SIR: It was indeed discomforting and distressing to see youths appraise and assay the sexual prowess and doughtiness of A-list Nigerian artiste, Ikuforiji Olaitan Abdulrahman, popularly called Oxlade, whose scandalous, shocking, and sickening lovemaking video with an unidentified lady inundated the internet and the social media a couple of days ago. This loathsome and nasty experience ignited yet again a social media firestorm, recalling in a similar fashion the release of Tiwa Savage’s make out video with her supposed lover into the internet some months ago.
Celebrities must come to the terms that their lifestyle crystallize and coagulate clusters and configurations of ideas, attitudes and moods on the sensibilities of many impressionable young people in Nigeria. The ton and trend of baby mama’s, heartbreaks, divorce, single parenting, smoking, substance abuse, promiscuity, cultism, profligate living, desecration of family life with transgender and homosexual ideologies, breast and butt enlargement, and emphasis on crass materialism, by a bevy of celebrities rubs salt into the wounds of an already injured nation.
This age-long injury was created by the perfidious past of leaders and statesmen whose adulation and admiration for social-political anomalies have normalized nepotism, impunity, unaccountability, deficiency of transparency, selfishness and corruption escalating multidimensional crises of insecurity, insurgency, kidnapping, ritual killings, fraud, poverty, youthful restiveness, unemployment, inflation, barefaced injustice, amongst others.
Therefore, to stave off this growing fad of depravity amongst our youths and by extension Nigerians, the first primary agent of socialization – the family has a laborious task to perform. At this level of colossal depravation and demoralization, we do not need a soothsayer to make us realize the injurious effects of lax and lazy parenting. Parents must wake from their slumber and ingrain into the minds of our children values and virtues like hard-work, integrity, transparency, sincerity, studying and reading, balanced understanding of the human sexuality and its corresponding intricacies, and judicious use of resources.
This further implies that parents must continually censor what their children learn from school, church, peer groups and the social media.
The task to rebuild a morally sound nation and restore sanity to the minds of our youths still remains a task to all and sundry; celebrities, government, religious and educational institutions and the family. Yes, we may have failed but there is still time to salvage the heightened state of depravation that has catalyzed an adorable frenzy for the youths.
- Tobechukwu Johnpaul Nwabuisi,
melchi5801@gmail.com