Filial love is ambivalent, to be precise. It is neither here nor there. Art may run riot with romantic projections of its aspects but reality presents the push and pull of its perverse fascination – often uncensored.
Consider for instance, 32-year-old Afeez Olalere’s confession to operatives of the Lagos State Police Command that his mother encouraged him to kill his younger brother for money rituals.
Olalere revealed that his mother took him to a witch-doctor, who told him that if he wanted to be successful as an internet fraudster, he would have to sacrifice his blood sibling.
The witch-doctor said he would prepare a concoction with the severed thumbs, hair, fingers and passport photograph of Olalere’s sibling. “So, we went back home and thought about it; then my mother suggested that we used my younger brother since he was just 21 years old. She also brought the poison which we gave him to eat. He died within 20 minutes after consuming the food. I was the one who cut out the body parts needed. We then wrapped his dead body and headed to the mortuary,” said Olalere.
The duo were eventually arrested by the police along Itamaga, Ikorodu Road in Lagos.
The pursuit of money and self-actualisation fosters a deceptive labour and happiness ethic; assertions of selfhood simply release the amoral chaos of lust and materialism.
There is little difference between the Olaleres and the Bayelsa boys: Emomotimi,15, Perebi, 15, and Eke, 15, who plotted to “hypnotise”13-year-old Comfort, for a similar money ritual. At their arrest, last week, the boys revealed that they hypnotised Comfort and led her to Emomotimi’s apartment, where they cut her finger and sprinkled her blood on a mirror for ritual purposes.
The Olaleres and Bayelsa boys, like Boko Haram and armed bandits, are kindred spirits with public officers looting the treasury to gratify private lusts. The latter’s brazen embezzlement of state funds often manifests in citizenry deaths on bad roads, substandard public hospitals, and rising insecurity.
They are all failures of the Nigerian family as a social unit on one hand and the vagaries of the new socioeconomic order on the other hand.
Toxic families produce toxic citizens. Toxic citizenry becomes poisonous to nationhood in the long run. The interplay of toxic materialism, misandrist-feminism and the absence of an exemplary father figure has foisted upon us a generation of ill-nurtured boys.
Economic forces aggravate their sense of disenchantment and futility and changing gender roles and the denouement of masculinity afflict them with greater confusion.
Masculinity flows from nature as an aspect of the birth mother, no doubt, but it is sculpted by society and a father figure into humane and effective manhood. The boy-child learns by instruction, counselling, and imitation. In an ideal setting, the father moulds his character by careful nurturing, awarding punishment for vice and reward for virtue. So doing, he teaches him to be a man within acceptable precepts of culture and society.
Where the father is absent, or feckless, the boychild suffers exposure to degenerate blooming, like Olalere, who was encouraged to use his younger brother for money ritual by his mother – to encourage him, she fed poison to the said brother (her younger son) and watched him die.
The lust for money has become endemic; fostered across societal divides, it is symptomatic of boondocks rebellion against bourgeois society and aspiration to it in the same breadth. It is the ultimate resort of increasing hordes of teenagers “hustling” as Yahoo Boys, gang-bangers, or masquerading as musicians, bitcoin traders, to mention a few. Beneath their pretensions to honest labour or the “hustle”, if you like, many of them are murderous felons.
Fetish diabolism, comprising the ubiquitous money ritual has become one of their vehicles of offensive against the odds. These boys are done doing hard, honest work; they have become estranged from the universe’s romanticised culture of industry and rewards.
More worrisome is society’s tacit approval and brazen celebration of their exploits. Musicians, public officers, prominent politicians, business leaders and law enforcers have been seen to hobnob with them and patronise them, as indicated by international fraudster, Ramon Abbas aka Hush Puppy’s patronage by prominent Nigerian politicians and crime-fighters.
We must acknowledge the amoral cleavage of outlaws and supposed custodians of the law, like the wedlock of light and darkness, and the resultant eclipse of catholic morality by chthonic lust.
Savage Nigeria, can only be cured by farming our loins for the hidden cowries of a nobler race, no doubt. The absence of a father figure in a child’s life is often problematic. If a boychild, the consequences could be intense. The family is the building block of society and civilisation. When it disintegrates, the responsibilities of raising a child are borne by a single parent, oftentimes, the mother. Where the woman is left with the sole responsibility of raising a boy, shades of dysfunction manifest in the boy’s blooming.
If money is her problem, she may encourage her child to use a sibling for money ritual. If money isn’t her problem, she makes sure her ward lacks nothing. If care is not taken, she would raise a child as a glamour pet, ensuring, for instance, that her son grows up to become “nothing like his father.” So doing, she may infect him with gall and virulent fits. She overcompensates and splurges to make her child miss nothing about his “deadbeat father.”
That is hardly child-grooming, it’s called child maintenance; keeping a child, like an expensive pet. Yes, orthodox families may fail at child grooming; and this is not about the ‘prominent’ or ‘successful’ few, who “made it” despite being raised by a single mother. It’s about the many who grew up broken, partially or completely damaged, because they were denied a father – be it their mother or the absentee father’s doing.
The dominant role of fathers in preventing delinquency is well-established. Over fifty years ago, this phenomenon was highlighted in the classic studies of the causes of delinquency by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck of Harvard University. They described in academic terms, what many children hear their mothers so often say: “Wait till your father gets home!”
The benefits a child receives from his relationship with his father are notably different from those derived from his relationship with his mother. While the mother nurtures and provides emotional healing, the father contributes a sense of paternal authority and discipline which is conveyed through his involved presence.
The additional benefits of his affection and attachment add to this primary benefit. Albert Bandura, professor of psychology at Stanford University, observed as early as 1959 that delinquents suffer from an absence of the father’s affection.
In recent years, there has been a sudden rise in the phenomenon of single mothers, mostly depicted by misandrists as ‘victims of deadbeat fathers.’ While some are, in truth, victims of scorching romance and irresponsible male partners, some naively got pregnant after orchestrating a one-night stand with the random ‘superstar’ or criminal, most especially Yahoo Boys, hoping to get pregnant and the baby would be their anchor into their target’s world of opulence.
The situation is aggravated by modern society’s commodification of love, and consumer culture’s inflation of our expectations of relationships to an unmanageable degree. Many consider partners as wish-list fulfillers and when they fail to do so, as disposable.
The toleration of uncertainty and compromise necessary for sustaining intimacy and providing a platform for parenthood has become inconsequential – often to the detriment of the child.
