Societies racing to hell usually make pit-stops at irrationality to re-tank their superstitions. They stop not only to caress their indiscretions, but also to refill their pathologies. On their way to oblivion, they loiter around the theatres of infamy. They celebrate feasts off their impunity. At those convocations, they erect funeral pyres to immolate their posterity. They have already crucified their civilization with the hammers of brigandage. The cadaver stinks. It must be disposed. They chose cremation since burial is out of the question. Burial in a sacred rite. It is a celebration of hope in some metaphysics. Cremation is for what we want to erase to memory. To this end, any attempt to consign such inglorious load to mother-earth, will eviscerate the ontologies that gives meaning to our reality. It will raise an abomination of indescribable proportions. As nature’s punishment and disapproval, such corpses will arrive with an erection. A corpse arriving its burial place with an erection is an abomination in terms and in fact. Our ancestors would eternally frown at such an internment.
But the incestuous rapacity of that inglorious cadaver, whose existence was an exercise in the infernal iniquities of Dantean wretchedness, would guarantee that erection. You cannot rape your mother, and expect nature to applaud your atrocity. You cannot disembowel your tomorrow and invite nature to celebrate your cannibalism. You cannot dine off the flesh of your own very children, and expect our land to crown you with the diadems of honour. That’s why our earth will not receive that unsavoury load, or honour such cosmic crimes with a burial.
Nigeria has cannibalised its posterity. It has raped its earth. It has murdered its children, spilling their blood in a violent orgy of unconcern, since 1914. We have legions of un-propitiated spirits, murdered by this country of ours, hovering over our memories; screaming for justice. Over 2 Million Biafran women, children and men had to die, to appease the murderous realpolitik of a country that does not know its essence. That was between 1966 and 1970. Today, Boko Haram is causing rivers of blood to flow from the aridity of our Northern region, down south to the timidities of our collective witlessness. Over 12,000 Nigerians have lost their lives to Boko Haram alone.
Nigeria and Nigerians have raped this country so repeatedly that such incestuous rapacity is only a recipe for disintegration. This country has not being able to utilize over 450 Billion Dollars it has earned from oil, since its discovery in Olobri, in 1956. A few trans-tribal thieves of primeval audacity collaborated with their foreign friends to rip the nation asunder. This massive financial muscle has not profited Nigerians any bit. Our educational system was not funded. It is finally on its knees, spitting our graduates that can neither think nor act to liberate themselves from their dysfunctional circumstance. Our health system is so sick that our hospitals are were Nigerians go to die. This money was not invested to create opportunities for our population. Over 70 percent of the Nigerian population are young people below the age of 30. This teeming army of robust and restless energy have no jobs or prospects to employ their talents and energies. They have been there, lying fallow; a huge reservoir of frustration waiting for a demagogue or a moneyed-terrorist to come around and hire out their expertise for apiece of porridge.
Nigerians are wont to blame the leadership. But what has the followership ever done, to retrieve their country from the hands of the elitist rogues that wrecked her?
Boko Haram may be hugging the headlines today. But there is nothing surprising about that fanatical insurgency. The trajectory was clear from the beginning. Nigeria and Nigerians chose to ignore it all along. We chose to ignore the fact that the funds mapped out for the education of our young people were being embezzled and stolen by those who are charged with those responsibilities. We chose to ignore the fact that millions of our young people in the North of Nigeria were only educated unto ignorance in Koranic schools for the Orwellian purpose of using them as Napoleon dogs of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Our country utilized every opportunity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. We wasted every opportunity for greatness. Opportunities knocked at our doors, but we opened to let it out through the window. We even played politics with religion. Why wouldn’t that be the case, since our politics has forever been based on another primeval fault-line; namely ethnicity. So, it was not beyond those who view Nigeria as their private estate, to deploy religious fanaticisms of the murderous variety, to violently blackmail anyone out of power, and assume it for themselves.
Such societies would cremate themselves, not only because they chained their embrace to the pillars of eternal discomfiture; but also because their society aped the exclusive characteristic of every realm inhabited by infernal scoundrels. In such constructs reside all sociopathologies. Dysfunctionality is actively pursued as the policy of state, while injustice pivots all blueprints of social action. This then paves the way for the promulgation of mediocrity, which then invites retrogression. This is what eventually floors a state, and ensures its disintegration.
At those pit stop, the chickens finally come home to roost. The insanities we cultivated, comes to haunt our arrogance. The insecurities we sowed, dumps themselves at our doorposts. Those rivers of discontent we failed to canalize, rises to flood us out of our pretentions. The poverty we constructed rises to drown us in squalor. The retrogressive elements we empanelled in our search for unmerited privilege, to scaffold our parochial insularities and unforgiveable myopia, all come to exact their pounds of flesh. They come, armed with the militant mediocrities that our injustice and destructive greed has created across our land. Those we passively over-indulged, are convoked to attend the society’s funeral. Those we crapulently enjoyed are resurrected to wreak final havoc on such rotten embraces, and push them over the brink.
Nigeria is at that pit-stop at the moment! That is what Boko Haram is all about; a violent symptom of a rotten embrace.
