By OIatunji Ololade
Our collective personae as a nation is reflective in the governor who stole $4.2 million from his state’s coffers and stashed it to fund his vanities abroad, not minding what good such loot could do in resolving the educational, healthcare, and infrastructure woes of his state.
It is reflective in the shenanigans of the female minister of petroleum, who raped Nigeria silly until she suffered the industrial strokes of scarcity and recession. Yet she frantically fights to walk free and her cronies in government are eager to let her off with a pat on the back – thus the protracted drama of her prosecution at home and abroad.
Cut to a hodgepodge of governors looting billions of naira via “security votes and hyperbolic capital projects, outrageous life pensions, among other frills, even as poverty, policy failure, and insecurity devastate the electorate and crucial social institutions on their watch.
Our collective personae flourish in youth feverishly flying ethnic flags in support of their ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ lawmaker, minister, governor, and even president irrespective of the atrocities committed by the former, and criminal charges levelled against them.
The Nigerian government, from the Presidency, the National Assembly, to the state governors and their pet legislatures and local councils embody our frantic culture of dubious citizenship. They legitimise our culture of being, which enables and justifies a public officer’s immediate descent into a basement of opportunism right after emerging as an elected representative.
The latter locks himself (or herself) in that amoral cellar, against the ethical rungs and wise counsel of sterling statesmanship. As the citizenry sinks in wretchedness, he embarks on a quest of inordinate acquisition and counts his spoils in material possessions.
He is, however, a mere fragment of our bigger cultural dilemma. Think of him as the pointed end of the spear of our culture of greed, administrative rapscallionery feverish pillaging, and criminality, in whom the triggers of consequence-free theft, sponsored violence, ethnoreligious carnage, gender, and sexualised menace are fused.
In concert with fellow wild personae prowling Nigeria’s corridors of power, he reinvents, with creative malice, the penetrative outcrops of our national maelstrom. Optimists would call them salvageable ogres from our dark, primal aspects but their cruelty attains deeper resonance in their manifestation as poster icons of our corrupted personae.
They are our decadence. Our disease. Like the millions of citizenry they supposedly represent, they are products of our moral void; the sickly stems bearing our poisonous petals. Little wonder we suffer a carnage of incarnations.
Yet even as we have rightly identified their emergence as an affliction of the eye and disease of the mind, our chances at healing are hindered by chinks in our surgical armour: the fissures of ethnoreligious bias, illiteracy, willful degeneracy, greed, poverty, savage ego, and sheer malevolence.
These constitute severe impediments to our healing. Thus as usual the political class have corrupted the debate on our parlous situation; we should be discussing and taking decisive steps to rid governance of their savage afflictions but they have hoodwinked Nigerians into yet another emotional fog by making an issue of the southwest governors’ ban on open grazing and the calls for true federalism. The latter engage their northern rivals in intense bickering, presumably in defense of their people. Of course, the people have fallen for their gimmick, threatening war and secession from the Nigerian enterprise in solidarity with their dubious representatives.
It’s a familiar scene, a Nigerian reality that often resounds like the fable of doomed Odysseus and the labouring ships.
In the backdrop of these shameful proceedings, the argument persists in academia, social and political circuits, that the future is blurry and bleak due to youth absence in politics. But the youth had been in politics as armed thugs, assassins, arsonists, and internet trolls for several years.
Lest we forget our more ‘youthful men and women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s control the country’s ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and major opposition platform, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
To sustain their legacies, their clannish pride bequeath the country’s leadership to their wards even as they draft boondocks young as cannon fodder and enforcers of their never-ending cycle of sleaze and mayhem. But the youth are hardly the preys they are thought to be. They are often willing participants in a dehumanising ritual of violence and bloodshed.
This minute, the image persists of the nation’s youth as human assertions imagined in degenerate stillness, by specific and random politicians. Unlike the artist’s immobile masterpiece, sculpted in bronze and stone, the youth evolve like plasticine, easily malleable and amenable to devious plots.
Some have attributed the youth’s afflictions to structural banes and the perverse culture of citizenship by which they are weaned and ushered into adulthood.
In the wake of plausible and often far-fetched analyses, too many ‘patriots’ conveniently absolve themselves of blame. Some propound the tragic theory of Nigerians as being innately incapable of self-determination and self-governance.
These arguments have over time attained a language of their own and thus evolved as a dialect of dissent and exaggerated self-abnegation. The nation’s elite frequently marshals clashing precepts as solutions and in condemnation of the status quo according to their biases.
A more damning view identifies the electorate’s persistent claims to victimhood and sense of entitlement as whiny and symptomatic of a dense and irresponsible citizenry. Between the conflict of hyperbole and informed sophistry, Nigeria suffers the affliction of intellectual miscreants and promising youth-turned-fetal-adults.
The coordinated tragedies afflicting our consciousness daily, append the only real structure to our lives as impoverished Nigerians. From burdensome realities of fast slipping youth, recurrent rites of bigotry to the ethical quandary of coping with strict moral codes of adulthood and ideal society, our lives obscure in purpose and meaning.
Thus the scorning of ethics by the youth for fast, illicit riches even as ripples of their actions keep hundreds of millions more in binds of despair.
Consequently, the revolutionary dissent that sprouts from oppression is pitiless and unbending. It radically splits our world into ‘insensitive ruling class’ and ‘clueless lower class,’ ‘elite’ and ‘downtrodden,’ ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ It fosters even more fragmented discord that continually pits Nigerian Christians against Muslims, Hausa against Igbo, Igbo against Yoruba, Yoruba against Ijaw.
While this piece too may resound as hackneyed howl and lamentation, a regurgitation of towering monstrosities we have become, it need be said that our ultimate solution lies in our will to effect true change.
None of the existing parties can foster a progressive nation. They are programmed to a recurring cycle of rebirth and self-destruct. In the vortex, they show occasional flashes of brilliance and daring against familiar odds. But it’s all smoke and mirrors.
It’s about time the youth united progressively and adopted a party of true patriots, driven by men and women of unimpeachable character. The change Nigeria deserves is anathema to the prominent parties and the political class. Real change requires neutering them in capacity and real-time.
To the youth, I would say: “Failure to do this will sustain your status quo as slaves and your children as slaves to your oppressors’ children.”
But could the youth save Nigeria if gifted with power?
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