– by Thomas Ozodi Osuji
What is truly amazing is Africans refusal to try gaining insights into their behaviors.
They do not want to know why they do the stupid things they do and keep doing them to other people’s astonishment. They keep behaving as mad persons do and if you call their attention to their madness suddenly you are said to hate yourself.
As they see it, if you like yourself you must sing praises of Africans and their insane ways of life and pretend that they are sane. Here is the deal.
What it means to be a human being is to feel small, inadequate and inferior. Human beings are those animals that have the awareness of their imminent death hence existential nothingness.
Nobody likes to feel like he is nothing; therefore, all human beings struggle to seem adequate, superior and powerful.
When the pursuit of superiority and power is exaggerated we say that such persons are neurotic; when people actually believe that they are superior to other people we call them psychotic (deluded).
If you bear this simple psychological fact of what it means to be a human being in mind you can then understand the behavior of African big men and women.
Patience Jonathan feels like sh*t, literally. She believes that she is sh*t, not figuratively but literally. This fact is in her consciousness. Feeling like sh*t she would like to pretend that she is not sh*t. How does she do it?
She does it by grasping onto the paraphernalia of prestige that makes her seem to have worth. By rolling around in presidential limousines and jet fleets and having the entire city closed down when she comes to town, to a party, mind you, not to produce anything for both her and her husband are consumers, not producers; they do nothing in office and are thus garbage, literally, well, by closing the city streets down as she cruises by, her infantile histrionic ego seem very important person in her mind.
Now in her immediate conscious mind she seems a very important woman. She is now like god; she fancies that she is immortal and not going to die.
In the meantime, she eats like a pig and grows fat by the day; thus, sooner or later, she would experience cardiac arrest or stroke and die. She would decay and smell like refuse.
She would be buried and worms feast on her bloated body. Put truthfully, she is currently food being prepared for worms, bacteria, virus and fungi.
If you are into science, here is the scientific fact for you to chew on: our bodies are composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON) and traces of phosphor, magnesium, potassium, zinc, iron, copper, calcium, sodium etc. When we die those elements, atoms decay to their constituent parts: electrons, protons and neutrons. Sub-atomic particles in time decay to quarks and photons.
Ultimately, all matter decays to nothingness, the nothingness from when it came during the big bang that produced this universe 13.7 billion years ago.
We came from nothing and return to nothing; or as the writer of Ecclesiastic in the Christian bible says: our lives are vanity upon vanity (somewhere in the bible it is said that we came from clay and return to clay, from sand and return to sand).
In effect, Patience Jonathan is nothing, as all human beings are nothing. This is the truth that we all know; a truth hidden in our deep unconscious minds; a truth that gives all of us existential depression.
We all have existential depression from the awareness of our existential nothingness and the fact that we live meaningless, purposeless lives.
We are like slaves, we work like slaves to earn food for our bodies and then those bodies die and decay. What a beautiful life! Life is pain and then you die. Life is a bummer!
Some people try to escape from their existential depression by behaving as if they have fictional worth. Nigerians adopt this pattern of behavior. In all my life I am yet to see a humble Nigerian; they are all billionaires, chiefs or sons of governors and presidents even though they are starving and come to the West to drive cabs and take care of old white folks (as assisted care workers, glorified name for nannies for old people).
The religious type seek worth and importance in religion. Religion offers them life after their bodies have been eaten by germs and that kind of makes them believe that they transcend death hence have existential worth.
Hindus and Buddhists, that is, Asians, the most mature human beings on planet earth (and, interestingly, also, the most intelligent since they score highest on IQ tests and scholastic aptitude tests and do best at universities) behave realistically: humbly, not pretending to have worth they do not have.
Africans, like five year old children (they are literally dumb since they score lowest on IQ test, scholastic aptitude tests and at schools) deny the existential reality of death and the nothingness it gives us by decorating their useless egos with fancy titles and decorating their bodies with superfluous flowing robes (agbada is not conducive to working in factories or laboratories; to industrialize the Japanese and Chinese gave up their elaborate attire and now dress in business suits that are conducive to working in offices and being productive workers).
What this bag of rice called Patience Jonathan does other Africans do; they are human beings and, as such, are aware of their existential nothingness but instead of trying to ask: is there anything we can do to be something important, Africans like mentally retarded folks think that by giving themselves empty titles and social prestige that they are now something important.
An Igbo proverb says that you can wash the human anus with all the soap in this world and it would still smell of feces. People are existentially nothing important and nothing they do would make them something important.
Adults all over the world know that they are existentially nothing. They try to give themselves a sense of worth by figuring out what they are good at (what they have aptitude in doing), train for it and throw their lives to doing it, twenty-four-seven.
Existential philosophy says that the only way a human being can make his meaningless, purposeless and pointless existence seem important is to figure out what he has aptitude in and do it twenty four seven.
As long as a person is trying to understand a part of reality (through science) and is doing it and producing what serves all human beings well he obtains realistic sense of worth.
Parading around as if one is important, as Nigerians do, does not make one important!
Instead of Africans trying to obtain realistic sense of worth via engaging in productive work that serves public good they seek it in an infantile manner, as Lady Jonathan and her foolish husband does.
Africans like all of human beings, myself included, are nothing for they are food being cooked for worms, bacteria and fungi; give or take a hundred years their bodies would feed germs (and return to the biological cycle; we eat animals and plants to live and when we die they feed on our bodies to live).
Let us hope that at some point Africans would grow up and deal with our existential nothingness with adult wisdom, not their present childish attempts to deny reality by pretending to be important when deep down they are garbage. The rest of the world sees them as garbage despite their pretended importance (can you imagine any one asking for and listening to Jonathan on what to do about the world economy; do you listen to a nincompoop on serious matters?).
If Africans want to be seen as important they had better start contributing to science, technology, business and good governance. As long as they contribute nothing to existence and merely pretend to be important
they are no more important than the worms that would eat their bodies.
Patience Jonathan closing the streets of Lagos and Port Harcourt when she comes to party with her fellow do-nothing ladies of Nigeria is not important; what would make her important is if she dedicates her current useless life to serving Nigerians, say, by making sure that the poor shoeless children of her Ijaw neck of the woods wear shoes so that jiggers and other parasites don’t feed on their toes and shorten their lives