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Victoria Ngozi Ikeano
It appears like a hydra headed monster. As soon as the authorities appear to have tamed it, it rears its head in another horizon, more ferocious and daring. From the era of pick pocketing and burglary, criminality and other deviant behaviours have grown wings to fiendish proportions. Chilling were the comments of some Zamfara indigenes who protested in Abuja against the troubling killings in their state under the hashtag, #End Zamfarakillings. Any humane person would be touched by accounts of how their relatives were massacred brutally. Out of anger some commentators accuse the government of doing nothing, being insensitive to the plight of Zamfara people and others.
This is not truthful. After all, the commander-in-chief had been having security meetings on this and other related issues. We can say that government’s efforts is not yielding desired result and urge it and other stakeholders to do more. And to describe the state governor as the “most useless” as someone did as well as rain invectives on the authorities with some people cheering as happens on social media is begging the issue. It does not advance the cause by way of solution. Emotional outbursts and loud protestations laced with abuses, insults and even curses do little good to the memory of the dead. What the occasion calls for is sobriety, solemnity and sober reflection on the ‘why’ and how to stem it.
Fact of the matter is that there is lamentation everywhere. The general refrain is, ‘what is our world turning to’; ‘the world is turning upside down’. Intellectuals are calling for summits/conferences/workshops to brainstorm over the plethora of problems that are hitting us from all sides as a way out. Government is setting up committees upon committees to look into them as well as using machinery of government a.k.a. army, navy, air force, police, to confront them. Religionists are organising crusades. Special trips are being arranged to far away holy sites of Jerusalem and Mecca for special prayers to ‘heal our land’. The average person, not knowing precisely what to make of the confusion around us, says perfunctorily, that the world as we envisage it in our limited understanding is coming to an end. The weary and tired, fed up with what is happening, are resigned to fate in the belief that ‘what will be will be’. Radicals are calling for a change of government.
But succeeding governments over the years have not fared better. They clamoured for a change of Shehu Shagari’s administration because of scarcity of essential goods, leading to queues for them. Buhari/Idiagbon regime came and was overthrown for its high handedness; Ibrahim Babangida’s regime was lampooned for its structural adjustment programme that changed the face of Nigeria’s economy. Ernest Shonekan’s interim government was simply not recognised by a segment of our populace; General Mohammed Abacha’s regime was considered draconian.
And General Abdusalam Abubakar’s regime was too brief for Nigerians to assess as it handed over to an elected government headed by Chief Olusegun Obasanjo within months. Obasanjo is accused of squandering the opportunity to make Nigeria whole again. And his successor was said to be retarded by his own lingering sickness. Goodluck Jonathan was considered too weak to frontally confront Nigeria’s problems. Enter another general, President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration and the complaint is one of high criminality, involving high level kidnappings andunbridled killings even in areas where such crimes were once considered an anathema like parts of the northwest region, the home state of the president himself not excluded.
Fact of the matter is that things will continue to get progressively worse with passing of each year, literally. Thus even if there is a change of government, our problems would persist, for their root causes lie deeper than what we see on the surface. At best they would take on new forms. All segments of society are responsible in one way or other for the pervasive malaise. However, the group that is responsible the most, that bears the greatest guilt for what is happening all around us today, for the wailing lamentations and air of hopelessness that suffuse us, is women. Women are the major cause of it all and the solution lies in a radical change of women. Why? Because they are primarily responsible for their descendants. Women determine the quality of the fruit of their womb. They can influence the calibre of human beings that they bring forth to this earth.
For this they need true knowledge to comport themselves aright and deviate from our current frivolous lifestyle. The act of procreation has to be taken more seriously, it is not something to be indulged in thoughtlessly or casually; and the woman has to comport herself well in thought, word and deed as well as be mindful of those she mingles or associates with, not least during pregnancy. Otherwise, it may happen that she attracts and brings to this world a character that would later oppress her and us all in all its facets as we are currently witnessing.
It is not for nothing that our forebears in the good old days had dos and don’ts for pregnant women and that women/young girls were required to behave in a decent, civilised manner generally. Remarkably, women and children (who always cling to them) are the most vulnerable and suffer the most with respect to problems that are bedevilling the country and indeed the world. Poetic justice, you would say? They are the hardest hit with economic crises; suffer most from social deviants and political conflicts, including insurgency.
The English language hit perfectly on the right phrase when it refers to these kinds of criminally minded persons and other deviants as ‘men of the under-world’. Truly these are people that should be living in the under-world, with their homogenous kind. Here on earth, good and evil souls co-exist together. We are told that more than half of those on earth today, ought not to be here but in the nether region. We bridged the natural gulf through our corrupt lifestyles which was/is tending more and more towards evil in all its ramifications, thereby enabling those in the nether regions to incarnate here on earth through women and thence making life horrible for us all.
Everybody is guilty in one way or other but women have sinned the most because being psychically stronger than the man they could have stemmed the evil tide through earnest volition for what is true, pure and noble in thought, word and deed and reverentially looking upwards to the Almighty, wherein better souls than those from the under-world could incarnate through us.
Ikeano writes via [email protected]
