Occupy Yourself By Malcolm Fabiyi, PhD

If you throw a coin in the air on a Sunday
or a Friday in any hamlet, village,
town or city in Nigeria and it will
likely fall on a person doing their
homilies, bowing during Jumu’ah,
speaking in new tongues, or
engaged in ablution. The nights are
never silent, but filled with the
voices of the Christian faithful,
raised in countless vigils and
marathon prayer sessions. Without
fail on a daily basis, the early dawn
is heralded by the Muezzin, calling
the faithful to Fajr, the first of the
five daily muslim prayers.
Talk of God never leaves our lips.
Spiritual verses are liberally served
up in our conversations. We allude
to God in every discussion about
our conditions, our hopes, our
aspirations, and even our private
deprivations. Our leaders, even
those most enmeshed in the vilest
throes of cultic depravation, who
reek of corruption in very marrow of
their being, mouth their
subservience to God. Their every
sentence is punctuated with
references to God’s providence.
Their victories, won through devilish
contracts, voter manipulation, the
elimination of opponents and the
subversion of the political process,
is celebrated with hymns and
thanksgivings, with generous
donations to the churches and
Mosques that serve as event
centers for their perfidy.
In a former time, the corrupt
embezzler would squirm through a
worship or prayer service. Every
word spoken from the pulpit or altar
would be as darts, piercing
mercilessly with the sting of truth.
Today, such offenders would have
front row seats in the carnival that
our worship has become. They
would be publicly acknowledged for
their generous donation, and held
up as models of generosity and
philanthropy. When did we lose the
fear of God so completely, that we
find it acceptable to bring ill-gotten
wealth, proceeds of corruption and
blood money into a house of
worship believing that it is possible
to subvert the justice that must
surely follow? When did we become
so arrogant as to believe we can
bribe God? When did the speaking
of truth to power become a rare
commodity, even in the house of
God? When did our hypocrisy
become so brazen?
The same pocket that holds the
prayer bead is the one that houses
the bribe. The same hand that is
raised in worship and folded across
the chest in supplication is the one
that signs the fraudulent check, and
squeezes the trigger on a
defenseless soul. How did we
become this whore mongering
people, this nation where majority
of our daughters, even those who
cannot blame need or deprivation
for their actions, are only a phone
call away from sexual trysts with
men they do not know. Where
students can sleep or pay their way
to high grades. How did we become
this nation? How did we descend
down this path to perversion so
quickly?
How have we become a people that
are able to see the perversion and
corruption in our leaders, yet fail to
recognize that the same greed that
animates them to steal in the
millions and billions is the same one
that motivates our corruption and
greed in the lowliest of places? How
have we come to believe that the
thieving politician or Permanent
Secretary is any different from the
clerk who charges a thousand naira
to discharge a duty which he is paid
to perform? When did we become
this nation that has elevated
relativistic morality to a religion? A
philosophical and spiritually
confused place where corruption is
justified and scales of equivalence
are applied to moral absolutes of
right and wrong.
When did we become a nation
where everything and everyone it
seems, can be acquired for a price?
Where uprightness is mocked and
scorned and those who are patient
and law abiding get no bone at all.
A nation where those who maim,
steal and kill are celebrated and
praised.
A nation is the sum total of its
people and Nigeria’s moral compass
cannot fare better than the
collective morality of its people. A
nation may not always get the
leaders that it deserves, but the
way we know that a people are
more deserving in the leadership
that serves them is to see that they,
the people, are far nobler than
those who lead them. Can we truly
say today, that we are nobler than
those who lead us?
The struggle for Nigeria’s soul
begins with the most difficult
protest of all, and in the language of
the moment, that would be the
Occupation of one’s own self. We
have many problems as a people.
Some we can solve, others we are
powerless to change. The
occupation of one’s self is well
within our power to achieve. If we
fail in even that most fundamental
of tasks, then we will, as we have
done for the last fifty years, simply
continue to lament, what could have
been. The occupation of Nigeria
must start first with an Occupation
of oneself. Occupy yourself, then we
can Occupy Nigeria.