If you are a man wearing native attire right now (buba and sokoto, Senator, babaringa, etc), check your trousers: you will discover that it looks like women’s leggings. How can trousers have the same size as shirt sleeves? That’s how madness starts little by little, but society is taking no notice. Men are striving hard to look like women and women are burning their blood to look like men. The Yoruba have a warning for the unwary: E je ka ti ibi isana kiyesi oogun.
Their future already stolen by politicians, Nigeria’s young people are resorting to base pleasures to negotiate their way out of the agonies of existence, embracing psychiatric disorders. Only this week, the Kano State Police Command arrested 58 suspected criminals, including 33 miscreants (Yandaba) and 17 drug dealers. The politicians need the boys to be miscreants, and miscreants they shall remain. In Ogun, students are busy beating up their teachers. Well, in November, the chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Brig-Gen Buba Marwa (retd), indicated that 15 million Nigerians indulged in the consumption of illicit drugs. When they are not doing drugs, the youth are engaged in cyberfraud. I hear there’s now an association of mothers of Yahoo boys. The mothers fortify their boys with occult manipulations so that they might conquer their victims and the law! This can be no surprise, as we are in the era of Yahoo Yahoo kings and pestilential politicians. Even language has changed, as boys direct undeserved venom at their addressees’ mothers. Instead of saying: “Do I know you? If I get hold of you!” they say: “Do I know you? If I get hold of your mother!”
The foregoing should give no false assurances: the girls are no better. Indeed, they are worse. An accurate picture of the state of Nigeria’s young females was provided by the shisha show of shamelessness witnessed sometime ago. Schoolgirls, all of them teenagers, converged on the room of a boyfriend in Igbogbo, Lagos, and uploaded a video of themselves smoking shisha as if their life depended on it. These days, young ladies take their family issues to the social media, curse their parents, and upload videos of themselves performing base acts with bottles, sticks and fruits. Only this week, a lesbian posted a video online in which she berated her mother for objecting to her “sexuality.” Parading breasts in various stages of retirement, young women give unsolicited advice on tiktok, purveying thoughts that are either silly or downright insane. To be sure, the social media is the province of Nigeria’s educated agberos. Over the smallest of matters, you hear curses: “Ogun kill you there!”
Of course, a lot of the bad influence is from the Wasted West. Since they took up men’s jobs during the Second World War and refused to go back home, women in the West have been implacable. First they asked for equal rights, then they asked for the right to commit adultery and be rewarded for it through divorce settlements, the right to marry fellow women, and so on. Now they marry trees, buildings, stones and even themselves. A lady recently divorced herself. There are hardly any women of value in the West. Knowing that their women could easily seize their wealth, soccer stars hardly get married, preferring to raise a family with girlfriends or surrogate mothers. In search of people of value, King Solomon, the son of David, wrote ages ago: “One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found.” How true, even in 2021.
You would think, in the face of the moral pestilence that has gripped society, that the decisioners would spare a thought for family values. Perish the thought: they are busy building the Tower of Babel. This week, the Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, presented a N1.39trn 2022 budget outlining grandiose plans. In Sanwo-Olu’s state, just like in different parts of the country, many people behave like psychiatric patients, but the government has never pretended to care about the mental health of its populace. People shout themselves hoarse behind the steering, strip naked and exchange blows in banks, and turn the smallest arguments into fisticuffs in shopping malls. Of course, the madness took a long time maturing: one day during military rule, a young rascal in a corner of Lagos jumped into a gutter, burst a waterworks pipe, and started beckoning on passers-by to “buy water.” In no time he was making brisk business.
I don’t even know whether to laugh or cry over the situation in Cross River. In October, Professor Ben Ayade, governor of Cross River, signed his 2022 Budget of Conjugated Agglutination into law. In January 2020, he had signed his budget of Olimpotic Meristemasis into law, saying it would help to actualise key projects of his administration. “For us in Cross River, with the governor and his deputy as professors, it will be a thing of shame for us to budget based on our envelope size,” he had boasted, adding that in augmenting the shortfall, he would deploy “intellectual money.” I like the sound of “intellectual money”, only that I dare not go to Computer Village or Bodija with it, hoping to return with goodies. Ayade had presented his Budget of Quabalistic Densification to the state House of Assembly in 2019, saying it was anchored on the “belief in the spiritual force, which is the third energy.” Are we in the terrain of Soyinka’s Ogunnian metaphysics? There was a Budget of Deep Vision, which is fair enough, in 2016, but what on earth is Budget of Infinite Transposition (2017) and “Budget of Kinetic Crystallization (2018)?
Lacking intelligence, members of the political class act as provincial thieves, forgetting that the diabetes and heart trouble they are managing will kill them shortly. To them I say: make all the money you want: your children will blow it all away on gambling, together with your houses and cars.
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