Does morality mix with business? Does morality mix with politics or diplomacy? These are questions whose answers would certainly vary from audience to audience. When politicians are out to put their opponents on the spot, they talk of morality, when they are on the receiving end, they say there is no morality in politics. Businessmen say the same of business. There is no morality in business: The business of business is business and maybe your bargaining power.
In the past few weeks, the question of morality has crept into the social and business scenes of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. It has pitched the Abuja Environmental Protection Board (AEPB) the Social Welfare Secretariat of the FCT and some civil rights activists against themselves. On the other hand, it has brought owners of Night Clubs and Parks in conflict with the officials and security operatives attached to the AEPB Task Force.
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The raid on some Night Clubs and parks in the Abuja metropolis is at the centre of it all and morality is the keyword. The Social Welfare Department justified the raid in a particular Night Club where women were arrested naked and ferried into waiting vans of AEPB as a process of “rescuing our lost daughters” and turning them into “good mothers.” No fewer than 100 women were arrested and detained in the past week and no one knows how many more fall victim as the days would roll by.
The sad end of the FCT moral story is the report in the social media which indicated that a number of the arrested girls and women ended up being raped by some Task Force members who turned used nylons of ‘pure water’ sachets to condoms.
There comes the danger of morality enforced by the gun. Because morality is controversial and human behavior itself a purveyor of chameleonic fluctuations, it becomes difficult to draw the line. Owo igbe kii run, so says the popular Yoruba saying. The fact that I do sewage business does not make my money smell filth.
The issue of morality is one thing the world has been unable to fashion some universal meaning. In today’s scholarship, morality is one word that is already hinting at the status of a philosophical problem. But it is indisputably a value laden word. Morality simply concerns the principles that raise distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad behavior.
Wikipedia defines morality as the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper.
While giving a background to evolution of morality, Wikipedia reports that the topic, morality is principally about human behavior, with human being correctly recognised as social beings. Scholars in the field of sociobiology have, however, submitted that human social behaviours are complex and that socio-biological explanations of human behavior are controversial. While some would argue that there is the science of human morality, the general view of human conducts tallies with the social science assertion that behaviours fluctuate and that morality can be culturally relative.
Back to the unfolding saga in Abuja: The FCT authorities believed that the city was becoming filthy as a result of the rising waves of strip clubs, Night Clubs, Parks and Gardens that roll out a lot of features the people in authority see as despicable, wrong and bad. They unleashed gunmen in the name of AEPB Task Force, raided the streets, the Clubs and charge those captured at the nearest Magistrate Court.
But as the FCT Minister, the Social Welfare Secretariat and the AEPB strive to clean the city of Abuja, caution must remain the word. ‘My morality is better than yours’ would only lead to anarchy. The status of Abuja as a rising modern city cannot be compromised. In today’s modern world, the bad is distinguished from the permissible. In Nigeria, prostitution is illegal. A number of us shudder at the sights of prostitutes on the streets, but prostitution is a legal business elsewhere. In some major cities out there, women prostitutes hang in show glasses in the designated red light districts. Those districts pay tax and contribute to the beauty of the city/state. The distinction is between the bad and permissible. Strip clubs may be despicable, but they are not homes for prostitutes. In some climes, a husband and his wife can form a strip partnership to entertain at Clubs and Gardens.
To fight prostitution, gay and lesbianism, the AEPB could target Lesbian and Gay outlets and the streets where the ladies of the night hang out. But the raid should not subject them to being raped or extorted. Those who need rehabilitation can be separated and helped. It is not a joke that same sex conducts are spreading fast in Lagos, Abuja and the big cities. That is clearly against the law.
In the Night Clubs and parks, a lot of decent girls and women strive to earn their living. Some Corps members whose place of primary assignments don’t pay them a dime as allowance are said to find their ways to the parks and Clubs to offer one form of service or the other. I was even told that some jobless married women turn to strip clubs because they could make their money while sex is not involved.
A colleague once introduced a young lady to me. She is a serving Youth Corps member who rather than go home to idle away after leaving the place of primary assignment, retires to a Park where she serves customers diligently. She does not put the graduate in her on the forehead. To her, she is learning a trade, tomorrow, she would land a big park somewhere and contribute to the growing entertainment industry.
Rather than kill the business of Night Clubs, which is a big industry by all standards, FCT authorities need to carefully separate the wheat from the chaff.