Nigeria and her culture of weaponised oddities, by Eshiomomoh Ifoga

The society largely mirrors the aggregation of behavioural patterns hinged on social idiosyncrasies, political affiliations, clustered ideologies, religious leanings and the crimes perpetuated. By a feeble stretch of logic, the systematic alignments of these aforementioned behavioural indices delineates countries along different socio-economic spectra. It’s a no-brainer. On this premise, countries would arguably remain under-developed as long as there exist blurry interwoven lines amongst these human dynamisms. In clear terms, what is not defined gets cluttered.
This explains why politics of third world countries are riddled with religion, nepotism and brazen maleficence in equal proportions. In most African societies, the punitive systems for checkmating crimes are either non-existent or abysmally weak.
In this clime, you can get away with a deliberate and pre-meditated misdemeanour and suffer no attendant consequence(s). More depressing is the effortless indiscriminate legitimization and weaponization of shenanigans re-created from expected societal norms.
In Nigeria, weaponized sympathy is a ubiquitous item woven into our communal fabric of existence. The most vicious types of victims are those armed with weaponized sympathy. Take for example, a reckless yellow and black stripes bus driver hits your car from behind. He alights from his rickety bus and quickly goes on his fours with veiled apologies. He is never bothered about the level of impact and the cost implications of the repairs to your car. He dips his hand into his bag of pleas and offers his wherewithal of apologies.
The longer you stay at the scene of the accident in strong defiance to the flurry of appeals, the more of a villain you become. In a twinkling, the tables are flipped right in your face. The crowd of bystanders who were hitherto indifferent to the ensuing drama begs you to “understand”. The reckless driver now adorned in the sackcloth of remorse is seen as the victim. The sympathy becomes rife, you gradually lose your resolve to demand for a compensation. You reluctantly cave in to the demand of the crowd, the driver is left the hook. The crowd disperse into thin air, you are left alone to deal with the cruel realities of fixing the car yourself. This scenario is a daily occurrence in the boisterous city of Lagos.
Weaponized sympathy permeates our society. The politicians wear this garb of knavery to fleece the people they swore to protect whilst seeking electoral positions. Most politicians know that a large percentage of Nigerians are at the stage 4 level of the Stockholm Syndrome. They (the politicians) know that an economically deprived mind is deluded from making right choices.
Hence, poverty is weaponized to further weaken the collective resolve of the people. The man with an empty stomach is a beclouded mind with narrowed choices. An offshoot of this is weaponized ignorance-a blind fold worn by the plethora human flotsam wandering at the lower rungs of the social class. The faceless armies of street urchins responsible for arson and senseless killings before, during and after elections are the direct products of weaponized ignorance.
Also, weaponized incompetence is one of the very few reasons why we embrace and celebrate mediocrity. In Nigeria, Governors, Senators and other political officer holders commission the most bizarre projects in the world. From the commissioning of made-in-Nigeria cooking utensils to the distribution of transistor radios as a constituency project, the list is endless. These absurdities only happen in Nigeria. Our penchant for recycling gross incompetence somewhat accounts for the little economic development we have achieved (as a country) despite the huge human resources at our disposal. It is only in Nigeria that a failed Governor of State after his term in office, is either recycled as a Minister or as a Senator in the Upper Chamber.
You require no rote memorisation to assert that the present make-up of Nigerian politics is an amalgam of exhaustively recycled political full timers oblivious of what 21st century governance is all about. This is a national tragedy staring at us in the face.
Welcome to Nigeria, where the inconceivable is weaponized.