The Nigerian Joke By P. Chuka Nwafor, PhD

There is a joke about foolish people. It is only funny if you are not one of them. It goes like this: While People are fighting over land, over name, over color, over gender, over the meat of kite; the third party is busy planting and getting his yield, busy using your culture and poetry, and songs, busy making science and painting the world. They are hunting and eating your animals and drinking its milk, allowing their women to speak like women and exploiting your world.

The Nigerian problem borders on the lack of consciousness. Or maybe it is as a result of a pathological deficiency in sense of rational approbation, which afflicts greedy, lustful people: Every thinking inhabitant of a given national space must surely, at some moment or other of his existence, reflect upon the significance, or lack of of his or her own identity as it relates to existing or historical definition of that space (Soyinka 109).These people in control of the Nigerian growth will do anything imaginable to attain their goals. These goals are not virtuous; they are always selfish, self-serving, praise and pleasure driven. There is a level of iska (mental affliction) that attends these individuals. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) definition equates it to operating in the unconscious reality available to certain people. They are more like the efulefu who sold his machete and wears the sheath on his waist to show off. It is a level of ranu (stupidity) that afflicts individuals known as agbaya (imbecile). The world watches and laughs at how easy these fools have sold themselves for ornaments. May be it is the ancestors of wayward children afflicting them with irrationality. We know there is a problem, and we must identify it and resolve it right away: The refusal even to calculate (to think, to test) is a self indulgent cowardice incognito (London 20).

The Nigerian problem is also the African problem. Chinua Achebe identifies uninspired leadership as a source of the problem in the text The Trouble with Nigeria (1983). This attended lack of consciousness is a dearth in seeing beyond ones immediate preservation, excitement, and exuberance. With these psychotic episodes disguised as governance, the men and women of this grandiose personality reproach are afflicted further with folies deux that is reflected in their mentors and further transferred to their children. Wole Soyinka believes there must be total moral, physical, and ethical rehabilitation: If the nation is to live, its resuscitation must commence where its heart first stopped beating (141).

Kwame Nkrumah stresses that: The emancipation of the African continent is the emancipation of man. This requires two aims: first, the restitution of egalitarianism of human society, and second, the logistic mobilization of all our resources towards the attainment of that restitution (78). If Nigeria cannot set a standard for humanity as she is populous, then the whole of the African race will be lost in this looming collective psychosis or disorder.

There is no meaningful investment in the future of the country. These efulefus (irrational persons) have no faith in their own people; otherwise, they will not be bent on destroying them. There is no governmental agency or public service that functions or provides service the way they operate in other countries. These machines have joined exploiters in telling us that our customs are bad.How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us?(Achebe 176). Soon the term failed state will be consistently reflective of Nigeria, not for the failure to adhere to imperial instructions, but more so, for having no imagination or inspiration to serve the people of the country.

Our people are busy fighting over which colonial masters policy is better. Frederick Douglass, in his narrative, equates the strife amongst enslaved people, which is also apt in describing the Nigerian (African) bickering: , it is not uncommon for slaves even to fall out and quarrel among themselves [and end in a fight] about the relative goodness of their maters, each contending for the superior goodness of his own over that of the others. [.] They seem to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves (Douglass 12).

They are purchasing arms and ammunitions to destroy their own people and homelands because their masters ordered them to do it. There are so many arms and ammunition floating around Africa, yet no African nation produces even bullets. These mechanized humans are so mentally programmed that they fail to realize that warfare creates deep and bitter wounds. The wounds are physical, psychological, and emotional, and they take lifetimes to heal. They are busy fighting about whose master is supportive, or whose has the bigger house or the larger colonial influence. While they are investing in violent emotions amongst themselves, their children are enslaved forever.

Our women have joined in the same destruction in an attempt to sell their lives for illusory dreams. Women will always be women until the desiring ones choose to use science to satisfy their feelings or recreation, or as it is known surgically, to undergo gender reassignment. So would men be men, and the ones so moved otherwise may change their disposition through this happy search called reassignment. The fight is not at home or against the culture. It is against the wickedness and violence of the human soul. While we misunderstand the controversy, we are creating a gulf that may never be reconciled in our culture or even our lifetime. It will take an act of god, since we are not showing good examples to our children. This new moon madness for wealth and glitters has disjoined human virtue in Nigeria. And with the hypnosis of foreign magic, our spy-warrant leaders can only take orders to save their lives, while laying the whole race to waste. They are taking the things of your culture to divide you. One can never escape his/her heritage no matter what lustration or ritual they are promised. You cannot bargain with creation to take back your basic humanity, which you are supposed to enhance and elevate. Our chosen ones are deceived into thinking their culture, which gave rise to other cultures is obsolete; they have rejected themselves in rejecting their mythos.

Until you accept yourself, no one will accept you. Even if they pretend to know and accept you, you are only as good as the exploits they have for you. The truth about you and your acceptance is only as clear as the mischief you are willing to perpetrate. Look at the smirks on their faces as they use you to destroy your families. In On National Culture Frantz Fanon explains: Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for emergence of the current struggle (Wretched145).

There is always an attempt to escape through electron bonds in the destruction of familiar things. Maybe it is neurotic engineering, or it might be the chemical precipitation of people who through the drunkenness of other-ness attempt to efface their skin, their hair, or their voice, and even their humanity, in wanting to be accepted. As they awake that nightmare, their children are enslaved by the bond of confusion. This bond rests in the attempt to escape without preparation. These people who so love and deceive you, who sell you their thoughts and ideas; in-turn, they make you over in their discarded image to remind them of what not to be.

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The Nigerian Joke By P. Chuka Nwafor, PhD