The first reason why I stopped considering joining the Nigerian military was because I stopped seeing the reason why I should aggravate my current circumstances: living in a country where your civilian life is weighed and valued on a meat scale.
For example Cow >You, ordinary citizen, dispensable; Cow < You, high worth, must be protected (and you will usually be the owner of the cow). When you become a soldier, you move a step lower than the ordinary citizen. Your life expectancy is now dependent on the mood of the politicians (and their cows).
Living in such circumstances requires a constant interference and intervention from the divine to stay alive, and I do not see a reason why I should be ungrateful and go further down the scale because I want to help a bunch of unintelligent, irreparably myopic politicians who need to hold on to their milk cow – a stable Nigeria and it’s economy.
These insensitive individuals think the cosmos has given them the exclusive right to pad their bellies and buttocks at the expense of the nation, while they send other peoples fathers in pursuit of blood sucking spirits only arming them with stones and sticks.
The second reason is my mother. She said NO!
Now my mother has cooked and prayed for me for as long as I can remember that obedience will be my only display of loyalty.
The first reason I do not join protests is because I will not allow other people waste my time on propaganda. Example: occupy Nigeria 2012, Nigerians were brought out in protest against the removal of a fuel subsidy which was nonexistent in 2012, but suddenly appeared in 2016 when the propagandists decided it should. But that is politics.
In Nigerian tertiary institutions, only one party suffers the consequence of protests – the students. If lucky, they only elongate their academic waste of time (which is embodied by the dead education system). But in many cases, where the protesters display a lag between thought process and action, they end up signing affidavits to be of good behavior, after paying fines for damages (and earning pepper soup money for their task masters).
The above is a cycle which should on average repeat itself four times in four years. And if Nigeria was not in the 17th century that we are, research should have discovered and given this medical condition -the inability to learn from experience – a tongue-twisting name.
I do not suffer from this infection. Protests in this world (the 3rd) do not achieve anything. Everybody goes back to the status quo after suffering “salary withdrawal symptoms”. Except ASUU who still get paid for not working for as long as possible. If I joined a protest, I will never have backed down until my life was on the line or we got what we wanted. That stance will only be possible if I know the major backers, and the thought put into planning. I would rather be a Mandela or Luther-King, than some backbencher who will drop his tools at the smell of jollof rice.
The second reason is my mother. She usually says a half-hearted ‘Nehi’! And my people say “half-a-word is enough for the wise…”
Yet I sense we are reaching a time when protests will not be about propaganda; when it will be because the oppressed are angry enough to demand for a change. I will be available then!
I will not be joining a cult. Two reasons are stated already. The third reason is because there has been a lowering of standards in entry that people who cannot pass a single subject in WASSCE and JAMB are offered membership. Imagine!
It appears the fall in standard of Nigerian education is a “kariile” (general) curse. To think that a Nobel laureate was one of the progenitors of Nigerian cults is an unpleasant experience whenever you hear the quality of argument/submissions (if any) coming from them. And it’s always delivered in unintelligent gibberish spiced with bad English.
Now ask me, (or rather ask yourself) why should I waste a life of infinite potentials by joining a cult, whose only fringe benefit is little or no money, plus a shorter life expectancy?
I never bothered to check with my mother on this one.
Eriifeoluwa Mofoluwawo
