The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Useful idiots (3)

    Useful idiots (3)

    We speak in several pitiful tongues. And every tongue reels a different story of identical loss and misery. And so one comes to callousness, a savage ruthlessness and culture of protest that drives us to ruin our world; dateline Boko Haram, MEND, Ombatse and the complex bigotry, avarice and bloodlust characteristic of all. Yet this page will not contain the genocide, amorality and grotesque body count we have learnt to perpetrate not because they are too horrendous and unwieldy to keep tab of but because there is neither wisdom nor tact in rehashing the consequences of our towering idiocy and bloodlust.

    We blame the older generation for everything. We claim they created a very difficult world for us to live in; a world that is rigged to booby-trap our efforts to survive and that is why many of us fail. We also accuse the ruling class of keeping us unemployed, prone to corruption, exploitation, crime and the devastation of our economy and social infrastructure. We accuse them of denying us access and right to the Nigerian dream.

    What have we done with such world that they have given us? What are we doing to make it better for you and me and the generation that will succeed us? Nothing. Rather than evolve in thought and attitude, we choose to rant impotently and wallow in self-pity. And when we choose to productively engage our faculties, our conscious quest is marred by our inclinations to self-destruct.

    If our world is ruined, we are to blame for it. This is because we are major actors in every tragedy and perpetrators of every calamity that accentuates our ruin. We are the hoodlums causing chaos at random, according to the whims of benevolent godfathers. We are the policemen mounting road blocks to fleece hardworking compatriots of the little money they manage to make, everyday. When they refuse to cooperate, we simply shoot them to death.

    We are the bankers pilfering the lifesavings of the poor. We are the bank chiefs stripping Peter to pay Paul and robbing the downtrodden to feed our wantonness and greed. We are wives to the thieving governor, and gigolo to the rogue bank chief. We are the journalists who sold out, the watchdog who became lapdogs and then, dung-dogs. We are armed robbers and thieves. We are the activists exploiting the downtrodden to perpetuate our grand schemes of greed.

    No matter the ills visited upon our generation, we lost the right to howl and cry ‘foul!’ the moment we agreed to do everything and anything to make money, including serving as instruments for the attainment of the perverse goals of the criminal ruling class. Shame that we have to look unto the same generation that we accuse of ruining our world to take measures necessary to save our world. The current ruling class won’t save us. They can’t. And that is because like you and me, they are held captive by greed, irrationality and base immoralities.

    Every generation considers itself uniquely challenged like we do and each generation truly is, in different ways. But I don’t buy into over-generalizations and self pity. Like we accuse older generations before us, successive generations will accuse us of ruining their world claiming we had better chances to resolve our crises and recreate the world that they would inherit from us.

    Our sense of entitlement goads us to believe that we are entitled to a good, fair life but for the ruling class and older generation that thwarts our dreams of bliss. When the older generation claim that we are ill-educated and unemployable, we respond in kind, claiming that they render us so with visionless leadership and substandard education. Truth is, school is a bore to many of us. And artisanship doesn’t quite do it for us. We breeze through school and apprenticeship unenthusiastically, thinking that somewhere or somehow, something would give and we would chance on bliss.

    Notwithstanding, some of us enter the labour market thinking it wouldn’t hurt to be exploited a little. Having being raised on the mantra that “Slow and steady wins the raise and tiny drops make an ocean,” we subject our will to the grindstone and stoically tread the path of obedience and honest labour. But the path of industry and honesty hardly ever pay off in the long run.

    Eventually, we realize that the system is designed to thwart our dreams while enabling the dreams of the exploitative one per cent at the top, and we get mad. We get mad because our leaders do not see us as human beings with cosmic value and rights anymore. But despite our dissatisfaction, we keep them in power and keep asking them for handouts. Our rage and rant hardly ever articulates our towering need for realistic opportunities.

    We do not choose to be treated with dignity. That is why the government and our employers become entitled to take away our dignity. That is why we are entitled to expect nothing from our politicians anymore. We should be ashamed of our sense of entitlement. We should be embarrassed by our failure as a generation. We should be ashamed that we go through life thinking the world’s a sweepstake.

    We believe the world is for the taking by a lottery; this is understandable as a carrot on a stick that the top one per cent – comprising government and big business – perpetually dangle before us. Thus the Nigerian dream has evolved from a promise and belief that every Nigerian will get to have a good life, a job they enjoy, a generous paycheck, affordable housing, healthcare and transportation and a secure retirement, into some reality show fantasy and a pipedream.

    Today, the Nigerian dream comprises a tall fantasy that every Nigerian will get to live a charmed life. It offers attractive fantasies of palatial residences in exclusive neighbourhoods home and abroad, fancy cars, easy money, consequence-free indolence, sex, fraudulence and violence to mention a few. The Nigerian youth consider these perks their birthright and they heartily pursue them on the streets and now ubiquitous reality TV shows where parents and their children from relatively humble backgrounds engage in funfest of foolishness and inordinate lust for unearned riches. The tragedy of this development resonates in the number of‘has-beens’ and reality show runners-up still loitering the red carpets for the barest chance to hug the limelight for no justifiable reason or attainment.

    Each generation has a responsibility to wisely develop itself and become indispensable to the world despite all odds. It is the only way we could equip ourselves to take over the country’s leadership and use the resources and power available to us to provide this generation and the next, a secure, sustainable country that will be stronger than the one inherited.

    We need to stop whining and begin to take action now to reverse the rapid decline of our country. If we wait until we are older, it will be too late. Life in the future will be worse.

    Our hubris and sense of entitlement is sickening and truly mind boggling. It’s about time we seek our Nigerian dream not because we are ‘special’ but because we truly deserve it.

     

     

    • To be continued…

  • Useful idiots (1)

    Useful idiots (1)

    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 the swollen belly of our pride. 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 mature.

    It takes courage and an enormous reserve of decency to evolve a humane ideology and establish it. We haven’t the courage and 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 ills of fraudulent and impatient youth, perverted values, greed, racism, disillusionment with study 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.

  • If

    If

    If we were truly as intelligent as we think we are, this will be the moment in which we understand that the choices we made had never served but impeached us. This is the moment in which we agonize over what consequences we shall get to endure or what indescribable joys we will get to enjoy, according to the choices we made.

    If we had truly given voice to our rage and pain by casting our votes for the candidates truly deserving of them, we would know, from this moment henceforth; if President Goodluck Jonathan is the Messiah that we had longed to find. This moment henceforth, we will get to know if every state governor, senator, local council chairman, among others, actually measure up to statesmanship we are yet to enjoy.

