A Global Materialistic Crazes, Indigent Guardians and an Inactive Government in a Sickly, Avaricious, and Fast Perishing and Dwindling World -By Jimi Bickersteth

The heaven’s open up at about 5:45 a.m., the sea at the Oworo lagoon estuary, bordered by the university of lagos’s swamps in its farther north was this morning behaving rather nicely. It wore a glassy calm as the sea looked as though it had been oiled with black grease.

There were great patches of Azure colour on it, blue, pale, emerald, purple and deep orange, is like a ‘cubist’ picture. The air was moist and cold. Its breath was like a perfume caressing the soul. There and then came the ‘Breaking News’, and was it devastating!. Kò kàn mí, kò kàn mí, tó bá kan ẹni tó kan’ni óò ti kan’ ni! Is a Yoruba refrain. The killings should be of concern and source of worry to all.

This early dawn, the shocking news on the airwaves was about the gruesome murder of a teenage girl, somewhere in Abeokuta, southern Nigeria, whose bloody remains of a cadaver was heartlessly packed in a sack, while the head was been roasted in preparation for some out-of-the-world recipe(s) and concoctions that would bring money to her equally teenage killer boyfriend and his ‘acolytes.’

Penultimate week, the news was that of a five year old, assaulted, killed and buried by her teacher. The prevalence of the arrest by the police of some of our compatriots in possession of human body parts on the streets and in their dens. Add to this, the quite uncleared mystery and unanswered questions surrounding the death of Sylvester Oromoni of Dowen college, Lekki; and so many unannounced. What an epitaph for a nation!

A nation that is seen from the point of view of appearance as inelegant, from another standpoint, supremely elegant. A curious nation that looks into the 200 million or so pair of eyes with a sort of reckless mockery hard to describe. The crumpled society, the lack, poverty, hunger, et al, all around with hearts all beating like a mill race, as the responsibilities of adulthood kept its children attempting the impossible. Even now, I was still puzzling over those queer discrepancies.

The puzzles portrayed the nation as one plagued by unsubstantiated generalisations, factual errors, incomplete footnoting, leadership absence, and the saga of a people left naked in the creek to hold a baby. I don’t know of any other nation so tenor positive, so endowed, and yet so vulnerable.

The nation have today became sick in the craze for money, for wine, shisha, prostitution, and like frivolities – all of which were material things with a short lifespan: and, the youths were willing and ready to do practically anything, and take any risk, engage unabashedly uncensored in anything to acquire the means to getting whatever it is that was going to make same possible. Ìyà njọ’mọ̀rì ìṣasùn, ìṣasùn jẹ’gbádùn ọbẹ̀. Loose lifestyles!

The nation must struggle to dispelled the darkness surrounding it, the darkness of sin, the worst in human history, that the instant wealth craze threatened to bring upon life and living. The world can only contemplate the great drama of destruction, if it continues to indulge in the darkness with hopeful expectations. I’ll get back to the government’s factors in the materialistic craze in a short while.

The old and the young, male and female all need money to survive. But, all can keep it from becoming an all-consuming obsession and pastime. The intresting thing about making money is that, we became rich, but couldn’t slow down and enjoy and savour the savoir-faire life of riches. Couldn’t quit our jobs and spend more time with our families and friends. Take up a career that we really enjoy.

Curiously, many who become rich do no such things. Instead, they devote the rest of their lives to making more money–either to pay off their new debts or just to get richer. The society itself by its frailties and dispositions do not ask questions and do not require much to be asked I searching for peoples means of wealth, whether fetish or not.

Thus, some go too far in committing crimes, and others engaged in unwholesome voodoo practices of using human body parts and human and animals blood on the altar of ‘get-rich-quick’ talisman. Therefore, rather than grow wealth, do some trading, commerce, stockbroking, and engage actively and gainfully in the real sector, the world has been caught in the darkness of the narrow aisles of instant gratification.

The crevices and chasms are the noted damaging effect that materialism has had on their conscience, on their health, their family life, and the moral character of both themselves and their offspring. Recently, books, articles, television programmes, and VCD’s have warned against over-indulgence and have, instead, encouraged “voluntary simplicity.” A number of sources point out that becoming absorbed in materialistic pursuits can make you blood-guilty and make you sick mentally, emotionally, and even physically.

