Category: Thursday

En route to the February polls, Nigeria flails to impassioned hope and jarring cynicism of political actors. Politics stews to a scalding broth as rival parties, posing as patriots, split private terraces and public courts in vulgar gladiatorship. They do it for the culture. Indeed, patriotism thrives on cultural standards. The politics that Nigerians espouse, the lore of nationhood, and the lyricism of partisan poetry manifest the kernel of our sovereignty.

A similar dynamic undergirds our political and literary traditions. Politics thrives on literary culture and vice versa. What shouldn’t we do for an evergreen story? What shouldn’t we give? Evergreen storylines make up the fabric of our collective narrative; when progressively spun, they are endlessly fascinating, yielding fresh insights through the imagination of the writer or filmmaker, who milks history and recalibrates reality to espouse a positive national lyric.

What is the Nigerian lyric? What is our reality? Nothing worth celebrating perhaps. In search of the proverbial elixir, we have drunk water from an unnamed stream and filled our bellies with toxins.

The superiority of Western democracy is one of the supreme constructions of imperialism and the poisonous elixir of Nigeria and her neighbours on the African continent.

Nigerians elevate it with obsessive love. It is the magic pill to the nation’s ceaseless headaches. Demagogues exploit its hackneyed tropes in a torrid caress of the vanities and base sentimentality of the gullible masses.

Politicians chant its praise. Social commentators extol its virtues in their vituperation via mainstream and new media. Everybody is a sucker for its perceived benefits.

But the West must never be blamed for our collective ignorance – the United States in particular. The latter’s democratic enterprise is one of the most profitable constructions in its bid to “make America great again,” at any cost.

It is both music and philosophy, a sensory stream of thought feeding generations of writers, political activists, filmmakers, politicians, gender rights activists, academia, and so on.

We must understand, however, that Western democracy and foreign policy, while deliberately presented as two tines on the same fork, are sustained by oft-deceptive ideals and contradictory precepts of influence, crudely wedged into the nuclear powers’ global dominance stratagem. It is imperial politics without heart: ideologically deficit, dangerously manipulative, and Janus-faced.

Democracy and foreign aid do for America, for instance, what painting and sculpture did for the Italians. They are potent tools for wooing and recolonising the world. A few good minds with an intuitive grasp of the hard-edged imperialist designs of the Western agenda are spuriously labelled as conspiracy theorists.

Those who would die embracing colonist doctrines must understand that there is no way this could be achieved without horror, given the marked differences in culture, temperament, and histories defining different nations of the world.

It’s about time we identified values complementary to our precepts of humane governance. We cannot dwell like the Americans or Brits in Nigeria. We can only assimilate aspects of their culture that complement ours.

The Japanese, Chinese, Bhutanese, Arabians, Europeans, Americans, Ghanaians, Rwandans, to mention a few, all have different aspects of their governance traditions and cultures that are worthy of emulation but not until we sieve and winnow them to make their preferred aspects amenable to our politics, economy and socio-cultural institutions. We must always remember that the Libyans, Afghans to mention a few, wildly embraced a dandy dream of freedom, but instead, they got trapped in a sinister nightmare. To date, they are paying dearly for it.

Back home, it’s even scarier to note that our arts and literature have become very weakened in our bid to entrench American and European Renaissance in our cultural frames. More worrisome is our artists’ rabid deconstruction of Nigerianness.

Writers and filmmakers, for instance, struggle to acculturate the Nigerian landscape with defective foreign mores. Thus they corrupt their presentations and stifle the possibility of attaining homegrown, practicable solutions to oft-politicised conflict. Nonetheless, they have a dedicated industry of cheerleaders and courtiers who romanticise their follies as the valiance sorely needed to reinvigorate Nigeria’s creative sector.

Themes glorifying repulsive gender wars, mindless youth rebellion, and the orchestration of social hierarchies are aggressively projected and patronised to the detriment of rational, progressive, and didactic art. This hurts us immeasurably.

While creative industries in America, Britain, China, India, Korea, Malaysia, Russia, and France, to mention a few, commit genii and capital resources to constantly recreate and embellish their political narratives, with progressive outcomes, the Nigerian creative sector obsessively weaponises and projects vulgar themes of citizenship and romance.

The projection of toxic consciousness has become a thing among local artists. We see it sprout across genres: drama, prose, poetry, and beyond. It seizes mainstream and indie filmmaking, corrupting Nollywood inside out, as you read.