    This moment henceforth, we shall begin to understand the many aces and inadequacies of “If.” And so shall we finally come to terms with wantonness, folly, and cowardliness by which posterity will define and judge us.

    If only we could ever get past “If”and its politics of regret and expectation. If President Goodluck Jonathan would scorn the beaten path, he would offer us more than time-worn “life-boats”that basically, incapacitates and obscures.

    If Mr President-elect truly intends to be true to his words, he would be done with his promises of better life, free amenities and infrastructure for in the normal conditions of existence, it is the duty of the government to provide among other things; good roads and electricity, security and a stable economy; for we do pay for them – quite painfully too; from our income as tax.

    If President Jonathan would do his bit, then he would foster a prompt eradication of the canker of unemployment; then he would seek with intent to actualize, lasting solutions to the monstrosities of bad roads, substandard education and health sectors, insecurity, erratic power supply, redundant refineries, elephant projects, ill-equipped hospitals, pervasive poverty et al. Then he would motivate his associates and fellow public officers in power to hearken and seek determinable end to the people’s cries and grunts of pain.

    And if every serving state governor among others would aspire to the noblest deeds in statesmanship and ardour, then every city and every village would be a haven for tourists to explore. If Governor Babatunde Fashola would extend his politics of progress and expansion to the enclaves that no one could manage to accept, still, as dazzling emblems of his mega-city project, then every street and every neighbourhood in Agege, Abule-Egba, and Agbado-Ijaye to mention a few, would become attractions no one could ignore.

    If Governor Babatunde Fashola would accord his studious stare beyond the bounds of Yaba, Ikoyi, Ikeja, Victoria Island et al, then he would find that there are resources yet untapped within the enclaves no one would gallantly identify as brilliant archetypes of his mega-city project. Then every lane and every settlement in Ayobo, Iyana Ipaja, Ipaja, Ajasa-Command would be a sight for the living. Then every street and every neighbourhood in Ahmadiyya, Meiran, Iju-Ishaga, Akute, Ojodu and those impenetrable streets of Ajegunle, just before Ogun state would become more habitable for every visitor and every resident alike.

    And if Ogun state governor-elect, Ibikunle Amosu, is truly the Messiah the natives claim he would be, he would endeavour to reverse every anomaly that has been foisted upon the state. He would re-energise the state by repairing the damaged roads of Abeokuta, Sango-Ota and the link roads by which Itele meshes with Lagos. He would make the filth in Ita-Elega, Itoku, Itoko, Isale-Ake, Onikolobo, Quarry road, Adatan, to mention a few disappear; he would improve the lot of Abeokuta, the land of industry, paramount royalty and the cerebral.

    If every incoming governor, local council chairman, could aspire to such noble ideal as the provision of good roads among other vital infrastructure, then, the mountain dwellers of Sankwala and their neighbours in Gashaka-Gumti, Taraba state would have no further need to travel across the border into Cameroon to seek good medical care. Then they would have no need to emigrate to till other people’s lands in Cameroon, while our land lay fallow in our motherland.

    If every public office holder would accept that we do not live for the benefit and love of “lifeboats” and that no patronising politics would serve as fertile earth in which to sow our seeds of hope, development and prosperity, they could chance on the means to improve our lives. And they could learn to institute veritable means by which we could attain it, like conscientious leadership cum service in the interest of the people.

    If they all would accept that poverty, ignorance, illness, corruption and strife as other afflictions of their kind are hardly metaphysical emergencies as we have been made to believe, they could finally attain a grasp of true statesmanship and governance.

    If they all would seek to obliterate these anomalies and improve upon our lives within the bounds of conscious efforts in pursuit of those values we seek – particularly those we are too effeminate to seek, they could eventually become the worthy representatives we have always wished that they would become.

    If every incoming public officer would evolve a personal ethic wholly derived to elevate the fundamental nature of our universe, then they could be able to revert that time-worn and insidious altruism that has been our lot.

    Then the Nigerian state could be able to refute such menacing philosophy that that propagates the notion that every citizen by his nature and stature is helpless and doomed. Then every Nigerian could be able to rebut such manner of altruism that stresses that success, happiness and achievement are impossible to you and me; that emergencies and catastrophes are the norm of our lives and that our primary goal is to combat them with the least expectation of triumph while we expect altruistic lifelines, lifeboats and other pick-me-ups from our leadership and state.

    If every newly elected public officer would endeavour to scorn the allure of the beaten and yet most travelled path, they could attain such wisdom and honour their predecessors could never have. They could get to appreciate that no brilliant degree of sophistry or double-speak could ever justify or validate such politics that seeks to asphyxiate the aspirations and wishes of the man on the street however far-fetched they are.

    They could get to understand why like the altruistic philosophy from which it is derived, such politics rests on a plethora of myths that are as outdated as supernatural as edicts legitimizing“The Divine Right of Kings” over serfs.

    And if we could endeavour to be more mindful and assertive, we could at long last, re-invent ourselves as everything but the inconsequential social elements we have been labeled to be.

    We could divest our lives of the shams that incapacitates and obscures. We could learn how not to compromise our struggle for self-determination any longer knowing that if we do, more often than not, we will suffer a succession of familiar betrayals that has overtime emboldened and fortified the power of corrupt and wholly evil leadership that we had lacked the courage to fight and conquer.

  • Man in the mirror (10)

    Man in the mirror (10)

    Now that we are done fiddling with change, we are dying to articulate dissent like the emptiness that approximates silence; again. Like leadership we loathe, the language of our dreams and dissension has never been fathomed by us. Perhaps it’s because we allow our sentences and imports to trail off in confusion. Perhaps it’s because we swallow grief to express impotent will even as we vow to show that we too are blessed with discretion and character.

    But we have our inclinations too – wantonness, incoherence, shallowness and that fledgling impassivity that masks essentially, our recklessness and vile. Thoreau would call it a knack for folly. Russell would simply identify it as the manifestation of imprudence and lack of tact.

    I would call it suicide. For only the suicidal would entrust such sensitive things as the birthing of a “promising dawn” to professional undertakers accustomed to darkness and vile. We are still the little, little people with neither principles nor strength of character. That is why we bestow our mandates unto all manners of candidates – in a manner characteristic of ones who have been programmed to self-destruct.

    Forget our apologies for Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari, Nuhu Ribadu, et al, it does not matter who we root for; it’s the reasoning that excites our politics that should appall us.

    It wasn’t too long ago that we brandished our untiring love for President Goodluck Jonathan. Many revealed their passion for him just because his name is Goodluck. Others took a liking to him because he is purportedly “humble to a fault.”

