Democracy in Afghanistan was unarmoured, an artifact of aggressive forging.

While it lasted, it floundered nebulously against the furnace of insurgent Taliban. Yet it was an ideal to live for.

Supervised by the United States’ military might, bolstered by NATO, its stratagem resonated themes found all over the world, a conflict between definitiveness and dissolution of state.

Refuting it was deemed suicidal and redolent of the Taliban’s oppressive instincts and wild inclinations to propel Afghanistan to self-destruct. Accepting it, however, portended dangerous freedom. That barbaric power spuriously wished away in a hail of allied offensive and defensive military campaign has stirred into a beast, plunging Afghanistan into dystopic hell. The beast now waits in every glade, returned to its wild perch in nature.

Afghanistan is back in hell’s kitchen, perhaps. The country’s capital, Kabul, fell on August 15, 2021, to the Taliban forces whose leadership assumed de facto control over most of the country and subsequently pronounced the country as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Prior to the Taliban takeover, the government, consisted of the cabinet of ministers, provincial governors, and the national assembly, with President  Ashraf Ghani serving as the head of government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Ghani, who was backed by two vice presidents, Amrullah Saleh and Sarwar Danish until Ghani fled to Uzbekistan as the Taliban took over the capital.

Read Also: Five quick facts about Afghanistan

In the last decade, Afghan politics have been influenced by the U.S. and other NATO countries, in an effort to stabilise and democratise the country. In 2004, the nation’s new constitution was adopted and an executive president was elected. The following year a general election to choose parliamentarians took place.

Hamid Karzai was declared the first-ever democratically elected head of state in Afghanistan in 2004, winning a controversial second five-year term in 2009. The National Assembly was Afghanistan’s national legislature. It was a bicameral body, composed of the House of the People and the House of Elders. The first legislature was elected in 2005 and the most recent one in 2018. Members of the Supreme Court were appointed by the president to form the judiciary. Together, this system served to provide a set of checks and balances.

Despite this massive investment in stabilising the country, it fell to the bullets of the Taliban.

The U.S. President Joe Biden, probably summed up the ugly truth in his claim that there would never be a right time or less messy circumstance for America to quit Afghanistan.

He condemned Afghanistan’s elected leaders and military for yielding so cheaply to the Taliban, stressing that they squandered the time and money America spent to assist their security forces.

He said, “We gave them every tool they could need…We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them, was the will to fight for that future.”

Biden said it was “wrong” to put Americans in harm’s way to do a job that Afghanistan wouldn’t do itself. “I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me,” he said. “I’m deeply saddened by the facts we now face, but I do not regret my decision to end America’s war-fighting in Afghanistan.”

Lesson learnt. The United States’ hasty desertion of Afghanistan after 20 years of carnage and war with the Taliban offers timeless lessons. It’s instructive that the country lost the war despite its supposed backing by America and NATO’s military intelligence and might.

In recent weeks, the Taliban advanced across the north of the country, claiming possession of over two dozen districts against feeble resistance by a severely demoralised Afghan army and police.

The nation’s armed forces retreated to fight on the outskirts of key cities such as Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif. Senior U.S. officials have warned of a civil war, in the wake of a forecast of the complete collapse of the Afghan government within a year – which the United States had worked to strengthen for two decades.

Would Nigeria learn from Afghanistan? It’s about time we understood that nobody could love our country more than we do. Joe Biden could never love Nigeria more than Muhammadu Buhari. The U.S. president, like his predecessors, sees Nigeria as a mere tool for preserving his country’s enlightened self-interest. It’s as simple as that.

No foreign media would ever aspire to utmost social responsibility in reporting Nigeria; that is a role best served by patriotic segments of the local press.

Thus journalists and civil societies, in particular, must desist henceforth from inflaming the polity via incendiary statements and reports. The lust for NGO patronage should never incite them to mortgage national interests for hard currency – whatever the slant of their greed and their sponsors’ professed intent.

Social media, in particular, has become a major source of warmongering for separatists and fake news aficionados; in truth, they are all terrorists. Those who spread fake news in bid to incite carnage and hatred against any individual, tribe, social or religious group must be prosecuted as terrorists. We do not need another civil war. We must not give the doomsayers the opportunity to gloat; since their prediction of Nigeria’s collapse by 2015 failed, they had been left smarting in shame and earnestly committed to Nigeria’s death-watch.

It’s about time we learned from Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and victims of the obscenely romanticised Arab Spring. Neither America nor Europe must be blamed for our inclinations to self-destruct.

Carter Malkasian, author of The American War in Afghanistan: A History, served as a civilian advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan; according to him, throughout his travels with U.S. military commanders around Afghanistan, he saw numerically superior and better-supplied soldiers and police suffer incessant defeats by poorly resourced and unexceptionally led Taliban.