Of course, concern about the dangers of materialism is not new. 2000 years ago, the Bible, in First Timothy 6 Chapters 9 and10 stated: Those who are determined to be rich fall into temptation and be snare and many senseless and hurtful desires, which plunge men into destruction and perdition. For the love (and lure) of money is the root of all sorts of injurious things, and by reaching out for this love and lure some have been led astray and have stabbed themselves all over and with many senseless pains. In plain terms, this is saying that, those who with craze and determination to be rich live for money and material acquisitions really suffer for it. Funny! Isn’t.

In a world where it took over 2 million years of human prehistory and history for its population to reach 1 billion and only 200 years more to grow to its 7.9 billion, 811 million going hungry, more than 2 billion suffer from malnutrition, but there is enough food, knowledge and resources for all, it may be hard to imagine that having too much could be a problem.

The way the world is going looking for money riches and the things money can buy, this is the effect, first on their children. It is estimated that in a year, an average child in the country sees about 20,000 television commercials. Add to these the video games, sophisticated music players, computer programmes, and name-brand clothing that children see in stores and in the homes of their friends, and then try to imagine the barrage of requests parents face as a result. Some parents have pandered to their children’s every wish. Why?

Having been denied material luxuries, when they were young, some parents are eager to make sure that their children do not grow up feeling deprived and awkward. Still other parents are afraid that if they say no, their children will stop loving them. They want to be their kid’s best friend and make sure they’re having fun. Other parents hope that an abundance of gifts will compensate for their spending a great deal of time at their job, away from their children. Then, too, after a long week of stressful work, a parent may simply not feel up to the conflict that inevitably follows the answer “No, you can’t have it.”

But are parents who give their children everything they want helping them or hurting them? Ironically, experience is showing that instead of loving Mom and Dad more, spoiled children tend to be ungrateful. The nation have noticed what children of politicians made of their parents inherited political dynasties

You’ll discover that the children of the nouveau riches don’t even appreciate the gifts from their parent:s, that they begged for so desperately. It’s been my experience that when children have their ‘gimmie’s met immediately, the sought after items are often discarded in a short while. What happens to ‘spoiled’ children is a scourge that has suddenly descended on the world.

The spoiled children have become adults who have difficulty coping with disappointments. Never having learned to work hard for what they get, a number of them failed at school, at work, and in marriage, thereafter remaining financially dependent on their parents, look for alternative to making quick, instant monies to gratify their greed for opulence living. They may also be prone to anxiety and depression.

So spoiled children and the ‘flocks’ that emulate them are deprived after all. They are denied appreciation for the value of work, a sense of worth, and the ability to feel rich on the inside. They give the general impression that children taught that they can have what they want when they want it, are being set up for a lifetime of misery. Do you see the recent scene of the girl whose neck was chopped off by four teenagers in their quest for money rituals and their fate in the hands of the law.

In the present world, if you are married, no matter how long you have been together or how much money you have, your next fight is likely to be about money, and the way a couple deals with money disagreements and disappointments can predict the long term success, or failure, of the relationship.

A couple who place too much importance on money and material things, and about seven out of every ten does, clearly put their marriage at greater risk. Indeed, it has been estimated that arguments about money are dominant in 90 percent of divorce cases. Yet, even when a couple stay together, the quality of their marriage may suffer if their focus is on money and the luxuries it affords them.

A couple in debt may easily become irritable and Ill-tempered, with each blaming the other for their financial worries. In some cases each mate is so preoccupied with his or her material possessions that there is little time for their relationship. What happens when one mate makes an expensive purchase and hides it from the other? Doing so breeds secretiveness, guilt, and mistrust–all of which eat away at the marriage. Never mind that their children who were fast growing up were watching and learning.

The world today, married or not, have literally sacrificed lives to materialism. Some in Nigeria, under the stress of adopting Western-style materialistic values, have veered into heinous crimes, like 419, pants and or outright ritual killings for money because of their financial problems. Of course, most of this people, particularly, the young ones do not die as a result of pursuing riches the ‘Yahoo plus’ way.

Yet, life could easily pass them by while they are lost in their quest. Then, too, the quality of their lives may suffer if job stress or financial strain causes panic attacks, sleeplessness, chronic headaches, or ulcers–health problems that can shorten one’s life. And even if a person wakes up to the need to change his priorities, it may be too late.