    Then there were those who would die to see him retain his seat just because he hails from the South-South. They believe it’s the turn of the South-South to plunder our national purse. But the song has since changed. Now we are beginning to see that it is not enough for Jonathan to answer the name: Goodluck. We have begun to see that it takes more than Mr. President’s touted humility and inclination to “respect elders” and call “those who are older than him Sir or Ma!” even though “he is President,” to salvage our State. Let me not dwell on President Jonathan as there isn’t much to say of his candidature and administration. Any attempt to do so would be tantamount to squeezing the palm kernel seed for crude oil.

    And there was Buhari. Remember Buhari? It wasn’t too long ago that we labeled him an “extremist” and “terrorist,” among other things; just because he is a Muslim. Some claimed he was set to implement a northern agenda to Islamize Nigeria. And not a few people recalled perceived excesses and shortcomings of his regime – to this lot, it hardly mattered that the former military dictator recorded some commendable feats during his regime.

    Then he picked Tunde Bakare, controversial and self-styled cleric, as his running mate and suddenly, the rising wave of dissent against his candidacy quieted to a drone. Vintage Buhari. The Spartan general knew just how to shut his detractors up. Now the much dreaded “fundamentalist” has become the favourite of not a few Nigerians.

    It isn’t just that Buhari had to pick Bakare that should shame us but that he had to play the religious card in order to sway the opinions of even his most virulent critics in his favour, provides food for thought. We have chosen to ignore the fact that Buhari, for all his stature and promise could have done better in choosing a running mate. Even Buhari knows that. But the elder statesman was just being pragmatic. He needed to feed us a generous dose of our own poison.

    This emphasizes our lack of depth and dependable political philosophy. I do not blame Buhari. The tireless contender had to survive. It doesn’t matter that his choice of running mate, Bakare, resounds all manners of permutation neither does it matter that his action projects our personal politic as desperate and shorn of wisdom. The Spartan general is actually not as rigid as we thought him to be. And we aren’t as wise as we thought we are. If we were, we wouldn’t be taken by such cheap politic and stunt.

    And there was Ribadu; the candidate whose bid excited the worst of unexplainable bitterness and ill-will in various circles – basically because he did a poor job of connecting with people he sought to govern. Not a few people claimed“Obasanjo’s attack dog” was no saint. Many argued that he was hardly Nigeria’s equivalent the awaited Messiah. It is understandable that the ruling class and highest echelons of the civil service and the corporate business sector would rather perish than see Ribadu mount Nigeria’s most coveted seat; for it wasn’t too long ago that he became the brute in their recurring nightmares.

    It is even more understandable that a considerable percentage of the nation’s youths – particularly internet and advance fee fraudsters among others – would give their last breath to thwart the presidential ambition of Nuhu Ribadu. But that a great percentage of Nigeria’s youth would profess an abiding dislike for Nuhu Ribadu because of numerous reasons they are yet to pin-point, is actually very distressing.

    Some argued that he contested knowing he was incapable of victory. They claimed he only sought to register his eligibility in order to appear as a worthy candidate for the presidency come 2015. Then there were those that believed Ribadu deserved scorn simply because it is fashionable to do so. Indeed, every other Nigerian is always supporting and scorning a candidate because it is fashionable to do so. A great many of us are switching loyalties, candidates and political platforms as socioeconomics and political expediencies demand. Some have done so because their favourite columnists suggested it.

    The most pathetic amongst us however, are loving and hating one candidate above the other, simply because it is fashionable to do so. Yet for all the thoughtlessness we foster, we could be forgiven for whatever political anomaly we foster; even as you read, none of our contenders and self-styled Messiahs has been able to justify his claim to our mandate and seat of power.

    It is just one of many such ironies that their emergence has failed to imbue us with much needed conviction and trust we ought to repose in our preferred contender to power. The connection is what we need. Among other benefits, it accords us a peep into the soul of each contender in order to trust him or not. It also means familiarity and wounds and scars. It could make it difficult to look upon them and see them as the future.

    But wherever it exists, it makes it easier to forgive the worst they’ve being in order to hope on the best they could be. We have two years to the 2015 general elections. Within the period, we could seek out a worthy candidate, “A man of the people and truly for the people in a sane way” if you like. But still, we rally round the usual candidates, the usual perversions and dire sentimentalism. Come 2015, when we usher in more calamitous leadership than we have now, you and I shall be deserving of blame.

  • We are very bad people (3)

    We are very bad people (3)

    Someday, death will become more than an unexplainable mystery to the incumbent ruling class. Every public officer will die; their family members too. Despite their inhumanity, they are human after all. They breathe and bleed just like we do. At their demise, they shall discover what manner of life they deserve in the afterlife. They shall find that money and rank they covet are useless after the last howl had fallen silent, at their funeral. They shall learn that currency-activated prayers their clerics hoist above them shall serve like raincoats under a blitz of cannon balls, at the end.

    In the wake of their demise, how shall they be remembered? How do we remember men who summon our joys to harness it with a sable bind? Shall we remember them with rage and rant? Shall we wish they burn in the earth, like splinters of wood fed into the hearth to spite the fire? Shall we wish that they lie in plagued repose low down with the worm and ant?

    How shall we be remembered? How shall posterity remember the ones who have perfected the art of letting their voices trail off in confusion at decision time? What will our children think of our desperation to keep the worst of our kind in power? What pantheons or dungeons shall we inhabit in the annals of Nigerian politics?

    The troubles of our world are unwieldy like a storm. By our perversions, we impregnate and corrupt history and civilization 53-years old. Great evil lies in you and me, and by our perpetuation of it, we make history the way of the diabolic that decapitates his newborn to satisfy his hunger pangs. Too many threads of heedlessness, woven of gluttony and lust, of racism and fear, inequality and blind hate of the stranger, form in our souls, a thick network.

    Yesterday, we suffered violence and bloodshed by militants in our creeks, down in the Delta. Today, we suffer violence and bloodshed by Boko Haram. Every day, we suffer greater violence and bloodbath by murderous and incompetent ruling class. The most remarkable characteristic of the Nigerian ruling class, according to Prof. Itse Sagay, “is its complete and total insensitivity to the public outcry and outrage over the percentage of our resources that the members appropriate to themselves for their own consumption.”

    Sagay, in his lecture on ‘Good Governance and Enforcement of Law and Order’ at the Nigerian Institute of Management’s 2013 Management Day, lamented that while Nigerian Senators and House of Representative members earn $1.7m and $1.4m respectively per annum, American Senators and British parliamentarians earn 174, 000 and £65,738 respectively per annum.

    Yet income per capita for the US and UK is $46,350 and $35,468, respectively, while that of Nigeria is $2,248. Simply put, Nigerian legislators pay themselves the highest salaries of all legislators in the world, even though their country is amongst the least developed in the whole world.

