They allege that the Senator-elect from Nasarawa was caught in an Abuja hotel with the wife of a fellow politician.
They beat him to a pulp, strip him completely naked, record the entire sordid act, and the video of the naked in-coming Senator is now trending.
I have seen the video.
What happened to that Senator-elect happens ad nauseam to citizens all over the country. It is called jungle justice. Usually, the next thing is they throw a tire around your neck.
Also, they do it to women a lot. At the drop of a hat, they beat a woman to a pulp and strip her naked.
Now it is the turn of a Senator-elect.
Whether it happens to a Senator or to an ordinary Nigerian, it is an indication of a collective degrading of the body politic in a society that insists that civilizational notions such as human dignity and decency are dogon turenchi – abstract theories preached by alienated diaspora hintelleshuals who are not “in tune with our realities.”
And they beat their own ignorant chests while spewing nativist notions of “our realities”. They do not know that jungle justice is an effect of the coarsening of mores, of the devaluation of certain markers of taboo which delineate boundaries between civilization and barbarity.
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In Akwa Ibom, the Nigerian Army today speaks of “troops”, “show of force”, etc, ahead of the next set of elections.
Some will condemn what happened to that Senator-elect in one sentence and praise the Army for “readiness” in the next sentence – evidence of a society that consistently is unable to see the connection between things, unwilling to establish the connection between things.
When you say dignity is foreign and diaspora hintelleshuals should let us hear word and not drag it here; when you say decency is alien, well, you get the jungle you struggle for.
Every society is a product of struggle. Some societies struggle for modernity, for civilization, for guarantees of such notions as decency and dignity because they do not believe that such things are fanciful abstractions. Such societies receive what they struggled for.
A primitive and backward country such as Nigeria is also a product of struggle. Primitivity and backwardness also require hard work to be attained and maintained. You can accuse Nigerians, leader and led, of many things but you cannot accuse them of not working had to attain the primitive condition of their country.
If you want a country where people are beaten and stripped naked at the drop of a hat, where democracy and registers like “troops” and “show of force” go together, where citizens can be ordered to deliver ethnic bloc votes or be collectively disenfranchized, you have to struggle hard to achieve such things.
No society, civilized or primitive, emerges without struggle.
Nigeria is a product of struggle.