Otherwise brilliant and perceptive filmmakers denounce patriotism and attack Nigeria. They corrupt our artistic vocabulary, twisting it into a meditation on society’s debauched nature. Ultimately, they celebrate degeneracy via aggressive cues of prurient art, promiscuity, gendered storms, and virulent sexuality.

While the consequences of such dross manifest in real-time, Nigeria welcomes from abroad, more insolent corruption of its media space through degenerate reality shows like the BBN without putting up a fight. The damage to the cultural psyche is incalculable.

The United States had always appreciated the depth and promise of the arts, and entertainment sector. Thus the US government and Hollywood’s symbiotic relationship. Washington DC provides intriguing plots for filmmakers and the latter reciprocates by glamourising the political class and reinventing America’s exploits on the global stage.

Between 1911 and 2017, more than 800 feature films received support from the US Government’s Department of Defence (DoD). These included blockbuster franchises such as Iron Man, Transformers, and The Terminator.

On television, over 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005, from Flight 93 to Ice Road Truckers to Army Wives. The inclusion of individual episodes for shows with a cult following, like Homeland, 24, and NCIS, as well as the established influence of the White House and FBI, further establishes that the American government methodically supports thousands of hours of entertainment.

Aside from the profitable impact on the US entertainment sector, the entertainment partnership and offerings are oft deployed to foster a positive image for the United States on the international stage, while offering its citizens ample channels to exorcise their post-9/11 demons.

Films and literature could be used to foster national healing and patriotism. And they may also be used to destroy a people and ruin nations in pursuit of global good or the “enlightened self-interest” of a dubious superpower.

With very few exceptions, like Tunde Kelani and his Mainframe Studios, Nollywood churns out too many rabidly wrought revenge-fantasies in which the Nigerian female perpetually scores retribution over her treacherous male; lest we forget the increasingly base novel and TV plots by which Nigerian audiences are lured to nurse innate demons of toxic sexuality, ethnic intolerance, religious bigotry, virulent feminism, and sexist rage.

It’s about time the government partnered with the arts sector to reinvent the Nigerian story while channeling humane governance and patriotism. This is not a call for government censorship of progressive art. Rather it’s a call for institutionalised support via public-spirited funding and ideological partnership.

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

Humanity thrives as political theatre. And Nigeria offers one big stage on which we are entertained, informed, and misinformed. The process, in recent times, assumes the course of indoctrination by courtiers.

The latter manifests as our most malignant affliction. Comprising journalists, politicians, NGOs, and various forms of rights activists, their presence and machinations are inimical to nationhood, individuality, and self-growth, ultimately because they are deployed as weapons of programming.

This may no doubt resonate as far-fetched to individuals and groups profiting from the status quo, especially the press and civil societies.

Yet for a people programmed for conquest, Nigerians carry on with unabashed ignorance and arrogance. Arrogance is pitiable. Ignorance is expensive and quite scary.

But Nigeria carries on, unperturbed by the ramifications of it all. This is what happens when a nation becomes unmoored from reality; it retreats into a fictive nirvana. In this predetermined cosmology, reality is redefined to suit dubious whim, and facts are manufactured, acknowledged, and disputed to suit relative bias.

If Nigeria seems unmoored from reality, it’s because our lives and national discourse are dominated by fabricated events; from exaggerated grief over insecurity, misgovernance, and national disasters to celebrity gossip and pageantry of political artifice, the country is sold to desperate narratives at home and abroad.

Whether it is Boko Haram or armed bandits’ resonant creed of violence and wanton genocide among brainwashed minors or the virulent manifestations of partisan politics, the compelling nature of the grievances articulated, and the pervasiveness of despair are wielded to justify the rationale for Nigeria’s creed of carnage and the country’s enduring portrayal as a banana republic by foreign governments and consulates.

A history of corruption and neglect at the federal, state, and local levels of government, among others, has equally morphed into a major source of widespread dissatisfaction towards politicians, the legal system, and law enforcement by the masses.

These sentiments thrive in greater depths across geographic and virtual space; as Nigeria prepares for the February 2023 polls, a wave of validation and reproof of the incumbent political class and the opposition seeking to dislodge it has produced a supercharged atmosphere of warring critics and apologists.

