Why throw the Baby out with the Bathwater? -By Hussein Adegoke

In the last recent days, I have continuously been plunged into a very familiar thought: the worry about how things have become topsy-turvy for young people. Precisely, I speak about the age group who have persistently been involved in all sorts of crimes across the country; that range from theft to kidnapping to rape and to, most depressingly, cybercrime (or internet fraud). I speak about childhood friends whom I had promising moments with; those I had spoken to about my lofty ambitions, as we exchanged dreams of robust moments in an imminent future. What has made them go wayward? What has brought them to the despicable state of discarding all the peculiar morales we shared? What has lured them into throwing away the values we swore to protect or, as literally, led them into throwing “babies” out with the bathwaters—in sheer brute and unkindness?

Right in their teens and twenties, you would see them desiring to cruise in exotic cars; and to become boastful of lofty edifices that hope to come by ill means, and to taint the hallowed institution of marriage by being largely promiscuous. They drink, they womanize, they do all kinds of voodoo; or say, they woo all kinds of spirits that even our great grandfathers would be terrified by their summons. They want to be rich and are “hustling” to attain the billionaire status; the wistful thought of even men in their Golden Jubilees.

For me, what has particularly been depressing is how I could not even juxtapose the actions of a section of my “wasted generation”—apologies to Wole Soyinka—with the lessons I thought were enshrined in them from the cradle. The family institution we all attended was quite replete with, and would perpetually hammer into our “hard” hearings, how being dubious in getting rich bears only fatal consequences. We saw home videos—most of which were depicted in our local languages—on how “blood money” spelled doom for its propitiators and how people who cut corners to riches were relegated to nothing later in life. Hard labour was dignified and retributions had gone to a people who were deviants to moral and ethical conduct.

Those could have been stories, really, or untrue plots for only our enjoyments, but they came as moral compasses to life. You would be perceived as affluent by the society who knows nothing about how you must devour a bread “garnished” with the fecal matters of your fellow men to make your business flourish (see the “case” of the arrested Ibadan merchant). You would spray money in parties and become celebrated by those within your caucus of mental depravity, but no one would have a scintilla of doubt in your “righteousness” and in the “genuineness” of the money you covertly pull from the blood. You would dare not complain about how your body was soaked in beatings the day before, and by the dead of the night, at your negligence with the laws of your merchant spirits. Those movies we saw together yesteryears, dear brethren, are playing out right before us today, and the Nigerian youth have gleefully taken the center stage. We see men becoming looped in the web of insanity at the pinnacle of their careers, nay, successes; we see them being swept away in pools of mournful tears after their bargains for a short accomplished life.

Let me be bold to launch the (dis)favouring argument of yours before you do, that perhaps, movies are fantasies and are often overstated than ordinary life accounts—and so, are baseless for these arguments. Yes, you may be right. But what about the other great lessons we got from our parents and our schoolteachers; their unceasing moral instructions and sermons to us, do you live by them, too? What about the scriptural accounts we know—after all, Nigerians are firmly rooted in semitic believes—that those who perpetrate heinous crimes and suck the life out of fellow human beings (like money ritualists are wont to do) would rot in perdition? Do you stay true to that, also? Hold! Why do you even belabour your quest to survive in your mundane affairs; ones that we perceive to be only temporal?

You know, this would be more horrendous on the realization that most of these “Hushpuppi descendants” that have earned my generation bountiful discredits have not even been through (with) schooling. They do not savour the unpleasantness of job hunt or underemployment (like some of us already do) and yet, they would toe the path of shame and dishonour. They are not breadwinners yet, or with any dependant to rescue from the pangs of hunger. But they have become murderers of souls in broad daylight.

Apparently, it is not in their quest for survival or for the country’s social dysfunction that they were driven to the land of disrepute. And even if it was to fulfill the delicate urge to feed that they were immoral, in the first place, it bears no justification at all on the people they snuff lives out from; those—like you and I—with about the same quest (to feed) as them. These ignoble lots are simply uncontentious. Most of them, I know, was persuaded into their frenzied ploys and rituals by friends who are, by themselves, driven by a satanic crave for ostentation. They have all lost their ways and it is my hope that they are found pretty soon.