After the jokes, memes, comedy skits, and satire about Ms Bianca Ojukwu slapping the former first lady of Anambra State, Ebele Obiano, had settled, it dawns on you how much abuse is endemic to our Nigerian societies and forms a part of our socialisation processes. To be born a Nigerian is to be thrust into a daily war where a weapon of warfare is all shades of abuse. Growing up Nigerian is akin to surviving a war front—you are dodging one incidence of abuse or the other while learning to inflict as much of it as possible. Eventually, we become abuse magnets, lives pockmarked with spontaneous and elaborately planned abuses.
Ojukwu’s slap resounded across the whole place because such an action was incongruous to her social status and, of course, the receiver was a woman in power whom—at least judging from all the comments that attended the public tiff—everyone seems to hate. From the video of the incident that later surfaced, the manner Obiano also stood up to go confront Ojukwu did not endear her to anyone either and that explains why many people did not care she got slapped. Otherwise, the propensity to experience impulsive violence is banal in Nigeria. In a society full of stressed people, abuse cannot but be endemic. We are constantly angry and seeking ways to vent out frustrations. For some people, lashing out at others is how they deflect their own dehumanisation and momentarily experience some cheap thrill of power.
Virtually anyone can be a victim of such indignity unless you are either rich or powerful or both at the same time. Even at that, you are not entirely free from the prospect of being casually abused. Emanating from the so-called corridors of power are stories of power-drunk politicians (and even their spouses and children), who easily raise their hands at others. There are governors’ wives who slap their husband’s deputies and even cabinet members, mid level politicians slap those they consider beneath them on the food chain and virtually every one of them assaults their domestic servants. Even their police orderlies, whom they have commuted into houseboys and house girls, could experience similar humiliation and no law will retrieve their dignity.
In the wake of Obiano’s slap incident, we have been told that what landed on her face was merely karma. She too, they say, was always quick to inflict similar violence on others while she and her husband were still in power. Such accounts of indecorousness are, of course, not unique to the couple. It is a story that has been seen and told about the people in power. We were all here when a man of God slapped a child in church, in the presence of thousands of people who had congregated to worship God, and there were no consequences for his actions.
The other day, it was some Arabic teachers beating children in a madrassah in Ilorin, Kwara State because they violated rules. In the video that surfaced and drew outrage, about three of those teachers congregated with raised canes in their hands, hitting the children like wild horses that needed to be broken. The most irritating part of the story was that their parents claimed they consented to such harm being inflicted on their children. But why would anyone subject their children to the uncontrolled passions of some crazy teacher if something was not already wrong with their psyche? If you saw yourself as a human who deserves dignity, and you thought of your child in a like manner, you would never consent for them to be treated in a way not even animals should be.
The Nigerians spotlighted this week for abusive behaviour were the founders and bosses of tech startups. An article by Nigerian news platform, TechCabal, had reported incidences of gross abuses in a company called Bento. The report was soon followed by lurid exposes of the horrible things people suffer in corporate organisations. Some of the stories were familiar and relatable because I have friends and acquaintances who had endured toxic bosses. Still, some of those stories about the horrible bosses of Nigeria’s corporate culture were shocking accounts of controlling behaviour. Nobody should have to go through that much nonsense in the hands of a fellow human being to earn a salary.
Before anyone brings it up to justify Nigeria’s horrible bosses, please know that I am quite aware that incidences of abuses have equally been reported against tech businesses in even places like the USA where they have strong labour laws and Singapore where their laws are relatively progressive. With its abundant money, fast-paced culture and male dominance, the corporate tech ecosystem enables abuses by leaders who think their supposed brilliance gives them a pass to act contemptibly toward other human beings. People like Jeff Bezos of Amazon Inc. and Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. have been serially called out on their toxic behaviours. Tech companies in places like China and Japan are not much different either. Just last year, Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba, faced its own reckoning after a woman accused her boss of rape. As it often happens after such an accusation, a can of cankerworms opened and the company’s corporate culture came under scrutiny.
Yet, we must also acknowledge that there is a pattern to abuse that is particularly Nigerian and which happens largely because we do not have laws regulating public conduct. People mostly follow their whims and their already debased instincts allow them to inflict cruelties on others easily. From schools to public offices to hospitals to police stations to courtrooms to religious houses to inside commercial vehicles and our intimate spaces, there is an endemic culture of abuse we suffer and which brings out the abusers in us too. Give people a little power and they are most likely to abuse it. Abuse has long become a norm and violence slaps us all in the face. Nigeria is a place where a policeman could shoot you merely because you argued with him over an insignificant sum of money like N200.
You only need to look at the level of abuse that Nigerians, especially women, inflict on children—be they their house helps, stepchildren, relatives or even theirs—and realise there are too many animals in human skins. Some of the violence inflicted on these poor victims are not only horrifying to merely behold but it would have also taken some degree of creative perversion to even conceive them in the first place. People who do these things have never been reconciled with their own humanity and so they are blind to the humanity of others. Unfortunately, there are too many of them among us; people with unresolved trauma who deflect their animalisation by dehumanising others. Our grandparents who conceived the myths of animals that shapeshift into humans to live among normal people rightfully observed human behaviour. They understood something about the slipperiness of people’s innate nature and their subsequent capacity to harm.
Our culture industry has not quite helped matters either. You watch some Nigerian films and comedy skits and you are embarrassed at their justification of aggression. People hit each for the flimsiest reasons. Sometimes domestic or partner abuse is chalked down to the aggressor being under some demonic spell, and rape is taken as comedy material. The massive blind spot they tend to demonstrate about certain uncivilised behaviour is as jarring as it is befuddling. I know they claim to reflect social reality but that function does not exhaust the point of why art exists. Art must also model alternate behaviours. Without such reflexivity, artistes are mere philistines in a drag.
From physical to emotional abuse to sexual abuse, almost every one of us is either rebuffing abuse or unleashing the abuser in them or doing both. It is a mode of existence that ultimately dehumanises all of us. That is why, as a society, we must develop stronger counterintuitive impulses to apprehend and challenge the banalisation of abuse. Doing so is merely an assertion of ourselves as humans.
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