Adebayo Fajinmi
Last week, Chrisland Schools in Lagos conquered cyberspace with a tale which laps no laurel; it also bears no supernova. We surfed to see two juveniles who aped the sleazy world. Rather than battling in wit, they battled to tumble. In faraway Dubai, they dramatised mania in which a lassie waltzed her bums on a phallus in a cowgirl’s manner. We gawped at a thriller that thrills but not without hypocrites who watched with smouldering admirations. When her mother came with a cook and bull story , she was heckled and damned. She strutted to Golgotha and descended abysmally to Hades.
I had known about three years ago when I was combining teaching with journalism, that moral is comatose and that a holocaust is afoot in our societal standards when two young boys (one was 7 years old and second was 10 years old) suddenly cultivated the habit of shunning assignments in our academic outfit. Displeased with the development, I asked the mother if she was giving them many responsibilities at home that have turned to impediments, she remorselessly quipped, “Nobody is disturbing them o; it’s Big Brother Niger (BBN) they used to watch. I have shouted and shouted but they are not listening.” I further asked, do you watch too? The answer was a YES. She, however, entertained me with the efforts the family was making to build a brighter future for them. “The horns cannot be too heavy for the head of the cow that must bear them. If you and your husband refuse to support teachers or tutors at home, it will not work,” I replied.
I have repeatedly told a story of a teenager, also in our outfit, who persuaded me to sell my tab to him. He wanted to engage in Yahoo Yahoo (internet fraud).
This emasculation dawned on me in my subsequent beat as beauties without brains were becoming new goddesses. I was not flabbergasted when a young lady who professed to be in possession of First Class in Mass Communication (in first degree) but didn’t know the plural form of INFORMATION in a story she wrote (full of riotous sentences) when my erstwhile boss ordered me to assess her. As if nothing has happened to her, she stood up, smiled and eventually became a VOICE.
An Irish poet and writer, William Butler has revealed Nigeria of today by his expression “the ceremony of innocence is drowned,” in his poem, The Second Coming. That’s what you get when a society teaches you to embrace the moral high ground but makes you to loathe it; a society that prefers to venerate nudity cum voyeurism to intellectual properties and diligence.
“A person often meet his destiny on the road he took to avoid it. People both in real life and literature, seal their fate through their own actions,” says famous French fabulist, Jean de LA Fontaine.
