Hate seems like other people’s torment until it growls in you. Sometimes, it glowers in the eyes of a bigot and the scowl of a predator. Sometimes, it seethes in the quiet glances of their prey.
These days, it shrieks in the rant of the Nigerian wild – our virtual wilderness to be precise. Here, we relive the infernal crud of frantic personae: the political animal, apolitical pacifist, hyperbolic ‘influencer,’ data-fabulous millennial, and the defiant Gen Z, scud to the shore of national consciousness on the world wide web – all hoisting tribal banners and interests.
Whatever the bent of their politics, they cuddle one prejudice and cringe from the other as their vanities dictate. Such is the tenor of political correctness that has seen many clash in defence and furtherance of random bigotries or a desperate demagogue. Journalists, activists, rights activists, and failed political aspirants afflict our social space like pitiless hooligans.
They mistake lava for wit and molten banality for intellect. Their voices weigh like a thundercloud; whether debating celebrity scuffles or their political preferences, their passions sparkle and flit from fetid intelligence to brilliant witlessness.
There is a cult of ignorance knifing through Nigeria right now, ripping all that should bind us apart – particularly in cyberspace. This cult thrives on anti-intellectualism and base sophistry – derogatorily dismissed as otellectualism in Yoruba parlance, to connote the presumed intellectual’s acquiescence to be corrupted by what the Yoruba term as ‘ote’ translatable as ‘perfidy’ or ‘treachery.’
This strain of anti-intellectualism rifles through our sociopolitical and cultural lives, nurtured by the false notion that the freedom of speech means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’ or that ‘my malevolence is just as good as your benevolence.’
The malady manifests in cyberspace in real time. In this public space, everybody becomes a wilding, trading bitter realism, infantile whim, and pseudo-idealism with awful relish.
The guts and sinews of every stereotype and theme-park hatred are validated via mind-numbing sloganeering, toxic bigotries, sophistry, and outright lies.
A casual visit to Facebook or Twitter manifests as a pilgrimage; the esplanades of public discourse unfurl to a sordid, cutout version of anarchic thinking, replete with ethnoreligious bigotries and the hassle of incomprehensible logic. Then, there are the strange movements and morbid ideologies – all fostered and marshalled from bizarre platforms.
In this public wilderness, everybody pontificates. Everyone mutates from philosopher to savage pawn and vice versa; they all speak impressive and atrocious lingo. Call it our patois of rebuke and immoderate assemblies.
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En route to the 2023 elections, we encountered Nigerians of vast mental stripes in our social space: the BATIFIED, ATIKULATE, AND OBIDIENT. Once you get past the facade of slogans and artifice, it’s mostly the same defiant, virulent passion driving the mob.
Even after the elections, the bickering persists. We see the savage mutations of the political Nigerian: persons of presumed higher learning, persons afflicted by poverty, persons of affluence, authority, and high glamour. The lambent complexion turns muddy. The aura vanishes. Integrity is innately borne and espoused as a kernel of character but respect is a gift under no one’s control. It peaks and ebbs as spectator mood at a crunch soccer tie.
A familiar decline from admiration to disillusion, hope to disenchantment festers in the citizenry’s public engagement with one another and their elected representatives.
Our greatest undoing, however, would be our inability to douse the flames of hatred incited by our bigotries and cutthroat politics; post-2023 election, our politics must be rid of rancour. There is no excuse for maligning an individual, group, or social divide for their political choices at the just concluded elections.
Where such mayhem subsists, everybody gets burnt: the ruling class, opposition parties, the entitled elite, and the wealthy upper class. At the bottom of the cauldron, however, roasts the incorrigible hordes of the boondocks, or ‘base’ electorate if you like.
Through the inferno and chaos, we must seek a redefinition of the Nigerian patriot. We must learn from the chaos overseas. Again, I reiterate that Nigerians learn from the Afghan experience. In the wake of the United States-backed NATO’s sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan, Gaisu Yari, an Afghan refugee, now grantee of the Open Society Foundation (OSF), recalls his flight from his homeland as his darkest hour.
As the U.S. and NATO commenced their hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, he had just four hours to pack up every personal item in his apartment. He had to decide, without wasting time, what to take and what to leave behind—knowing that he might never see anything left behind again.
“One rule kept circling through my mind: Pack the life you have created here in Afghanistan into one suitcase and never forget the dreams of the people of this land,” he recalled.
Thus in barely four gruesome hours, he anxiously stuffed a few belongings in his bag and parted with his life, his work, and everything that made him Afghan. In a pain-filled memoir, Yari revealed that he cried all through his perilous trip to the Kabul airport. He hadn’t enough time to say goodbye to loved ones.
And as much he tried to conjure ways to plan, resist, and fight to stay in Afghanistan, with each passing moment, ”it became gut-wrenchingly evident that we had lost our chance,” he said.
One year after his painful departure from his homeland, Yari relives the agony of his flight; he relives the pain of saying goodbye to his tearful mother on the roof of an old house, where he had been hiding from the Taliban for three days.
He eventually evacuated to Poland, landing with his family in a refugee camp with scarce food or resources. Even so, Yari is luckier than fellow refugees and Afghans who fled to Poland, France, Canada, and the U.S. At least, he enjoys the momentary boon of an OSF grant thus he might not have to really worry anymore about the quality of his provisions, living space, and food supplies.
Yet every day he rues the misery of refugee life, the pain of sudden flight, those stolen moments with his mom, and the aching feeling of being abandoned.
Every new dawn he spends abroad lacerates him to the bones and leaves a thick welt on his psyche. He realises that he is living some of his “darkest days a year after leaving” his homeland.
Would Nigerians learn from the sad fate of the Yaris of the world? Yari and fellow Afghan refugees never imagined that their country ”could fall back into the hands of the Taliban—and that no one could save it.”
As they fled, many of them took with them, what they thought was important. “A prosecutor told Yari in his OSF-sponsored documentary, “Afghan Voices” that he brought his knowledge and experience to the U.S. “But does that matter here in the United States? No,” he said. Quite instructive.
And despite their initial patronage by the bleeding heart Western press, Afghanistan has faded from global news headlines.
As we heal from the 2023 elections, let us be guided by the Afghans’ experience. Nigerians must desist from rancorous engagement with each other.
We must scorn chaos and poisonous interventions by aliens, whose major interest is to abolish our sovereignty, plunder our resources, and strip us bare to devious elements.