    More worrisome is the government’s inequitable distribution of benefits and punishments meted out to people from different classes and professions, along with the asymmetrical distribution of respect and dignity. Eventually, you get the feeling that some people don’t count and never expected to count in the Nigerian State.

    In the wake of violence and bloodshed by successive terrorist groups, mostly constituted by youths, in the country, Mr. President, legislators and governors simmer in frustration and moral outrage. Jumping on to the bandwagon of these elected representatives’ deceitfulness and officialese, monarchs, clerics, newspaper columnists and other bastions of society pay lip service to the degeneration of the Nigerian youth and State.

    It is hardly astonishing that the government and cohorts resort to explanations of criminality, a feral underclass, and dysfunctional parenting. These are easier explanations for which the government does not need to accept responsibility. However, a careful assessment of the situation reveals that a greater percentage of the culprits are motivated by poverty, illiteracy, dysfunctional parenting, unemployment and inequality induced by unfair government policies, insensitivity and oppression by the ruling class.

    But such cruelties by the most insidious leadership as we currently have do not justify the descent of the Nigerian youth into barbarism or bloodthirstiness of any kind – but they do anyway. Insensitivity and bloodlust enjoy sweet repose in the psyche of the Nigerian youth thus habituating them to all manners of savagery and triviality.

    Hence it wasn’t surprising to see the Nigerian youth, the media and the general public descend on Shema Obafaye, former Lagos State Commandant of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defense Corps (NSCDC) as violently as a mugger, as frighteningly as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man, over his gaffe when he featured as a guest on a breakfast show on Lagos-based private television, Channels Television.

    For Obafaye’s “My oga at the top” slip-up and his inability to accurately state his organization’s internet address, he became an object of nationwide ridicule. Footage of his blunder went viral on the social media making him an object of malicious jokes and caricature on Facebook, Twitter, Blackberry Messenger, T-shirts, and rascally musical medley by local disc jockeys (DJs).

    It was one gaffe that Nigerian youths particularly, couldn’t forgive; consequently, branded mugs, face-caps and T-shirts with the inscription: “My oga at the top!” were produced and sold at a profit in merriment over Obafaye’s gaffe.

    Several celebrities cashed in on the madness and donned the branded T-shirts to major public events in pitiful desperation to replenish their dwindling acclaim. A smart movie producer attempted to cash in too on the national ridicule of a man and public servant while it lasted by hastily putting together and releasing a film titled, “My oga at the top.”

    Nobody cared what sorrow or misery burdened Obafaye’s heart nor did anyone pause to imagine what shame and disillusionment his wife and kids are forced to relive and suffer daily long after the mockery had quieted to a murmur.

    If the Nigerian citizenry, the youth particularly, could be so coordinated and methodical in their perpetration of such “good-natured” ridicule and hate, would it not do Nigeria immense good to have us unite in more coordinated and disciplined revolt against the oppression and cruelties of the incumbent ruling class?

    We are past the novelty of coordinated mockery and moral outrage. The most powerful indignation we could express exceeds the pages of acerbic columns and social media; it subsists in latent courage and will we haven’t yet summoned the courage to express.

    Until we mature in grace and learn to apply ourselves to passionate pursuits for the love of the good, our pains shall run amok where we seek ease and bliss, always. It’s a matter of choice; to which system of thought should we commit our lives to? Is there anything in our norms worth saving? Shall we define the Nigerian dream in the language of humanity? Shall we begin to officiate for posterity’s sake? Shall we begin to affect the honesty and decency to which we pay lip service? Shall we choose the right candidates and vote them in at election time?

    It’s about time we refined the subtleties that make the Nigerian dream the fantasy of thieves, looters and blinkered murderers.

  • Readers’ parliament

    You have said the mind of sane people still remaining in the church. The most foolish people are those that even with the glaring diversion of our hard-earned money into their personal accounts, we still can’t talk to a “man of God.” Church is another business: “Me and my sons” limited. 08079279831.

    What a beautiful and educative write-up you have here. You have expressed exactly my views but most times those close to me think I am an unbelieving individual who is too proud to be subservient to any of their fraudsters called daddies. 07038001105.

    The problem is that most believers are not interested in truly and faithful worship of God rather people are just interested in their wicked desires. There is no more dignity in labour. Everyone wants to make it without working hard. Present day pastors and church founders are preaching their own gospel, not that of Jesus Christ. From Sunny Okafor. Nkpor. 08035755641.

    Who is this? What religion is he representing? Could this not probably be the foretold antichrist? These and many other questions will definitely be agitating and tormenting the minds of the few of the Nigerian faithful who will care enough to read this masterpiece of exposition but will not reason deep on its intent and thus miss its intended purpose – that is, a call to add a little bit of sensibleness to their misconstrued faithfulness. For those who will not read the article for whatever reasons aside from those who see any attempt at redirecting their incorrigible wayward daddies as an affront to Christ. Our prayer is that people of like mind, effrontery and boldness like you…who are truly interested in honest and sincere belief should not rest even when it is sure that your fans will be very few. Have solace in the fact that truth and honesty are orphans in the morally and religiously deprived society that we find ourselves. Keep up the finer work. 08032078292.

    Hello, Mr. Olatunji, I have been following your article and I love your presentation. I totally agree with you where you wrote: “he strips the believer of intellect and thought, he silences his ability to think.” That’s what is happening to the two major religions in Nigeria. I find it very depressing that people can no longer think on their own. I have while reading the article if this writer is a free thinker, only to be disappointed in the last paragraph in which you mentioned “God-given intellect.” From NANDIP Wuse 2, Abuja. 07037793312.

    Thank you Olatunji for your piece. You have put it just as it is. My prayer is that this truth will set free all who have been bewitched by these hirelings. God bless you. From Ben Ilebode ESQ. Benin City. 08033015690.

    You are on point but how many people will listen to you? The soul of the Nigerian believer has been sold to the smooth tongue of the daddies’ greed and craze for materialism in the name of religion. This philosophy thrives on pervasive poverty and a hopeless economic situation occasioned by inept political leadership.08057797241.

    Your article was very good. May God bless you to unravel more. Nigerian pastors are shamelessly corrupt. Thanks. 08038772010.

    This is about the best local article that I have read in a while. God bless and keep you. 08098422768.

    You have just hit the nail on the head. People rush to spiritual homes for deliverance forgetting that deliverance lies within us just as the kingdom of heaven is in us. From Biodun Soga, 08060006790.

    That was an excellent piece bro. So glad to find out someone else is in their right senses. Let them worship on God, the father. 08023506040.

