The collapse of everything we held dear 

YOU do not need to join the Anambra State Commissioner for Women and Social Welfare, Ify Obinabo, in her futile search for help in managing the 18-year-old apprentice who recently impregnated 10 girls within five months. The sexual terrorist has ample models in the lepers who rule the public space. As they say in the South-South, E don red. Onitsha-based 12-year-old Munachi Udochukwu, narrating how he found himself in a Yahoo training centre in Lagos after he was arrested by detectives from (SCID), Panti, said his mother sold the only land in the family’s possession to enroll him in the school of thieves! This society has collapsed, with everything we once held dear, including respect for elders and a sense of shame, blown into smithereens. Hear Obinabo: “This boy was sent to learn a trade at the age of 18 and after three months of apprenticeship, he impregnated his master’s daughter and his salesgirl. He was sent packing. I want advice from the public because this one is beyond my capacity.” Well, as that famous singer said, if you ask me, na who I go ask?

 The headline of a national daily on Wednesday, “Senate proposes national summit on insecurity” and two of the riders (“Sets up 19-man committee to oversee emergency rule in Rivers” and “Reps to parley Senate to restore democratic order —Speaker) made me realise how utterly repulsed I am at what is supposed to be Nigeria’s national legislature and the entire governance architecture. I quickly skipped to the next page. National Assembly to restore which order in which place? A conclave of servile yes-men that reduced such a serious issue as emergency rule to a voice vote and did not even pretend to be fair even to their own posterity? Across the country, innocent villagers are being cut down in cold blood and their ancestral homesteads seized, yet the concern of Nigeria’s lawmakers is a meaningless talk-shop at which they will be surrounded by security agents armed to the teeth while their compatriots keep getting slaughtered like bonus rams! Pray, who cursed us with these set of depraved, soulless, pestilential leaders? Are people being killed because leaders did not stage talk-shows?

 In word or deed, it looks like our leaders are dazed and lost. They remind you of New Zealand’s Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, who in a fit of inebriation called for a general election in 1984. In the infamous event later nicknamed the “schnapps election,” Muldoon’s National Party lost to the Labour Party led by David Lange.  If you get pregnant with palm wine, warned Nigeria’s apala maestro, Ayinla Omowura, you will birth Gulder, as Winston Churchill, known for his affair with whiskey, knew too well, although he often rose above the fog of drunkenness. On one occasion, Churchill told a lady rejecting his amorous advances:  “I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.” Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, made many public speeches while drunk, and may have taken his spirit from Alexander the Great, that infernal slave of the bottle who drank so much that  a drunken argument led to the burning of Persepolis, the capital of the Persian Empire, or King Charles II, who ruled England drunk like a man challenging a brewery.

Bad leaders breed bad societies. There was a time you could look at the apex court and based on logic and the law, predict its stance in a case. These days, you wouldn’t dare. Kings used to have a sense of decency and were not caught rolling up a joint, decorating themselves with alien titles, or committing fraud in distant lands. Those were the days when Generals did not hide failure under meaningless talk about kinetic and non-kinetic warfare. Around us, almost universally, everything sounds like a provocation: the bandit on the streets acts exactly like the one in Government House, and shame seems like a commodity no one wants.

Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, the man who once justified herders’ murderous onslaughts on innocent farmers and declared that the Fulani man as an international citizen had the right to move in and out of Nigeria at will, told a congregation of ignoramuses this week that Western education is a mere “formality.” Drawing attention to himself, Mohammed told his captive audience: “Today, Bala did not go to school but he became somebody..Western education is a formality, but if you have Qur’anic education, you have knowledge of what it takes and you’ve helped yourself in knowing what you want, especially in farming — that is education.” This is transparently insane, but hear the governor of Jigawa State, Umar Namadi, panning the idea of people defending themselves against terrorists, as canvassed by former Army/Defence chief Theophilus Danjuma: “We are not at a point where citizens need to defend themselves.” Apparently, though, we are at a point where citizens need to keep dying like flies! With leaders like these, who needs enemies? 

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In search of a laugh during the week, I came across videos by some military (wo)men, and the feeling of despair heightened quickly. These days, talk of soldiers and generals or generators sounds completely useless. I don’t recall feeling this unnerved and desolate in years; it is the feeling you get when war has wrought all the devastation it can. News that terrorists have beheaded the next victim sounds like garbage: those sons of the devil have done their worst and no longer hold public attention. We are supposed to have soldiers and no one is safe, not even the soldiers themselves, a question I confronted in “Soldiers in slumber.”

 I mean, we look for leaders and get jesters, a rabble of rogues who are super proud of themselves. Look at the defectors in and out of political parties: they sound like zombies, flaunting their treachery in the face of the platforms that brought them fame and money–money that they stole from our future. I mean there’s really nothing that is exciting or at least funny.  Social media, the new preoccupation of the youth, looks like the home of lunatics in training: in a video, a lady approaches a welder, asking him to weld her womanhood. It seems that some people have forgotten that you need a level of intellect to be genuinely funny.  Each time I see bankers in suits, I remember thieves, and I definitely can’t stand the purveyors of the theology of theft. I feel really tired. Aren’t you?

NB: With all the money lost to CBEX, some people have reportedly started CBEX 13. The misfortune pro-max, I am told, requires $300 investment. As I wondered about the lunacy, news from India jolted me out of my reverie: a 21-year-old woman from Uttar Pradesh, known by aliases like Kajal, Seema, Neha and Sweety, has been arrested for defrauding at least 12 men in a state-wide wedding fraud. E don red o!