The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Lawmakers’ Prado toys as symptom of our malady

    Nigerian lawmakers, because of their antipathy towards laws put in place to guide their behaviour, are often derisively dismissed as law-breakers by Nigerians who believe they are out only to serve themselves and not those they represent. We didn’t need to search far for evidence. Our lawmakers so far have not tried to invalidate the claim by well-informed Nigerian opinion leaders that lawmakers in breach of the constitution and the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission’s (RMAFC) salary ceiling for lawmakers awarded themselves outrageous monthly salaries of between N20m-N30m in a nation where many states cannot pay the N30,000 minimum wages. Nigerian lawmakers have since acquired the unsavoury reputation as the highest paid lawmakers in the world with the influential London Economist in 2013 ranking Nigeria as “the country with the most unjust and lopsided pay structure in the world”.

    Beyond humongous salaries they are allegedly paying themselves, it was obvious from  RMFAC published details of the remuneration package  for political, public and judicial office holders, that lawmakers  are not entitled to operational vehicles, but an optional car loan of between N7.9m and N8.1m for each lawmaker.  But the senate in spite of this went ahead to spend  N4.7 billion on Peugeot 508 saloon cars for themselves in 2015 and similar amount on Toyota Camry saloon cars in 2020. If Nigerians are outraged with the 10th assembly’s N160m financial frivolity on “operational vehicles” for each of its 469 members, at a period when Nigerians are experiencing economic pain, it was because the action was considered insensitive and treacherous.

    First, this was at a time the voters on whose back the lawmakers rode to power are unable to go to work daily because of increase in cost of transportation as a result of fuel subsidy removal. It was a period of an ongoing government negotiation with Labour in order to prevent a general strike and a lock-down of the economy. It was also at a time the government was desperately trying to work out palliatives in form of money transfer to some thousands of the poorest and most vulnerable in the land.

    With the naira in free fall against the dollar, many believe the  time is most inauspicious for legislators to spend our scarce foreign exchange on importation of toys when we have local brands such as Innoson, Nords, Pro-Force and others producing high-end vehicles, including SUVs currently patronized by some state governments in the country. As one local manufacturer puts it: “The National Assembly buying foreign-built vehicles at this time is dispiriting especially when you consider that we are all trying to promote buy Nigeria to grow the Naira”. “Exporting jobs by ordering from foreign brands instead of local brands” as the Centre for Social Justice also recently observed, many believe is a crime against the nation.

    But if you ask me, I will say the antics of our lawmakers; their betrayal and corruption are but symptoms of greater malaise assailing our nation. We are probably expecting too much from our lawmakers who unfortunately cannot give what they don’t have.

     The military destroyed our political socialization process and when finally forced to step aside after almost 30 years, what was bequeathed onto us was a military-baked ‘new breed’ politicians that behave like army of occupation groomed in the art of sharing loot of conquered territories.

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    It was therefore not an accident that within three months of coming to power in 1999, the new government and legislature populated by retired Generals and other ranks and their business fronts came out with petroleum importation policy through which fuel import licenses were allocated to over 100 companies fronting for them. A House probe was to later confirm the theft of about N1.7t through the fuel subsidy regime exploited by lawmakers, PDP stalwarts and their children without importing a pint of fuel.

    It was not a surprise that with Obasanjo’s privatization policy, they sold to themselves Nigeria’s total investment of about $100b for a paltry $1,5b while with Obasanjo/Jonathan monetization policy, civil servants and lawmakers including Speaker Dimeji Bankole, Senate President David Mark and CBN Governor Chukwuma Soludo allegedly bought their official residences at a fraction of their real cost.

    It was not also a surprise that the new-breed successive leaders of the National Assembly were all discovered to be men with feet of clay. Senate presidents Evans Enwerem was removed from office on November 1999 for falsification of name, Chuba Okadigbo was removed as Senate President in August 2000 by 81-14 votes over inflation of contract costs while Anyim Pius Anyim out of office was grilled by EFCC for shortfall of about N396 billion in ecological fund deductions as well as over $1.3B Centenary City project.  Bukola Saraki sold the victory of his party to the opposition by cutting a deal which ceded the deputy senate presidency to the opposition, in what Itse Sagay described as “a victory for impunity, a victory for fraud and a victory for political desperation and indiscipline”.

    In the Lower House, Speakers Salisu Buhari was removed for certificate and age falsification, Patricia Ette was removed in 2007 over award of about N628m for the renovation of her official residence and that of the deputy speaker,  Dimeji Bankole bought his palatial official quarters for N45m after N200m provision had been provided in 2008 budget for its renovation. There was also  Abdul Mumin Jibrin who, when  accused of ‘unilaterally padding the 2016 budget to the tune of N4.1 billion to his Kiru/Bebeji federal constituency in Kano State, attributed his travails to his inability “to admit into the budget almost N30 billion personal requests from Mr. Speaker Dogara and the three other principal officers”.

    The excesses of our lawmakers did not go unnoticed by Nigerian concerned opinion leaders. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi as governor of Central bank on December 1, 2010 during a lecture at the University of Benin was the first to inform Nigerians that federal legislators had cornered about 25% of federal government budget. The late former Justice of Supreme Court, Justice Kayode Eso on November 21, 2010 warned that ‘for any senator including absentee senators to take home N30m every month without accountability as a foundation for revolution”.

    While ex-President Obasanjo at the public presentation of the autobiography of Justice Mustapha Akanbi, in Abuja, in November 2014 ridiculed the National Assembly, as “largely an assemblage of looters and thieves”, it was the view of Biodun Jeyifo that “if you want to know why looting and thievery became so pervasive in the 4th Republic, you must pay attention to the legalization and institutionalization of greed and sleaze in our predatory legislature”.

    Lawmakers’ infidelity, perfidy of ethnic nationalities and political intrigue and economic sabotage by those who have no faith in the country are but symptoms of our greater malaise. Our malady is our superstructure. General Abdulsalami Abubakar’s Decree 24 as Pa Ayo Adebanjo has repeatedly warned, will not take us to the Promised Land.

    President Bola Tinubu might have tried to prove that separation of power in presidential system is an illusion, the N5.7b Prado toys’ treachery is a sad reminder that even if an angel operates a unitary constitution in a multicultural society, he will fail. To guard against the fate of his predecessors therefore, the president must ensure we stop playing the ostrich and return to where the rain started to beat us.

  • Netanyahu, European allies as scourge of Jews and Arabs

    Netanyahu, European allies as scourge of Jews and Arabs

    The compromised international community and the rest of humanity must hold Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, his US and European allies responsible for both the October 7 brutal murder of about 1,400 Israeli soldiers, innocent women and children by Hamas terrorists and Israel’s retaliatory indiscriminate bombing of caged people of Gaza resulting so far in the death of over 3,000 Palestinian civilians including women and children.

