The Arrogance Of Foolish Knowledge (2)

The secret is out. Unlike the North Korean peoples, we know how the world out there operates. The Nigerian youths are aware that they have been rendered serfs in their own country. They know that their rulers are thieves and enslavers. They might have started with #EndSARS, but I ask that you incline your ears: the owls are hooting...

I became acquainted with the phenomenon of foolish knowledge, rather early in life. Handed to my maternal grandmother at about 20 months old or thereabouts, I effectively grew up as the quintessential “Omo odo Agba”. I was Maami’s lapdog. Her pet. The one that sat at her feet, her friend. I grew up faster than my peers, and learnt foolishness at the feet of the old. Every wisdom is born of the experience of foolishness.

I quickly learnt to focus on cause, and effect. How actions and inactions are intricately connected with outcomes, and how introspections and deep cogitations are essential, before I might presume to act. I ended up a maladjusted little runt. I could see the foolishness of my mates, long before they had even commenced the long chain of glaringly stupid actions and inactions. I became an insufferable prat. A big mouthed know it all. And then I learnt.

I learnt to befriend older children. Those that were almost ten years older than me. They didn’t seem so foolish to me. I began to learn from them. I learnt the good, and I learnt the bad. My friends in my early teens were in their twenties, and my best friend whilst I was in Form 4, Lanre Lisabi, was a Part 3 student of the University Of Ibadan. I was introduced to smoking in Form 1, was knowledgeable about girls without being able to score, before I was 14 years old, and I generally grew up long before my time, and before I should.

As I became a young adult in my own right. As I entered the Nigerian university system at 17 years old, I was unlike any of my much older mates. I was already battle hardened. I could see much farther than most. I was cynical about life in Nigeria. The rot that is today, coming out of our very ears were already evident to me. I wasn’t fooled by the tomfoolery of General Babangida, the ambitious thief that was in power by the time I was unleashed on Lagos in 1985. His debauched stealing and myopia was painfully glaring to me.

Black Moses fled the Promised Land at the age of twenty. Second Semester, Part 3, of a four year degree program. I saw today, yesterday, and fled. Another story for another day. Let us deal with today’s episode of the arrogance of foolish knowledge.

Foolish knowledge may be defined as the expression of an opinion, based on truth and facts, that are incomplete, because of the exclusion of germane truths and facts, either due to the ignorance of the foolishly knowledgeable, his intellectual arrogance, his prejudices, or any other reason, that might be responsible for the omission of such relevant truth, or fact. You may clap. Thank you.

How can they sell their votes? You have asked on a full stomach. Your sole problem is the struggle with decisions ranging from what you should eat? When? Diet? Perhaps eat twice, and not thrice? You are hungry by choice, and some of the choices might not be within your control. But do you know what “di’bo se’be” means? Ask the impoverished peoples of Ondo State, who just voted in the Ondo State elections. The stories are the same everywhere across this blighted land. Poverty has been weaponized against the Nigerian peoples, and it is the Nigerian state and its rulers that are the culprits. How can they sell their votes? Bombastic asking!

What do these children want na? Shebi they have won #EndSARS? Odensons! Weres! What do they want? Look around you!

The world is a global village. They have all been outside Nigeria. Your generation overcompensated for the poverty of your youth during the military years. You sent them to the best schools outside the country that you have helped to destroy. The ones that were born poor, have not been blind to the possibilities that are outside of the land of their birth. If they have not been to London or Paris, they have seen Ghana. Dubai now finished you lot when it became the destination for the Nigerian aspirational dollars.

The secret is out. Unlike the North Korean peoples, we know how the world out there operates. The Nigerian youths are aware that they have been rendered serfs in their own country. They know that their rulers are thieves and enslavers. They might have started with #EndSARS, but I ask that you incline your ears: the owls are hooting.

I am gratified to see that there is no leadership to the emerging movement for the Nigerian state to compromise and corrupt. It is a thing of joy to see, that there is none to be victimized, brutalized, jailed, or maliciously prosecuted as Yele and Mandate have been. And have no fears about the ongoing shenanigans and schemes, the genie is already out of the bottle. Even if the current round is corrupted, the Nigerian state is late to the game; the Nigerian revolution has already begun.

So, what do the kids want?

Citizenship. The Nigerian youth is a global citizen, he doesn’t want to be a serf at home.

DF