By
Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh
24 May 2014
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.
Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh, born and raised in Nigeria,
studied philosophy and law in Enugu, Nigeria.
He earned his bachelor's degree at the Pontifical
Urban University
in Rome, Italy. Subsequently he received his
doctorate in social ethics at the Goethe
University in Frankfurt, Germany,
and won the Konrad Adenauer Award for his doctoral studies. Since 2009
Ogbunwezeh has led the Africa department of the International Society for Human
Rights (ISHR) in Frankfurt and published
articles in various journals and magazines. Ogbunwezeh always represents an
optimistic point of view concerning the development and cultural integrity of
the African continent. In spring 2012 his book Towards an Ethical-ecological
Assessment of Companies in Nigeria
was released.
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