    Netanyahu claims the Jews owned the land of Israel because they occupied it 3,500 years ago before the Arabs he described as colonialists exiled them from the land in the 7th century. That was just an attempt at revisionism. Jews, through Sarah and Arabs through Hagar were siblings. Abraham, their patriarch came from Ur in present day Iraq in search of a land he was told was flowing with milk and honey. His children, including Joshua waged vicious wars before securing a land which turned out to be a desert, with a ring of deep craters, hills and valleys of death.

    But Israel’s story is the story of migration in all societies. However, unlike other societies including America, Canada and Australia taken over by new invaders, Israel as admitted by Netanyahu had the support of Christian Zionist sympathisers and of course powerful European nations to take their land back.

    In 1947, the UN voted for Palestine to be split into separate Jewish and Arab states with Jerusalem becoming an international city. While Israel embraced the plan, it was rejected by the Arabs. With the help of powerful European nations trying to atone for centuries of savagery against the Jewish people in both central and eastern Europe, Israel overpowered the Arab and had by 1967 occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Sinai peninsula while Palestinian refugees lived in Gaza and West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The status quo has remained the same ever since. 

    With the Norway Oslo Peace Process, Israel and Palestinians after years of bloodletting recognized the quest for self-actualization by both as legitimate and therefore recognized the right of each other for statehood. Not long after, Benjamin Netanyahu then opposition leader called the Oslo accord “a mortal threat to Israel”.

    With Netanyahu’s electoral upset in 1996, Israelis accelerated building of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories while frustrated Hamas organized suicide bombers to kill people in Israel. The Oslo deal eventually collapsed. Netanyahu, the longest serving Israeli leader perhaps after Moses has done everything ever since to prolong the nightmare of the Israelis and Palestinians.

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     Netanyahu’s strategy is the exploitation of the innermost fears of the Jewish people – the survival of their hard won state and preservation of their religion and cultural values. Desperate to retain power after some electoral setbacks in recent years, he formed an alliance with the ultra-right that has always opposed the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

    The result was continued expansion of settlements in the Palestinian occupied West Bank. This was to lead to endless clashes between about 700,000 new Israeli residents and aggrieved Palestinians dispossessed of their homes and land. Netanyahu’s periodic police raid left over 300 Palestinians dead with as many in Israeli prisons. The immediate cause of current hostility according to Hamas was the storming of Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam by Israeli police who took away some worshippers.

    Netanyahu celebrates Moses’ law of “an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth” despite Ghandi’s warning that such will make the world go blind. He forgets the essence of Moses law for the rebellious Jews with hardened mind was to prevent disproportionate vengeance since one cannot find peace by hating and getting your own back but by forgiveness and grace.

    While Golda Meir, 4th Israel’s Prime Minister believed violence was not the answer to violence and lamented that while “Israel can forgive the Arabs for killing Israeli children, they cannot forgive them for forcing Israelis to kill Arab children”,  Netanyahu celebrates violence believing Israel was invincible especially after its acquisition of nuclear power with the support of America and Europe who stood against similar quest by other nations in the Middle East including Iraq, Libya and Iran.

    Golda Meir confessed “while it is true Israel won all their wars, Israel paid for them”. For her, a leader who does not reflect deeply before sending soldiers to kill is not worth to be a leader, because “there is no difference between the person who kills and the person who send him to kill, if anything the latter is worse”.

    But for Netanyahu who last week mobilized 350,000 Israeli youths that have known nothing but violence and intense hatred in the last 30 years, his strategy has always been an appeal to their sense of patriotism before sending them on a mission to bomb not just Hamas terrorists but  women and children that constitute two third of caged Gaza residents.

    Netanyahu understands that Israel is haunted by the spectre of the Holocaust. As Golda Meir puts it: “Israel itself is the strongest guarantee against another Holocaust. Israel was not created to disappear. Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave”.

    Netanyahu was seen last week lionizing some of the mobilized Israeli youths he was sending to Gaza on a suicide mission, which the Oslo accord he killed would have prevented.

    As for the US and Western Europe, history has shown they love neither both Palestinians, Israelis, Africans nor anyone but themselves. Their avowed solid support for Israel has largely been driven by guilty conscience. Precisely because of centuries of humiliation and persecution of Jews across Europe, they lack the morale courage to promote cause of justice as Israel, out of a sense of misplaced aggression and fear of another Holocaust, continues to visit sins of Europe on their caged Palestinian cousins in the occupied territories.

    It is on record that because Europeans envied the Jews because of their economic success during the middle ages. Jews were denied citizenship, of their rights and barred from holding posts in government and the military by European rulers. In both central and eastern Europe, they were treated as second class citizens confined to the ghettos.

    The 1096 crusaders terror and massacre were directed at the Jews. In the 12th century, Jews were falsely accused of sacrificing of Christian children at Passover to obtain blood for unleavened bread. 

    The resentment and religious prejudices that followed their economic and cultural successes led to their forced eviction from several European countries including France (1112), England (1290), Germany (1350s), Portugal (1496), Provence (1512), and the Papal States (1569). Those who refused to convert from Judaism to Christianity faced persecution during the 1492 Spanish Inquisition.

    For 27 years, Netanyahu has played politics of fear to remain in power. Europe’s centuries of anti-Semitic campaign led to six million Jews being incinerated during the Holocaust.

     It is therefore time for Jews and Arabs that have more that binds them together start loving each other.  On the negative side, I have searched without finding a difference between Hamas terrorist who slaughtered women and children and Jews who bombed women and children put inside a cage called Gaza from where there is no escape.

    On the positive side, they should remember that Abraham was the father of both Ishmael and Isaac; that Moses, the father of Hebrew religion was married to Zipporah, a Midianite Arab woman (Exodus  verse 21) and that Ruth  who became the grandmother of King David was a Midianite from  Moab, today’s Jordan ( Ruth 1.1.)

    Arabs and Jews are one and the same. They should stop killing their own children. As Golda Meir predicted: “There will be peace between Israelis and Arabs when they start loving their children more than they hate us”.

  • 17 days to the final call

    17 days to the final call

    Early next month, the nation will, legally speaking, finally know where it stands on the February 25 presidential poll. By the time the Supreme Court decides the pending appeals before it on the election, the issue will be buried for all time. But will the two major appellants allow the nation breath?

        There is nothing the apex court says that will sit well with the duo of Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), except it favours them. Any ruling contrary to the notion that they won the election will, to them, be nothing but miscarriage of justice.

         Interestingly, the duo have never sat down to think deeply over the matter. How can there be two winners in an election? And an election already won fair and square by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), for that matter. They have done and are still doing everything possible to pull the President down.

