Humanoid Kings: Multiple Miseries Of Discounted Peoples

 By Sulaiman Salawudeen

 

There is this apparent emergency regarding the human condition that warrants being generally worried! But who is? There is fire on the mountain, and no one seems to be running, says the acclaimed American author, essayist, and social critic, James Baldwin.

Speaking at a time one/tenth of the evil humankind today loosens upon itself had not manifested, Baldwin was both worried and frustrated at the alarming complacency and widespread denial he beheld in the American society about its profound racial injustices and moral failings.

Even today, evidences abound of a yet sick society and infirm humanity. In my country at least, there are extrajudicial killings foisted as much by uniformed brutes, as by ‘articulated’ slaughterers that move freights in-between locations!

The husbands are disemboweling/decapitating their wives and vice versa – all for scummy ends! Mutual friends, co-workers/travelers, clergy and laity, adults and teenagers alike, all are caught in a maelstrom of errors such as affirms man’s visceral decay! From homes and offices to city-centres and sub-urban nooks, from administered capitals to ungoverned countrysides, reports of whole miscellany of eye-popping wrongs foisted by men upon fellow men scream off the dailies and broadcast stations in such banal frequency that boldly questions man’s humanistic ascriptions!

Family relationships have collapsed; the bonding love of filial commitments in tatters. Beneficence exchanges among extended kins no more! It’s simply as though stories of how things were in bygone ages were figments of fancied imaginings, embellished through oral accounts. Such horrific whirl of anarchic moral somersaults everywhere, an era of epochal reverses – whole new lows – in virtually everything in which man is involved.

How has man learned to poopoo standards!

What used to be concern for a few has lately arrested quite staggering swath of human collectivity! Sensate homo erectus seems today largely lacking in senses. Talk of sociopathy and one may be quite close to such definition implications of which had much earlier applied to only a micro-minuscule of the race. And masterminds of killings, upon being caught – and they quite often are(!) – keep smiling to freedom/safety, as victims cry to their graves! I recall Orin Ekiti farm settlement shooting dead by a police officer in 2011 of Tayo Abe, a young woman in her early twenties, while harvesting corn on her family’s farm. Seyi Fasere was similarly murdered –  handcuffed to the back and shot at the back of the neck – by a police officer nicknamed Akobi Esu (devil’s first child) within the premises of a police station in Oye Ekiti.

One should never forget the early afternoon death campaign by a 5-member robbery gang which claimed nearly forty lives in Offa, Kwara state in 2018. That Hamisu Bala was once the most wanted criminal in Nigeria might no longer be the story; that police detectives who went to effect his arrest were all eliminated at an army checkpoint as they were making their way back to Abuja, while he today has finished serving two-year jail term and basking in the euphoria must remain the hottest story of all time!

Perpetrators of legion similar atrocities have ended same way: they either have entirely escaped punishment or been awarded penalties the weight of slaps on their wrists!

What has happened to those who masterminded mass slaughters of youth corps members post-2011 national elections across 13 northern states and End-SARS protesters fell by army bullets at Lekki Toll Plaza?

Hmmm…even billionaire kidnapper, Chukwudubem Onwuamadike, known as Evans, is now a ‘repentant’ varsity undergraduate, and Reverend King, Lagos pastor/church founder, has been enjoying life in official isolation ever since ‘death’ sentence!

Aside the free-for-all competition in homicidal rage, in my country is also deeply entrenched pattern of purloining public possessions for personal pleasures! If the countrymen, given exceedingly collusive ambience, are shredding one another literally for sundry unwelcome reasons, executive controllers are equally strangulating the citizenry in physical, fiscal and monetary regards! Amidst the stench of global decay, Nigeria remains an especially sorrowful specimen of a supposed African giant plagued and crippled by endemic sleaze, which has launched sundry other significations of a fugitive administration system. 

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Education to health, infrastructure to energy, it’s all a story of leadership as has perfected governance by pretense, and whose understanding of development/progress is such as must fixate country and citizens to permanent reverse gear!

Here, the triple arms of deceit appear terminally mired in compromises! The executive, primary enforcer of laws and guardian of national security, has been the basic prop for systemic subversions through a blend of thrilling political will deficit, selective enforcement, and outright complicity!

The civil – derisively but quite aptly dubbed ‘evil’ – service, envisioned as engine of national progress, has been beaten into a rubberstamp, and entire workers’ unions, save those manning health, bought and pocketed! The legislature contributes to the rot through deliberate inertia, the creation of loopholes, and anaemic oversight functions.

Budget padding, insertion of “ghost” projects, and routine diversion of constituency funds, often through opaque processes, are forms and fashions of sabotage that go unpunished within the graft-ridden cycle. Judiciary – final arbiter of justice – has evidently receded into graveyards for criminal collusions through entrenched inefficiencies and thoroughgoing corruption.

The agonisingly slow pace of justice, often marked by countless adjournments, conflicting ex-parte orders, and frivolous appeals, allows suspects to exploit legal dodges, deploy resources, and ultimately escape conviction. When the temple of justice itself can be compromised, how would law as deterrence not be impugned/collapse?

From federal, to state and councils, it is unrelenting treasury-bleeding spree on a magnificent scale, the kind that forces someone to imagine if Lawrence Anini, the Edo robbery kingpin of the eighties, and other iconic bandits similarly executed by state, should not be awarded post-execution pardon! Visit some states and witness white elephant idiocies unleashed by managers who dispense controls without conscience!

Indeed, lunacy has so far proven not to be the exclusive preserve of clinical psychotics that ply urban streets and rural nooks. The morally famished that appropriate life’s obverses across our capitols have ingested quite humongous dose of the ague. Localities parade as much mental invalids as executive chambers and the assemblies advertise deranged pseudo-crats: how we are often tutored to admit/accommodate their runaway greedy aberrance as inevitable cost of a democracy and civilian governance that have remained teething almost a century! Indeed, in our clime, it has been politics as plague!

Aside plainly infinite cash it puts in charge of public officers and political office holders across the tiers, it equally places them unpretentiously above the law, as they frequently savour the latitude to enjoy transgressions of whatever magnitude, even as they can extend similar obtuse privileges to whoever they so desire.

This is why barefaced bandits continue to enjoy a field day, and their punishment often stops at arrests and few court appearances that never extend to diligent prosecution and deserved judicial comeuppance! Nigeria has banned, not the death sentence, as the courts keep making pronouncements, but actual execution of sentences! It is clear enough now how absentee governance drives misconducts at several levels!

Aside outright loss of control upon the markets, leaving the masses at the mercy of mindless mercantiles and shooting inflation into the heavens, government’s abdication of effective prosecutorial powers and appropriate punitive measures for the indulgent have been the strongest pull-factor for criminality, making the environment fantastically unsafe for the law-abiding! Philanthropy itself is dwindling in quality, mode and measure, while genuine mercy/goodness as should proceed from very highest seats of executive authority, on constant waning lane. How can such be a Nigeria of dreams? 

While practitioners of politics continue to reap super-normal gains, career workers have been enduring punishment wages, even as petro-induced inflation, at 30 per cent – this is the figure they gave, though the reality is worse(!) – pummels livelihoods to near-zero points for the common people.

To be continued tomorrow.

Salawudeen, writer/freelance Journalist, wrote via: sulaimansalawudeen@gmail.com