By Busuyi Mekusi

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Lifestyles are either deliberately chosen, or forced by nature, depending on ones propensities and body chemistry. To this end, beyond the personal desires or expectations of an individual, decisions arrived at are often externally forcefully influenced. Diets and residences are two major manifestations of the foregoing. Both humans and animals determine their natural habitats, based on available means and space, with either good or bad unexpected outwardly unpremeditated precipitations dislocating the abode sought by a human or animal agency.
For instance, an animal could be captured and tamed, adopted and relocated to a human enclave. Snakes, bees and lions are now used in Nigeria for security purposes, even as a human non-offender could end up in prison because of being caught in the web of the indiscretion of security agents. Apart from such accidental prisoners, so many Nigerians have been imprisoned by greed, poverty, corruption, infidelity, etc.
By reason of the unpredictable movements foregrounded above, reptiles do abandon their familiar places, in search of better ones, due to one disruption or another. The same principles underlay the presence of malignant cells in the human body, that get viable when nurtured in a body-frame considered adaptive. Incidentally, human beings have the propensities to do what would accommodate unwelcome strangers, even though air naturally helps dust to penetrate very beautiful and well-secured spaces. Unexpected rains could be relishing, and similarly have the capacity to cause nostalgic feelings by reason of the smellscape, but could also lead to the aggregation of strange bed-fellows, as evidenced in the amalgamation that do take place in political formations in Nigeria and the rancorous power-games that are witnessed in political parties on the eve of major elections. As the 2023 general elections draw near, the symbolism of the Tower of Babel is already playing out.
Monasteries are places of abode for members of a religious group, such as monks or nuns, whether living in communities or alone, but has been reduced to the dens of monsters in Nigeria. The monastery is expected to provide the solitariness required for deep reflection and thoughtfulness that are needed to birth a new orientation, discourse and socio-political engineering, but has been transposed to volatile places of sexual and financial abuses by monsters, who are considered in Judaism as wolves in sheep’s clothing. Unfortunately, most qualified occupiers of the monastery are fleeing away from the sacred place to chaotic centers of politics and civilizations, in the order of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Remi in The Black Hermit, who flees the village for the city, not to live a solitary life, but to escape what he sees as a prison life in the village.
Just like the liberalization found in the city, monarchies in Nigeria are no longer sacredly reserved for monarchs but are now havens to robbers. The Nigeria scapes are presently subjected to various transgressions, as religious altars, praying mats, groves, Ivory Towers, etc., are invaded by maskers, boxers and killers.
In recent times, the news wave has been greeted with the aggression visited on a female lecturer at the University of Ilorin by a debased student, Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba Akoko also got her peace disrupted by unserious violent masked elements, who threw caution into the wind and desecrated the iconic Senate Building that remains a cynosure of all eyes. Most Nigerian higher institutions have been seized by the jugular, no thanks to money-ritualists and internet scammers.
These deranged students are either Lords of the Minor in their families, who are accomplices in their crimes, or not known to their families as having departed from the path of reasonableness. To underline the pathetic state of the moral regression in South West Nigeria, parents do not just openly form nucleus of identification with their thieving children, but encourage and sign their struggling children to apprenticeship in the act of scamming and criminal accumulation of wealth.
Controlled spaces like the Ivory Tower, churches, mosques, groves, etc, are supposed to be occupied by structured minds that should be duty-bound to regulate a warped society. This is more so as human beings have got the capacity to do evil, necessitating the emplacement of regulations to moderate excesses. However, although Nigeria lays claims to sacredness, there are sustained perversions at the different levels of human existence. In the executive line, we have people given to executive recklessness; the judiciary parades murderers of justice and exploiters on the altar of justice, as found in the practice at the Ondo State High Court where N300 receipt was issued for the N900 collected from people who come around to swear to Affidavit; academic institutions are bugged down by merchants of grades and sex-for-marks peddlers; churches are struggling under the weight of stealers of tithes and offering; deliverers are offering infidelity in place of spiritual cleansing on god’s altars, as the recent baby abandoned on the altar of a church in Akure signifies the rejected sacrifice of Cain. The murdered and dismembered woman by the door of a Deeper Life church in Iwaro Oka, Ondo State, reminds all of the cannibalism in the land.
As the orgies of violence in Nigeria higher institutions continue, and tinted-vehicle-driving ‘executive students’ in ‘rags’, clutching ‘hard soft drinks’, sustain their systematic decimation of their future, and that of other misguided pals, slay Mamas are busy amputating sugar daddies that are lacking in sweetness but given to sexual enhancers. For these gold diggers that are far removed from the Zamfara illegal gold mining, the problem is untamed greed, enamored by the attractive facial deceptions of ladies, that seem to bury the fact about the sameness of the hole beneath. Institutional campuses in Nigeria are fast gravitating towards the styles traceable to Night Clubs. As the universe remains shut out of public universities in Nigeria, education continues to be priced out of the reach of the majority poor and impoverished, including the children of former members of the middle class that since collapsed due to the economic degeneration that incessantly plagues the country.
Snakes are fabulously believed to be taking over water closets in rest rooms across the nation, with the alleged claim of fatality. In what looks like a desperate bid to inscribe the culpability of Africa in the politics of COVID-19, the Omicron variant is eurocentrically willed to the Africa continent, particularly after the projection of deaths and fatality in the continent fell flat. While it is condemnable that the West would always get carried away by actions that predispose her alleged conspiracy theory, the behaviours of Africans nay Nigerians often times question their humanity. For instance, how do you explain that a government agency would resurface a road to retire unspent monies, close to the end of the year, and the road would collapse almost immediately? There could not have been a factory-fault when Nigerians were created!
The masked monsters in AAUA that ruptured tyres with knives and axes, and as well fell portraits, are similar to pedophiles and rapists that inhabit common and familial spaces unnoticed. The confession of an alleged suspect in the kidnapping of a Deeper Life Pastor in Akure, Ondo State, Nigeria, few months ago clearly shows that monsters are in monasteries, as enemies are usually people within. Some of the tinted cars on our streets are cages for victims, while the secluded/isolated house next to you might be a prison of sort. It would interest you to know that some of these monsters are protected by agents of the State, and prayed for by men of gold and not God.
For the sake of collective peace and well-being, monasteries must be rid of monsters; water closets must be fumigated to mitigate vampires; institutions must be purged of masked criminals, for the universe to return; altars, praying mats, and covens must be recaptured from merchants of venom, as we await the siege to be over, very soon, and ultimately, bringing down all the prophets of Baal that clad in purity-signifying whiteness, while they remain monsters, given to violent rage.