      Atiku and Obi are bitter and their bitterness has turned them to sore losers. Atiku in particular cannot stand the Tinubu Presidency. To him, anybody but Tinubu can occupy the high executive office. Why this much hatred for a colleague, friend, associate and confidant with whom he fought many political battles in the past? Should politics become war because of electoral loss?

      The kind of bitterness being exhibited by Atiku and Obi has never been seen in the history of elections in the country. For all they care, the country can go up in flames. They do not care if lives and properties are lost. All they care about is their own selfish interest and that is to be declared winner of the election. I ask again, how can two persons win an election?

       Elections have always been won by one person and in case two contestants emerge with equal votes, the outcome is called a tie, meaning there is no winner or loser. This was not the case in the February 25 poll. A clear winner emerged and he was so declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The losers, in line with electoral requirements, went to the Presidential Election Petitions Court (PEPC) to challenge the President’s victory.

       It was within their right to do so and it is still within their right to appeal to the Supreme Court, but it is not within their right to adopt extra-judicial means to achieve their aim. These sore losers and their supporters have left the ball to go for the legs of not only Tinubu, their nemesis, but also of the Justices who are only performing their duties. The PEPC Justices went through hell in their hands. Their Lordships of the Supreme Court may experience the same thing.

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      But these are people who have developed thick skin in the course of their jobs while handling cases of this nature. So, they know what to do. Come rain, come shine, whether they are called names or not, they have sworn to do justice to all manner of man without fear or favour, affection or illwill. No amount of blackmail will make them to do otherwise. So, it is all in the line of duty for them. They will not be moved by fake video and audio clips meant to destroy their image and integrity.

      May their final decision which is likely to come up in the next 17 days help to finally end the unnecessary acrimony over the presidential poll. Atiku and Obi should bear in mind that Nigeria is greater than any of us. Nigerians  are equal stakeholders in the Nigerian Project, irrespective of Atiku’s and Obi’s status as presidential candidates.

  • Remembering Dele Giwa

    Remembering Dele Giwa

    How time flies? Today makes it exactly 37 years that founding Editor-in-Chief of Newswatch magazine, Dele Giwa, was killed by parcel bomb in his Adeniyi Jones, Ikeja, Lagos home. Time virtually stood still that Sunday, as news spread of his death. Sympathisers rushed to his residence and the Newswatch office then at Oregun to condole with his family and colleagues.

    Giwa was a colourful journalist. After returning home from the United States (US), he landed at the Daily Times, where he made the features pages a delight to read. He crossed over to Concord Group of Newspapers to edit the Sunday paper. Giwa wrote with passion. He threw himself into his job and when he and his three friends started Newswatch in 1985, magazine publishing came of age. Giwa’s forceful nature gave Newswatch its outlook.

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    The circumstances surrounding his death remain as hazy as they were when he was bombed in 1986. Who killed Dele Giwa? This is the question his family, friends and colleagues have been asking since his death. The question remains pertinent today, just as it was in 1986. The Ibrahim Babaginda-led junta under which he was killed pledged to fish out his killers. It failed to do so despite the linking of some of its top officials with the dastardly act.

    Will Giwa die in vain? Will we continue to ask the question: Who killed Dele Giwa? Or will the latter change to: Revealed: Those who killed Dele Giwa? For his children and grandchildren, finding Giwa’s killers and bringing them to justice is the only way to bring closure to the matter. May he continue to rest in peace.

  • Secret of longevity:  A practical approach

    Secret of longevity:  A practical approach

    I have just watched a video produced by the American journalist Dan Buettner on longevity in Netflix and I was so impressed by the details of the experimental research conducted that I decided to give my readers a brief discussion of it and also fill whatever lacuna that I find exist in the write up. Of course, no knowledge is absolutely complete. The Bible says that there is nothing new under the sun. Some people may also be wondering why I am writing about something that is not as topical as the Israeli-Gaza war which I agree is perhaps the most important issue facing the world right now, even more important than the Russia-Ukraine war because of the possibility of the crisis spreading to other parts of the combustible Middle East. The crisis is not just a flash in the pan; it has a long gestation and it is not likely to end very soon so there will be plenty of time to discuss the issue.

    The Netflix video on longevity based on the experience of a reporter who has followed the subject of his enquiry for 20 years is based on careful search for places where people live for 100 years all over the world. For practical logistical reasons, the writer did not include Africa as part of his study. He concentrated on Japan particularly the Island of Okinawa in the south, some isolated village in Sardinia in Italy, a village in Costa Rica in Central America and Loma Linda in southwestern Bernardino County in California.

    Any knowledgeable person on wellness will immediately find connecting factors in all the four areas that may promote longevity. First of all, they are not huge sprawling urban conurbations. The village identified in Okinawa as an abode of centenarians, is inhabited by hard working men and women who did not believe in any retiring age and who felt one must continue to make use of the brain and body until it is practically impossible to move. It is their belief that if one continues to work, the body will not give up. The people also ate sparingly and their menu was largely vegetables, fish and fruits. The people also managed to socialise by communal meetings, physical exercise, celebrations, dancing, singing and laughing. Something as simple as laughing was considered very important for long life. According to the study, the people avoided much starchy food and sweet potatoes were considered very essential part of their diet. It is now generally known that avoidance of red meat or any meat at all is a key to long life. Ancestral belief of their Buddhist religion was also a central psychological rallying point for the elderly of the Okinawa community under investigation.

    The writer did not want us to jump to conclusions with one study alone so he decided to look at a Sardinian community in Southern Italy which did not live exactly as the Okinawans did. This Italian community indulged themselves in typical Mediterranean menu of pasta, bread, fish and meat cooked in copious amount of olive oil and ate a lot of fruits. The location of this village on a hill was significant.   Even the church which was the centre of the village activities was located on the highest part of the village. The significance of this was that those who felt compelled to go for early worship in the morning must be prepared to go up the hill to fellowship with one another and praise their God. Without their knowing it, the people throughout their daily living developed healthy lifestyles and burnt out excess fat on daily basis and did not need to take cholesterol tablets. Many of the elderly people in the village considered pensions unneeded because they were working their fields and producing virtually all the fresh food they ate. Like the villagers in Okinawa, the Italians even though belonging to different faiths, were very strong in their beliefs. Unlike the Okinawa villagers, the Italians drank socially different kinds of wine but the most important thing is that everything was produced locally. The Italian studies suggest there was nothing wrong with eating carbohydrates laden foods as long as one ate sufficient amount of meat or fish and large amount of vegetables and drank moderately. The elderly kept working rather than abandoning hard work to younger people and that if one could no longer do hard work, one should learn other things to keep oneself engaged. One must never be too old to do something.