    I have read Part 2. You are a serial, blatant, cureless clown who tells the truth with religiosity, sentiment. Shame. Pity. From Kehinde Olalemi. Ibadan. 07041851806.

    May your pen never run dry. I enjoyed the article. I hope those who have ears will listen. We are in a state of decadence that makes people believe easily and get quickly brainwashed that there is miracle waiting for them at the expense of their intellect and ability. The so-called daddies capitalize on the socio-economic problems of the country to exploit them claiming that by paying their tithe, miracle is on the way. From Rotimi Akinbiyi. 08033050814.

    The creeps in our worship houses

    My friend, it appears you are qualified to be appointed a ‘chartered writer’— From 08187209543

    Kudos! I consider myself a victim of our desperate pastors because my wife is hooked on their opium. Our society is gradually slipping into the abyss because of illiteracy and unwillingness amongst the literate to read. We have more “men of God” and less godly men. From 08037400478.

    Mr. Ololade, I read your June 3, opinion. The question is, ‘are u five years early or one day behind the time?’ I am surprised that a Nigerian could say such a thing in this 21st Century. It’s okay, it’s an opinion. From Jacob 08034679229.

    Nobody made them pastors, apostles and bishops and till tomorrow, they are fakes, they claim God spoke or called them. The biggest liars in the world is and among them adhere to the teachings of Jesus Christ? They go all length and even make magic and yet, prosperity , healing etc is not achieved because the source is satan. In Nigeria, less than 10% are real Christians. Thanks. 08039456567.

    You have told the pastors the truth. Until you tell your Islamic terrorists the truth, I will continue to believe you are suffering from Logorrhoea. Truth. 07041851806

    Ola, you have not come by a more candid expository on our National malady in our time as yours on page 21 in The Nation of August 12. If I could, I will post unedited to all Nigerian Pastors hoping they will understand. Keep it up. From E.J Ebong. 08038137269

    There is no reward for goodness other than goodness. The truth you have said in the Nation about the true nature of Islamic Banking will be a success for you and your entire both in this world and hereafter. Amen…From Goodluck! 08065392578

    “The Creeps in our worship houses 1 and 2”: Nobody made them pastors, apostles, and bishops and till tomorrow, they are fakes. They claim God spoke or called them yet they are the biggest liars in the world. Is any among them adhering to the teachings of Jesus Christ? They go to all lengths and even make human sacrifice to make magical prosperity, healing and so on. In Nigeria, less than one per cent of the people are real Christians. Thanks. From 08039456567.

    Olatunji, I have not come by a more candid and expository piece on this national malady in our time. If I could, I will post it unedited to all Nigerian pastors hoping they will understand. Keep it up. From E.J. Ebong. 08038137269.

    There is no reward for goodness other than goodness. The truth you have said about the true nature of Islamic Banking will attract success to you and your entire household both in this world and the hereafter. Amen. From Goodluck. 08065392578.

  • Gods and clay toys (1)

    Idiots as fragile as clay toys evolve into out-sized heroes and gods, on our watch. But even gods grow out abandoned, writes the late Christopher Okigbo. I would say, “writers too.” But not Chinua Achebe. Achebe died and Africa mourns. The novelist whose engaging literature taught the world to read and understand from an African perspective died at 82 and his demise is felt across literary tropes and political cultures.

    In Nigeria, Achebe’s death reignites a seductive dirge; a ritual culture of requiem and colourful superlatives. Politicians froth with doctored and hardly-felt regret around their over-fattened lips and literary buffs compose tributes with obscene and overwhelming lyricism. Yet none is perhaps as impressive as the mainstream media’s glorification of Chinua Achebe.

    At his death, Achebe not only made “cover page,” he commandeered the first five pages of many a flagship newspaper. And he didn’t have to spend a dime to achieve such impressive feat. What height politicians and conglomerates burn a fortune to attain, he used mere words and a fertile imagination to ascend.

    Alive, Achebe lightened many a thunder by his words; in death, he commands seductive shrieks of wonder and appreciation. Such is the quality of life and manhood of Chinua Achebe. It doesn’t matter how skewed or alluring he was in politics and candour, everybody remembers Achebe as one good thing that happened to Nigerian literature. In his death, the world relives his quality as a man and African.

    How do journalists die? How do journalists live to be precise? Do we merit such honour and appreciation like we confer on Chinua Achebe? Do we at least merit the passing tribute of a sigh at our demise? Is there such person amongst us that excites interminable tributes, poetry and superlatives like Chinua Achebe?

    The time for pleasuring ourselves will soon be over and like failures eternally condemned to self-fellate, on ego and all that vanity ever gives; many of us will pass in spasms of insignificance and self-love. The world has seen the swollen belly of our pride; it is nothing to write home about. Nothing excites, nothing moves, nothing encourages anyone to go to bat for our cancerous pride.

    We have failed to become worthier than our bylines. And our bylines aren’t really worth much to be precise. Yet every time we see it, we feel like some gift. Gift to whom? Gift indeed. How narcissistic can we get? We, whose answers to national riddles have become trite. We, who bandy inappropriate cliché as solution to avoidable conflict pretend to be worth more than disposable pawns in the scheme of things.

    A simple lust is yet our woe; the lust for unearned riches and self-love. It drives many a practicing journalist beneath the bounds of ethics and above it. But no matter how significant we pretend to be, we are actually worth nothing in the eyes of our benefactors and “friends in high places.”

    This is some truth we love to ignore simply because it’s therapeutic to do so. Every journalist on the beat is on a string to some puppeteer. Be it on Crime, Politics, Business, Aviation, Entertainment and Society beat, everybody kowtows to the wiles of some contemptible deep-pocket, to the detriment of society and journalism practice.

    But many of us would never admit this much; rather we love to argue that we “operate on a higher level.” We have learnt to claim that by virtue of “quality journalism” that we practice, we get to hobnob daily with “the crème-de-la-crème of Nigeria’s high society.” And thus is the ultimate fulfillment to many of us.

    It is however, fascinating to note that many of us are actually kept on a leash by our so-called “high society,” like dogs. Our so-called “clients,” benefactors or friends in high places do not think much of us.

    That is why they agree to an interview and request for the interview questions in advance. They think many of us are incapable of normal conversation and informed questions and follow-up questions hence their robotic repetition of what their “personal assistants” or “media person” tell them to say. That is why they prefer an email interview but get their “media person” to write the answers. That is why they agree to a two-hour interview session and shorten it to 15 minutes on the spot.

    Our so-called “big friends” in high society liken the Nigerian journalist to scum of the earth, that is why they invite journalists to their offices for an interview session only to keep them waiting for two or three hours in order to tell them that they can only do the interview if they can grant full copy approval before publication. That is why they invite journalists to their events only to tell security operatives on site to prevent them from getting into the venue. The embarrassment and shame will encourage humility and show the journalist who’s boss.

