So I've talked a little too much about the fantastic kinds of people one gets to meet and live with in camp. The people with beautiful or... unique (unique is a better word) behavioral qualities. Well, today, I intend to say a little bit more about these people, but not how brilliantly fantastic their behaviors are. I intend to thrash them, but just a little bit.
First, I have read a lot of pieces, (I almost started believing, even) about how most Nigerian graduates, especially ones that graduate from institutions in Nigeria, find it difficult to put together simple sentences. Well, thankfully, this is very false; though the average Nigerian graduate is far from being Cormack McCarthy, he also is, fortunately, far from being the president's wife, in terms of spoken English. Of course, it's true that you'd find some folks that are absolutely clueless and have no idea what a noun is, but those cases are few and far between.
We have this problem though: a lot of people, mostly girls have little self-worth (they believe that their God given accents does not allow for smooth passage of words and so they incorporate fake accents, the kind that they hear fat African American women speak with on Oprah. No disrespect to Oprah or fat African American women.) We shouldn't try to speak like anybody, we should just try to speak.
In camp, you meet boys or men, so called, that have absolutely zero (0) respect for women. To them, women are properties, things that are meant for enjoyment, for merriment, for sex and nothing else. As a matter of fact, while I was standing quietly on the parade ground (cos I do that alot, stand quietly, watch and listen) during the second week of camp, I (over)heard two boys wondering to themselves why there were so many ladies and how these ladies were wasting their time since eventually their place will be by their husbands. I didn't try to stop them from talking or to argue with them because I knew I'd have started an inexhaustible argument that would just go on and on and be stupid. A lot of men, even educated ones still think women are things. This is unfortunate because this is the 21st century and women stopped being things like, ten centuries ago?
The next problem is the problem of corruption. This is unapologetic. While you can't blame these young people for what corruption has done to them, you can't help but wonder what difference it will make when tomorrow comes and these so called leaders of tomorrow actually become leaders. Let me explain what I mean by corruption 1. A queue is never a straight line, it's usually a dome. Times when it's not a dome, it's like a snake with a giant head, you understand? Straight at the back but really large in front to allow people enter, thereby taking advantage of the patient ones standing at the back. They call this 'shunting' 2. All you need to do in order to get a favourable posting after camp is to know someone who is either someone or knows someone. Or better still, be friends with your platoon coordinator (we're all divided into platoons in camp) and it is done. The effect of this is that people who do not know people get to go to the crappiest places, doesn't matter how intellectually gifted they are. And the ones that are connected, no matter how dumb they are or how they do not know what a noun is, get posted to the best places. 3. If you're influential, you can skip camp altogether or come to camp whenever the hell you like or just for the heck of it, you can stay in camp and live in a flat with decent plumbing and a decent living room and have an Army man at your beckon while everyone else stay in hostels with forty other everyone elses and sleep on 2 inch mattresses and use crap 4 inch * 4 inch toilets with 120 other everyone elses and get ordered around by the army man at your beckon. Need I say more? See the inequality? And how deep the rot runs?
Finally, maybe the gravest, you get to see young people who ceaselessly waste their lives on frivolities: drugs. I have major issues with drug addicts and that's why I consider this the gravest of all. An addict is a man or a woman who is dying and dying faster than s/he can ever imagine. The degree of drug use is way louder than alarming and it's a monster problem that needs to be extinguished one way or another. The trouble with drugs is it gets more difficult to stop the longer it goes on, so let's hope a word will be enough for the wise(literally): STOP!
Till next time,, Keep dreaming!!
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