Tag: Wisdom

As you read, methodical folly becomes Nigeria’s perennial fascination. The gross and barbaric proliferates in plain sight. And society approves the descent down the pole of morality and civilisation. Thus men and women with character of a dung-beetle, the scarab, are worshipped and glorified as rare gems.

On the watch of such characters, the democracy we declared recoils into a spent shadow. The scarab was primeval Egypt’s minister of decay, her epitome of muck and amorality. In Nigeria, scarabaeans dominate the corridors of power. They have turned government into a death cult, a painted tomb of justice and progress.

Seventeen years on, in the grip of such blood-drenched mascots, democracy afflicts us like the proverbial slut making a surreptitious exit with her drunken lover’s wallet. Consequently, we suffer poverty of character and this manifests as quiet, wily, mean-spiritedness; akin to the patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours, the corrupt police at illicit checkpoints, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the thieving public officer on his perch. This patience is illustrative of the predator hunting its prey.

Oftentimes, it manifests in uncontrollable spasms that have seen us bury our best and elevate our worst, in abject negation of the cycle of morality and the universe.

In such stew and stink, many a Nigerian of commonplace roots live through each day without ever contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanising squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate and exhibit no conscious effort to better their lot, beyond what their immediate circumstances dictate.

Almost as impulsively as the beasts of the wild, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought and consideration that by sufficient endeavor, they just might improve their living conditions. However, a certain percentage – comprising men and women of privilege – guided by personal ambition, consciously strive in thought and will to attain higher status but very few among these are concerned enough to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves.

Very few men are indeed capable of humaneness that inspires martyrs to persistently rebel against glaring social evils, in the interest of less fortunate members of the society. But there exists a few however, that are truly bothered by the impoverishment of their fellow citizens regardless of any risk or discomfort it might attract to them personally.

These few, driven by compassion, tirelessly seek first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape; some new system of society by which life may become richer, more joyful and devoid of avertable evils that mars the present. But surprisingly, such men oftentimes, fail to curry the support of the very victims of the injustices they wish to end.

This is because more unfortunate sections of the Nigerian populace are hopelessly ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and disillusionment, apprehensive through the imminent danger of instantaneous chastisement by the ruling class, and morally defective, owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation.

Thus despite our claims to modernity, higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian society have failed to achieve better living conditions and a better society even in the throes of rising demand for more radical intervention and reconstruction of the social order.

It is no surprise however that the Nigerian citizenry has persistently proved a dismal failure. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: Nigerians have a problem with differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate political behavior.  That is why the nation’s democratic experiment like any other system of governance practicable by us was doomed from the start.

What exactly has democracy offered? A 4-1-9 progressive plan that booms circumspectly like it had been doctored as part of a cold-war era propagandist scheme. But despite our self-righteousness and persistent cynicism about the current order, we really cannot explore a more worthy alternative than what we have now. The average Nigerian can’t bear to be led by a truly honest, visionary and accountable leadership.

Apparently, we possess an overwhelming and oft-convincing inclination to self-destruct thus our lack of a coherent and defensible political ideology essential to the evolution of a progressive leadership and state.

The average Nigerian is no more electable than the leadership he endures yet he loves to speak truth to power; even as he simultaneously smothers his protests by extolling the ruling class, whose dominance he seeks to terminate. No matter who is elected, the demographic and economic realities of Nigeria will persist, and there is a very limited range of politically-viable solutions for dealing with them.

It’s about time Nigerians consciously evolved in thought and will, in pursuit of saner social order. But such conscious evolution can only be achieved by re-orientation in scholarship and purification of though.

The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be tirelessly reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advance — problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life – and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization must be resolvable largely by elected representatives of the people by reason of their exposure, leadership skills and humane constitution.

This informs a greater need for study and thought. It requires appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes, in the journey towards the reduction to the barest minimum, the possibility of future mistakes. The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.

It’s about time poor, struggling members of the nation’s working class and youth divide, scorned the maxim that holds that their worries are always reducible to a cup of rice, a loaf of bread or paltry bribe. The paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood.

The better society that we seek requires the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the low income earners and ambitious middle class, emancipated by training and culture.

Such human elements would no doubt be conscious of the fact that not even the sustenance of oil subsidy, higher wages and a fairer economic system could protect its members from the usual handicaps and monstrosity constituted by the incumbent and predatory ruling class.

Hence they would be able to understand that positive change, must be mooted and achieved by upright youth and working class, in further substantiation of their capacities to assimilate the culture and refinement of humane civilization.

A veritable step towards such reality is to vote the incumbent administration out of office and elect a younger, less ethnic, less directionless, visionary and benevolent leadership. But to achieve this, the youth must establish a more truly progressive, vibrant and detribalised social and political platform.