Money ruins many men. It impairs the moral fibre thus making the average human inhumane but that is because man often fails money. The Nigerian man in particular, fails money and so doing loses his right to lord over it and own it.
Money, like a wild mongrel needs to be tamed. It requires firmness, chariness, deliberate conservatism and modesty of a full man to tame it, own it and control it. But that is hardly the case. Too many men are owned by money. The Nigerian man, woman and society in particular, are owned by money – that is why contemporary Nigeria worships money.
Like fire, money becomes a bad master due to our incapacities at taming its flare and controlling it. Consequently, it consumes us. Money corrupts the brightest among us and renders the most promising man and woman worthless. It consumes all who would do anything and everything to acquire it, whatever the consequence.
Hence the domestication of yesterday’s ‘heroes’ and corruption of the shrewd – men and women by whose citizenship and wisdom we aspired to freedom and progress have being tamed, house-trained, like hunt dogs and pastoral cattle. Eventually, we suffer the transmutation of such established, self-acclaimed defenders of the people’s rights into despicable lapdogs, attack dogs and junkyard dogs of the ruling class.
Little wonder Sunday of Isabo, Abeokuta, Ogun State, ditched his noble job as foremost columnist and chairman of a national newspaper’s editorial board to become attack dog and junkyard Labrador for former President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration. Many of his readers and fans bemoaned his ‘betrayal’ but from Sunday’s perspective, it is unarguably selfish of anyone to expect him to cling to the drudgery and emptiness of his former job and scorn a-chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of Nigeria’s high-society – be it as errand boy or disposable ‘bingo.’
Who would have thought that the unrepentant critic of inept and oppressive ruling class would dump his pen and cape of honour to become an attack dog for the ruling class that erstwhile incited his vitriol? Through his spell as former President Jonathan’s media aide, Sunday spoke from every side of his mouth. He patroled Aso Rock corridors as the greyhound would the premises of its master. It must be lucrative being an errand dog.
In Sunday’s descent subsists the irony of a contrived metaphor; the former columnist’s desertion of his sanctimonious high ground and renunciation of his self-touted activism and crusade for justice, government accountability and morality aptly illustrates contemporary Nigeria’s self-love and enslavement to mammon.
Add that to the contemporary ruling class desperate politics and their philosophy of public office and power as means to systemic fraud and embezzlement of public funds and you have a perfect portrait of the Nigerian in the vice grip of money.
An inordinate lust for money drives this generation to self-destruct. Having perverted the natural order that places man above money, the animate cowers to the inanimate. Nigeria submits to mammon, and science, technology, power, property and other bastions of materialism own and controls us. The consequences are rampant and discernible for all to see.
Our lust for money has put paid to that staunch historic adherence to a cultural value system that supposedly distinguishes the Nigerian in the larger comity of nations and universal citizenship. Gone are our touted values – incontestable code of personal and societal ethics that supposedly humanizes the average Nigerian and moulds him into a fuller and better breed of mankind than any other in Africa and across continental divides.
The current generation, the youth especially, manifests a dissonance with future bliss and progressive leadership anticipated of it. This generation is not only the most knavish but also the most effeminate of all generations; I will not bother over the shortcomings and atrocities we inherited from preceding generations lest I tow the oft beaten path and glamourize our claims to victimhood and base sentimentality. If the Nigeria we inherited is truly shorn of values and promises of a brighter tomorrow, must we aggravate the circumstances that foist upon us such hopelessness?
One of the most curious kinks of this generation is its sustenance and obeisance to the cult of the ruling class. Consider the former administration of President Jonathan for instance; men and women that erstwhile professed to champion the people’s rights united to defend Jonathan’s ‘honour’ and justify the unceasing ineptitude and mindlessness of his administration.
They conveniently forgot that the administration’s insensitivity, clumsiness and gluttony cost Nigeria thousands of lives and public fund till date. Evidences of the government’s incompetence and tactlessness abounded in its appointment of men and women unfit to run a roast corn kiosk to man the nation’s finance, aviation, health, defense, foreign affairs, education, works and housing ministries to mention a few. The citizenry’s election of shady men and woman into the nation’s legislative chambers and their defiant justification of the emergence of such individuals in the country’s hallowed chambers was equally instructive in the nation’s descent the steep slope of institutional corruption and decadent culture. Inefficiency of such characters fostered corruption, violence and deaths across the country.
This anomaly periodically incites harsh criticisms and disillusionment among the citizenry. However, as had always being the case, the leading critics take no part in the pursuit and actualisation of majority will beyond lip service. Nonetheless they proceed with the most vulgar extravagances courting power and projecting it, irrespective of the nature of men and women that wield it.
It is incontestable that many of such men, including the former president’s media aides functioning as attack dogs, attracted to themselves, too much of every ill that lies on the threshold of psychosis and common crime. Like the minority parading themselves as Jonathan’s apologists – even as you read – they cackle like a coven of crooked enthusiasts that see every illicit and sentimental act of bestiality as cause for political theatrics and hysterical spinning.
Renowned turncoats like Sunday of Isabo for instance, are very useful to the ruling class – wobbly in intellect and infinitely handicapped by greed, they repeatedly parade themselves as pirates amenable to crimes and accessible to venal enterprise. These purchasable characters eventually shed their pretensions to heroism and honour to unite with the ruling class in its savage war against the citizenry.
We have fought many wars in Nigeria. Wars for Biafra and the soul of the Niger Delta. The ongoing war for and against the soul of the northeast currently asphyxiating in the grip of terrorist sect, Boko Haram. And the never-ending war against thieving governors, legislators, and a corrupt judiciary. These wars are ultimately triggered by our failures with money and its innumerable material vestiges. Yet these wars are never enough. Everyday, we embroil in fresh wars for self-actualisation but the wars of the underdog, Nigeria’s impoverished lot, has a greater significance than all of the others.
This daily battle for the soul and survival of the struggling working class and barely existent middle class is merely an episode of the universal war that constitutes the true nature of humanity and history of the world—the war of good against evil, ruling class against working class, the haves against the have-nots.
These wars however, are lost on all fronts even before the masses march on to the battle field every day. This is a consequence of the knavery of men entrusted to serve as our moral sentinels, custodians of culture, value and hope for a brighter tomorrow. These men, contrary to their touted crusades in the interest of the citizenry, unconscionably mutate into more savage destroyers of hope and forms of life than the ruling class they were known to despise.
But rather than call them out as the savages and murderers of hope that they have become, the Nigerian masses continually rationalise their betrayal arguing that they were only being smart. Perfidy and greed thus become noble enterprise in the Nigeria of our dreams.
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