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    The third community examined is located in rural Costa Rica in Central America. I was particularly interested in this subject because this was largely a community of transplanted Africans (African diaspora). The people chose to work all their lives not by choice but by destiny. They were hardy cowboys, farmers and their tough women took care of the business aspect of their husbands’ lives. They ate sparingly but had a lot of fruits in their diet. The land they tilled was not large but they produced enough to keep bodies and souls together. They had good social lives and age was not a barrier to dancing, drinking and singing. The people also had strong faith in their Catholic religion. They also laughed a lot and were contented with their lives and their government despite its limited resources had an effective and efficient medical service covering the entire country. It was therefore not surprising to find many of the people living above a hundred years.

    These three studies on rural societies had many things in common. The communities were not touched by urban craze of fast, processed and homogenised foods; rather they ate what is now called organic food straight from the soil.

    The researcher realising that most people in the world live in urban areas decided to find a community that was not isolated and that was reasonably urban but small as well and that is how he landed in Loma Linda In California. Loma Linda is by American standards a small place of about 26000 inhabitants of mixed racial population. It is of course famous for its medical university but perhaps much more famous because of the number of centenarians in the community. It is also largely a Seventh Day Adventist community that is almost vegetarian and alcohol abstaining. This is a thoroughly modern American society using cutting edge technology in all areas of life but at the same making the Seventh Day Christian theology the centre of its life.

    Unlike the other communities previously studied, Loma Linda is not isolated and it is well known as a centre of modern medicine and medical conferences. What cuts across the four communities studied over a period of 20 years is the fact of total engagement of each person with the community, absolute belief in their faith, a sense of purpose and lot of fruits and vegetables in their diet. It is only the Loma Linda community that abstains from meat or fish as a source of protein and from alcohol. The Italian and Costa Rican communities eat all things but maintain its health through physical activities such as demanded by the nature of their environments. The Okinawans seem to indulge more in socialised living and communal work without any ideological mumbo jumbo!

    The most relevant of the four studies is the Loma Linda because it is more realistic and can be embraced and practiced by all those who are willing without embracing the Seventh Day Adventist ideology .The more vegetables and less meat or animal proteins we eat, the healthier we are. This appears to be the trend in most parts of the world today and it is environmentally friendly in a world where all abatement measures need to be considered if we are to save the only living planet we have. If the researcher on longevity had had the time, resources and logistics for global spread, he would have been surprised by the number of communities in Africa where people live over a hundred years because they live organically, eating own grown food, lots of vegetables and little meat because of lack of means and hunting animal and catching fishes for protein. My home town Okemesi and many other towns in Nigeria used to be like that and I believe villagers still live longer than towns’ people with minimal medical support by government.

    In conclusion, we may ask how important it is for people to live for a hundred years or more. It is not worth living very long and in this case until one hundred unless one lives those years in reasonable health and happiness. There is a general saying that it is not how long one lives that matters but how well. There is no point living long in ill health, penury and consequent sorrow and unhappiness. Medical science will also confirm that longevity is in the genes and it does not really matter how some people live their lives, they will still live long. But if one has a cursory look at people who live long, one will discover that there are certain factors in their lives predisposing them to longevity. These could be their hard work, commitment to certain purposes in life, feeling of being needed and having a larger horizon than the ordinary people.  

    Sir Winston Churchill, British statesman, soldier, politician, writer and war-time leader lived till he was 90 years old, yet by ordinary reckoning he shouldn’t have lived that long. His father Lord  Randolph Spencer Churchill died at 45 and Winston himself was a rotund, chain smoking and hard drinking man but he made up for these by his public life and writing. This should be an encouragement for those of us elderly public intellectuals who continue to write even in our evening years.

  • Your child incarnal theatre

    Your child incarnal theatre

    The lust for applause and cheap renown is the common grave of internet natives. This minute, it finds fertile tracts in the psyche of the Nigerian wilding on TikTok, Facebook, X, and Instagram.

    Sex and nudity are profitable in cyberspace. Thus you would understand why a struggling actress would sleep with a man and pay him to subsequently leak the sex tape. She took her cue from the music diva who connived with her boyfriend to leak her sex tape and afterwards feign victimhood. Even bad news serves the celebrity junkie.

    It becomes worrisome when such creepy creatures emerge as popular role models for the young. Inspired by their theatrics, the Nigerian child resurfaces in the public arena in garish cruciforms: the girl child is no longer meek and innocent. She has grown from the temperate virgin without tarnish into the intemperate vixen with animal taint.

    The boychild needs saving but he is repeatedly ignored. Growing up is never easy on both. Puberty is their savage space. They get destroyed in real-time by the jarring depravity of popular culture.

    Neither religion nor moral strictures could disrupt their induction into carnal space; the ritual riddance of their innocence takes place as you read. It is active and latent in our language, music, imagery and thought.

    Like the proverbial moral castrates, we have turned ritual orgy into a street carnival, feting the degenerate and debauched, while we consign the virtuous and pure to permanent ill repute.

    Little wonder many approach life as a pagan theatre; to survive, they embrace the brazen pomp of bestial personae. This perhaps explains why a teenage girl would rant and rage, accusing a popular TikToker of plagiarism, or rather, performance theft of her sex video.

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    You just might understand too, why frantic TikToker, Veegoddess’ resorted to bestial hustle. If you ask her, she would tell you her grin is “expensive.” For the right price, it will slink into a sneer, while she receives pounding from a dog. The youngster went viral after claiming she slept with a dog for N1.7million. 

    She said, ”I only slept with a dog, I didn’t kill somebody. You, in your life, you have done worse, and besides, have you seen N1.7 million before? As if it’s a big deal. And mind you I’m not infected or anything. Stop dying on the matter, I’m enjoying the money,” she said.

    Scared by the resultant backlash, she recanted, claiming she was simply “cruising” (fooling around). Yet, the fact that she deemed such social harakiri status-enhancing depicts a new low for modern Nigeria and her dysfunctional family units.

    Through Veegoddess’ cocksure demeanour, her voice crashes through the social space like a broken scream, and a silent shriek creeps into her narrative. The impact is chilling.

    It resonates in Lagos sex vixen, Angela Jika’s carnal roar. Jika can “act anything.” She would submit to restraints and take a beating from a dominant male or dominatrix. She would feign a rapture by draping a slick, sultry mask on her face. For N50,000, she would spread out and make a flora bed for the studio.

    Money teases off her inhibitions. Hard drugs too. Now 23, she is a prominent feature in porn movies. Angela’s role models in the industry are Ajibola Elizabeth aka Maami Igbagbo and Tobiloba Jolaoso, popularly known as Kingtblakhoc. It would be recalled that Jolaoso was arrested for allegedly recording a pornographic movie at the Osun Osogbo sacred grove on the outskirts of Osogbo, the Osun state capital, and a UN-designated World Heritage Site.