    I do not know why an average journalist needs to blindly believe that he can attain relevance only by courting and serving as publicity pawn to his so-called “friends in high places.” It’s amazing to see journalists engage in heated altercation and fisticuff over accusations of “stealing” and “courting” of each other’s “friends in high places.”

    Many of us are a pathetic fraud. We make a show of friendship and intimacy with our so-called privileged friends although the latter do not consider us worthier than vermin or intolerable hacks. Many of us have nothing to say, do we? We have no more stories to tell or hope to offer to folk who still wander to the newsstands hopes aglow, every day, seeking answers to timeless conundrums on the pages of our colourful prints.

    What answers can we give? What remedy can we flaunt past the trite banalities we haughtily couch as columns, and most times, “Our Stand?” But the readers hardly know better. They never know better and those that think they do would buy into our finest delusion as long as they can identify with it and as long as it fetes their vanities while they do the spirited waltz in the intellectual trash can of public discourse.

    Talk is still cheap. It is yet the proverbial staple that keeps compatriots who know no better, glued to our sensational news prints. Still they seek answers but we have no answers to give, do we? Just more sensation and rhetoric.

    Nobody actually learns from us anymore. Every journalist is seen as an attack dog or junkyard dog for a variety of interests and “high society.” Having pretended to have answers to everything, we have no more answers to give. And our l usual alternatives are tainted by our vanities and grief; twin-miseries for which we have no tongue.

    Every day we see that we are not ready for the travails of the inflamed distance. We know the darkness of our practice and the perversions in our hearts and yet pay lip-service to evolving a practice worthy of the humane and the heroic. This is not to deny the existence of the few good ones among us but their paltry band isn’t enough balm to soothe our practice’s festering sores.

    • To be continued…

  • Celebrity trash, trashy journalism and everyone (3)

    He could not have a better society even if we tried. We could not have a better nation too. We cannot be the land of the free inhabited by free people. Every day, we are reborn into the anguish of what we are desperate to forget.

    One can never make the words too strong; we are captives now other than before 1960. We are independent although we are yet to be free. Freedom too should be a fount from the heart. It isn’t. It desecrates our hearts and corrupts us. It stacks up profanities like fancy bricks in you and me till we become outstanding perfections of wantonness and ruin.

    Our cries are of insecurity, unemployment, epileptic power supply, selective justice, dwindling economy, hospital corridors of death among others but a greater ruin subsists in you and me, particularly in the Fourth Estate. One should not make the truth seem forced – Nigeria ruins because journalism has failed us. And journalism devastates on the strength of our failures.

    Thus journalism and the society remain opposite faces of a rusted coin. It has become the way of the Nigerian press to inform, educate and entertain with the clarity of an ice-blur or soot-smutch. No more is the media the vanguard of truth, justice and accountability. No more does it seek to understand our painful silences in order to scream them.

    Currency style is still politically and economically correct in newsrooms nationwide, and relative truths and half-truths hang stock-still, like bad philosophy, where the mint-blaze of advertisements, electronic money transfers and brown envelopes successfully domesticate even our most hardnosed critics and newshounds.

    Everybody insists that Nigerian journalists are crappy and lost; some claim we are maddened by poverty and greed but I would say we have simply realized delusion to be our favoured pattern of truth. I would say, we are only responding to the archetypal syndrome perverting our psyche – driving us to lay to waste, humanity and our most treasured industries.

    Our degeneration began no sooner than we destroyed every crucial appendage of our social bedrock. As it does to every other crucial sector, the Nigerian society provides the worst of simpletons to serve as conscience to the nation. Scholarship we extol produces the citizenship that corrupts and sets us back in abominable leaps. In our Fourth Estate, the few good hands are still keeping faith half-heartedly. They are shamelessly underpaid, persistently disrespected and denied of even their meagre income.

    But the middling second-rate and third-rate smile home from the banks. Their garages flaunt automobiles and hand-outs that dwarf the principles and achievements of the few good hands. Thus is our vision for Nigerian journalism: to perpetuate a litter of men so grossly employed beneath the faculties of a humane mind, that a little money, fame and other paltry inducements quite cheaply buys them off the fabled press’s most principled pursuits.

    Like every one of us, the Nigerian journalist answers to different prices. He is as perverted as the social system that produces him and conditions him to serve as a reluctant watch –dog, rambling lap-dog, obsequious stunt-dog, dung-dog, junk-yard dog among others – as circumstances and his vanities dictate.

    An efficient journalist and wholly conscientious one at that do what he can whether his employer and the society appropriately reward him or not. The inefficient journalist on the other hand offers his inefficiency to any bidder with a wad of cash; he is forever lusting for political office or “Corporate Affairs” spot. He is rarely disappointed however.

    Hence the average journalist’s inclination to report the shameful shenanigans and delusions of grandeur of every constituent of the Nigerian society flaunting a wad of cash. This frantic posturing of the journalist to serve the interests of every actor, politician, musician, reality show contestant and business executive for the paltriest gratification is merely a manifestation in the journalist of the fetters of indignity holding the Nigerian society captive.

    Our maddening lust for wealth and tireless celebration of it without doubt epitomizes the greatest disgrace of our kind. That so many are ready to live by luck in a mad dash for affluence and the frills of enterprise without appropriately earning it perpetuates the startling immorality of our kind and the most indecent culture of enterprise.

    The philosophy, poetry and religion of our kind are not worth the dust of a destitute puffball. Hence today, we stir in mind the worrisome notion that God created our kind in jest. Burning with our inordinate yearnings, we make God out to be a mischievous money-bag scattering a handful of currency in order to see us scramble for it amusingly.

    Our world’s a raffle. From stardom, power, sudden wealth and chances to our base necessities, everything is on a sweepstake. Yet it worries us not to foster such satire on our social institutions. The reality show contestant is as much a gambler as his fellow in the underground casinos and dangerous crannies of Lagos. The only difference is that one shakes duplicity and the other shakes dice.

    And we have journalism to celebrate them both as it does our criminally-minded thug-fathers, god-fathers, clerics, drug barons, park-thugs, business leaders and aristocracy to mention a few. If this isn’t the nastiest distortion to the media’s esteemed “Status-Conferrer” theory, what is?

    The lure of affluence is truly great that withers the grains of wisdom in even in its most dependable repositories in the Nigerian society. How can the journalist not cultivate such rot? Despite his purported depth and candour, he is essentially, a luminescent mirror into the soul of the Nigerian society.