While the U.S. and Afghan forces fought for hegemony and money respectively, the Taliban soldiers were inspired by faith and a divine nirvana. They were united in belief and purpose as they fought to thwart a common enemy: the American soldiers of occupation and their Afghan enablers.

May we not face a similar threat from Boko Haram, ISWAP, armed bandits, and spurious separatist groups.

Corruption was part of Afghanistan’s problem. The military and police suffered as their commanders and government officials pocketed their pay, hoarded ammunition, and sabotaged the counterinsurgency operations.

Predictably, the soldiers and police refused to lay their lives on the line for corrupt leadership. In a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in one week, despite the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO over nearly 20 years to bolster Afghan security forces.

In a Monday footage identifiable as one of the defining images of the Taliban takeover, Afghans clung to the side of a departing U.S. military jet as it rolled down the tarmac on Monday. Some of them fell to their death as the aircraft gained altitude, according to agency reports.

The U.S. authorities estimated that at least seven people died during the chaotic evacuation at the airport, including several who fell from the military jet.

The Afghan nightmare evidently mirrors the Nigerian situation. Thus we must scorn poisonous interventions by countries whose major interest is to abolish our sovereignty, plunder our resources, and strip us bare to devious elements.

By Olatunji Ololade

A multitude of youths, disgruntled and starved, may flirt with strife and call it ‘revolt,’ just as a swarm of mosquitoes can make a noise like thunder. But when they emerge, irate and drugged-out, Nigeria should flinch.

It gets scarier where their ignorance, intemperance, and rage enjoy the caress of a dubious demagogue. They launch like loose canons at the slightest provocation. Left to their devices, they are feckless and sterile.

My recent sojourn across Lagos’ drug dens manifested as a pilgrimage. I encountered several teenagers venting in the vice-grip of harsh psychotropic substances. At drug dens in Alimosho local government area, for instance, many of them claimed to find escape from their daily travails in hard drugs.

Bingeing indiscriminately on local brews like Gutter Juice aka Omi Gota, and its variants like Colorado, Pamilerin, containing rohypnol, tramadol, Indian Hemp, codeine, and cocaine, they blamed the government for keeping them unemployed and out of school. They also blamed the government for bad roads, insecurity, and persistent looting of the public coffers.

Read Also: NDLEA recovers 8,268kg of illicit drugs in raids, arrests 15

My encounters revealed, among other things, that, many are the same social products as their elders and peers in the political class. They vented their bitter, desperate intent to chance on sudden and stupendous wealth, by hook or crook – as canonised by the political class.

They dream and speak of a revolution that would redistribute power to their hands. How could such vitally impaired characters be trusted to conduct their affairs appropriately and judiciously?

It is the tragedy of the moment that Nigeria’s youth obsess more about fulfilling debauched stereotypes than building and securing a progressive future. Burrowing through decadent enslavement to find bliss, they fulfill a theatrical pledge of acceptance to dominance by a predatory political class.

The latter know that beneath their cries of misery and clamour for change, subsists a tireless yearning to be demeaned, enslaved, browbeaten, and deployed as minstrels of carnage and death, across their impoverished neighbourhoods, for a token.

If thus preoccupied, there is no way they could pay good mind to more beneficial causes, like training their minds to participate in free and fair elections, where they vote for truly humane and patriotic candidates.

The incumbent administration of President Muhammadu Buhari identifies the harsh criticism and protests trailing the increment as the citizenry’s Initial Gra Gra (IGG) – their theatrical artifice to the government’s ‘tactical plunder.’ They consider it a futile, necessary performance of dissent as the citizenry wails, the economy lies comatose, insecurity worsens, and Nigeria becomes ungovernable and inhabitable to the poor, in particular.

It is about time the youth moved past their lofty expectations of the incumbent ruling class and opposition figures, knowing they are all borne of dubious intent. A continual belief in the possibility that Nigeria might prosper and stabilize on their watch is tantamount to a malady, a conceptual persistence of mental and ethical disorders.

Corruption and duplicity are the ritual links between the political oligarchs and the youth. The latter’s unquestioning belief in the former thus manifests as a triumph of fetishism; the consequences are all around us. We are on the receiving end of them. But who could lead us out of this quagmire? Not the hordes of youths peopling our rural and suburban drug dens.

As you read, more youths, teens especially, are trapped in the rapture of hallucinogenic substances but they are ignored in plain sight by regulatory authorities. Between 2018 and 2019, nearly 15% of Nigeria’s adult population reported a “considerable level” of use of psychotropic drug substances, a rate much higher than the 2016 global average of 5.6% among adults, according to a study led by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the Centre for Research and Information on Substance Abuse with technical support from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and funding from the European Union.