    From Jolaoso’s desecration of the sacred grove to his teeming fans’ celebration of his “feat,” a generational conflict resounds with an instructive peal. It highlights the widening cultural chasms between the older generation and the young channeling degenerate impulses in defiance of Puritan values.

    It’s about time we all understood that neither words nor images accede to moral control. As pop culture elevates morbid idolatry as fascism of the Nigerian psyche, every ravenous, roving eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience.

    Popular culture is the new Babylon, where defiant art and intellect thrive. Think of it as our imperial sex theatre, the supreme temple of the Western eye elevated as the Nigerian psyche. We live in the age of idols. Every child wants to be a star. And there is a downside to the scourge.

    If Veegoddess and the infamous Lekki girls’ alleged commercial sex with dogs, constituted our reality check, the Chrisland School underage sex scandal offers more frightful glimpses into our infernal core.

    Greater tragedy subsists in the adult public’s morbid fascination with the underage students’ sex video. On the pretext of condemning their sexual misadventure, several adults enthusiastically shared the video, drooling over the sordid imagery of a 10-year-old girl reportedly performing a sex act on her 13-year-old mate.

    If the participants were the children of sharers of the disturbing video, would they excitedly share it across social media platforms? Sadism manifests in the wanton sexualisation of Nigerian society. The sadistic voyeurism triggered by the Chrisland school scandal is a consequence of society’s broken moral compass and a manifest descent of amusement fare.

    The kids are casualties of the corruption of societal values fostered by the mainstream media, unregulated cyberspace, and institutionalisation of perverse entertainment like the Big Brother Naija (BBN) reality show, among others. Disguised as modern entertainment, the show subsists as a rebuke to moral nature, an escape from the province of responsibility with its restraining womb walls and bowels.

    The show’s broadcaster via the digital satellite television feeds an amoral miasma, creating a world of fluid caprices, amid its carnage of incarnations.

    But while it’s starkly convenient to arbitrarily blame the BBN producers for normalising filth as media fare, it must be acknowledged that greater fault lies with Nigerian parents who manifestly fail their wards every time they sit with them to watch and obsess about the sordid show.

    Aside from the BBN filth, social media is rife with pornography; time and over again, teenagers and minors are persistently exposed to scandalous videos of revenge porn.

    There is no one to protect such minors from the aggressive cues and wild decadence insinuated into their psyches by the highly sexualised content to which they are exposed. Entertainers use porn to groom society, and youngsters, in particular, are dealt a gruesome form of psychological conditioning that leaves too many among them stirred, shaken, and receptive to dross. 

    Despite its apparent dangers, porn addiction has become pop culture, cutting through swathes of conservative norms and social correctness. As it knifes through the country, cyberspace becomes a garish, raunchy boulevard; a theatre of libertine delight, fetishes, and rendezvous for voyeurs  and porn stars.

    It also offers a negotiation point for the addicted desiring real physical action. The social space thus unfurls as an esplanade of taboos and fetishes that expand and contract to temptation and patronage.

    In Nigeria, porn has won the culture war by fusing with the commercial mainstream. Modern fashion takes its cues from porn. Music videos and comedy skits mime porn scenes, presenting females as porn rats and video vixens. Everybody exploits porn for shock and commercial value.

    All these sever the exposed minors’ mental connection with moral roots. The leaders of tomorrow are thus lured backwards, away from menarche into the womb of regression.

    The solution, sadly, lies in proper parenting. But have we proper parents?

  • Beyond farce and fury

    Beyond farce and fury

    It is an ideal of dubious clerisy to make the tragic sense of things the touchstone of Nigerian politics. This desire to daub life dire has for a long while, defined the tide of political partisanship and the transience of hope as a national ideal.

    In the fracas of faith and fury, the negligible attains significance while the essential gets consigned to the fringes of awareness. Thus the primordial fascination of presumed intelligentsia and thought leaders with trifles at the expense of issues pivotal to national progress.

    The moral and ethical issues of misgovernance, predatory corporatism, treasury looting, self-serving legislation by lawmakers, anti-growth economic policies, insecurity and sky-rocketing inflation appear to be irrelevant in the arena of public discourse post-2023 elections.

    Every critic is obsessed with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s academic credentials. Demagogues have, once again, set the agenda for media coverage and public discourse. And the media characteristically fulfil its role as a junkyard dog, drooling all over the bone of contention.

    Media platforms have become a sounding board for all shades of bigotry and suspicious clerisy. The latter, by their antics, loom as marketers of illusion, skittish shamans channelling deceit to profit from confusion. Even while faced with incontrovertible truth, they see what they have been paid to see or what they have trained their minds to believe.

    All is fair in pursuit of power thus at their victory or defeat, politicians recruit all shades of characters to condemn their defeat or celebrate their victory.

    To such end, a few privileged idealists assume the role of courtiers; to validate power in unworthy hands, they create a pseudo-reality plausible enough to redefine truth and distort facts. It is instructive, for instance, that a good many of them are still egging on Labour Party’s ‘Obidients’ that Peter Obi is set to grab power through the trapdoor of the Supreme Court after failing to do this at the elections tribunal, even though he came a distant third to the winner of the February 25 election, President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

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    Outside the corridors of power, they plot pseudo-events and pretend to speak for the people. They claim to work for the country’s good but they are performers whose chief intent is to make money. Conflict is their treasure trove. Call them political profiteers or merchants of misery.

    In the corridors of power, they shamelessly parrot official propaganda, polluting public discourse with sycophancy, and doublespeak, among other behavioural toxins. 

    Government and corporations allow courtiers into their inner circles imbuing them with instant celebrity but as Saul points out, no class of courtiers, from the eunuchs behind Manchus in the 19th century to the Baghdad caliphs of the Abbasid caliphate, has ever transformed into a responsible and socially productive class.

    Courtiers are, ultimately, political degenerates. They are intellectual hooligans committing the violence of pretence against Nigeria and her people. When they claim to be pro-citizenry, they carry on like “political hobbyists,” often lending their ‘voices’ to front-burner issues, and sponsoring hashtags to attain clout.

    There is little difference between them and the proverbial fawning page, who plays smooth flatterer and thug to both the government and citizenry-herd, twisting and turning with changing circumstances.

    They are deucedly reactive, a spectacle of submission and ideological sodomy, their words and deeds boom as a cloying mime of irate mobs, corrupt politicians, and corporations’ reprobate wiles.

    Eitan Hersh, Associate professor of political science at Tufts University identifies courtiers as “political hobbyists,” and highlights their perfect contrast in the person and politics of Querys Martias. The Dominican immigrant in Haverhill, United States, presents a rare exemplar of supposedly educated eggheads.

