The battle for Nigeria’s soul may be won and lost on the screen, and between the lines of the printed, spoken word.
Word denotes newspapers, magazines, the audiovisual but never the book. Screen alludes to TV, new media and illusions of our multiple ethnic, religious bigotries.
Living in a world of words and images, we have grown from people who spoke words and painted images to folk who speak images and paint words.
We have learnt to interact in varnished dialect; amid the racket of voiced imaging and painted words, a pagan illusion triumphs over the moral eye and mind. It is fitting, therefore, that heathen idolatory subsists in the absence of national heroes and heroines.
It is the latter that we should seek but Nigeria defies the tenor of lore and wisdom indigenous to us. Thus we ditch heroes to create gods by the dozen. In our lust for deities, we romance and spread to fickle idolatory.
We all have gods, Martin Luther said, it is just a question of which ones. In Nigeria, our gods are celebrities thus religious belief and practice, business, economy, advocacy and politics, are modeled around the idolisation of personages.
In contrast, China prospers by native intelligence despite her love of celebrities. Likewise Japan. Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Korea. These countries’ socioeconomic and technological progress were built on a sturdy foundation of autochthonous intelligence and wisdom. Such wisdom should see Nigeria through her dark passes; left to our own devices we are retrograde.
There is no gainsaying modern Nigeria inherited the achievements and perversions of her ancestor generations. Then she lays waste to the latter’s achievements, even as she modifies their perversions and gives them new form.
Nigeria lusts for western-styled progress but the only modern parallels we have to the west occurs in politics, the arena where gladiators whip up artifice. Then we have cinema, our machine of the aggressive, amoral eye.
As amoral eye, cinema penetrates time and space. Enter Big Brother Naija (BBN) and its house of nasty realities. Big Brother’s culture of filth and voyeurism reflects the unacknowledged prurience of the Nigerian mind.
With money in contention, families ditch morals to embrace mammon. A so-called disciplinarian family, led by a cleric, learnt to turn a blind eye as their beloved and presumably well-groomed daughter gets ravaged in a public toilet; a lavatory frequented by 20 people in the Big Brother house during its last edition.
It didn’t matter that her body, a supposed ‘temple of God’ got plundered and sullied like a befouled orifice, by a fellow inmate fulfilling his role as a random buck.And the fable persists. Many a defeated, disciplinarian father, mother, sibling, granny, and other blood relative, impotently watch a loved one enthuse wild profanities on live TV, in frantic bid to emerge winner of the BBN sweepstake.
Such parents learn to ignore the rape of their elevated mores, values they hitherto inculcated in their child, painstakingly and pray for their ward to win.
As the travesty progresses, millions of youths and families participate actively from the sidelines, arguing mindlessly; their beclouded vision peering aggressively through labia of daemonic nature, cheekily eulogised as a DSTV/Multichoice’s social, experimental broadcast.
The show thus becomes a pornographic parable of Nigeria’s submission to amoral sex and power. It localises lust. Defiance, seduction and domination are precepts of the show’s blooming. Values hitherto idealised as Nigeria’s sunny, flowering fields are wilted in the searing of BBN’s bestial, infernal substratum.
Producers of the show strive to prove, that, success has too little to do with being a genius or smart workaholic, and everything to do with playing the game for the sweepstake.
The ongoing edition of the show incorporates wilder ingenuity by its producers as the inmates include supposedly made men and women; a banker, psychotherapist, human resource manager, Mr Universe Nigeria and a grandson of late sage, Yoruba and national icon, Obafemi Awolowo. Some alpha breed.
DSTV/Multichoice certainly mistakes its selection of Awolowo’s grandson as one of the 12 inmates of its morality jailhouse, for a work of pure genius; whatever outrage or applause results from its coup is expected to generate wider buzz about BBN and give it traction. But this is discussion best saved for another day.
By vetting the continuous broadcast and viewership of the show, the Nigerian government establishes itself as DSTV/Multichoice’s eternal wimp cum yard dog, and the nation, as the broadcaster’s doormat.
Yes, government and the broadcaster’s apologists will continue to rave that the BBN show is broadcast on paid digital service and that “It’s not a must that you watch!” and that “It’s a matter of choice.” Yet the government has no scruples outlawing what it terms “indecent dressing and behaviour.”
Government, for instance, disapproves of two public officers or citizens having sex in a car by the roadside, even if the vehicle’s windshields are tinted and the act takes place in front of their house or a remote street.
The culprits would be arrested for constituting ‘public nuisance’ although BBN apologists would argue that they committed the act in the private confines of their car.
The show’s producers argue that it creates stars, heroes and empowers youths. They would claim it propagates ‘values’ too. After all, former inmate, Teddy A’s values and moral compass led him to ‘appreciate’ fellow inmate, Bambam, by having sex with her in the toilet.
Picture the duo as candidates for Nigeria’s Presidency and Presidency. If the imagery scares you, wait till you read rationalisation of the BBN perversion by society’s supposed leading lights; so-called fiery critics of government and societal corruption mutate into DSTV/Multichoice’s lackeys or errand boys in real time. What do they still seek? A seat at the broadcaster’s annual gala or movies award night?
Kids are witnesses to BBN inmates’ perversions. They watch it on the internet and read frenzied reports of goings-on in the show by mainstream and new media.
Desperate rationalisation of the show, routinely, ignores its imminent repercussions on society; BBN apologists drone about how lucrative it is. To whom? It’s still the show’s producers and sponsors that pocket all the profit. Even its N60 million prize – increased from N45 million – remains devilishly exploitative of participants who ultimately become fame junkies and commercial sex workers by the end of the show.
They bend and break and distort into hideous forms in pursuit of the prize money. Such character is unworthy of young men and women persistently touted as Nigeria’s future leaders. To this end, let us hope Seyi Awolowo, a medical doctor, would remember his pedigree as grandson of the sage ancestor, who blessed generations of Nigerians with free, quality education cum civilisation and withdraw from a show, which perverts civilisation. But on the flip-side, his family and friends would argue that it is his choice and a free world.
At a time when Nigeria needs young men and women of unimpeachable character to wrest leadership from predatory leadership, the BBN show cloaks the minds of prospective patriots in wantonness, wild ego and muck.
This minute, their chants resound like the crusted corpse’s muffled groans in a garden of dirt.