The Ikoyi Rape Scandal
The shock, hues and cries that attended the social media story of the Ikoyi secondary school rape story is still an indication that our sensibilities have not been completely seduced and eroded by the growing and near boundless laissez-fair attitude of the modern era. Implicit in the consternation and anger is a realisation that over the years we have descended into complacency and have slowly been giving way to a creeping liberalism that would ultimately drag down our society into the cesspool of unguarded and godless moral relativism. Are we surprised about this school rape story? It is bound to happen. It is a trite saying that when the head is rotten, it spreads to the rest of the body. Our society has descended into decadence. Many of our parents no longer set values and live by them. Our political institutions are marred by corruption and some of our churches and mosques dens of 419. Musicians and entertainers are modelling their lives after their European counterparts with their skewed and perverted sense of morality. Our youths have made the forceful taking of citizens through kidnapping a business. We celebrated the meaningless and morally corrosive Big Brother Naija that does not add anything useful to our national life. Our children are daily exposed to the soft porn on our televisions and the crude and vulgar lyrics on radio. Some newspaper write-ups are no different. Are we surprised about the increasing rape of our little kids by very sick old men almost on a daily basis? Our young girls are induced, seduced, deceived, coerced, abducted and taken to baby factories and forced to be impregnated by unknown and perhaps, unkind men, to produce babies for the rich. I hope we are aware that large scale deadly cult groups are no longer the exclusive preserve of our universities and lately, secondary and primary schools. We now have them on our streets made up of teenagers and youths. We have sown the wind and we can only reap the whirlwind.
The danger of modernism is that it is able to look back with scorn at where it is coming from, forgetting that without the old, there is no new as the new is only a refinement of the old. The forces of today and tomorrow are engaged in an unrelenting battle against the values of yesterday and today. It is a cultural war with imperialist capitalist motivation being primarily the basis of this engagement. Weak, underdeveloped, and depended nations have fallen prey to the imperialist cultural onslaught, a natural consequence of neo -colonial and neo-liberal dependency. Billions of dollars are spent every year in Europe and America for the production of contraceptives. The movie, music and entertainment industry is equally humongous in value. The implication of this is that in the constant search for markets, the right kind of environment has to be created abroad for the reception of these products. The Middle East, in most parts, strong economically and religiously very conservative has been a closed society to foreign values and the loose liberalism of the west. This is in spite of the heavy foreign capital inflow into countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Dubai, etc., and in spite of the throngs of Western and American tourists and business people all over the Middle East. A large swathe of Asia, economically weak, politically unstable and dependent on foreign capital has suffered some form of coerced cultural reversal while Japan, Hong Kong and a few others have become increasingly liberal. China has been able to put some check on the spread of pornography by restricting internet access to the population.
A major casualty in this battle to redefine certain moral components of society is the family. But the loss ultimately is that of mankind. For when you destroy the family, the base on which the society stands, you destroy that very society. The gay rights agenda, the very overt fixation with sex and nudity in Europe and America and the continuing attempt to sexualise children in Africa as well as the increasing effort to pass laws in Europe and America to allow incest and possible marriage between father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister, etc., are some of the clearest danger faced by the family today. In the last few years we have seen an increasing normalisation agenda of these contradictions in the content of foreign films available to the African viewing public. Uncontrolled and x-rated pornography has become the lot of these films. Unfortunately, there is no keeping of our children away from these dangerous items as those people and institutions who should help in making our space more sane, safe and friendly are either wallowing in incompetence and mediocrity or have been compromised. The Nigeria Broadcasting Association (NBC), it would seem, has caved in. But perhaps the greatest danger is coming from the various Education Ministries all over the country that are now manifesting a distorted and perverted sense of understanding of their responsibilities. Encouraged by the nebulous patronage of special liberal agenda setting foreign NGOs the Education Ministries have embarked on the very dangerous part of sexualising our children in the most odious and deceptive manner. The contents of some of the books being given to very young and impressionable children, some in primary school are nothing short of scandalous. We must see the Ikoyi secondary school rape incident in the context of the various socio -economic contradictions that are today assailing the Nigerian society. The increasing inability of parents to provide for the basic needs of the family has left them in a vulnerable situation with regard to effective parental control and supervision. Others, better financially endowed, have abandoned their primary responsibility of better care of the home and have subsequently left their children to the unbridled influence of the media, both new and old. The Ikoyi incidence is frightening, detestable, distasteful, reprehensible and severely punishable. The boys who engaged in such unwholesome conduct are not too young to know that what they did is inherently unlawful, bad and morally dirty. By their conduct they have decided that they prefer the walls of prison than to exist in the world of free men and women.
AchikeChude,Lagos.