And we sink deeper down the cesspool

Our world is disoriented. Everything is in disarray. We have progressively lost a sense of right and wrong. We have lost our humanity, that aspect of us that makes us empathise with others in their time of difficulty or need, that makes us our brother’s keeper, and we have supplanted it with a callous, unthinking, unfeeling cruelty. We have lost our sense of the sacred. We have no respect for the living; we have no respect for the sick, the dying and the dead. We have lived up to the saying that a corpse is but a log of wood to an unconcerned passer-by. Indeed, we have gone past that stage described in William Butler Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’, where “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”.

Every day takes us deeper into the cesspool. And the danger is that we do not even seem to know it. It was the advent of social media that nailed the coffin. The social media, with its almost absolute freedom and democratisation of information flow, has made it possible for content that would otherwise be banned in the mainstream media to now find its way into the public domain.

Every day on Facebook, you wake up to behold several manifestations of abuse of social media in the form of gory pictures that Nigerians post. The other day a friend of mine made the following post on Facebook: “I don’t understand why Nigerians delight in decorating their timelines with graphic pictures of dead bodies. You wake up to all manner of gruesome pictures of accident victims and victims of vicious attacks. See, listen up, this is not right… Even the dead deserve some respect.”

Indeed, you cannot but begin to read some sadistic meaning into some of the things mostly young Nigerians do on social media. Someone is attending a burial of a so-called loved one and in place of the tears that should be shed for the deceased, that ordinarily would blindfold the bereaved from even thinking straight, some phone-camera wielding maniac brandishes a camera, takes several shots of the corpse lying in state and, fiam, everything is on Facebook within seconds. What for? Are corpses supposed to be for public spectacle?

Another Nigerian stumbles on an accident scene. Several bodies are littered everywhere, some stone dead, limbs and other body parts scattered here and there; others still oozing fresh blood but conscious nonetheless, with chances of survival if given immediate attention. But that’s not the concern of the young man or lady. Rather than call for help, they pick up their phone, activate the camera and take several shots of fellow human beings, both dead and dying, and post on Facebook, and then add a note: ‘Happening live at Ajah Roundabout’. Some might even take a selfie and add a note: ‘Me posing with some accident victims at Ijesha Bus-stop’. How nice!

People get to a crime scene and what’s on their mind is to take shots of those shot down by armed robbers or armed robbers killed by the police. They’re not wired to call the police, even if the police do not have a history of responding to emergency calls in record time.

And the absurd part is the amazing rate at which these nauseating pictures go viral on the internet. Once it drops, the hundreds of illiterate, untrained, unskilled kobo-kobo bloggers would feast on it like flies on a heap of faeces with their one-one line stories that make you want to throw up, and the “collective children of anger” would like it and share it as if their life depends on it. You ask, what are they sharing? What are they liking? The suffering of others or the death of their enemies?

That was how they shared the picture of the butchered body of Eunice Elisha, a 42-year-old mother of seven and an assistant pastor with the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), who was murdered while preaching around Gbazango-West area of Kubwa in the Bwari Area Council of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). That was how they shared the picture of Mayowa Ahmed, an ovarian cancer patient who eventually lost the battle, in her lowest moments. That’s how they’ve been sharing gory pictures of several people killed by Fulani herdsmen in many parts of Nigeria. That’s how they’ve been spreading stark naked pictures of alleged petty thieves, men and women alike, caught in the uncensored web of jungle justice. As if sharing these pictures gives them some special kind of pleasure.

Do we need a microphone or an amplifier to announce to young Nigerians (and even some old papas and mamas who think through their nether regions) that it is mean, cruel and demeaning to post pictures of fellow human beings in their weakest and most vulnerable state? Is it a case of an idle mind being the devil’s workshop? Is it a case of commercialising other people’s heartaches? Is it that death has been demystified, that we have seen so many deaths in the last few years, in the hands of Boko Haram and the herdsmen, that we no longer care? Is it an affirmation of the saying that life is cheap in Nigeria? Or maybe they don’t know that anything that goes on the internet cannot be recalled? You can delete your original post, but what about those who have shared it like balls of akara at the bus-stop?

You may continue to blame the government for not providing jobs for these youngsters. My concern is that the way we’re going, we may soon descend into the dark age of cannibalism.