Nigeria’s open secret

Man’s karma travels with him, like his shadow. But karma is on nobody’s leash. The universe’s agent of cause and effect, deterrence and retributive justice, can neither be owned nor tethered. Unlike life, it doesn’t suffer the affliction of man’s dubious acquiescence to daunting, baleful bestiality oft summed up by the terse, intense statement: ’Life’s a bitch.”

Karma is our open secret. In Nigeria, it is our sacred, secret space, ignored in plain sight. It becomes our temenos, ritual precinct of reward and deserts. In this divine, marked-off terrain, the moral code of the universe operates at its darkest and most mechanical – there are no emotive shingles of pardon or persuasion, just causes and effects, actions and consequences.

In 1932, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget found that by the age of 6, children begin to believe, that, bad things that happen to them are punishments for bad things they had done. The Nigerian society, however, fights to subvert the karmic laws of cause and effect, and thus insulate individuals from the injurious effects of their vices and poor judgment.

Local ‘gender activists,’ like their European and American role models, abandon more progressive causes to pervert the birth control and abortion debate, in bid to detach sex from morality and its natural consequences.

Politics is equally rigged to reward greed, savagery, indolence, illegitimacy and so on.

Lest we forget the pervasive political and economic crisis bedeviling the country. The nation’s woes originate from her moral lapses. Endemic poverty, substandard healthcare and education, ethnic and religious bigotry, bribery and other forms of corruption manifest by the society’s poverty of morals and humane ethics.

Hence those guilty of corruption escape the consequences of their wrongdoing in connivance with a bland, treacherous government. The consequences of this anomaly are of course, better imagined – think Dasukigate, Mainagate, and so on.

The frightful blooming of the Nigerian karma is a brazen incantation of debauchery’s triumph over morals. Desire trumps ethics on the watch of supposedly invincible oligarchs.

The latter espouse raptorial power in rebuttal of patriot magic. Their awful energy incites the eerie flurry of Medusa’s reptilian hairlocks, entangling everyone and everything. From treasury looting, sponsorship of terrorism, to the elevation of random bigotries, the incumbent ruling class manifests as Nigeria’s worst comeuppance.

Until recently, there was no punishment for the wicked and no deterrence for the corrupt. On President Goodluck Jonathan’s watch, Nigeria was pilfered silly. The country was persistently debauched by cliques and individuals.

There was no good or evil. The cult of moral grayness bloomed on Jonathan’s watch. Thus our reality of chronic indebtedness and bankruptcy.

Enter Muhammadu Buhari, incumbent President and leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Buhari suffers the flipside of karma – from his ascension to power and ouster by military coup in the 1980s, to his re-emergence as democratic President, the retired General from Daura, is widely appreciated and denounced along bigoted shoals of ethnic and religious extremism.

In his first term, base sentimentality and impoverished logic of entitlement fostered by the ruling class and segments of the citizenry, afflicted Buhari with a clumsy cabinet; subtle cues abound therein, establishing incompetence and workings of unforgiving karma.

Thus we have ministers whose appointments were hotly debated and questioned on basis of their shameful antecedents either as governors, commissioners and other capacities in public and private sectors.

Four years after their appointment, these ministers can only manage a hobble along the clogged, swampy corridors of the APC’s castle of “Change.” Such individuals must be replaced with competent hands. Buhari’s next cabinet mustn’t bloom as yet another bower of ill-bliss.

Contemporary legend contend that some of the outgoing ministers are victims of hubris and retribution trailing their emergence through vile, subterranean tactics. Such characters constitute impediment to national progress and his presidency – his personal inadequacies notwithstanding, if Buhari has a formidable team, his shortcomings as an administrator and leader wouldn’t be so bothersome.

Lest we forget the country’s outgoing Eighth National Assembly and its lack of character. Lawmakers in the country’s upper and lower legislative chambers currently constitute a disgraceful burden to national purse and pride.

But groupies of the ruling class would have none of that. Left to them, their cronies and benefactors in the current administration can do no wrong. In the scheme of things, not only are the corrupt saved from their just deserts, the worthy and true are punished for their uprightness and industry via burdensome levels of maladministration, taxation and bureaucratic ineptitude.

In the ensuing moral sepsis, the ruling class treats equality as an ethical baseline even as it establishes prosperity and poverty as fortunate and unfortunate draws in Nigeria’s cosmic lottery. Thus public office metamorphoses to moral insult and government officials make concerted efforts, daily, to subvert progress.

The most prescient portrait of the Nigerian character and our ultimate fate as a nation however, resonates Hedges’ apt commentary on Herman Melville’s allegorical portrayal of the American character in his literary classic, “Moby Dick.”

Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia, argues Hedges.

In truth, Nigeria is likable to the fictional ship, the Pequod. The ship’s crew is a mixture of races and creeds which is reflective of Nigeria’s heterogeneous society. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like the Nigerian society’s inordinate dash for wealth, assures the Pequod’s destruction.

While Ahab and his crew eventually gained awareness of their imminent doom, very few Nigerians appreciate from experience that our prevalent culture of acquisition, fostered by insatiable greed and based on cutthroat politics, extreme corporate profit and devastation of farmlands by oil exploration accelerates doom.

Nigeria, like the Pequod’s crew, rationalises insanity, scorns prudence and bows slavishly before hedonism and greed. The society yields to the seductive illusion of unbounded luxury, wanton idolatry, limitless power and acclaim. Thus we unfurl to degenerate forces and systems of death.

Those who foresee the impending doom lack the fortitude to rebel. Thus moral cowardice makes hostage of all. This shouldn’t encourage Buhari and his ruling class to scorn the subtle nudge of tact. History offers timeless lessons in the fate of Napolean, Hitler, Stalin, Joseph Mobutu (Mobutu Sese Seko), Saddam Hussein, to mention a few.

These men rose to lead with positive intentions. In time, they did good but later got drunk with power, losing touch with reality, causing misery for many with their own fate sealed in the Karma of their actions.

They forget that a movement toward the illicit, as Camille would say, produces a violent movement outward in desolation. We see the same pattern in the finale of Moby Dick, where Ahab’s attempt to pierce the heart of nature by harpooning the whale ends in tragedy and a vast, empty silence.

Moby Dick eventually rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one.

Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.