Tag: kidnappers

The parents who prowled the Sambisa forest left nothing to an impotent state. They prowled the woods for the souls from their souls, blood from their blood, those for whom they had invented a future at birth, as toddlers, at puberty, as nubile beauties.

They did not envision bigoted goons, red-blooded and hooded, hounding and carting them away into a forest, defying the law and a state of emergency.

But that is the desperation of the Nigeria of today. What the beastly boys of Boko Haram did reflects a society not just of self-help or of impunity. It is a mirror of a return to feudal savagery. The sort of life that these boys evinced is already at play in all aspects of our lives. The powerful invade the weak and take away their valuable assets. We are back to the modern version of pre-capitalist society. They are the new kidnappers.

The feudal system prospered on the logic of a few with military and economic might. They took over the society and made the laws. The men worked for them, the women were their wives, sex slaves and sometimes glorified whores and the children grew into the servile roles of their parents.

They owned all the land and that was why some of them were called landed nobility. The wives were property.

The feudal lords, who then were the kings and Obas as well as the chiefs and other feudal elites, could corral anyone’s wife, or accost her at a village intersection or bush path and avail themselves of instant pleasure and move on. That is the context of the Boko Haram boys and their brutish rights to entitlement. They have created their alternative society since the days of Mohammed Yusuf, their founder, and they are their own lords.

They are a shadow of the larger society that has lost its capitalist mooring. The business elite, weaned on the colonial masters, understood the value of productivity. When they left power to the Nigerian elite, the principle persisted for barely two decades.

We had businessmen who turned out wealth from almost nothing. They were the capitalists, like the Fajemirokuns, Rewanes, Odutolas, etc. They knew how to eke money out of sweat and resources. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who bred technocratic elite, showcased men like Simeon Adebo. In the centre, we boasted geniuses like Asiodu, Udoji, Ayida and Agodo. They understood that wealth derived from ideas and industry. That explained the rise and glory of the middle class and the high standard of education from primary to university levels. Standards were vehicles to success.

But with the rise in oil revenue after the civil war, we began to witness a decline. Yet the standards still glowed. Parents did not dream “miracle centres” and products from our education system still preened against their British and American counterparts.

But the military punctured our pride. It started with Gowon, who allowed indulgence with oil money. Our oil wealth made its debut with scandal. Murtala wanted to instill disciple, but his reign was a soap bubble. The Obasanjo and Shagari eras resumed our fascination with materialism fueled by opportunism. In fact, opportunism subsumed opportunity.

The Buhari regime saw the lapse but it did not have the cunning to address the drift, as it was also caught in its own moral sleight of hand, especially with the 53 suitcases saga. The Babangida era let loose the Freudian id of greed and, from then, the society saw a free fall. That has led to the new feudalism of today. What is important is not the ability for rapidity of success, but connection for concession from the mighty. That has meant the decline, not only of values, but of value for talent. Our society makes billionaires of the lazy, like the jet set titans of subsidies. They are like stock broker Jordan Belfort, the American wolf of Wall Street, who lived a life of false glamour and extravagance on the misery of others. He was a baboon dey chop. His book, The Wolf of Wall Street, depicts such a contract with Beelzebub, like a hyena crying gloatingly on bleeding flesh.

The new invasion begins in politics. They rig elections. But the larger society frowned at it in the first republic and, hence, we often welcomed the messianic adventures of soldiers. Now, the military pool also became poisoned.

The political elite invade power. While in old feudal societies, the militarily powerful worked with a few others, today, the new feudal elites are the politicians. Rigging is their version of invasion of political power. They kidnap power. Then they work with bureaucrats, bankers and contractors from the civil society. The rout is complete. Now, the lawyers and judges, media barons and a few others become accomplices.

In this setting, they kidnap power, business, law and information.

The nation’s pot is the prime abduction. We don’t need to produce, but to consume. Oil provides the wealth. They are a consuming elite and we a consumptive society. They rig to office, get the judges to legitimate them, they plunder and bankers formalise their fraud, pastors canonise their rule and a section of the media elite burnishes their image. Ours is a kidnapped society.

The results are the impotence of the civil society and the whittling away of the middle class. It leaves two classes: the very rich and very poor. The middle class afforded loans to build their homes, educated their children, bought cars on higher purchase, had decent medical care and had the pride of life. These attributes only belong to the rich today. We cannot make businessmen who rely on their sweat and resourcefulness anymore. They get contracts from belonging to the ambience of power. At independence, we had a false start with meritocracy. Now we have mediocrity from the top. We buy degrees, wives, contracts, pastors, Imams as we buy political offices. While the BH boys kidnap with raw weapons, our elite kidnaps with law, guns and money.

When they plunder our resources, they live large, fly jets for N10 billion, dance when others die in bomb blasts, accuse others of genocide without evidence, call elections war without apology, move from campaigns in Kano to champagnes at Ibadan when girls are abducted, the lazy lap billions, the smart ones smart from lack of jobs and die searching. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is cited by Time Magazine as one of the world’s influential persons even though she cannot add simple numbers. When we earned less than $105 a barrel, we could pay all the states their entitlements. Now we earn more, we pay 60 percent of their allocations.

Nothing explains this era of moneychangers more than the recent discovery that when we rebased our economy into African preeminence, we also became one of the poorest in the world. Pastors cannot caution them because they have no moral authority. Rather, they anoint them and welcome them to their churches with front row seats and benedictions. Jesus would not have welcomed leaders who stole the people’s money. Rather, he would have rebuked them in the fashion he did to the Pharisees.

In the United States, President Obama has embarked on a campaign against inequality and that is because the United States is witnessing a big gulf between the rich and poor. The top 85 richest men in the world are richer than 3.5 billion people on earth.

Now a new book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, by French economist Thomas Picketty has caused a storm in Europe and the U.S. by making the case that western society is going back to the pre-World War 1 era when wealth was based on inheritance and family pedigree, rather than merit. In this book seen as modern Das Kapital, income and hard work have suffered a divorce. And those with capital keep making more capital, and the so-called theory that skilled labour determines wealth has lost face. In our society, it is primitive acquisition. Ours is worse than the west because the rule of law, unlike here, can redress it. Their rich did not steal from the government.

Just as our lazy jet set – politicians, business elite, clerics, etc – sees the society as free booty, so the BH goons see the girls and food and other valuables as their share. Society created the crime. They committed it.