By Olatunji Ololade
The sun still rises and sets over Nigeria’s blinders and ruined stones. Above the rubble, visages of the world we dream diminish and fade, but we have learnt to romp over the corpses we make.
We bellow just to hear our voices return from the hills. We watch our lives cascade bloodied ravines, sprawled and littering, where everything morphs to nothing.
What is it that we seek? To shriek our fears hoarse or inter them beneath the capers of our tragedies and open secrets?
Perhaps we simply need the landscape to repeat us and replenish every rind of logic that absolves us of blame.
Who do we blame as our fortune hangs askew? Some have fingered the oligarchs. They say the latter do not believe in self-sacrifice for Nigeria and the common good. Of course, they never have and they never will.
Their leadership is assured by their full control of the economy and the media. They control the legislature, executive and judiciary; little wonder they wield power as a sharp instrument for personal enrichment and domination.
Nonetheless, we attack their ocean surge with catapults, hoping pebbles repel their bandit storms. The Nigerian crisis is a human crisis thus the failure of the law, precepts and structures at addressing the country’s major afflictions.
The foundation for progress is non-existent and that is because the human elements that are meant to erect such monument are spiritless and corrupt. Consequently, we suffer the affliction of a predatory ruling class and a citizenry inclined to fulfill the role of unforgivably docile, self-flagellating lower elements.
The imprudence of the latter reasserts in the upward mobility of certain crucial members of the divide across class boundaries. Increasing wealth, higher status and social affiliations often alienate this band of circumstantial leaders from the self-confessed values and politics that stood them out as vanguards of rights of the under-privileged.
Just recently, the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT), a coalition of supposedly brilliant, youthful revolutionaries emerged to challenge the dominance of the ruling party, the fast-dissembling All Progressives Congress (APC) and its clownish rival, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) at the 2019 general elections.
Sadly, these new kids on the block failed to earn Nigerians’ mandate due to their banal theory of rage and aggression.
Having failed to connect with the grassroots, they embarked on a fool’s gambit, seeking to match the predatory oligarchs, filth for filth, rhetoric for rhetoric, while belting righteous indignation.
To establish and sustain its integrity, PACT suspended itself in ideological voyeurism and fault-finding, a tactic of assault and defence that eventually became its crucifix and tomb.
As PACT buried itself in bitter mummiform, Nigerians, the youth especially, consigned the platform and hopes it stoked in them beneath the country’s political thrash pile.
The PACT disaster is hardly astonishing; the platform and its members, if elected, would eventually play into a stereotype – better they dashed our hopes at the 2019 polls than later.
Such pitiful waste of potential leaders and emancipators of the masses should never be overlooked. Even so, they are considered as the lucky few who made it to the spotlight. Politically, they are the smarty pants who dared the system and acquired the title of “Former Presidential Aspirant.” They are the nouveau riche, who inspire anecdotes for attaining success and deep pockets despite all odds.
How many Nigerians succeed so in real life? How many definitions of “success” aren’t deductive from “cheating the system” or defrauding it at all cost?
Money changes everything. An obsession for it corrupts the elderly and youth alike. While loving it could be practical, an inordinate lust for it drives the covetous to the brink. It shows the oligarchs upside-down and inside-out as men of vulpine souls and intellect, eternally forsworn against statesmanship and the collective good.
For the love of money, several armed robbers, kidnappers, and terrorists, in their youth, have wasted innocent lives. Many “woke” youths and misguided millenials have equally justified taking bribes, and playing ruinous muscle to the ruling class, claiming its their “share of the collective wealth that they steal from us.”
Whatever justification they choose to give to it, a bribe is a bribe. And it often changes relations. Once accepted, it reduces the recipient, making him inferior, like the proverbial impotent, who pays to be sodomized by a horse, thinking it would cure his impotence and aid him to sire by his woman, a blessed child.
The folly of our ways have dawned on us. The oligarchs we enabled with power have evolved some of the worst tyrannies across the 36 states of the federation. A brilliant tyrant could be trusted to a certain degree of depth and capacity to lead but a dimwitted tyrant is infinitely dangerous; as he cannot be trusted beyond his mental handicaps and the devious plots of his associates and kitchen cabinet.
Sadly, in the corrupted currents of our world, such characters are making frantic gestures to perpetuate themselves in power beyond 2023. It’s 2020, and some governors have spent more time in Abuja than their domains; they are embroiled in desperate plots to beguile and forcibly seize power in 2023 even as they fail to fulfill the duties of their incumbent offices.
Ongoing political liaisons enable a system in which the youth are psychologically confined and broken by inducements, dubious segregation and manipulative politics.
Many argue that the major problem afflicting Nigeria is the dearth of inspired leadership drawn from the nation’s youth. A converse view advances the presence of eminently capable youth, potential heroes who have learnt to keep quiet and tactfully ignore our romanticized wish to abolish the status quo. They know, that, as usual, we would always settle for an opportunistic contract between our exploiters (the government) and a part of the exploited (labour and youth leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin aptly identifies as “the original sweetheart agreement.”
It is about time we actualized a culture of true ideals against petty passions and sordid objectives. Let us begin to build that proverbial bulwark of citizenship whose ideal of patriotism is held untainted by wantonness, ill-bliss and the temptations of power.
Let us begin from the grassroots. Let us desensitize ourselves of toxic prejudices and conceit.
Let us begin to court and patronise the usual objects of our apathy and disdain – like the “inconsequential” park urchin, “hooligan” and muscles for hire in the boondocks, university campuses, the media and law enforcement agencies.
It is time to connect with the park urchin, neighbourhood thug and militia to channel the inestimable benefits accruable by identifying with them in psyche, electoral will and numbers.
In 2019, candidates of the PACT collective thrashed blindly about the nation’s political swamp, inciting rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. Eventually, their language did not make sense.
They could begin to make sense by speaking truths amenable to the miseries of the electorate outside the perimeters of the general elections. For the latter, better tomorrow has passed, today is stricken and yesterday has withered with her ridged fundaments at last.
Now that fractured ‘Change’ in which they trusted, has drifted down shifting waters to the darkest deep, let the PACT “disrupters” strap torn will to broken resolve and furiously row before we sink.
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