Tatalo Alamu
The heist is benumbing and mindboggling in its scope and scale. And the display of opulence and affluence so crass and in your face that something was bound to give in the end. It did with such a resounding thump that it reverberated across the globe and sent a chill down the financial epicentre of metropolitan derring-do. All sane and sober minds have kept wondering: what did this boy and his horde of accomplices think they were doing?
Ramon Abass Igbalode ,aka Hushpuppi, wanted to live out his child-like dreams and infantile phantasies of Croesus-like wealth and spell-binding affluence. He was determined to make it by all means and at all costs. Nothing was going to stop him, not even the unwavering scrutiny of international surveillance and round the clock cyber-patrol. There is something to be noted about such nerves and impossible temerity.
Ramoni is our own whatever the sanctimonious outrage and hypocritical handwringing. He is a dysfunctional product of a dysfunctional society on the verge of an ethical and moral meltdown. Whether we like to hear this or not, there are still many puppies out there who will refuse to be hushed up.
They are daily defrauding the banks, hacking into corporate accounts, cloning credit cards, phishing our e-mail correspondence, perfectly forging official letter heads, hijacking electronic transfers and trumping the most secure cyber fortresses. One day we will wake up to find that the nation had succumbed to the most daring fiscal heist that the modern world has witnessed. It will be the equivalent of an electronic Armageddon.
They are our babies, our puppies; the children of the present darkness and prevailing midnight. The fruit does not fall very far from its parent tree. It is said in the bible that their fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set at the edge. And it came to pass that in the land of the living dead, only living ghosts can survive: ghost leaders, ghost followers, ghost workers, ghost soldiers, ghost traders and ghost writers serving as unsympathetic undertakers.
But as it is said, a man can make for himself a throne of bayonets, whether he will be able to sit on it is another matter entirely. There are many culprits for this pandemic of rabid puppies that is about to swamp the entire nation and infect the international community in the process.
They include a dysfunctional and kleptocratic political class, a thieving bureaucracy, a disoriented traditional institution, a disordered military profession, a paralysed police force, an alienated and enfeebled citizenry and a corrupt and corrupting spiritual merchant class that preaches the virtue of prosperity without commensurate hard work.
It is impossible for a society to achieve meaningful nationhood or make meaningful progress as long as it is freighted with such debilitating debris, such terminal incontinence. It is instructive to note that while he was still at it before the FBI terminated the party, Hushpuppi garnered and gathered around himself over two million followers on his Instagram handle. Surely they were not all there for puppy party. They could not care a hoot if something did not add up.
It is also worthy of note that while Hushpuppi carefully transformed himself into a celebrity of global notoriety, an endless stream of leading Nigerian politicians, media notables, so called cyber influencers and star singers flocked round him for photo-ops. Some of them were so star struck that they basked in the reflected glory long after departing the Dubai abode of the cyber fraudster.
There were also ominous hints of an electoral heist in the making deploying the infamous hacking skills of Hushpuppi to damning effect had the federal authorities succumbed to a loss of concentration. This surely would have led to the mother of all electoral conflagrations in Nigeria. Hushpuppi’s obsessively flamboyant life style and the unexplained source of his plutocratic riches ought to have flagged off the politically prudent. It doesn’t get more heinous.
This tragic episode has once again underscored the lack of a national ethos and positive value chain to undergird Nigeria’s march to authentic nationhood. As it has been noted several times in this column, no nation can survive without some core values that drive its politics and developmental goals.
In the absence of an authoritarian but authoritative founding father who stamps his authority on the nation right from inception riding roughshod over sectionalist and special interest objections, core values cannot be an overnight affair. They tend to mature slowly and organically and are usually a result of substantial pacting and considerable elite consensus.
In multi-ethnic countries haunted by their colonial past and brimming with unresolved ethnic tensions arising from mutually countervailing and conflicting political, economic and spiritual modes of production, things can get very problematic and nasty indeed. It is like rolling a huge boulder up the proverbial Sisyphean hill; a futile venture.
