A Horrible Generation!

By Jude Atupulazi

They are easily identifiable by these things: their dressing, their hairstyles and, wait for it, their smells. I’m talking about those youths who wear dirty looking dreadlocks, wear earrings, wear drooping trousers that expose their dirty underwear and who assail your olfactory sense with their smells, all in the name of showing off. They are part of what we have today as a horrible generation.

Although they are generally found among a certain age bracket (mostly between teenage and mid-twenties), you can also find them among those a lot older. These include the yahoo and yahoo-Plus ”guys”. They are those who make money by ripping others off or by ritual practices.

These latter ones are usually seen in flashy and exotic cars. They lodge in hotels or rent apartments, not minding the price. Young girls flock around them like bees to honey, with the consequences often dire. These rich ones have influenced their younger admirers who have no money but steal whenever they have the opportunity. It is these younger ones that hardly take bath and put you off with their bad smells.

Both categories share many things in common though. They have little or no respect for their elders; not even their parents. They disrespect all societal institutions, starting from their communities.

They see themselves as above reproach. They insult anyone who tries to give them advice. It is from among them that you find those making trouble in their families, streets and communities. They belong to many secret cult groups. Their only religion is money and how to make more money but without honest work.

In fact, to ask them to work is to annoy them. They are scared of hard work. They only look out for easy ways of making money which include robbery, kidnapping and killing people for money rituals. Many of them are those you see in the morning as you go to work. They hang out in shops or pubs (beer parlours) smoking, drinking and watching others as they go to work.

They monitor people around them, knowing when they leave and when they usually return. Thus it is easy for them to rob the homes of those people. Yet, when they make any money, they immediately waste it on drinks, partying and women and return to square one.

Oh, how I detest these people!

Native doctors or negative doctors?

All around us today are many young men and even women parading themselves as native doctors and ezenwanyis. It is the new fad among the youth. Many of them are those who either failed in their businesses or could not have the patience to learn various trades under their masters. They thus see being native doctors as the surest way of making money off the gullible.

The women among them will often leave whatever they are doing and turn to the occult. They suddenly become ezenwanyis and embark on what they call ”olue zinauno”. They come to your place and perform cleansing rituals and exorcise imaginary spirits. But they are often not as diabolic in their practices as their male counterparts, so I’ll focus more on the males, the emergency dibias or native doctors.

These young dibias make money because they are patronized by gullible youths who believe that coming to them will give them money. They also make money from armed robbers and kidnappers who meet them to be fortified with charms that will make them immune to bullets. Yet, when these hoodlums confront security agents, they get killed with their charms.

But my grouse is that the government seems not to be doing anything about these emergency dibias. They make money from whatever means and flaunt it on social media and some people adore them. Or have we not seen them telling their stories on social media? One of them was kidnapped early in the week in his big hotel, shortly after posting a video of where he was talking some rubbish about charms and bullets. I wondered, like many did, why despite his acclaimed powers, he was able to be kidnapped in the first place before he was falsely said to have regained his freedom.

This man and his like have negatively swayed the minds of many a youth who deify them and wish to be like them. Was it then a surprise that many youths in his area were said to have turned out to ”celebrate” his return from the kidnappers? As they celebrated, no one spared any thought for the two security men killed when their hero was kidnapped. This tells you about the extent of decadence in our society today.

I really don’t know what government is waiting for to go after people like this man because of the harm they are doing to our society. I also don’t know why their communities have continued to tolerate and even elevate them. Yes, they are often given chieftaincy titles simply because of their money. Tomorrow you wonder why the younger elements are striving to be like them and why the Oba youths reportedly turned out en-masse to welcome their hero back.

I’ve written about the ignoble activities of these emergency dibias and the need to rein them in. I am still calling for action against them. The harm they are doing to society is incalculable and what is brewing is like a time bomb which will lead to a shattering impact on explosion. Things are bad as they are at the moment.

Let’s not allow them to get worse. The Igbo say that investigations into the source of a murder should begin with the place where the weapon was fashioned. Much of the crimes committed today are connected to these emergency dibias who fool the criminals into believing that the charms they make for them will protect them.

Lawrence Anini was a famous criminal in his day. Everyone in the country knew about him and his exploits. He even had a charm that warned him of danger well before it happened. Yet, on the day he was arrested, his charms failed him. He was arrested right in the house he stayed.

Osisikanwku was a notorious armed robber in the East. He was said to possess terrible charms and powers. Yet his reign as a notorious criminal lasted not up to four years. He fell to the superior fire power of the police.

There have been many like these two I mentioned who all succumbed in the end to the superior fire power of security agents. Like one police commissioner in Anambra State once told journalists, no criminal lasts more than four years, which, he said, was even very long.

So why do able bodied young men take to criminality when they should be using their youthful energy to do honest work?  They are people who have been fooled by those who don’t tell them that all that glitters is not gold. This is why such people who mislead them should be rounded up. There should be no half measures.

Because of these bad people, our youths are taking to all kinds of terrible drugs under which influence they commit heinous crimes. Because of these men, our youths have become uncontrollable and are causing confusion in their communities, challenging constituted authorities and even trying to usurp the leadership of those communities.

Today we have an irrational army of youths who have this entitlement mentality. They blame others for their woes without accepting that they are the ones that brought such woes upon themselves. They believe that they must be helped by more successful people, including siblings and friends. Sometimes they harass their aged parents for money when they should be the ones providing those parents with money.

What they fail to understand is that once they get to a certain stage in life, they become responsible for themselves. Do they expect their parents to continue bearing the burden of their upkeep until those parents die? Do they expect their siblings to leave their own families and continue taking care of them ad infinitum? Do they expect those they consider rich to leave their immediate families to cater for them?

They should know that whatever help they receive at a certain stage is just a bonus, a privilege, rather than an entitlement. Thus they should be grateful for any little help that comes their way rather than demanding more. They have their own hands and legs to do honest work and become successful. But the company they keep and the wrong role models they worship will not let them know this. It is this failure that has reared the monsters we are seeing today.

Oh, God, what a wasted generation!