    For Matias, politics isn’t just a hobby. In her day job, she is a bus monitor for a special-needs school. In her evenings, she amasses power. By leading a group called the Latino Coalition (LC) in Haverhill, she unites the Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Central Americans who together make up about 20 per cent of Haverhill. The coalition gets out the vote during elections, but it does much more than that, notes Hersh.

    The coalition once met with the Haverhill representative in Congress and asked for regular, Spanish-speaking office hours for its community. It advocates for immigration reform and federal assistance in affordable housing. The coalition has also met with the mayor, the school superintendent, and the police department requesting more Latinos in city jobs and on city boards.

    Matias’ political participation is strategic; the 65-year-old influences governance to the benefit of her community. Under her leadership, the coalition operates with discipline, combining electoral strategies with policy advocacy under her leadership.

    Unlike Matias, Nigeria’s college-educated intellectuals personify Hersh’s political hobbyist stereotype. They are disproportionately educated, flaunting several awards, titles, and postgraduate degrees.

    They espouse politics of the soapbox; a wanton game in which they debate Nigeria’s big issues on abstract merits – often mouthing off their “superior” logic or sounding off for clout in social space, at events sponsored by meddlesome foreign consulates or on government-sponsored think tanks.

    Their assemblage thrives on pseudo-realism, their ability to propound and market spurious experiences. In reality, they are toxic to politics and harmful to the country. 

    Nigeria would do better if her eggheads redirected political energy to serve the people. For instance, they could start at the grassroots, where government presence is non-existent. 

    To re-establish relevance and repair integrity, Nigeria’s idealists, revolutionary heroes, youth leaders, or whatever other labels they answer to, must detach from ideological voyeurism and fault-finding – a tactic of assault and defence that eventually becomes their nemesis and tomb.

    They must seek to empower people. For so long, they have united to market cunning and rhetoric, for and against selfish segments of the political class; it’s about time they united in the electorate’s interest.

    Grassroots politics thrives on empowerment; helping imperilled peasant farming communities defeat desert encroachment, insecurity, and flooding; improving fringe communities’ access to health care, electricity, and good roads, and provision of soft loans to unemployed youths, SMEs, and agricultural start-ups.

    These could be achieved by influencing real political power. The political intelligentsia seeks collaboration in modest and large organisations to meet the immediate and long-term needs of the people. Then, when an election dawns, the community would show up. Call it dividends of their investment in the people’s emotional bank account.

    Some would call it strategic citizenship. It’s pragmatic, humane, and real politics. It’s the kind of engagement that public intellectuals must perform to give substance to their professed clout.

    And it’s precisely the kind of politicking that helps the electorate shun the tokens and humiliating food packs, often handed out by the political class in exchange for their votes, at election time.

    If we humanely engage with the people, we might attain noble repute with the grassroots and the grudging respect of the political class. We might assume a prideful place in the pantheon of Nigeria’s finest patriots and statesmen.

    True, fancy repute and ghostly online clout may earn us money in the short run but we shall lose it all in the long run to the same system that taught us to be soulless hobbyists.

    We have used fiery intellect and the soapbox as mirrors to reflect society’s hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice.

    It’s about time we walked our talk in the interest of Nigeria and the populace

  • Obi and Atiku as true sons of their fathers

    Obi and Atiku as true sons of their fathers

    The battle for the soul of Nigeria, a beautiful country of wonderful people by self-serving leaders masquerading as messiahs has always been very fierce. This is why, for those who understand the nature of our crisis of nation-building, it should not come as a surprise that six months after an election won “round and square’ by President Ahmed Bola Tinubu, a victory upheld through a unanimous pronouncement of a five-man judicial panel, Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar, his defeated opponents have not only continued to heat up the polity, they appear prepared to pull the roof down over their heads. And this they are doing through propaganda, misinformation, outright lies, and de-legitimization of his government and demonization of his person with the active connivance of a section of the media managed by politicians in journalists’ borrowed robes.

    A journey through memory will show that our nation has for long been haunted by our leaders’ ideology of ‘if I cannot have it, no one else must have it’. Following the rivalry between Nnamdi Azikiwe and Tafawa Balewa over who loved Nigeria most during the constitutional crisis that followed the 1964 disputed election, both lured the military into politics in 1966. Thus, two old men who hated each other ignited the fire that was to throw our beautiful country into a 30 months civil war in which over three million Nigerian youths who had nothing against each other killed themselves.

    It was the rivalry between Emeka Ojukwu and Yakubu Gowon over who was best suited to be Head of State that sparked off the war that finally truncated our political socialisation process; just as it was the rivalry between Ibrahim Babangida who claimed there was no alternative to the Structural Adjustment Programme and Muhammadu Buhari who believed such a policy was anti-Nigeria that eventually destroyed the foundation of our economic development.

    I am sure many Nigerians still remember that it was Babangida, the evil genius and Abacha who fraudulently claimed “for our future they sacrificed their present” that annulled the most credible election in our nation’s history, institutionalized an interim contraption and incarcerated MKO Abiola, the winner of the election who later died in captivity because according to Obasanjo, their accomplice, he “was not the messiah Nigerians were waiting for”!

    Desperate Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar are therefore tarred with the same brush as Azikiwe and Balewa and other aforementioned self-proclaiming messiahs. The facts stare us all in the face.

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    Obi desperate to rule Nigeria after his two terms as governor of Anambra State on the platform APGA, jumped boat and became Atiku Abubakar’s PDP VP candidate in 2019. Sensing that the PDP rotation policy that favoured the emergence of an Igbo as PDP presidential candidate was going to be breached by Atiku, he jumped boat again, this time to the Labour Party.

    And the strategy of his witch doctors and godfathers including Pat Utomi, Charles Oputa, Akin Osuntokun, Dele Farotimi and his sponsors, Pa Edwin Clark, Ayo Adebanjo and Olusegun Obasanjo was to exploit the sentiments of his aggrieved Igbo ethnic group at home and abroad. He was also to play the religion card as he hopped from one big Pentecostal church to the other while Catholic priests in his native Anambra took it upon themselves to mobilise their congregations across town and villages.

    Their other strategies involved the use of the social media and demonisaton of the ruling APC over its choice of Muslim-Muslim ticket by Obimedia who regularly invited into their studios, Christian pastors without the spirit of Christ who were allowed to make incendiary statements.

    ‘Obimedia’ painted a picture of an invincible Obi. But while Obi won 95% of Igbo votes and about 50% of Christian votes especially in the middle belt region, he lost Muslim votes in nearly all the northern states. While of the three leading parties, Obi came a distant third, he insisted his mandate was stolen. As it was in 1964 and 1993, his unquestioning Obidients called on the military to take over while Obasanjo appealed to Buhari to stop counting of votes and institutionalise an Interim Government as he and Babangida did in 1993. When all failed, he decided to go to court to retrieve ‘his stolen mandate’.

