POLITICS DIVIDES PEOPLE INTO WARRING CAMPS,
AND OTHER MATTERS
Ozodi Osuji
A nominal relative is into identity politics; he identifies with his ethnic group to the extent where he does not look at any politician from his ethnic group objectively.
Apparently, he believes that I do not identify with his current ethnic savior (my background requires me to evaluate people in a dispassionate, unsympathetic, and impersonal and objective manner, and not support any one just because he is from my supposed ethnic group); well, this man did not just stop at disagreeing with me but went as far as to insult me, calling me a saboteur to his group.
He felt self-righteous in calling me that degrading name. The man does not respect people’s freedom of speech and right to say what they believe is politically right; he tried to silence me just because he does not think that I support his present hero on a white horse out to rescue his ethnic group.
The salient point is the extent he went in his need to support his ethnic candidate, to the point of insulting me, unaware that if you insult a person, he reserves the right to deal with you harshly, as I was tempted to deal with him. Instead, I dismissed his outburst by attributing it to political immaturity; men do go to war over their political beliefs; therefore, you ought to be circumspect in insulting people because of their politics.
In the USA, Liberals and Conservatives are these days so divided that they may go to war at any moment. We saw what the supporters of Donald Trump did on January 6, 2021, and they are probably going to try it again, if they lose the next presidential election.
The lesson to be learned from this absurd situation is that politics (and religion) divide people; each person (or group) believes that his political beliefs are correct and that other people’s political beliefs are wrong. In the context of Africa, where there is no ideological politics, people believe that their support of their fellow ethnic group’s men is correct and that if you do not support them, you are their enemy.
As I reflect on this man’s outburst, I am inclined to believe that there is more to it than politics. I suspect that he believes that I am not supporting him; he has a dependent personality (with anxiety disorder) and believes that it is my function to support him and his children.
Many Nigerians undertake to support those around them and to be able to do so resort to taking bribery; the absurd level of corruption in Nigeria is contributed to, inter alia, by folk’s desire to help dependent relatives who cannot shift for themselves. Therefore, to reduce corruption in Nigeria, folks will have to fend for themselves and not look unto others to take responsibility for their children’s education. Better still, they can struggle to get the public to pay for their children’s education (at elementary, secondary and university schooling).
I was told that many Nigerians believe that their relatives in the USA who are married to Americans should not support their American children and, instead, support their own children in Nigeria. In that light, this man probably believes that I ought to not support my children but support his children. On that ground he feels angry that I support my children, not his children.
Considering their self-centeredness, many Africans see children by American mothers as not African hence should not be supported (many African men get American women pregnant and abandon their children or use the women to obtain green cards and thereafter abandon the women and their children and go marry in Africa; Africans amorality is legendary; after all they are a people who until recently were capturing and selling their people to Arabs and Europeans and their politicians could care less for their people but go to office to rob the nation down).
If this dreadful line of thinking is true, this man probably feels that I ought to support his African children who, in this stunted and insane line of thinking, are real children (this is another evidence of African self-centeredness).
For what it is worth, in no part of the world is a brother obligated to support his adult brother’s children, unless he wants to do so, and can do so. Young brothers, before they are married, may help each other, but as adults each of them takes care of his family and has no time for other people’s families.
If one cannot support one’s family one should not marry and have children. As I have, elsewhere, said, repeatedly, folks need to plan their family size; no one has a right to have more than a few children (two is ideal). If you cannot support children, do not bring them to the world to come and suffer or expect other people to take care of them for you. No one lives to take responsibility for your polymorphous sexual activity. Control your sexual urges, do other things in life rather than just live to have sex and produce children that you cannot take care of until they go through university education.
Folks should not burden other people with the responsibility of taking care of their sexual profligacy. What are such folks living for, anyway?
If you are not contributing to science and technology, honesty requires me to tell you that I personally do not care whether you lived or died!
In Africa folks are so afraid of death that they would not fight the corrupt politicians that hijacked their national treasury. Well, if all you want to do is survive but not struggle to improve the human polity, I do not have a duty to keep your feckless and cowardly life in existence.
To me, life is a perpetual struggle for social and economic justice and if you cannot engage in that life and death struggle, you are free to exit from life.
I know enough to realize that if one is driven by fear, one is not going to amount to anything significant in life.
Of course, one has a right to defend and protect one’s life, but it is not for other people to protect and support one’s unproductive life.
Finally, folks should mind their business and not take it upon themselves to tell other people what to do; such behavior is controlling and irritating; it is authoritarian and dictatorial. Imagine a person with nothing in his head trying to tell me to behave in a certain political manner. He ought to mind his business and not poke his finger into my business. If you poke your finger into folks’ business, they will smack it to teach you to mind your own business.
Ozodi Osuji
July 6, 2022