Are We All Hypocrites?

It is always interesting when Nigerians express shock at the way things are in our country. But our shock is often misplaced. We keep trying to make the assertion by the late Dele Giwa look like a lie. It was Giwa who described Nigerians as unshockable.

Every other day, for the past couple of months, we have heard of one vault of horror or the other opened. They seem to be scattered across the country. We seem to be truly alarmed at what they reveal once the gates are flung open to a battery of cameras. When it first started, it was about some children ‘abducted’ from Kano, ‘sold’ and ‘converted’ to Christianity in the south.

We were shocked at the conversion. We love our religion. Apart from sniffing glue and drinking codeine syrup, the average Nigerian gets their high on the opium of belief. Until recently, the only thing required of a politically indolent ruler is to hide under the allegiance of a dominant religious group. Any attempt to bring them to accountability is rebuffed on the altar of their religion. The credo seems to be; touch not my indolent politician, that they share my faith is enough.

So, we were not scandalized that none of the parents or guardians of the eight converted children declared them missing. Anyone conversant with almajirci need not question why. Their parents loaned them to itinerant scholars who are supposed to cater for their material needs mysteriously.

Their parents being repulsive sinners to the Almighty rely on the saintliness of the scholar for access to manna from heaven. Our concern was how the Christians dared convert our spiritual kin. If they had built a mosque for them, we wouldn’t have bothered a bit. If those kids had died of juvenile pneumonia, they would have entered Jannat and earned a medal or two for the genitally reckless parents that brought them to the world without a burden of the responsibility of care. In Canada, if your cat missed its veterinarian’s appointment twice consecutively, you get a call from animal welfare! No such luck for the almajirai.

Our scandalization was how Islam could have lost eight juvenile believers to rampaging Christians in the battle for dominance between the two Abrahamic religions. Abraham came from the present Middle East but most almajirai have no idea of their state of origin. They were too young when they were trashed. God help them if their malam dies before they could make it through life fighting the elements that confound and destroy even adults.

Our hypocrisy stuns rationality. We laughed at the eastern region’s baby factories. Up till now, we have not provided a reason why they exist or a way to stamp it out. We simply go cold until the next one opens.

Currently, we are concerned about the new houses of horror built by seers with nothing but claims to cure everything. In one such vaults discovered in Kano, a full-grown man with a PhD from England was discovered in manacles. Before he was trashed into that prison, he was happily married. His family ‘donated’ him to a boka to exorcise him from his Christian traits.

If he schooled in London and allowed a bit of England to pass through him; on his return, his attitude is bound to confound the Neanderthals he left behind. Those whose minds and dispositions are impervious to change in spite of their interaction with modernity. He was termed odd, infected by the virus of Christianity. He needed help! They shackled and starved him and his fellow cellmates.

Similar vaults have been discovered in Kaduna, in Ibadan and lately in Lagos. A common thread runs through them all – relatives wary of being tainted with the stigma associated with mental health. We have a lack of understanding of mental health and our best defense is to stigmatize those suffering from it.

Most Nigerians think that a city, town or village gets its commensurate number of vagrant mental health cases. Any diagnosis related to mental health is either rejected in Jesus’ name or discharged to a seer. Family members would travel with their sick relatives overnight, just to dump them on a big city and wash off their troubled consciences.

Nigeria has one of the oldest neuropsychiatric hospitals in Africa. Over the years, we have trained some of the world’s best experts in psychology, psychiatry and allied professions but we probably have only a few practicing at home.

What happened you may ask? Nigeria happened. Whenever Nigeria happens on anything good, it gets the reverse Midas touch. So, when people exhibit mental health we dump them on schizophrenics who are themselves in need of care and throw the key away.

So, here we are pretending to be shocked at these vaults of horror being unearthed in our neighbourhoods. Government being experts at finding temporary solutions where permanent resolves are required pay little or no attention. We love to spend precious time applying scabies medication in the hope that it would cure Hansen’s disease. We’ll soon move from this circus to another national drama yet wonder why nothing has changed.