    Meanwhile, the president-elect became target of campaign of calumny in the hands of ‘Obidients’ mob and ‘Obimedia’. From faraway USA where he was giving a lecture, Farotimi said to his audience “an indicted drug pushers was about to become president of Nigeria”. Back home on ARISE TV where he is always a toast, he, without restraint called the president names. Others that do not share Farotimi’s views did not escape his caustic tongue. “We Nigerians are shameless”, “the judiciary has ceased to be a court of law”; he has “zero trust in the capacity of the current Chief Justice of Nigeria to deliver justice’, all in the service of his Peter Obi, his messiah.

    It is not difficult to understand Atiku Abubakar’s desperation. He has come to be regarded a serial loser by Nigerians having contested for the presidency in 1993, 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2019. For the 2023 election, he was so desperate that he was prepared to break all rules including his party constitution which splintered PDP into ANPP, Labour Party and G-5 governors, with the first three garnering about 14m votes to the victorious APC’s  8,794,726.

    Ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar rejected former President Goodluck Jonathan’s admonition that “you, go home and rest or find something else to do, if the people you wanted to serve rejected you”. He similarly rejected the advice of Bola Tinubu, his estranged friend that he should return to Dubai from where he periodically came for election for a well-deserved rest after many heroic electoral defeats. He headed for the court where he lost.

      He decided to take his case to the Supreme Court. As part of preparation for this, he headed to Chicago University in faraway America to secure President Tinubu’s transcript and diploma. Atiku, desperate to hold onto any straw returned to Nigeria and held a press conference where he claimed Tinubu forged his diploma certificate. A section of the media without asking why a man whose transcript showed he was a first class product would forge a certificate, has continued to assault our sensibilities with Olisa Agbakoba (SAN) quoted by an online newspaper last Monday as saying “I am ashamed to see lawyers on television arguing one way or the other on the merits and demerits of the CSU matter,” while “calling out all media that tolerate the nonsense of adjudicating on TV and newspapers”.

    Obi who as importer of labour of other nations contributed to the collapse of our budding industries, the reason we have an exodus of our youths to other nations in search of greener pastures is not is tarred with the same brush as Atiku Abubakar who under Obasanjo presided over the sale of Nigeria’s total investment of $100b to PDP stalwarts for a paltry $1.5b.

    Obi and Atiku are in all respect true sons of their fathers. And as the Yoruba will say “you don’t begrudge a son for resembling his father”.  The tragedy of our country however is a section of the media that often try to mislead the public by calling a dog a monkey.

  • Agbakoba’s ‘moral high ground’

    Agbakoba’s ‘moral high ground’

    I wiped my eyes several times when I stumbled on the story in this paper on Tuesday. The reason for my action would be obvious to the discerning: I did not believe what I was reading, so I wanted to be sure my eyes were not deceiving me. Agbakoba slams debates on cases before Supreme Court, said the headline of the story.

    Which Agbakoba? I wondered. But inside me I knew that there is only one Agbakoba who can make such newspaper headline. But could he be the one taking offence to his colleagues’ comments in the media on cases before the apex court? Who started it all? Was he not the one? Olisa Agbakoba, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and activist, took his activism too far shortly before the February 25 presidential election. 

    When you see the name Agbakoba in the media, you know instantly that it could only be Olisa. Olisa Agbakoba’s romance with the media did not start today. It started over 35 years ago when he and Clement Nwankwo founded the rights group, Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO). The organisation has grown in leaps and bounds since then, but Olisa and  Clem have gone their separate ways. The story of their break up is for another day.

    The duo have made good for themselves in their common field, enriching human rights and civil liberties advocacy, with their campaigns on different platforms. Clem now runs the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre (PLAC). He is the convener of the Civil Society Situation Room under  which the group works with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) during elections. In the run-up to the last elections, Agabakoba started a campaign, the kind that had never been seen since the country has been holding elections followiing the return to democratic rule in 1999.

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    His evidently self-serving campaign on scoring 25 percent of the votes cast in Abuja as a requirement for winning the presidential election set the tone for the rancour over the poll. It was as if Section 134 (2) of the Constitution had just been inserted, with the way Agbakoba took the matter. It turned out that he was only paving the way for a bitter ending to the election. Thanks to him and his ilk, the nation is still reeling from the acrimony over the election.

    What was Agbakoba’s angst? He wanted to know if a candidate could be declared winner of the election,  if he did not score 25 percent of the votes cast in Abuja? He said he was just raising the issue ahead of the election to avert crisis. But, he was wittingly preparing the ground for a crisis. His swift reaction to the September 6 verdict of the Presidential Election Petitions Court (PEPC), which held that a winner did not require to poll 25 percent of Abuja votes, gave him out.

    Hardly had the tribunal finished delivering the over 12-hour judgment that he texted an Arise News newscaster on air, wondering why the Justices took virtually the whole day to give the verdict. The newscaster, who revers Agbakoba, then turned to her guest after reading the text to ask him whether the tribunal should have sat that long, I have a text from Agbakoba, the Agbakoba himself (and that was reporting!), saying the tribunal should have summarised its judgment within 30 minutes or so instead of keeping people that long in court.

    Unknown to Agbakoba, it was because of people like him that the tribunal took that step of televising the judgment and reading it to the hearing of all to avoid being accused of bias. Yet, some people are not satisfied. They are still calling their Lordships names for not conferring Abuja with a ‘special status’? In the aftermath of the verdict, Atiku (or is it Sadiq?) Abubakar has turned to ‘Ajala travel all over the world’ looking for ‘after-discovered evidence’ to upturn it at the Supreme Court?

    The outcome of the fishing expedition has become a subject of debate everywhere, and Agbakoba, who started it all, is disturbed. He should not be. He should be happy that at street corners, football pitches and bars, people gather to debate the matter.  They muse at the American trip to confirm if the certificate President Bola Tinubu submitted to INEC emanated from Chicago State University. More worrisome for Agbakoba is that lawyers have joined the debate bandwagon in the media. He wants the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) to sanction such lawyers. Really!

    Agbakoba cannot mean that. He started this fire and he should not be seen crying fire! fire!! fire!!! after  it becomes a conflagration that can consume everything along its path. If only he knew, he won’t have started this raging inferno. The issue is beyond the comments, as sickening as some of them may be, but the audacity with which some of the commentators are threatening to bring down the country, if things do not go their way. As Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Kayode Ariwoola observed on October 4 at the swearing in of some new Federal High Court judges, court decisions are not based on public opinions, but law.