After twenty one years of post-military rule, Nigeria is nowhere near fashioning or evolving a set of core values. Rather than being a site for the aggregation of competing elite interests and the reconciliation of group differences, the Nigerian post-colonial state resembles an imperial Roman coliseum with political gladiators duelling on to death.
This is why sixty years after independence, a civil war, several military upheavals, regional conflagrations, a subsisting religious insurgency that has lasted eleven years and a despondent climate of insecurity, Nigeria approximates a political jungle at best and a thriving bedlam at worst. There is a steady regression into the Hobbesian state of nature.
As a result, the post-colonial state is often viewed as a hostile alien construct to be conquered at will and deployed for narrow sectional interests rather than the national interest. Every ascendant group captures the state and its overwhelming power apparatus before unleashing its might on other segments of the nation.
In twenty one years of post-military rule, the last three administrations have been accused of gross nepotistic tendencies and of pursuing narrow sectional interests. The possibility of evolving core national values recedes farther and farther into the shadows and with that the possibility of organic nationhood.
This is the only thing that can explain the rise of Hushpuppism as a pan-Nigerian ideology and a national way of life. In Western societies, there a very few billionaires who flaunt state-derived wealth with such impunity and lack of concern for the social fabric of the nation. In a disciplined and ordered country like China, such juvenile miscreants would have been flagged off before they become a source of international notoriety to the society.
But it has not always been like this for most of Nigeria’s –and Africa’s—constituting nationalities. Judging from their extant philosophies, their illuminating proverbs, their mores and norms, it is clear that most of them had a dominant national ethos which drove and framed their lived experience before colonial disruption.
This is why in the ontological and normative chaos of contemporary Nigeria, there is a growing nostalgia for the ordered and regulated normality of pre-colonial existence; a revival of political nativism and the resurgence of ethnic nationalism which clash often violently with the very notion of the post-colonial nation.
In Nigeria, these urgent cries against the current normless non-existence sometimes take the form of plaintive pleas for a radical restructuring of the country or calls for outright dismemberment. In its classical incarnation, a nation must not only be, it must also mean something. Otherwise it is technically a normative non-entity where anything goes.
More than its political, economic, intellectual and spiritual failures, the signal failure of the post-colonial state in Nigeria lies in its inability to mean something. In the absence of existential meaningfulness, the nation becomes an anomic free lease in which the terrifying void is filled by all kinds of aberrant pathologies: state larceny, nepotistic impunity, rape, ritual killing, kidnapping, cyber-crimes and deregulated violence.
A national ethos is driven by a national ideology which in turn crystallizes from a set of core values. There is a nexus between the solidified core values of a nation and individual character and ultimate destiny. The Calvinist modern masters of Netherlands, whatever their fabulous wealth, are notoriously thrifty and marked by obsessive frugality. The Prime minister can often be seen driving himself to work on a rusty bike.
In India, the founder and owner of one of the most famous companies can often be seen driving himself around Mumbai on a hot sultry day, or he could be found in the general cabin of commercial aircrafts poring over his files in indifferent self-effacement. Sometimes, he goes to the airport to welcome prospective employees while offering to help with their luggage.
In America, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and one of the richest men ever, flies Club Cabin class in commercial airliners and has been seen several times taking his turn in a burgher queue. Sam Walton, the founder and owner of the Walmart chain, drives himself around in his old jalopy and has lived in the same house for over forty years.
The ethos of the unreconstructed hunter-gatherer gets in the way in Nigeria and leads to monumental national tragedy. We can see this in the career trajectory and individual destiny of our own Hushpuppi and Eric Yuan, the founder of Zoom. Both are undoubtedly gifted and talented young men. But while the one will end up in American jail, the other was recently catapulted into the front ranks of American billionaires.
Eric Yuan arrived in America a little over two decades ago virtually penniless after eight failed attempts to secure an American visa. With the Chinese national ethos of discipline, prudence and perseverance burnt into his genes across generations despite serial national humiliations, Yuan persisted despite crushing rejection and withering dismissal.
His fortune changed with the current coronavirus pandemic. Eric Yuan is now a listed billionaire and the toast of American society. But he has not allowed the outlandish success to get into his head or affect his worldview. He can often be seen among his workers with his sleeves rolled up. Not for him any ostentation or vulgar display of crass opulence. What Ramoni Igbalode tried to obtain by fraud and psychotic daredevilry, Eric Yuan can now procure from legitimate toil.