It showed the highest levels of drug use were recorded among people aged between 25 to 39 but excluded teenagers drowning in the stark grip of psychotropic substances like Gutter Juice perhaps because they fall outside the radar of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA).

Gutter Juice has attained prominence particularly among teenagers and the consequences of taking it is often devastating on the user and their families. Dr. Oluwayemisi Ogun, the Medical Director (MD) of the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital (FNPH), Yaba, recently sounded an alarm over the prevalence of drug abuse induced mental disorders among children, adolescents, and adult Nigerians, stressing that over 150 new cases are admitted at the hospital and its Child and Adolescent Centre, Oshodi Annexe every week.

Just recently, Abiodun Toye, a 16-year-old developed acute psychosis soon after binging on the brew. He is currently chained to the floor at a traditional mental home in Ogun State even as Dr. Ogun insists that he is better off in the care of qualified FNPH personnel.

But the consequences are no deterrent to hordes of teenagers trooping in thralldom in pursuit of irregular highs by the extremely dangerous potion, and other variants including Colorado, Pamilerin, recklessly sold and consumed across Lagos’ drug dens.

My findings revealed that a litre of Gutter Juice is easily available to teenagers at a fraction of the cost of hitherto elusive narcotics, like cocaine. On average, users spend N9,000 per day on cocaine. This amount is half of the national minimum wage per month. However, one litre of standard Gutter Juice costs N3,000 while a 50cl bottle costs N1, 500.

It’s hard not to panic over the prevalence of a drug that leaves devastating marks on its victims like paranoia, hallucinations and strung out physical collapse, not to mention the loss of inhibitions, brain damage, and predisposition to violence, according to mental health experts.

Yet the dealers and users passionately answer as willing muscles, and army for achieving the mother of all revolutions as romanticised by random segments of Nigeria’s citizenry, the elite, middle class in particular.

The truth often rankles a sore note. If you are elite, middle class, you won’t watch the revolution happen on TV because you will be in the thick of it. Since you have failed to emerge as the heart of a bloodless one, you will suffer the blows of a bloody one.

The teen armies of the revolt, severely agitated and drugged out, will storm your homes while you enjoy family time and movie hour with loved ones, in your serene, gated suburbs, and amid the manicured lawns of your high society. They will intrude your peace, wielding guns, machetes and clubs indiscriminately furnished them by the predatory ruling class, to assault, rape, and hack you and your loved ones to death.

At the dawn of the revolt, you will be identified as the enemy of the people, and tarred with the same brush as the proverbial one percent supposedly feeding fat off Nigeria and the citizenry’s bare bones.

This is possible because we have lost our sense of ethics and nationhood, and embraced the erosion of our culture. The consequences are distressingly visible in the teenagers and young adults trooping in a daze, to dip their heads in Gutter Juice, in order to escape the present and detach from a belief in the future.

The current enthrallment with the politically correct aspirant will end in a splash of spittle and a curl of the tongue inwards. No doubt. But this minute, vistas of the 2023 elections unfurl like another fragile fiction of ‘Change.’

Amid the racket, dreams of progress bloom like a fictional retreat. An elaborate simplicity. A Nabokovian invention of rarefied detail, as Gardner would say.

Incensed by the fiery mantras: “Change!” and “Change the Change!” citizens marched to both real and taught indignation, ignorance, and unabashed arrogance, to stretch their necks for a leash of cash, bigotry, and sound bites at the 2019 general elections.

Two years on, they have resumed howling from dawn through dusk, threatening litters of tumult atop the soapbox, forgetting that the storms they incited would eventually consume them and weaker, wretched compatriots. But they are making good their threats anyway and increasing the swell of trodden demise via terrorism. The press would sensationalise the tragedies they incite in reportage that stretch beyond the photographs of civil deaths.

It’s all part of a recurrent script. Some would call it the Naija-theory of things. I would call it the therapy of the breadlines; the deputation of evil from one social class to the other.

The heathen dialectic of Nigerian politics depicts electorate mind and nature. Nigerians vote for tribe, money, and random bigotries. Many vote to actualise established and latent hostilities thus the voter’s card becomes a weapon to torment a rival ethnic group and religious divide, seasonally.

Both the 2015 and 2019 general elections fulfilled horrid stereotypes in Nigeria’s perpetuation of hate and bigotries. The electorate, severely divided along religious, ethnic divides, voted for Muhammadu Buhari and Goodluck Jonathan, and then Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar, respectively, in fulfillment of the ugliest sentimentality.

Few voters could convincingly articulate their reasons for choosing their candidate.  True, a depressed economy, sky-rocketing inflation, and embarrassing corruption across tiers of government substantiated the debate for and against each contender.

