Elitism fades to melodrama, where the elite, misappropriates the role of a revolutionary, and considers himself greater than the state.
In his struggle to usurp privileges and power, he inflicts misery on ordinary citizens, those whose predicament allegedly triggered his discontent.
“For the love of country” becomes his arrant lie, the falsity that becomes his slogan. Thus, this minute, Nigeria pulses to duplicitous rant. Having lost or seen their favourite candidate lose at the last general elections, cliques and criminal masterminds among the nation’s elite are going for broke.
These characters, comprising top clerics, political and business leaders and failed aspirants, have resorted to spite, couching their dissonant vibes in the language of patriots. For instance, they would claim to condemn President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption fight ‘for the love of country.’
Too much of such duplicity is discernible in the exploits of militant warlords of Nigeria’s delta and north-east regions – many whose ‘hardcore’ agitation had been seen to extinguish, soon after they got ‘settled’ by the ruling class or power brokers aligned to the former.
The incumbent elite, despite his pageantry of poise and mantra, answers to a more frantic form of savagery than militant terrorists and warlords; ultimately, he affects the passion of a wildling.
Ferocity manifests as crucial aspects of his passion, the clique culture, authoritarianism, and sense of entitlement characteristic of his class. Its a precursor to rite of Nigeria’s rape cycle.
The country’s elite is morally ambivalent. He pays lip-service to patriotism even as his provocative ‘purity’ incites filth in its wake. Stripped of his slogan, his passion betrays neither breadth, nor depth. It is barely individuated from the insensitivity and grotesqueness resonant of the primeval gladiator arena.
His passion connotes moral emptiness. What Paglia would liken to the still heart of a geode, rimmed with crystalline teeth. His platitudinous chant are disguised as a series of soothing gestures, like rubbing a lantern to make a genie appear.
In truth, he weaponises a dark sentiment, luring the masses into a dark cycle of sadomasochism. His exaggerated gestures and confessions of love, are an assertion of savage lust. He moots no selflessness or sacrifice, only refinements of domination.
Beneath the glitter and ire of his platitudinous chants, however, subsists a frantic hankering for privileges and spoils of power.
Gold plated doors and sofas. Plastered walls and Venetian glass. Platinum pumps and home theatre. Spring locks, expensive cars and wine cellars. Offshore villas and bank accounts; trophy wives and concubines among other things, symbolise the good life; according to the contemporary elite.
Civilisation, as Thoreau would say, has been improving our houses and husks, but it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. In Nigeria, the “civilised” or sophisticated elite’s pursuits are no worthier than the barbarian’s.
He spends the greater part of his life in pursuit and acquisition of affluence. At the prime of his life or apex of his growth, he becomes a President, Governor, industry titan, religious leader and “very successful” activist or media consultant, among others. Essentially, he becomes “rich” in societal terms.
But for all his touted affluence, he remains inherently poor; a consequence of his poverty of intellect and mind. This manifests as his handicap, which extends beyond the familiar trope of the human forelock or Intelligent Quotient (I.Q.) thus his alarming vanities and incompetencies.
Take for instance, the abject horror the nation’s political elite perpetuates in the name of governance and provision of decent shelter or “affordable and low-cost housing for all.”
Via such “citizenry-centred” and over-celebrated efforts, they brazenly embezzle public fund. The political elite, thereby, perpetrates a two-pronged atrocity with chain reactions: it defaults in its promise of “affordable, low-cost housing” and subjects the citizenry to untold hardship, characterised by homelessness and the burgeoning of slum republics prevalent in Nigeria’s high-profile cities.
To this, not a few elitists in government and their apologists within and outside the corridors of power, would argue, that it is not the duty of the government to provide housing for all.
They would argue, that, the government couldn’t provide decent shelter for all even if it tried. Then they would seek refuge in the workings of capitalism which purportedly provides for every man to fend for himself, according to his means.
They would pertinently state, that, the persistent failures of their class to facilitate an acceptable human state of affairs in the country are hardly unforgivable failures. They would claim that they merely add up to their inability to fulfill their constitutional obligations due to the “Nigerian factor” and because doing so, would impose avoidable inconveniences on them.
They would also argue, that, it would be essentially, inexpedient, to fulfill their statutory responsibilities, given the unstable and feral nature of Nigeria’s democracy.
Simply put, it is the moral character that breaks down. How many Nigerians can afford to pay between N9 million or N15 million to acquire the two and three-bedroom contraptions shamelessly splattered across the “affordable and low-cost housing estates?”
Only party chieftains, cronies and associates of serving public officers are able to afford such conveniences at ludicrous rates. Once they acquire them, they put them up for lease, at rates that would make Shakespeare’s Shylock, a saint.
Even in the primeval epoch, every family owned a shelter sufficient for its coarse and simple wants. Today, in Nigeria’s towns and cities, where civilisation supposedly prevails, the fraction of those who own houses is negligible.
The rest pay an annual rent that renders them impoverished and barely able to feed and clothe, let alone attempt the ownership of a house.
The Nigerian elite cares less about such issues than about getting one of its own into power. Its members are loyal not to posterity and ideas, but to the pursuit and attainment of wealth and power by any means.
In an ostensibly capitalist country, these self-styled vanguards of private enterprise espouse and brazenly perpetrate an oppressive social philosophy, that, upholds the existence of the average Nigerian as an imperceptible social organism—a view which implies that his needs are not valid instruments for perceiving social reality and improving it.
So doing, they project themselves as the chosen few supposedly endowed with special insight and ability to direct others. This implies the existence of an elite foundation of knowledge and aristocracy; a socio-political arrangement inaccessible to logic and beneath the mind.
Notwithstanding its astounding rise to relevance, the Nigerian elite will be toppled off its high horse sooner than it can ever imagine. This is unavoidable in spite of the citizenry’s seeming docility and apathy.
The elites are probably unaware, that they have lost the weaponry that guaranteed their rise to eminence and made all of their conquests possible: idealism and morality. They lost both precisely at the height of their acclaim, since their claim to either value was a fraud; the evident realities of their politics demonstrate the brute illogicality and cruelty of their social code and gospel of sacrifice.
The country’s elite do not preach sacrifice as a temporary means to some desirable and lasting end. Sacrifice is their end—the sacrifice of the lives of others.
It’s about time the ‘others’ reclaimed their lives.
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