How and where can one start with conceit?
This is a question that has tasked the formidable intelligence of generations of wise men, thinkers and philosophers, from the dawns of antiquity till the thresholds of the present. It still dogs our moments in this age especially in the Nigerian political space.
Ikwikwi the Owl once farted from his perch. Instead of keeping quiet to allow that olfactory felony to pass by unnoticed; in an ostentatious and garrulous celebration of haughtiness, called upon his kinsmen to convoke a feast and roll out the drums in celebration of his indiscretion and impunity. But thank goodness, the moral integrity of his kinsmen was still healthy. They collectively denied him that sadistic pleasure on the grounds that no reasonable community rolls out the drums in celebration of iniquity. They brought it home to Ikwikwi and to all other co-celebrants at the altars of iniquity that a society condemns itself to extinction once it makes it a culture to convoke a festival for the adulation of malevolence.
Conceit is the celebration of infinitesimality. It is the subservient genuflection at the altars of one’s arrogant unimportance. It is the degenerate elevation of one’s finite insignificance to the ontological level. It is the idolatrous canonization of one’s inconsequentiality. It is the slavish bondage to one’s presumed importance; the bending of haughty knees at the altars of the self. It is the worst form of slavery. It is the pathological imprisonment to one’s myopia. Conceit in spite of its dissimulations and consolidated habit of self deception is nothing but the maximum noise of an empty vessel. It is the exclusive province of men who have a very terrible bout of god-complex.
A conceited heart is not free. He is a slave to all the vicious and ridiculous tendencies of a compromised conscience. In conceit is an elevated sense of privilege. A conceited soul believes that the world is out there to serve the narrow insularities of his diseased selfishness. When he farts, the world must stand still and attend to his needs with pomp and pageantry. Conceit believes that he is the worthiest of the sons of men. He is more equal than every other man born of woman. He is the Alpha and omega-point of all considerations. In him resides and acts what Paul Krugman aptly identifies as a “belligerent sense of entitlement” .
One sees from this disposition or better put, character flaw, that such a poor, depraved soul has a very deranged bout of god-complex. Such people by nature are dangers to the human society. Aristotle of old must have had conceited such souls in mind, when he opined that those who cannot live in society of men are either gods or beasts. Since no human person can be a god, whoever attempts to dress himself in the borrowed robes of omnipotence, automatically converts himself into a beast. Such tortured souls; forever pursued by their vaulting ambition are the easiest people to hoodwink by their diseased sense of privilege. Such people are not far from murdering innocent sleep in their bid to attain the Olympia of omnipotence, which is ontologically closed to every mortal.
Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida is a bundle of conceit!
I wonder if that guy ever had advisers who really care about his welfare. We are not talking about the welfare of Nigerians at his hands this time, because we have for so very long being fucked by thieves like him. We are also not talking about his historical reputation or legacies, since he has a baggage of negatives and infamy trailing his memory in history. We are talking about the fact that this guy has not realised that Nigerians may be cowards but are not stupid. We may be poor (because thieves like him have plundered our commonweal and emasculated our resistance), but we are not suffering from historical amnesia. We know him and the criminal injuries he inflicted on our body politic. That he is still alive to mock us, is because we seem to have forgiven his thievery. But for him to think that we have forgotten is really the most stupid presumption anyone could ever entertain. In fact, it is insanity on steroids.
But the present vacillations of this moral chameleon attest to the fact that the follies of this machiavellic thief know no bounds.
It is foolery because anyone with such a belligerent sense of entitlement is condemned to be married to eternal insomnia. He will first murder innocent sleep because of the belief sired by the weird sisters of his diseased ambitions, and raised to the status of a dogma by his conceit. This belief is to the effect that the thrones of ‘Scotland’ are too sacred to be polluted by the buttocks of a ‘Duncan’ the legitimate Sovereign. This belief counsels him that it is his birthright to sit on that throne instead of ‘Duncan’.
