If prejudice is a disease of the human mind, it intensifies in the Nigerian, whose perception of others coerces the eye to make the mind a connoisseur of debauched reality and random, bestial stereotypes.
Prejudice sprouts invasive wiles; it fosters disruptive points of view, and reduces human beings into nouns and adjectives, and pliable, sacrificial epithets.
Sometimes, it resonates primal style and radically deactivates the humane, to nail the world against a picture plane. The prejudiced eye deploys vision like a sword; it dismembers and hacks, until its blinded by an excess of bias.
In Nigeria, the prejudiced eye becomes tyrant and the act of seeing is fanatically inflamed. Thus the Hausa-Fulani, subjected to pictural filter, disintegrates. As a man, he must “possess the sensibility of a cow.” If a woman, she must be a poor, helpless “child bride.” Together, they fulfill contemporary society’s random stereotypes of villiany a la murderous herdsman, almajiri, Boko Haram (BH) terrorist and suicide bomber.
The Igbo man must be an “armed robber,” “money ritualist,” “baby factory operator” and a “drug dealer”; if a woman, she must be a “brothel vixen.” The Edo female must be “Italy-bound and a prostitute” and if a male, “a notorious cultist” or “an armed robber.” The Niger Deltan must be a “kidnapper,” “greedy militant,” “murderous pirate,” “armed robber.”
The Yoruba must be a “sellout” or “indefatigable Judas,” if you like. He must be a “kidnapper,” “juju ritualist” or “prostitute” too.
Each ethnic group suffers an ugly, frantic streotype thus collapsing our world into a heap of visual objects coveted by the bigoted for their morbid decay.
Of these random stereotypes, however, a common narrative runs through as the thread of bias; that of the north as a haven of homicidal almajiri, BH terrorists and Nigeria’s most backward region. The almajiri conundrum resonates, quite jarringly, against the backdrop of BH insurgency, armed banditry and herdsmen’s bloody incursions into Nigeria’s southeast, southsouth, and southwest regions.
“When I drive round the country, what upsets me most is the status of our poor people…You see the so-called Almajiris wearing torn dresses with plastic bowls. I think we the Nigerian elite; we are all failing,” said President Muhammadu Buhari, in while acknowledging northern Nigeria’s almajiri crisis, few months ago.
Predictably, Buhari’s confession triggered yet another debate, which was wildly marred by cold, sentimental claims and counterclaims.
While it is alright to pillory a system that condemns millions of vulnerable children to the streets thus denying them rights to parental care and decent schooling, it would be duplicitous to claim that the almajiri system constitutes the greatest impediment to national progress, as some columnist recently intoned.
A parallel monstrosity subsists across the country’s supposedly evolved and sophisticated southern regions. The latter, despite their haughty, hieratic claims to literacy and higher evolution, merely reinvent terror; they make violence hip and experimental.
The statistics, of course, hardly resonate the darkness and virulence characteristic of northern mayhem.
Very few people would forget in hurry, how Lagos State cringed from the bloodlust of the infamous Badoo gang. The group of serial rapists and murderers carried out ritual killings of entire households: families of four and five, and newly married couples among others, in Ikorodu.
Unofficial sources claimed that more than 30 persons were sent to their early graves while the Badoo horror lasted. Eventually, in joint operations by the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), the Onyabo, a local vigilante group, and the police, many of the culprits were allegedly caught.
Lagos still cowers from the ravage of teen gangs including the Awawa cult and the One Million Boys; Imo, Anambra, Enugu, Delta, Bayelsa, Ogun, Oyo, Ondo and Edo among others, pulse with mayhem and murderous exploits of teen and campus confraternities.
Lest we forget the terror personified by the internet fraudster aka Yahoo Boy, kidnapper, the ritualist cum pant bandit; the corrupt civil servant, banker, teacher, street urchin, commercial transport union worker, politician and journalist, whose perpetration of official corruption, hate-speech, armed violence and intellectual hooliganism, to mention a few, glorify the predatory manifestations often attributed to the northern almajiri and the terrorist.
That these southern plague are supposed beneficiaries of advanced forms of learning, representative of Western education, professional and religious scholarship, emphasises an ugliness homogenous to Nigeria’s disparate ethnic groups and regions.
Pseudo-psychology goads us to believe that the northern almajiri is Nigeria’s greatest albatross thus the argument within southern elitist circuits, that, until the northern elite terminates the almajiri system, terrorism, child marriage, illiteracy and underdevelopment will continually hinder the region’s bid to match the rest of the country in literacy and development.
Those who defend and condemn the almajiri culture are undoubtedly at odds over matters of cause and context, definition and politics; many of them suffer from grave epistemological and data blind spots, a condition Pinker would blame on availability and negativity biases.
Both northern and southern apologists rationalise the backwardness pervasive of their regions, where different forces of terrorism hold the people to ransom. Rather than admit the truth, they choose to create semblances of reality, that serve, in a wider sense, the same role that perverse pleasure serves the sexual delinquent and moral degenerate.
Their bigotries destabilise the truth, goading all to manufacture and project alternate realities as replacement for their world’s uncomplimentary truths.
Ultimately, we project such relative reality to justify our feelings and perceptions of each other as inspired by mirages generated by pseudo-sensibility and events.
The sad reality of this ignorant state of mind, is that, it is mostly an affliction of the electorate. Politicians are hardly on the receiving end of such blind illusion.
Consider for instance, the curious camarederie of successive ruling class: the Presidency, Governors, State and National Assemblies conveniently maintain a sturdy bridge, by which they navigate through shoals of inter and intra-party conflict, political brigandage, and institutionalised corruption, to attain harmony in misgovernance. Sublime, isn’t it?
It is always the electorate, the breadlines, who get blinded by the illusion of pseudo-events and inflammatory politics. Those who slip into the mirage are eventually consumed in pursuit and perpetuation of a myth built around the presumed “cruelty” of “others.”
The passion we commit to tiresome bigotries and inter-tribal conflict should be redirected to more productive endeavour, like value reorientation, the elevation of norms and the training of thoroughbreds habituated to reason, catholicity of depth, scholarship and culture.
Scholarship should be geared to discourage the prejudices that bulwark society, and stamp out those that in sheer barbarity of intellect and ideology, deafen all to the wail of reason and matchless patriotism.
Such measures are best begun from our homes; the value of the family as a crucial social unit and building block of society must be re-asserted, even as we undertake the crusade in our worship houses and schools.
The Igbo man is hardly the enemy. Neither is the Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani, Ibibio, Itsekiri native among others. Nigeria’s mortal enemy subsists in the incumbent ruling class.
It’s about time we took our country back from them.
