BIG Brother Naija (BBN)’s Pepper Dem Gang perpetuates a fable, not of hope, but disintegration. The current edition of the reality show celebrates the pre-adolescent mind stuck in a grave of delusions. Participants on the show, like their predecessors, personify a deep cry for help, like Hoyle’s misdirected mortals, they will learn from avoidable mistakes, not from example.
An inmate of the BBN house, Khafi Kareem, who is also a Metropolitan Police officer in the United Kingdom, is reportedly being investigated for appearing on the reality TV show despite being refused permission by her employers.
The 29-year-old, who joined the UK Police as a Constable in 2015, is being investigated after she was allegedly filmed having sex repeatedly, with 31-year-old inmate, Ekpata Gedoni, on the show.
The Metropolitan Police said it had not granted Kareem’s request to appear on the show and that an internal investigation would be carried out.
A spokesman said, “The Directorate of Professional Standards has been informed and will be carrying out an investigation into the circumstances. The Met does not support the officer’s appearance, nor does she represent the Met whilst appearing on the show.”
Well, if she doesn’t represent Metropolitan Police, at least, she represents her family. Even if Kareem’s employer eventually sacks her, she has the ‘love,’ ‘votes’ and backing of her family and fan base.
It is instructive to note that while the UK Metropolitan Police is embarrassed by the conduct of Constable Kareem, the 29-year-old has become something of a folk hero, a pop idol to millions of Nigerian youths rooting for her to win the show mainly because of her sexual exploits.
Sex possesses a far darker power than society has admitted. It is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.
Kareem, for instance, participates in the show “to do societal good” and in pursuit of the prize money, she has unfurled interestingly.
As I asserted in last week’s piece, a show like BBN posits reality and entertainment by dignifying decadence and seduction.
To remould society, the show’s producers target the youth, and successfully sever their audience’s mental connection with moral roots. The so-called leaders of tomorrow are thus lured backward, away from menarche into the womb of regression.
The inmates are enclosed in a zone of morbid ecstasy. They are untouchable, carriers of charisma kept under quarantine, till they emerge as bearers of dirt.
The BBN inmate, irrespective of gender, is a non-person, subject to mass cheering and shunning. The eventual winner, like other participants in the show, emerge blinded by celebrity and severely crippled to function as a normal constituent of a humane society.
As BBN inmate, his imagination is free, but his body is bound in ritual restriction. He is a daemonic tool, a sacrificial totem maddened by intoxicants: alcohol and human milk, fluid of slovenly genitals.
The heated debate over sexual indulgences of the show’s participants is rife with sentiments as societal segments engage in a clash of obscenities in defence or condemnation of goings-on on the show.
The disconcertingly awkward sex between participants on the show has, reportedly, been untidy and shattering. Viewers’ morality has been seduced and conquered as DSTV/Multichoice keeps sensuality aglow in gothic gloom. Surely, the show’s producers legitimise carnal depravity. They broker pornography via BBN’s bedchamber of rank and malodorous sex.
Any critic of the show is, however, deemed ‘hypocrite,’ a disgruntled visionary who feels too deeply and sees too much and is tortured by his own vision.
Shall we seek import, still, in a social media post by a certain Shakeerah S. It goes thus:
In 2018, the total number of votes on the BBN show was 170 million. In a sharp contrast, the total number of votes cast at the 2019 general election was 27 million.
Then she writes: “A practical reality of who we are as a people and where our priority lies as citizens. The funny side in all of these; we still go to bed, have a good sleep and wake up with the hope to meet Nigeria we didn’t create.”
This brings us to the Nigeria of our dreams vs the Nigeria of our plots and intrigues. Do we deserve Nigeria as it is? Yes, we do.
Nonetheless, the country’s youth clamour for change. They want a revolution and a radical improvement on the status quo. But how can they exact change while they are perceptually enslaved?
In The Republic, Plato imagines human beings chained for the duration of their lives in an underground cave, knowing nothing but darkness. Their gaze is confined to the cave wall, upon which shadows of the world above are thrown. They believe these flickering shadows are reality.
If, Plato writes, one of these prisoners is freed and brought into the sunlight, he will suffer great pain. Blinded by the glare, he is unable to see anything and longs for the familiar darkness. But eventually his eyes adjust to the light. The illusion of the tiny shadows is obliterated.
He confronts the immensity, chaos, and confusion of reality. The world is no longer drawn in simple silhouettes. But he is despised when he returns to the cave. He is unable to see in the dark as he used to. Those who never left the cave ridicule him and swear never to go into the light lest they be blinded as well.
Plato, argues Hedges, feared the power of entertainment, the power of the senses to overthrow the mind, the power of emotion to obliterate reason. Plato, he notes, said that the enlightened or elite had a duty to educate those bewitched by the shadows on the cave wall, a position that led Socrates to quip: “As for the man who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow lay their hands on him and kill him, they would do so.”
We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news and BBN’s disconcerting reality.
In contemporary culture, writes Boorstin, the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous, until reality itself has been converted into stagecraft. We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so “realistic” that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.
Boorstin goes on to caution that an image is something we have a claim on. It must serve our purposes. The image is made to order, tailored to us. An ideal, on the other hand, has a claim on us. It does not serve us; we serve it. If we have trouble striving towards it, we assume the matter is with us, and not with the ideal.
A greater problem manifests where the BBN reality becomes the Nigerian ideal.