In spite of all the filth that his hired army of revisionists are churning out, to erase his infamies from our memories, we are still solid in our knowledge and conviction that this man is one of the greatest rapists of our commonwealth. He is the most eminent wrecker of our collective dreams. This man saw Nigeria a land of great potentialities, and left it a devastated, scorched earth of pain, penury and poverty. He presided over the brigade of military brigands that did everything in their powers to condemn Nigerians to eternal poverty. After raping Nigeria for eight years, instead of allowing the dawn of democracy to happen upon us, he held Nigeria down, opened wide her legs so that Abacha his accomplice, will take his own turn in raping Nigeria.
Anyone who thinks we have forgotten is living in a fool’s paradise!
Is it not ironical that this man is now patronizing democracy; a system he hates so much as not only to scuttle the democratic mandate of the people, but also to commission a study of Machiavelli; the greatest amoral political philosopher of all times; and the most prominent teacher and patron of tyrants.
I wonder what Babangida thinks of himself. Nigerians don’t need his services. His ‘services’ we have seen. We have seen how his ‘services’ laid our land prostrate. We have seen how he ran a government of settlement and blackmail. We have seen how he elevated perfidy and dissimulations to tools of statecraft. We have seen how he stole his way into stupendous wealth at our expense. We have seen how Better Life for Rural Women initiated by his wife was a pretext to dupe and swindle Nigerian rural women, while the First Lady and her Husband were busy feathering their nests. Many years after Better Life, has the life of the Nigerian rural women being better?
Babangida presided over the death of Dele Giwa. He has denied killing Mr. Giwa. But he was a president when that dastard act was perpetrated by men suspected to be agents of his government. Since the buck stopped at his desk what prevented him and his government from finding out, and prosecuting those behind that act? Were they protected because Babangida and his government knew more than they are willing to tell? This is the same man that is asking Nigerians to trust him again. How can we trust someone with our security apparatus a second time, when he failed to solve a simple murder like that of Dele Giwa, when he had absolute power over Nigeria?
Whoever told Babangida that it is his privileged birthright to rule Nigeria is like the Weird Sisters that prophesied same for Macbeth, and led him virtually by hand to his own destruction. Babangida is finally on the way to self destruction. And nothing is going to stop him until he self-destructs. But on his journey to perdition, he should travel alone and not drag Nigeria along.
Babangida’s case is similar in ontology to that of OJ Simpson. Simpson was the prime suspect in the murder of his wife and boyfriend. The court acquitted him of the charge. But the fool went about telling “how” he would have done it, R
20;If” he did it; prompting many to believe that he actually did it, but got off the hook thanks to the technical brilliance of Johnnie Cochran. But since the fool was on a self destruction course, the law eventually caught up with him for the stupid crime of “stealing” his own property!!!!
Babangida is on course to ending that way!!!
Babangida thinks he was a General. Macbeth was a great General. Babangida’s accomplishments pale into the insignificance when compared to Macbeth’s. But he was seduced by the weird sisters. Power is a weird sister that can seduce even the most stable minds, let alone one in the thraldom of god-complex. I don’t envy Mr. Babangida and his predicament. I care for Nigeria more than I care for the pathological self-inflicted predicaments of a midget and a petty thief, who is enslaved to his Napoleonic complex. It is his prerogative to enjoy his psychological indispositions. But he reserves no right to dump that shit on the public space to affront our moral sensibilities, without being challenged.
Babangida is a political and ethical leper. No Nigerian that has a conscience would vote for him or associate himself with his project of hijacking Nigeria again. He is damaged goods; and all those singing his praises are in it to get their share of stolen loot, not out of any political convictions. Babangida is relevant and popular to that cabal of petty and potential thieves that are so desperate to get their avaricious paws on the Nigerian levers of power, as to continue their pillage of this country. He is still relevant to that kind of bread and butter politics that is the major furniture of Banana republics, which converts government into a huge distribution agency where power and influence are traded for sordid money and lewd debaucheries. That is the only league where he can play.
The day Babangida will be elected president of Nigeria will go down in history as the DAY OF INFAMY!!!!
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Paul Krugman, ‘The Angry Rich’ Op. Ed. Article in the New York Times, Sept. 19th, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/opinion/20krugman.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB accessed on September 20th, 2010.