    It is remarkable that of all our media, there are so few moral teachers, “Agenda-setters” and “Status-Conferrers” we could tip as beacons of a better tomorrow and a better society. Most are shamelessly employed in excusing our misdemeanors while brazenly extolling the insanity of our infinite perversions.

    The best journalists that have been we hardly get to know because this paltry band choose not to grovel before misguided celebrities and impart into our insufficiently tasked minds, trivial affairs of pop-idols, spoilt rich trash and their over-celebrated kids.

    “But we are only human!” we rationalize. We claim that it’s due to human nature that we want to know who’s sleeping with whom and why somebody’s so upset about it. The same applies to the world of celebrity. With the latter, we are hopelessly curious because we do not know them personally and it never hurts anyone to obsess about them, right?

    Actually, it does hurt everyone and someone. It perverts our minds and pushes back the boundaries of public and private lives into the binds of distorted reality. And yet our uncontainable fervor for such trifling reports. Celebrity news may be cheap, easy and relaxing to read.

    But therein subsists the reason for our hurtful realities. Celebrity trash journalism hardly reflects our reality. But faced with the burgeoning thirst for such content, more publishers are giving over more of their column inches to such debris ignoring the real subjects that matter for a profit.

    Overdosing on gossip isn’t a good idea but like pathetic junkies eternally in need of a fix, we grovel and lust for the next best decadent pinch.

  • Celebrity trash, trashy journalism and everyone (2)

    This minute, conversation degenerates into mere gossip and heartfelt dreams manifest as perfections of perversity, everywhere. Everybody is a sucker for “high-society.” Like heat-maddened farm rats, ordinary people are persistently yearning for the madness of “high-society.”

    It’s the little packets of madness that we need to fear. How unforgivably foolish the society becomes in its lust for celebrity gossip. The news we read, for the most part, is too paltry for the human genius. I do not know why our news should be so trivial.

    It is the stalest repetition. Yet we madden and lust for celebrity humdrum to the point that one is tempted to wonder why too much passion is squandered in pursuit of too little substance. We live for idle amusement and thus the nature of our daily news.

    Our facts appear to spiral in the atmosphere, insignificant as the spores of the toadstool, and yet impinging on the surface of our mind, poisoning it, till it becomes not much in expression and thought. Superfluities meet superfluities; when our life ceases to be inward and absorbed, interaction degenerates into mere tittle-tattle and humanity relapses into the filthiest of averages.

    No thanks to celebrity journalism and an innately perverted public, the Nigerian mind has become a public arena, where the shenanigans of the rich and the idiocy of “high-society” are passionately celebrated.

    Every celebrity is a media creation; I repeat. While some may be deserving of the exaltation liberally accorded them, not a few celebrities are undeserving of the hero worship they receive and so desperately seek. It is hardly the fault of the celebrity however, that the press and the society in general have chosen to accord them immeasurable hero worship despite their glaring idiocy and deficiencies.

    It takes more than newsworthiness to create a celebrity. The vast, interlocking web of resources and institutions involved in creating and maintaining a single celebrity is astounding. From media outlets to fan clubs and agents, from media products to gossip columnists, a star is never solitary, but often the result of hundreds of backstage orchestrations and player deals.

    It is even all the more disturbing to watch our fascination with celebrity gossip slide into precisely the kind of ruthless pursuit of its subject to which we claim to be ostensibly opposed; it is disheartening to observe the infringement of morals and humaneness at the heart of our inquest. Yet despite the evils of our maddening lust for celebrity tittle-tattle, not a few tattlers gladly explain their obsessions away as some kind of virtuous curiosity.

    There is no such thing as virtuous curiosity. In respect of the subject matter, our curiosity oftentimes does violence to its object. On the flipside, it leaves the society stuck in a revolving cycle of spectatorship that believes in its own virtue even as it corrupts itself – a perfect representation of Jacqueline Rose’s the “perverting of curiosity in motion.”

    And even our so-called superstars have learnt to profit albeit fraudulently from the society’s perverse curiosities about their affairs. From Chaucer’s early poem, “The House of Fame,” whose hero-poet wrestles with the fame bestowed on him by society to Martin Scorcese’s film, King of Comedy, in which an amateur comedian jokes to a national television audience that it is “better to be king for a night, than schmuck for a lifetime!” celebrity worship continues to fester.

    Not to forget Nigerian actress, Genevieve Nnaji’s illuminating response to a CNN interviewer’s poser about her celebrity status, “Oh yeah, I don’t even need to wake up. Just sitting down sometimes, I’m like (sighs), sometimes I hate my life, but I can’t complain” — these celebrities and their works speak to us, even give voice to our own desires, as they reflect back to us the realities and illusions of today’s celebrity culture.

    Celebrities who insist, often with apparent desperation, that they do not court publicity, who try to hide from the public gaze on which they are totally dependent, are either naive or unapologetically fraudulent. With respect to Nigerian celebrities, being fraudulent and then, infantile, comes easy. Not only are most unable to discern that this is the balancing-act they are required to perform, they believe –erroneously so – that by virtue of their claim to stardom, they should have both the press and the public subjected to their whims.

    Therefore, the juveniles that they are at heart fail to realize that they are never functioning quite appropriately as befits their status; never perpetuating so perfectly the drama and duplicity on which celebrity thrives, as in the moments when they make that exasperating and utterly deceptive claim.

    If truly they do not crave media and public attention, let them desist from making their affairs known to the public. Let them desist from scorning such attention only to divulge news of their purported “best kept secrets” to the media surreptitiously. Celebrities who do that while making a show of their distaste for the limelight embody the worst form of infantilism and narcissistic tendencies.

    The vanity of their renunciation contains its own disavowal. It is a blatant hypocrisy that they perpetrate claiming that they do not want to be seen or become the subject of public attention; it simply says very much about their impoverishment in character and worth.

    It is even more disturbing to watch the society’s curiosity translate into precisely the kind of ruthless pursuit of subjects perpetrated by celebrity journalism. It is about time Nigerian journalists learned to focus on the issues that truly matter. How is news of the “high-octane” wedding of a telecommunication company proprietor’s daughter’s wedding, a Reality Show contestant’s current boyfriend, a professional hip-hop dancer’s pregnancy – outside wedlock – and the likely father of the child more beneficial to the youth and the society than a report about the dwindling culture of scholarship on the nation’s campuses and outside them? How is such news more beneficial to the public than the lack of functional local government authorities at the grassroots and the deplorable state of vocational and public primary schools across the country?

    It should be the media’s job not to give equal time, not to give 12 inches in a newspaper story to the idiocy and eccentricities of Nigeria’s middling rich trash and their spoilt kids. It is apparent that a passion for celebrity gossip has become the next illogical evolutionary step of journalism and readership in the country.

