exclusion of sub-Saharan Africa from the world history among others.

Like Onyeani I believe in the liberating character of the truth. However, I do not subscribe to his legacy of disbelief about Africa which permeates European imagination. Instead of confronting old stereotypes, Onyeani recites them with relish, thereby refreshing erroneous notions in the reader’s mind.

His description of the African as non-productive, lazy, slavish, Neanderthal, dishonest, undisciplined and genetically unable to take care of himself is contemptible even as it speaks to the core of the Nigerian nigger.

I do not agree with Onyeani for his “Capitalist Nigger” epitomizes the worst of blasé witticism that serve like double-edged sword, decapitating plausible realities and counter-arguments in its quest for applause. Yet in his subtle narcissism subsists truths, relative truths if you like.

It rediscovers and plumbs the depths of inferiority plaguing the Nigerian nigger. It is what makes the Nigerian Presidency nurture insults from perverse caucasian governments threatening to withdraw financial aids if Nigeria fails to legitimize same-sex copulation and marriage. It is what makes an average Nigerian lose his head in arrant madness over foreign soccer leagues. It is what makes the Nigerian lust to be less than to the pleasure of the so-called “first world.”

It is an emotional attachment, a bond of interdependence between captive and captor that develops when someone threatens your life, takes away your freedom, and doesn’t kill you.

It is what causes the Nigerian to bark like a stray dog, pitifully seeking the collar end of the leash of the “first world.”

Today, we struggle to turn white or some blurred pallid shade of the British or American. Some desperately seek to turn French, German, Ghanaian or South African even as you read. Nobody wishes to be Nigerian. Nobody seeks to be a Nigerian; and the few instances that we think we do are irredeemably marred by our conscious and desperate bids to perpetuate base sentimentality and cosmetic norms as the essence of the Nigerian spirit.

What is the Nigerian spirit? What culture of humanity best codifies the core and immutable individuality of the true Nigerian? Who is a Nigerian? Today, we live in the world of the Nigerian nigger. Niggers occupy our public offices and worship houses. Niggers parade our corridors of power and lord it over us with condescension and élan reminiscent of ‘slave-making ants’ on 17th century western cotton fields and sugarcane plantations. Niggers constitute our ruling class and with unabashed silliness and arrogance, they treat us like lesser niggers on a slave plantation.

And don’t we just love to be less than? Even when oppressed and irresponsibly shortchanged, we choose to be docile, bending over unquestioningly before the brute force of fellow niggers treating us with disdain. I am not a nigger. I do not know about you but being a Nigerian nigger has made it possible for most of us to get insulted in places where the average American “Negro,” or to be politically correct, “African-American” could never be insulted. Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Mali, USA, United Kingdom, Brazil Greece, Ghana, South Africa, Algeria, Mauritania,, Kenya, Cameroun, Botswana and Ivory Coast to mention a few have learnt to mock and scoff at the Nigerian nigger.

Being a Nigerian nigger is more humiliating than it seems, but we who are the objects of ridicule have grown to cuddle disdain like a day old babe. We have learnt to love it. Being a Nigerian nigger means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means clinging with relish to life amid psychological death. It means watching your children grow up with palls of inferiority in their mental skies. It means committing cultural and mental hara-kiri and then wandering about dissatisfied as a tormented ghost.

Being a Nigerian nigger also implies being the one that inflicts such hurt and untold hardship on fellow nationals. It means spewing webs of brilliant and not-too brilliant arguments, materialism and ethno-religious mayhem “in the interest of our nation,” according to the intent and designs of our “concerned,” and covetous neighbours.

Being a Nigerian nigger means fretting over such inconsequential things like an American President’s refusal to visit Nigeria. There is no sense in fretting over President Barack Obama of USA’s deliberate snub of Nigeria on his recent visits to Africa. But we choose to fret over it anyway. Many a columnist and soapbox critic have blown it out of proportion and still labour desperately to incite apprehension and outrage over the decision of the American President to ignore Nigeria.

President Obama has every right to snub Nigeria. In fact, I hope Nigeria suffers many more occurrences of such perceived disregard by many more powerful leaders of the world. Perhaps it will inspire us all to get our acts right and conduct our affairs in manners that would make us deserving of patronage and recognition rather than the pathetic wimps we have become, craving and demanding for unearned greatness and attention.

Beneath our terror over President Obama’s snubbing of Nigeria subsists a shameful reality; the desperation for unearned acclaim and approval of Western superpowers. This smacks of prevalent inferiority complex and insignificance of the contemporary Nigerian.

Why would any columnist or soapbox critic belabor the American President’s snobbery of Nigeria? That many of us proficiently personify the hopelessness and dire inconsequentiality of cowed American niggers indeed excites some ponderous metaphor; yet any conscious attempt to stimulate our wildly weak and untamed minds is tantamount to igniting a ravenous and uncontrollable fire. Need it be emphasized that any progressive effort at impeding our rudderless enterprises is to incite our volatile minds to a harvest of violence and bloodletting in defense of the status quo. What can I say? We are simply wired to self-destruct.

Like Akin Akindele rightly observed in his ponderous literature, “The Military Franchise,” “the west has succeeded in conscripting most of the world to revolve around it” and we Africans, Nigerians particularly, have sadly settled to play “third” fiddle, in shameless actualization of our label as a “third world nation.” This shamefulness continually manifests in daily, in our approach to governance and determination of national affairs: Nigeria has become so politically and socio-economically inept that we have made the nation a dumping ground for all manners of perverseness, substandard products and corruption. From the touted legitimization of homosexuality to substandard goods and food items, Nigeria has evolved into a latrine for the worst of western-european rot and perversion

I am not saying that there is nothing to learn from our western neighbours but we are equally in position and even stand at better advantage to teach them so much. It’s the way the universe is ordered; every race has its role and significance to world civilization. But despite the fact that the Egyptians – though Egypt has been reduced to a puppet state – succeeded in putting Africa on the world map, no other African nation, not even Nigeria, the delusive “Giant of Africa” has succeeded in distinguishing itself as a worthy propagator of a particular civilization.

By resigning to our current role as a global pawn and toilet paper, we have inadvertently shunted our race into playing “third” and disposable fiddle, like glorified eejits eternally strung to minister on to the desperately justified ego of the western-european. Even more appalling is our moral claim to western civilization. Many amongst us, the so-called intellectuals particularly, continually argue that we have as much stake in the western-european wealth and civilization. And to drive home this fact, they attend the best of western-european schools in pursuit of over-hyped Ivy League education that has so far enabled and empowered a “globally distinguished rare breed” of scholars, administrators and economists to administer the most savage policies on to our defiled and battered nations of the “third world.”

Being chic and modern means being unashamedly western or european. That is why our three arms of government persistently embark on wasteful and disgraceful trips abroad to learn western-european techniques of governance – I do not know the purpose of these idiotic ventures as they usually come back backward and even more inured in their brand of ‘sophisticated ignorance;’ apology to the presidential nigger who popularized the term ‘sophisticated ignorance.’

Worrisome as it is that we naively project cosmetic norms and culture as the core of the Nigerian civilization, it’s more amusing to see our women burn their souls and burn their hair as they hide both under scalding strands of western-european feminism, ‘Brazilian hair’ and animal hair in their desperate bid to look caucasian. Even we men are still overwhelmed and haunted by the inferiority complex that plagued our forbears that we still pass it on from one generation to the other. We are hostages to cultural debriefing by alien civilizations.