William ABORISADE, oosha53@gmail.com

Growing up in my community is as it was in most communities across Nigeria, we were subjected to systematic indoctrination on socio-cultural dos and don’ts. It was particularly emphasized that hard work is the only route to success. Any other way is evil. Stealing, lying and indolence were considered unethical, evil and as socio-cultural irritants. While weaving her clothes or doing other house chores, my mother, and most mothers in my village, sang different songs. Prominent, then, was the following, sung in my dialect:

Lead: Ibejide mo sole, Bejide has stolen

Chorus: E sole, uru adiye lereke rin, e sole       

Yes, he stole, the chicken’s feather on his cheek corroborates this.

This song, probably started before I was born or shortly after. It was about a man, called Bejide, who, allegedly, stole a fowl belonging to someone else. He was led out of town, excommunicated, by big masquerades, in accordance with the traditional treatment for unethical practices (abominations). His family went into extinction, as nobody married into or out of his family!

In the schools, we were subjected to rigorous character training, through religious and social studies, among others. The Roman Catholic Catechism, the first book given to a new entrant into my Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic School, contained the Ten Commandments and were rigorously imparted into us. They taught us about our responsibilities and duties as we serve God and man and that formed the premise upon which many of us live our lives, till date.

The 1966 Military Coup.

On January 15, 1966, a military coup occurred which sent politicians out of government, replaced by military men. Nigeria, hitherto, a federation with the three regions operating largely autonomously, thus became a huge military cantonment, in which force and intimidation became the tools of administration. Soldiers who, hitherto, were restricted to military barracks were located among civilians. The uncultured among them saw the need to, aided with their ammunitions, intimidate the citizens whose taxes were used to purchase those ammunitions! Those who could call them to order chose to get amused by those irrational behaviours since they could not be victims and those made them feel special. The civil populace was, thus, brought at the mercy of the rampaging armed men, regardless of what the law said! The helpless civilian populace, as time went on, started to see this rascality as heroism and sources of amusement, since no one in the society was willing to call them to order. That was the beginning of deculturalization of the citizenry as viciousness became a source of entertainment to a conquered people, an aberration to the African communal culture.

The military government had to rely on the public servants in its day-to-day administrative functions, understandably because cantonment administration cannot be equated with civil administration. These privileged public servants took advantage of the existing chaos and the novice state of the military guys, in matters of civilian administration, to do unethical things to their own material advantages. Thus emerged a generation of civil servants who saw the public service as belonging to them.

Indiscipline thrived and a generation of crooked public servants were called super-perm secs, a title that was never known in the public service. They wallowed in impunity and unexplainable affluence. That became the beginning of a huge crack in the socio-cultural wall of Nigeria and the very beginning of the chaos we are in today.

Towards the end of military governance, the debate on the mode of disengagement by the military raged, with right movements, like NADECO, staunchly opposed to the military solely designing the disengagement and handover scheme, without civilian input. This led to the military sidelining the civil rights movements to handpick a group of people it branded new breed politicians-a group of military contractors, sycophants and all manner of riffraffs, most of whom are greenhorns, as far as politics is concerned. It went further to set up two political parties which it branded a little to the left and a little to the right. That way, the more political astute and experienced NADECO members were successfully sidelined and the stage was set for all manner of people branding as politicians. It was on this rickety platform that the 1999 election was conducted.

From one inept administration to the other, we arrived at the Buhari administration of the APC, a party which used change as its electioneering slogan. In its naivety, the citizenry, truly desirous of a change from the failure that the PDP’s Jonathan administration was, voted it in- Little did anyone imagine that anything could be more inept than Jonathan’s administration.

Moving forward, we need to call to question all people of interests, as a way to saving our country from total collapse.

 

 

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