Money changes everything. It changes everyone. Every hour, it turns thousands who could have overcome its darkness into eternal addicts to the base and inane. For the love of a lousy buck, many have died. For the love of the naira, thousands more lose their souls and their lives every day. Man and woman, father and mother, son and daughter, privileged and pauper, are felled in pursuit of money and the good life, even as you read.
That President Muhammadu Buhari is persistently ridiculed and condemned as a failure even before his second year in office, is a direct consequence of his inability to uphold the corrupt but highly lucrative systemic bazaar of the past. Although Buhari’s leadership suffers the affliction of crooked men and women, his glamourised aversion to corruption and his ongoing anti-corruption inquiry, resonates dangerously to the country’s crooked divide. Too many men and women accustomed to pocketing and spending money that they didn’t earn are suddenly aghast and petrified by their inability to conduct ‘business as usual.’
That former President Goodluck Jonathan took God for a fool also attests to the plague and degenerate sway of money. Jonathan, in abject desperation for acceptance and goodwill of Nigerian masses, travelled from the presidential villa in Aso Rock, Abuja, to stage a dramatic communion with God, on his knees, before Enoch Adeboye, a respected cleric.
Cut to another hodgepodge of the ex-president on his knees, before Ayo Oritsejafor and other self-appointed “men of God” in faraway Jerusalem, Israel. Jonathan in flagrant disregard of religious tenets advising that man’s communion with his Creator should be personal and unpretentious, deserted his abode in Abuja to embark on a spiritual jamboree of his self-styled ‘humility’ and communion with God across the country and overseas.
Predictably, psychologically and materially-impoverished loyalists cum the ex-president’s media aides argued that he simply loved to ‘lead by example’ thus politicizing his “humility” and “love of God” to the fascination and appreciation of all. It is however, unclear by what standards they will prove that heartfelt prayers muttered by the former president on his knees, in the corners of his room, would have been less significant than his theatrical communion with God.
Were these spiritual shows emblematic of Jonathan’s unpretentious love of God or were they symptomatic of a desperate wish to perpetuate him in power for the attendant fiscal and material perks? Cut to Stella Oduah, aviation minister’s N255 million bullet-proof automobile scandal Sambo Dasuki’s $2.1 billion arms purchase scam and Abdulrasheed Maina, former pension boss’ N21 billion pension fund racket to mention a few, and you have an interesting picture of the Nigerian ruling class’ inexorable lust for money and other material things.
There is the oft-repeated logic and inclination to blame this persistent malaise on capitalism; however, attractive as such sophistry may resound, the impulse for acquisition, pursuit of gain and money in fact, has nothing to do with capitalism – it is merely a symptom, like perverse capitalism, of the society’s steady descent the slope of the decadent and grotesque.
Max Weber, the late German economist and social historian would say it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all cultures of the earth but I would say that the Nigerian malaise is brought about by the absence of an enduring moral code.
This deficit manifests in deficiencies of personal and societal ethics – the consequence of which is the preponderance and regeneration of eejits, tyrants, greedy-guts, fraudsters, narcissists, murderers and bloodhounds of all kinds and of all nature, across the country’s landscape.
The trials of Nigerians’ moral degeneration as exemplified by the citizenry’s inordinate lust for money, the country’s recurrent tragedies and propensity to self-destruct, reveals an overarching tendency to savour short-term greed and relief over long-term prosperity. Despite a protracted and tumultuous history of impoverishment and bad leadership, Nigerians continue to look for quick fix solutions thus mortgaging the country’s present and future for short-term benefits.
Through decades of moral perversions and self-inflicted disasters, Nigerians continue to bemoan their tragic fate. While many argue that the country ruins because the youth are too weak and too selfish to spill as much blood as is required to rid the nation of every human and institutional affliction, many more contend that the country’s woes will disappear immediately poverty is eradicated by the ruling class.
Today, the fear of poverty as the irrepressible lust for money, drives too many to commit gross acts of dishonesty and irresponsibility. Personal greed is pervasive and poverty is endemic. It represents the triumphal punch delivered by the proverbial system against the country’s poor, hopeless masses. Nigeria suffers the consequence of the supremacy of money. Money rules the Nigerian society. It elevates and ennobles the possessor of it; whatever the nature and import of the rich’s membership of the society, as long as he has money to flaunt and throw around, nobody cares what value he adds to and denies the society.
Thus the pardon and acquittal of several corrupt politicians and deposed bank chiefs; even after insurmountable evidences were marshaled against them by prosecution, they get off too easily with court sentences that were tantamount to a pat on the back. The poor, on the other hand, epitomise more of what is wrong and contemptible with the society. They represent that segment of the society that is easily swayed, viciously condemned and trodden by the power of money.
The power of money is indeed frightening and overwhelming. Like Okwudiba Nnoli notes, it uplifts and crushes, enhances and debases, exhilarates and disenchants, dignifies and dehumanizes, enlightens and blinds, unites and divides. Under the influence of money, humaneness and the quest for the collective good are ferociously smothered by disruptive and selfish considerations. Materialism is fostered and greed is ennobled in the mad dash for money. Consequently, justice, freedom, equality, dignity and other human rights, are sacrificed on the altar of the perennial rat-race for the accumulation of money.
More worrisome is the reality of the poor in Nigeria being unquestioningly docile to the power of money. This impoverished lot is hardly impressed by humaneness and promising leadership. To them, these are manifestations of weakness. Their loyalty and sympathies are reserved for tyrants that treat them like dogs on a leash. It is to these latter that they exhibit the greatest obsequiousness and erect the greatest statues.
While it is true that the poor would often trample maniacally on the despot, who by a poetic twist of fate – be it by class politics or masses revolt – gets stripped of his power and authority, they do so because having lost his strength, the despot becomes relegated to an ignoble spot among the weak and repressed, who are to be loathed and not feared.
This is emblematic of Gustave Le Bon’s philosophy of ‘The Crowd,’ which was valued not only by Pareto, Freud, Mussolini, and de Gaulle, but even by Horkheimer and Adorno. Le Bon contends that the type of “hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instills them with fear…Should the strength of an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from servitude to anarchy.”
The Nigerian poor, like Le Bon’s crowd, are incapable of progressive will and thought for any length of time. Like a servile herd, they are incapable of coping with the humdrum and vicissitudes of their lives without a master. Democratic ideas are therefore in profound disagreement with the psychology and experience of the Nigerian poor. It is unsurprising then, that materially and mentally impoverished folk would distrust democracy and its promise of collective good, to covet and pursue the vain and ephemeral perks of sociopolitical harlotry.