Perhaps some of the damage can be repaired, but it will require a great deal of work. It is in the hands of the nation’s leadership. How do I mean! The theory of paradigm shift would be instructive, especially, for the nation’s leaders, as explained by Thomas Kuhn. The shift, has become today an instrument and a key, vital key to success in industry — which the nation’s human capital resources is. In a literal sense, it challenged us to think outside-the-box. To think differently in order to discover new truth about our situation.

Now, back to the government’s factors in the rat race, and its apparent conspiracy of silence on this issue of national importance, ” tí gbogbo Igbó wá dá kánrin kése – like the Yorubas would refer to the chilly but loud silence of government functionaries on the rituals escapades of the nation’s youths.

Let the government begin to invest in its people, and their economic emancipation and liberation. Starting from the premise that politically and socially the nation faces an uncertain future, ipsofacto, the government’s role in that wise, is to promote conceptual understanding of what the problems were, what was the citizenry views of the problems, the prophylactic applications of the cure and the eventual way out.

In the nation today, the scenario says the present occurrences could affect the nation’s future, though with a live problem of the difficulty or encapsulating a number of unknowns. Except, here, force meet with counterforce. Wherein a phenomenon moving in one direction sets in motion forces that will modify its course and a pragmatic set of plans and policies aimed at promoting the welfare of the nation’s youths, the respect for the individual and the sanctity of life.

The social crises that ritual killings for money and instant gratification have become can be rationalised, as it is government’s tradition of rationalising every subject and or practice, by recognising that there are in general not one but two fundamentally different processes simultaneously going on in the nation.

One is classic: it induces the political leaders and ruling elites to make decisions about societal ills within the framework of the present dithering, planless drift; the second, a messier one, mediate autonomous, pathfinding proposals for the peoples wellbeing and peace that may significantly modify the current strategic direction and or misdirection of a country which is questioning in calmness, prose, pose the overall ability to compete in an economically restructured world, completely immobilised and could not be motivated by simple – even beautiful – values.

The nation has been exposed as one that has come to depend upon what has been called the “goodwill of civilisation” and without any appreciable input have remained the way it is, in spite of the superabundance of natural resources ever known to man underneath its soil, and in every of its district. The nation-state have such a dreadful sameness, hence, its youths recourse to self-help, money making efforts, from private bunkering and distilling of petroleum products, hostage taking, armed robbery and killings for money rituals.

The polity was riddled with kidnappings for ransom, killings for rituals, ‘Yahoo plus’ if you understand what I mean, daily taking provocative and precipitates a state of anarchy and pernicious violence meted on society. All, both the leaders and the led were losers absorbing subtle ass-kicking, as subtle as a rock through a glass window, and, without a fight. The police authorities looking on helplessly, as the miseries had all sliding off the deep end.

In times of crises such as this, answers were needed for complex problems and behavioural pattern. The ballot box, normally the most reliable means of guaranteeing the choice of good leadership in modern times, the nation would look forward to 2023, it is hoped that, given a government guided by well-articulated ideology, good public policy and the right type of leadership, the nation should be able to march forward correctly and in the right direction.

That was presently lacking, since in the clime, political expediency often substituted for objectivity. It has thus bred a situation where those youths not adventurous enough to go for the silly options of ritual killings, debauchery and kidnappings depended upon Yahoo-yahoo and ‘Yahooplus’ and or their parents, as they are unable to live on their own in the real world.

The nation must not leave any stone unturned in ensuring that it does not become a richly-primitive African village, but a truly 21st century economy which relatively supports the growth of the local economy through ease of doing business, innovations, incentives, interventions, as well as quality service-delivery by a well-motivated public service.

The tertiary institutions curriculum should be redesigned from what it was 50 years ago and in tune with the current global dispensations in the areas of jobs and wealth creation, even as the government pay more attention to the citizens welfare, housing, insurance and affordable healthcare services.

Its economic and political landscapes should be transformed and repositioned to meet the expectations of the business communities and also achieve the goals of becoming a destination of choice.

#JimiBickersteth
Jimi Bickersteth is a super blogger, public affairs commentator and writer.
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