    The danger in the fire Agbakoba started is that nobody knows how it will be put out, even after the Supreme Court decides the appeals arising from the PEPC verdict. What, with all manner of comments on the issue, both by lawyers and non-lawyers. When a shoeshine boy stops you on the road and tells you pointblank that without getting 25 percent of Abuja votes, a contestant cannot win the presidential election, then you know that there is fire on the mountain. Lawyers, as Agbakoba whose father was a Justice of the Court of Appeal knows, make their submissions in court and not on air and pages of newspapers.

    When they start parading the media, as he did, when he began the contrived debate on 25 percent of Abuja votes, something must have informed it.  Agbakoba used the media to sell his own agenda, now he does not want his fellow lawyers to enjoy the same privilege. He cannot stand on moral high ground on this matter. He is as guilty as those he wants the NBA to sanction. As Fela will say, teacher no teach me nonsense!

  • Nigeria’s worst pandemic (1)

    Nigeria’s worst pandemic (1)

    This minute, Nigeria unfurls to a viral disease. It’s a psychological and social pandemic. And it afflicts both young and old, male and female, engendering disaster of vastly different stripes.

    The young, however, are more vulnerable to its scourge thus their enthrallment as spectators and tools for the proliferation of our social prejudicial complex.

    Societal foundries of thought including the academia, religious institutions, and the economic and political intelligentsia, are burdened by the yoke of prejudice fostered by political and religious demagogues, confused liberals, and partisan social institutions – all thriving by the participation of a fierce and furious youth mob.

    The ruckus of selective outrage and anti-Nigeria sentimentality championed by the young have become worrisome. But if these youths seem incorrigible and hopeless, it’s because they are consequences of bad parenting, casualties of the complete collapse of the family as a social unit.

    An older friend of mine argued that it’s her generation, the Baby Boomers, that started the malaise. “Our parents raised us well and disciplined us appropriately. But our generation decided to spoil our children. We condoned too much misconduct,” she said.

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    Her generation, she argued, suffered the boomerang effect; because many of them thought that their parents were too strict, they compensated by becoming “too accommodating” and “less stern” with their own children.

    The Baby Boomers, however, aren’t solely to blame. Subsequent generations of parents courted impotence by skirting around the contentious issue of discipline in raising a child. Tomes have been written about modern parenthood; modern sociologists, marriage counsellors, and child psychologists have promoted weird and tame techniques of parenthood, urging parents to experiment with ideas from the so-called developed but debauched societies of the “First World.”

    What they advocate in their books and podcasts, however, is hardly child nurturing. It’s akin to animal grooming; that is, rearing a child, like livestock or an expensive pet.  

    The lack of child discipline is a consequence of parents’ obsession with ego, among other social malaise. Damaged parents raise damaged children. Thus self-centred parents imagine that their kids are the centre of the world and incapable of wrongdoing; that was the general Baby Boomer attitude toward their own kids. And subsequent generations, like the Millennials, internalised and perpetuated this defective culture of parentage.

    This is not to dismiss the efforts of those parents who painstakingly nurtured and disciplined their wards, imparting in them highly sought moral values.

    As a child, my parents never harassed my teachers for disciplining me when I did something wrong. No sensible parent would do that except in rare circumstances of extreme abuse. Cut to contemporary society and life gets turned on its head. Parents jostle to enrol their wards in schools where they are taught to feign a foreign accent at the expense of cultured grooming and discipline. Thus the preponderance of schools coaching minors to speak in British and American accents while our native language is dismissed as backward vernacular. On the flip side, indigent families haul their wards to school to learn skills required to function as systems managers in our highly dysfunctional and corrupted social system.

    Lest we forget those parents who force their children – even when they evidently lack the interest or capacities – into medical or nursing school, in preparation for future job hunting in the United Kingdom, the United States or Canada. Everybody wants their kids to be doctors or nurses abroad.

    Some, however, encourage their children to settle for less endearing jobs as public toilet attendants, janitors, street sweepers, sewage cleaners, mall attendants and so on.

    A disdain for their homeland fosters the burgeoning brain drain afflicting the country. Thus whatever the class of their degrees and professional competence, an increasing number of Nigerians are raising their children to romanticise life as menial workers abroad as their passport to the good life.

    This mentality of parenting has so far produced in the country, a generation of citizenry afflicted with toxic personae; their lives are complicated and fraught with low self-esteem and an abiding disdain for their homeland. They care only about themselves and think that the world revolves around them.

    They despise their country because they have been taught to do so by their parents, their schools and worship houses.

    Thus the increasing number of youths – including the professional working class and unemployed – mounting the pulpit in the various worship houses, to celebrate their visas to travel or relocate abroad at “testimony” time.

    A Nigerian medical doctor who has been doing menial jobs in Canada disclosed, recently, that he had a fantastic practice back home in Nigeria. He said he had a thriving hospital, four cars; a personal driver, and two wings of duplex – one served as his family home while he leased out the other wing.

    Yet he “relocated to the UK for the sake of the children.” Things got tough in the UK as his “wife and children weren’t feeling the country.” So, he moved them all to Canada. “I did it for the sake of the children,” he said.

    No one should begrudge him for doing what he considers best for his family. But he has been doing menial jobs for about five years now, two years as an ambulance driver in London and three years now as a store attendant in Ontario because the Canadian medical authorities have refused to validate his credentials.

    Already, he has burned through his savings from the sale of his property before his relocation abroad. Occasionally, he mulls relocating back to Nigeria, but he lacks the courage to come back and start from scratch.

    According to him, he was a “giver” and a “very successful doctor” who consulted for government hospitals before he migrated abroad. He dreads returning to the country to restart as an underling or underpaid consultant to doctors who once looked up to him.

    He hasn’t practised for over five years and this may be used to devalue his competence and suitability for employment back home in Nigeria, he said. That is actually the least of his worries. In time, his children will outgrow his paternal authority and challenge it. They will grow disaffected with his sacrifice and would most likely tell him, “Nobody asked you to do all that, Daddy.” If he gets lucky, he won’t get kicked out of his own home.

    Back home in Nigeria, he deemed each day rewarding because of the volume and quality of patient traffic in his private clinic. More patients and consultancies translate to a lucrative practice. These days, success subsists in getting through each day without losing his spot to a younger and more agile immigrant. Forget the challenges at work, his greatest challenge subsists in surviving domestication by his wife even as he struggles as a beast of burden to his entire family.

    Again, no one should begrudge him for seeking a better life for his children; even if his family of seven must squeeze into a two-bedroom apartment ridiculously tinier and inferior to his luxurious mansion back home. He only took his best decision towards the attainment of the best living conditions and opportunities for his children

    Let’s hope his children aren’t blind to his sacrifice. They know the certainties and luxuries he had to forgo in order to relocate them abroad. They see his reduction from a medical doctor and a high-value man into a menial worker and just another immigrant scum hustling in the structured societal jail cells of Canada.