Of the latter, the majority parade flawed presence because they have no real persona and moral substance. Yet en route to the February 2023 polls, Nigeria suffers its storm of spunk and slogans. Several media houses and journalists have pitched their tents with certain candidates, but at what cost? More news media and civil society groups parrot the official propaganda of foreign governments, consulates, and so-called non-profits pushing “enlightened self-interest” in the guise of transparency and as impartial observers.

The participation of large segments of the press and civil society is driven by funded partisanship but like Arundhati Roy would say, “I’m not against people being funded—because we’re running out of options, but we have to understand, ‘Are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you? Who’s the dog and who are you?”

The situation triggers existential questions about the quality of political participation en route to the February polls. How do we determine real and funded patriotism? Are Nigerians inured to the precepts of political participation astride the politics of reality and memory?

The jostling over reality and memory becomes most intense in an oppressive clime where both reality and memory distort to preserve the status quo of exploitation or repudiate it.

Hussein Bulhan addresses this anomaly in his treatise on metacolonialism as the latest modification and presentation of colonialism in the more savory euphemism of globalization – which enlarges the distortion of events in memory because written history is mostly about the valor and benevolence of the European coloniser.

The media, many of whom, are aligned to the doctored history of the presumed sophistication and unassailable humanity cum god complex of Nigeria’s colonizer(s), continue to propagate the imperial agenda to a society unmoored from its roots.

Students continue to learn this history in schools, literature and libraries preserve it, norms and statutes freeze it in time and place, and the media disseminate it. In short, our material world exudes, reflects, and perpetuates the reality of our coloniser.

The narrative valorises the coloniser and morphs into a potent weapon of subjugation while it invalidates and vilifies much about the colonised, including their culture, their epistemology, their ontology—indeed their very existence as human beings.

In reality, Nigeria is seen to exist to fulfill the needs and convenience of its modern colonisers. Consequently, the media and cultural agencies of imperialism become prime weaponry in the designs of the colonisers; the traditional press and new media, established and aspiring writers, musicians, actors, actresses, movie producers, social and humanitarian workers, healthworkers, NGOs, the academia and religious institutions, to mention a few, are often “empowered” and deployed as self-discerning social actors by the colonisers but in truth, they are expendable tools used to further the hegemonic plans (enlightened self interests) of Nigeria’s colonisers.

A citizenry shackled to such stricture is forever susceptible to subtle and pronounced capture. They are unquestioning, passive, and weak before the colossal might and influence of their colonisers. This is the Nigerian predicament.

A flawed persona, lack of pride, and moral substance have rid too many self-confessed patriots of grit and foresight. Consequently, they play court sycophant and pawn to foreign governments, financial lenders, rights groups, and non-profits with shady intent; they equally serve as tools to the local political class and the youthful, virulent herd.

They are pliable and servile, through political dispensations and conflict situations, projecting with slavish plasticity conflicting interests. Their identities are self-evacuated as they persistently open themselves like a glove to the political palm. Hence they serve as a medium of wheedling and imposition of pathologic rites and culture to the detriment of their own civilization. Ultimately, they elevate belly and bum over fealty and forelock in a flagrant rite of political intercourse.

En route to the February elections, the media must seek more altruistic means of participation alongside other actors. Journalists must seize the moment offered by the ongoing transition to regroup and recommit to a viable media practice, founded on humane principles of professionalism, nationhood, citizenship, and nativism.

To achieve this, we must purge ourselves of inclinations to redefine our reality according to foreign interests: digital satellite television channels, foreign consulates, arts, literature, and humanitarian agencies’ plots to stifle Nigerianness or redefine it in tune with obscure, pathologic civilisations from abroad must be resisted henceforth.

The story of the colonised often remains untold due to censorship and social amnesia enforced in crude or subtle ways, notes Bulhan. It’s about time Nigerians penned their own stories, not as the alternative stories, but as the unimpeachable, national narrative.

The local media must quit winnowing out our reality to reject all that some foreign actors deem too radical or proof of idiosyncratic compulsion to challenge their dominance or excavate a long-forgotten past too uncomfortable to recall.

It’s about time the media espoused progress relatable to the Nigerian reality. To what end are finely crafted homilies and treatises on the youths’ newfound political awareness if they won’t inspire the youths to participate creditably and constructively in the political process?

It is never enough to parrot some foreign consulates and non-profits’ fosterage of Gen-Z’s virulent politics and their disregard for historical context, what are the likely consequences of such toxic partisanship?

Progressive citizenship requires more evolved and purposeful engagement in politics than wanton theorising and spouting on barrel heads to be seen.