In the unfortunate case of Hushpuppi, a personal tendency to vulgar exhibitionism coupled with the prevailing ethos of prosperity without genuine work, an aversion for honesty and a penchant for instant gratification to destroy the young man forever except in a rare case of luck perchance the FBI needs his skills to solve some cyber mysteries.
As we have seen from the preceding analysis, this is a case of a personal tragedy that is also symptomatic of a larger national tragedy. Our puppies have arrived. Only God can now save the nation from a terminal injury inflicted by its miseducated and misdirected youth.
When General Buhari came to power after a momentous election five years ago, this columnist gave him a shopping list which included an urgent need to inaugurate a National Restitution Commission which will take a holistic look at the moral and ethical health of the nation with a view to fashioning out a national ethos.
But that will be the day. Meanwhile five years on, the situation remains the same if not very much worse. Only Nigeria’s legendary luck can now avert an ethical meltdown in the greatest conurbation of Black souls that the modern world has seen.
Big Boris is watching you
Whilst we are still on the subject of those who think it is their inalienable right to soil the image of the nation, it is meet to report that the international community and the global patrol may have finally tired of the fiscal heist of Nigerian fraudsters and money laundering panjandrums. After all it is not altruism that forces people to bury the corpse of an abandoned wastrel. It is the health hazard the corpse may constitute to the larger community.
The story you are about to read may appear stranger than fiction. But it is the truth. Three years ago, this column celebrated a friend who turned seventy. Our friend, a titled Benin chief, is the owner of one of the biggest advertising companies in the nation and has been a major player in the field since the early seventies when he was a youthful Advert Manager of the Daily Times Group.
In the said piece we described him as a business mogul and a major real estate investor. The article went on to describe our man as something of an enigma who lives in the equivalent of a fortress right inside colonial Ikoyi. According to the said piece, to access our friend, you have to pass through a prison yard, a famous Police Station, an immigration department and finally a thriving cemetery one after the other.
Anybody familiar with colonial Ikoyi must know the street in question. But this is where tory begin to get K-leg as they say in Nigerian pidgin parlance. Sometimes this week, a letter from his bank arrived in our friend’s London home asking him in a rather querulous tone to furnish them with answers to the following:
1 Why he thinks he is a mogul.
2 Why he is living in a fortress-like enclosure.
3 Why to reach him one has to pass through a prison, a police station and a cemetery.
Echoes of the infamous Colombian Medellin cartel? As proof of invincible veracity, the London bank attached a copy of snooper’s article duly procured online. Oh mine, oh mine, all this is getting rather Kafkaesque and a little bit ghoulish for the delicate palate. Is fiction a slice of real life or real life a slice of fiction? Writing about businessmen can affect the business of writing.
All snooper can say for now is that when our friend called from London to report the incident, he was in a cheerful and upbeat mood. Here is wishing him a powerful presence of mind as he is set to return the queries post haste. To our feckless fraudsters, we say Big Brother Boris is watching you. Exeunt snooper with his tail between his legs.
Christopher Columbus was there
Finally, the tsunami of statue-toppling has reached the city of Baltimore and the statue of the man who started it all: Christopher Columbus. With its huge Black and largely disaffected population, its teeming mass of alienated, unemployed youth and with a storied inner city brimming with human fiascos, drug freaks and slobbering junkies, Baltimore often feels like a secular hell. Despite all this, the visitor cannot but fail to notice a fundamental goodness about the denizens.
Last week, the man who started it all and who can be regarded as the greatest iconoclast of all time got his own historic comeuppance. The statue of Columbus in Baltimore was taken down by an angry crowd and carted to the harbour for a watery finale. Out of water thee cometh and into water thee goeth.
Although he was not the first person to discover the Americas— the Vikings having preceded him by almost six centuries- – Columbus was the first to weaponize the encounter with the native people thus setting the stage for the large scale conquest, expropriation and extermination of the indigenous people by European prospectors and speculators.
So long, Christopher?
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