For most voters, however, the decisive factor was the religious affiliation and ethnic root of the contestants. The malady subsists to date; as Nigeria prepares for the 2023 elections, the electorate separates into two factions, spawned on ethnic and religious bigotries. Whatever their frantic narratives, they are inmates of familiar mental jail cells.

Education is the key out of such captivity. Being educated, however, hardly translates to insightfulness. Intelligence is morally neutral. It can be used to further the exploitation of the electorate by predatory oligarchs and corporations, or it can be used to defeat the forces of oppression.

Where intelligence is docile, the educated man evolves like a bitch; a scrawny, sheeplike mutt, led only by wild instincts and subservience to a crafty, self-seeking shepherd. Oligarchic tyranny is bodacious and corruptive of intellect thus the unstated ethic of sheepish intelligentsia is to amass a fortune while justifying the dominance of their oligarch masters.

Little wonder hack-writers, sponsored NGOs, and the academia commit to the sustenance of oligarchic choke-hold on Nigeria. Come 2023, we must acknowledge the inevitability of gifting power to yet another blundering oligarch – given our lack of a truly progressive, credible opposition from more vibrant, promising demographics.

Thus we resume foraging in the desert end of our green pasture. Youthful segments of the electorate display political illiteracy that is embarrassingly sentimental and far-flung. In response, rival parties re-invent a political devil in each other, to exploit voter ignorance and intolerance.

The youth rant that they have been excluded from power at the state and federal levels yet they have populated Nigerian politics for 61 years as thugs, murderers, arsonists, vote buyers and sellers, and rhetoricians. They are deployed every political season as emissaries of violence and death by aspirants who previously identified as youths five to seven decades ago.

Nigeria’s current dilemma is a consequence of bad choices. There is an urgent need for the country’s enlightened youth and elder-statesmen to seek each other out in wisdom and coalesce into more definitive roles.

True change can only be driven by true patriots vying on untarnished platforms. Platforms matter as much as the candidates. Failure to get these right has often foisted on the electorate, limited choices.

Our situation demands urgent, proactive steps by progressive change-makers. The first is to provide a foundation for the unity of ideas and cause and to do it very quickly. The second is to evolve a social agenda that strengthens the ideals of progressive enlightenment, common progress, commonwealth, and moral autonomy.

To prevent this, the ruling class deploys what Adorno called “the manipulative character.” The manipulative character, argues Hedges, has superb organizational skills yet is unable to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple. Such characters in government are driven by frantic delusions of self-worth and an overvalued realism of their governance style.

Every manipulative character and government, however, thrives by pawns. The latter performs the role of a systems manager. Pawns by default are inclined to sustain the corrupt structure. Think the corruptible press and civil societies.

Education, I reiterate, is the key out of this mental jail cell. More realistic learning divorced from the pricey occupational training by which tertiary schools turn several youths into mindless certificate-seeking machines.

While violence and terrorism are often mistaken as the essence of revolutions, the fundamental tool of any successful revolution is the non-violent conversion of the oft violent forces deployed by the state to bully and restore order, to the side of the rebels. Most successful revolutions are, therefore, fundamentally non-violent.

Revolutionary movements, however, fail in Nigeria because the arrowheads continually cloak their measures and homilies in hostilities and platitudinous chants; such hackneyed dialect is a barrier to effective communication and progress.

It is the same dialect adopted by political, corporate players to cheat the electorate of their votes and rig the financial system in the obscure, cryptic language coined by their propaganda labs.

To strip them of power, a new class of political leadership must emerge to assert the mental and moral freedom of the citizenry by communicating in a language comprehensible to the common man.

Now is a good time to start. We must begin to teach our graduates and undergrads, street urchins, traders, commercial transporters, armed forces, and the unemployed, to scorn vote seekers who only visit the electorate to share corn meals and hold town-hall meetings at the dawn of general elections.

Teach them to scorn leadership that commits crumbs of their constituency allowances to empower their constituents with wheelbarrows, machetes, sachet water, and pepper grinding machines, among others.

It was Sparta that celebrated raw militarism, discipline, obedience, and power, but it was Athenian art and philosophy that echoed down the ages to enlighten new worlds, including ours.

In the same vein, while soldiers and politicians jostled for political spoils at several fronts in post-independence Nigeria, deploying gruesome violence and massacre, it was Obafemi Awolowo’s political intelligence and his deployment of state resources to drive educational and socio-economic growth of the southwest region that echoes down the ages.

Many beneficiaries of Awo’s statesmanship currently occupy public offices as governors, lawmakers, and presidential aides but they lack the intelligence that’s the essence of progressive politics, transformation, and growth. Thus Nigeria will never prosper by them.

They are the ones whose dominance we must quash.