Nigeria’s Ruling Class and the Collapse of Decency

-By Abdul Mahmud

In a country starved of dignity, the conduct of members of the political class becomes akin to the conduct of wayward sailors staggering on the deck of a sinking ship. Call it the Titanic. They stagger through public spaces, like the character, Juda Pesa, the self-proclaimed market philosopher in the Kenyan writer, Meja Mwangi’s novel, ‘Striving for the Wind’, who, while heavily inebriated, staggers and lectures his fellow villagers in the market square of Kambi, their tongues loosed by hubris, their minds empty of ideas, and their mouths brimming with insults.

What ordinarily should be spaces for sober public discourses have become arenas of farce, disrespect, and sheer moral bankruptcy.

Take, for instance, the appalling behaviour of Clement Jimbo, a member of the House of Representatives from Akwa Ibom State. Last week, he took to the social media and desecrated it. In a misguided attempt to attack the newly proposed coalition party, the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Jimbo likened its fate to that of the ADC airline that crashed into the Lagos lagoon many years ago. In doing so, he not only revealed a stunning lack of emotional intelligence, but also insulted the memory of those who perished in that national tragedy. Such a comparison is not just insensitive; it is utterly inhumane. It reflects the deepening rot within a political class that sees human suffering as a metaphor to win cheap political points. It was neither a slip of tongue nor the exaggeration of a man caught in his own rhetorical flourish. It was deliberate. And it was cruel. Disgraceful. Jimbo’s words betray a disturbing disregard for the solemnity of human life and the rights of association and assembly guaranteed by the Constitution. For what is the ADC coalition but a constitutional expression of political will? In mocking it with the imagery of death, Jimbo abandoned reason, embraced the vulgar and displayed bitter animus. No man, and no less an elected representative, with a sober mind, would write such a nonsense.

But Jimbo is not alone in this descent.

Please, welcome the former Governor of Rivers State and current FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, who, on his own part, has since embarked on a media roadshow of abuse and puffery. Like a man possessed by the ghost of Dionysus, he spares no one. His language, coarse. Elder statesmen who should be honoured are dragged into the portorportor of his invectives. Colleagues are treated as some objects of oddity. Wike’s verbal outbursts are not only unbecoming, they are offensive. They reflect a broader cultural decline where the values of restraint, humility, and honour have been replaced by noise and braggadocio. His public tantrums are not those of a statesman. They are the antics of a man too drunk on power to distinguish office from the theatrical circus. On this point alone, the late French thinker, Guy Debord was right when he described those, intoxicated by their authority, who turn power to a spectacle, mediated by performances that reduce governance to a public circus. Unfortunately, brilliant as Debord was, his life, shaped by heavy drinking, reflected what he critiqued, suggesting a definitive parallel to the self-destructive intoxication of power that was the oeuvre of his scholarship.

Ours has become the republic of the vulgar. Our rulers have normalised vulgarity and the kind of rulership that promotes staged circuses over substance. Rulers now speak before thinking. Their followers cheer, not for the wisdom in their words, but for the damage done to perceived enemies. There is no decorum. No civility. No depth. Only spectacle. What is worse is that this malaise is not confined to individual outbursts. It has become commonplace. From legislative chambers, social media, to press conferences, from campaign rallies to the marketplace, public communication has been stripped of thoughtfulness and replaced with buffoonery. Public discourses have collapsed under the weights of ego and idiocy. This is no accident. It is the consequence of a country that no longer rewards intellect or insists on virtue in governance. Today, political office is often the reward of wealth without work, noise without nuance, ambition without direction. Men and women who should never be entrusted with the responsibility of representing constituencies find themselves in charge of states. Those who should be in motor parks soliciting passengers for taxi drivers are making laws. Those who should be practitioners of virtue have instead become performers on the stage of vice.

The result is a tragic comedy. Ours, a country of famed thinkers and scholars, now finds itself led by jesters. A country that once inspired the continent with the intellect of its statesmen is now mocked by the vacuity of its present custodians. Our rulers do not read. They do not listen. They do not reflect. They hurl words the way savages hurl stones. Blindly and destructively. Aristotle, in his reflections on ethics and politics, reminds us of Eudaimonia and the idea of human flourishing through virtue. Leadership, he argued, should strive towards the good life, a life rooted in moral excellence. But our rulers appear to inhabit a different moral universe; one in which the basest instincts are rewarded, and vulgarity is taken as strength.

But, this is not just a problem with bad manners. Or of rulers or the rest of us behaving badly. It is a problem of ethics. When rulers lose the capacity for shame, the republic suffers. When elected public officials dance naked in the marketplace of ideas, citizens lose faith. When the elites speak like urchins, then what hope remains for street hawkers? Or for children coming after them? Yet, our citizens must ask: How did their country get here? How did men of such hollowness rise to such prominence? The answers lie partly in the decay of our civic institutions, in the ghettoisation of democracy, in the commodification of politics, and in the retreats of citizens from moral engagement. When elections are bought or stolen, not won; when godfathers select, not the voters electing their representatives; when loyalty to power replaces loyalty to principle, this type of rulership emerges.

All is not lost. No country weeps forever over its losses. It can recover. And it does recover what it loses. But recovery demands courage. It demands that citizens cease to excuse bad behaviour from leaders. It demands that voters look beyond ethnic and party lines. It demands that young people, women, professionals, and thinkers enter the arena, not with the weapons of insult, but with virtue, intellect, service, and vision.

Today’s rulers may act like drunken sailors, but they do not represent the totality of who the citizens truly are. They are a symptom of our collective complacency. If our country is to correct this course, it must recenter its values and reimagine its politics. It is not enough to pity these men of Brobdingnag. It is not enough to laugh at their tantrums. Citizens must demand better. Citizens must rebuild the moral spine of their national life. They must raise the ethical bar. Leadership is not the theatre of the absurd. It is a responsibility. It requires the mastery of the finesse of governance, empathy, and restraint. A country doesn’t achieve greatness or rise above the pedestrian through the actions of straw men and women; but by the character of those it entrusts with power.

The time to restore dignity is now.

As virtuous citizens sound the resonant bugle of conscience, summoning the wayward sailors of state back to the shore of reason and rectitude, our country must steady its helm and chart a new course of moral clarity and purpose across the calm waters of virtue and public decency, while it unyields to the tempests that may come.

A word is enough for the wise.