As you read, a shameful thing is recurring; men in their teens are meeting to determine the fate of the Nigerian State. Apology to teens, for many a teen have been proven to possess the intellect and soul of a man of 40 and above. It is amusing to see the so-called best amongst us: career youth leaders, activists, journalists, actors, musicians, artisans, professional associations and so on, court the devils we swore to divorce.
Today, such characters parade themselves as representatives and spokespersons for the Nigerian youth. They are meeting with representatives of the ruling party and its rivals. They meet to chart a game plan; an almighty formula by which the ruling class may enslave us, for the umpteenth time.
That has to pale in the face of logic; it does. Things are supposed to be different now but they aren’t. As the 2015 elections draw near, familiar trolls are joining hands with the devious and sly amongst us; their intent is to use us against us in their customary plot to rob us silly. The end result of course, can be better imagined.
Money changes everything. It vitiates the soul of the Nigerian youth. Although the need of it makes us human, loving it could be practical but an obsession with it drives us to the brink, it shows us up, upside-down and inside-out; as men of vulpine souls and intellect, eternally forsworn to despise honour for the love of mammon and associated luxury.
Many have argued that we can never sell out by playing muscle to the ruling class. “We are only enjoying our share of our collective wealth that they steal from us,” they claim, even as we get ready to be courted and plied with easy money and other inducement, by the same politicians that habitually treat us with disdain, until the elections approach.
Whatever justification we choose to give to it, a bribe is a bribe. And more often than not, it changes relations. Once accepted, it vitiates a large chunk of the essence of the recipient, making him inferior, like a man who has paid to lie with a skunk the same way the impotent pays to be sodomized by a horse, thinking it would cure him of his impotence and aid him to sire by a woman, a blessed child.
The folly of our ways shall soon dawn on us, as it did, few days after we installed the current dispensation. The meek and humble leadership we thought we had installed evolved to become one of the worst tyrannies Nigeria would ever produce. It’s worse than any other, given Mr. President’s manipulability by the murder of crows he has surrounded himself with.
A brilliant tyrant could be trusted to a certain degree of depth and capacity to lead but a manipulable tyrant is infinitely more dangerous, as he cannot be trusted beyond his blandness, intellectual handicaps and devious plots of his coven of cronies, advisers and kitchen cabinet.
Sadly, in the corrupted currents of the world such men have foisted upon us, we can only devise more alluring ways to play dumb and project our generation as easy marks for the ruling class to exploit. The current liaisons between the ruling class and the so-called representatives of the Nigerian youth portend an ominous development.
It presages the continued enslavement of the Nigerian youth and our incapacitation by obscene inducements and gifts of grandeur; the perpetuation of a system in which the youth are psychologically confined and broken by financial inducements, dubious segregation and manipulative politics; a situation in which the sentimental fops amongst us are programmed by rumors, innuendo and outright falsehood to shun the path to progress and tow the fast lane to destruction.
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 persons out there, many of whom have failed to altruistically and responsibly apply themselves because like every other Nigerian, they are too busy looking out for themselves. Potential heroes we could rely on have learnt the wisdom in keeping silent. They tactfully scoff at our romanticized wish to abolish the status quo, knowing that, as usual, we would 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.”
I recommend as usual, peaceful revolt guided by probity and a conscious quest to achieve the collective good within the ambit of fairness, equity and unflinching morality. Without such humane attributes, every measure we adopt will fail. Policies and practicable solutions are mere words on paper; they can only be activated by our conscious efforts to actualise them.
Mr. President, the National Assembly, the judiciary, our 36 State governors and political parties are indisputably worthless and impotent without the support of the Nigerian youth. These societal creatures depend on our goodwill to survive. It’s about time we stopped playing disposable muscles and junkyard dogs to them.
Money and other inducements they dangle before us shall be exhausted sooner than we can ever imagine. If we are indeed serious about installing visionary leadership capable of steering us from the threshold of ruin to the portal of hope and social renaissance, we have to start now.
The Nigerian youth needs a platform. We need a more concrete forum than Facebook and Twitter. We need to create a rallying point by which we could sit to determine a bloodless path to a promising future. Yes, the current leadership won’t relinquish power easily hence our need to act. Let us identify and vote into power that particular breed whose idealism and pragmatism capably understands our painful silences and heartfelt dreams in order to speak and actualize them.
Let us begin to ignore those who would desert us no sooner than they regain their hold on power. I speak of men and women that would recoil into their exclusive homes in Banana Island, Lagos, their palatial estates in Abuja, and fashionable neighbourhoods in Europe at the barest sign of chaos. There, they isolate themselves from the tragedies that mar our world by indulging in unrestrained hedonism and extravagant consumption of their ill-acquired wealth. We, the suffering masses are however, repressed with greater ferocity every time we protest.
Our resources are being depleted; soon they will be exhausted. And then our hollowed-out edifice will collapse. Impoverished and severely robbed of optimism, we, the hopeless masses will rise against the ruling class in a premeditated and very savage strike – of which we shall suffer the worst consequence.
Like in all such uprisings, Nigeria will plunge into a canyon of blood and maniacal murders, in the name of the “revolution.” The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in A Short History of Progress, “…extremists, or ultraconservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.” This is how all civilizations ossify and collapse.
Today, we tow a similar path.