    Basically, it is in the media’s best financial interest to pervert its principal role as “Status-Conferrer” according to the public’s yearnings. This bespeaks a deeper perversion of the journalism ethic particularly, its “Agenda-Setter” function.

    But the fault is hardly the media’s alone. Now that it has been confirmed that the Nigerian press is fundamentally a trash can cum sounding board for the psychosis and perversions of celebrity trash and their families, the public’s role in their perpetuation of such depravity is undeniable.

    Given the public’s fascination with celebrity trash and their world, everyone remains complicit in the societal perversion. In essence, the Nigerian society is being ruled by base desires and voyeuristic inclinations for accounts of celebrities’ lives. This has led us to the point where we are not getting the journalism we need but rather the journalism we deserve.

    • To be continued…

  • Cowards’ anthem (4)

    The night has murder in the eye, and the day, murder in the heart; every promising dawn drips with blood. One ill begets another, and our successive maladies, a great deal more.

    The solstices of sanity have sagged; we have become indiscriminate pawns in the theatre of the absurd. Thus today, we find“virtue” in the insanity of the rampaging hordes of Maiduguri and Jos. If you look closely enough, you will discover the politics that excite the madness they incite. Perhaps you would get to understand why peace-loving neighbours become blood-thirsty brutes and the average human becomes subhuman.

    And now that we have found honour in the novelty of explosives, Nigeria has awakened to the reality of the situation…our situation. It doesn’t matter whose loved ones died in the last bomb blast neither does it matter what towering hopes we extinguish by undesirable detonations, we too have found bombs, and we shall use it whichever way pleases us. We shall exterminate whoever we deem fit.

    And these too are “simple measures” to be had, “survival strategies – to be precise,” if you can learn to analyse the matter from the perspective that pleases. The wars we make are only the beginning of something else: mass murders, famine, rape, interminable hate and sorrow everlasting. Today, fear’s moon flower spreads across our clans. We ought to fear tomorrow but we don’t.

    If we leave today as we have made it, tomorrow, our children shall smart diarrheic, with distended tummies and skeletal limbs until their final gasp in our theatre of death and genocide. Our toddlers shall lust for dried egg yolk and cornmeal, even when stale; it shall become the staple diet to die for, and kill for. We shall learn to grovel and die and kill for measly fruits and rations, even if rotten.

    Our neighbourhoods shall be bloodied by carcasses of friends and family we have learnt to love but would betray whenever providence displeases our dark, desperate desire for survival. Those child soldiers whose stories offer amusement on the watch of international news media shall become the source of our greatest worries. The cherubs for whom we shed sweat everyday shall become little angels of death at the behest of heinous godfathers and warmongers.

    Our children shall man our streets armed with AK-47s, fishing harpoons, machetes, kitchen knives, and hand grenades. They shall take turns to decapitate you and me if we are unfortunate to belong to the divide that displeases.

    Our mothers shall become comfort women, our daughters too. Our sisters shall become vessels of wanton delight to occupation forces and militia of various shades and honour; and we shall support the decadence painfully, and whole-heartedly.

    The chastity we love to protect shall become the staple by which we quell our dark, dark desires; the currency by which our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters purchase and repossess everyday, their right to life, at the mercy of the elements of the order that be.

    And this is just a glimpse of the meltdown; the revolution that you seek would bring greater bloodshed than you think. The secession that you seek would hardly profit you, and me.

    Forget the folly of the misguided newspaper; it is not enough to propagate disunity in the interest of deep pockets. It is not enough to moot murder or “necessary sacrifice” or whatever you choose to call it, selectively. It is not enough to dispense death daringly to the households of those we deem fit.

    At whose behest do we exterminate those that we deem expendable? Who decides the lives to be extinguished, the futures to be snuffed out like candle-light in the course of a tempest? What politics, what philosophy excites the madness to which we play native?

    Is this the revolution that we dream? Is this the prologue to the order of our sweetest fantasies? I see nothing but death, sorrow, and death. And we are in the thick of it.

    Carcasses of friends we had known, relatives we had loved and neighbours we shared with, shall line our streets and sidewalks with unparalleled stench and dire breadth.

    And we shall all be held accountable; you, with your AK-47, fresh-filed dagger, sword; me, with my in-depth analyses, riotous pen and wit.

    Together we play puppet to the designs and fantasies of despicable hate emissaries and war-mongers. Tell me, these tragedies that we incite, at whose doorsteps are the black flags hoisted? Who gets to be on the receiving end?

    Kindly show me a Governor’s child, Senator’s wife, Minister’s sibling among the mangled and decomposing corpses in mass graves we dug in Ife-Modakeke, Borno, Bauchi, Kaduna, Jos, to mention a few.

    Show me the corpses of the ruling class and all those that we hold answerable for the tragedies our lives have become. I wish no evil on our incumbent leadership but their corpses are nowhere in the scenes of genocide; it’s the ordinary citizen that gets to die – defenceless folk like you and me.

    Yet we blame the ruling class, curse the times and kill each other; tell me, what madness commands our wanton sprees? What platitudes, what tokens incite our hearts to such bestiality and senseless murder?

    It’s our neighbours, family and friends that we decapitate in the thick of night and break of daylight. How can that be the uprising that we dream? Tell me, who would enjoy the fruits of our mindless bloodbath after we exterminate neighbours, friends and family in whose interests we claim to make the revolutionary cry?

    The ruling class is on to our game. That is why they use us against each other. Painstakingly, they master the art of misdirection by experimenting on you and me.

    The noise has quietened on familiar monstrosities that betide our land; we have got more pressing issues to deal with. Now, we dream of secession. Let us begin to secede if in the new order, leadership we currently endure shall be kept miles from our corridors of power. Let us begin to secede if our women shall suffer no abuse and peace shall remain to blossom undisturbed in our front yards and backyards. Let us begin to secede if our broken parts shall exist without racism and discord.

    Let us begin to secede if we shan’t re-enact tragedies we invoked by Federal might and Biafra. Let us begin to secede if evils that incited our clamour to separate shall disappear in the new lands of our dreams.

    If you take the pains to see through our scholarly rhetoric and sensational headlines, you will see that nobody can resolve the tragedies that persist in our motherland until we rid our government houses of the minority holding the majority hostage. Hopefully we shall get to understand that sophistry we propagate about the futility of further coexistence shall come in handy still, in the orders of our dreams, for we who fail to tread the path of wisdom now shall persist in folly even when left to our ‘separate’ devices.

    A grown up thing has happened and it requires that we respond as adults but even adulthood confounds us. Thus we respond the easiest way we deem, as cowards.

    • To be continued.