“Fear” seems such a powerful deteriorating influence on the character of the average Nigerian men.
I have thought long and deeply about the phenomenon of the clear fickleness and lack of moral courage of the average male under conditions of direct individual confrontation. Factually, the phenomenon is not new, the extreme circumstances of this years have only served to accentuate it. The tragedy of our nation is primarily due to this fact. I think the reason stems from the fact that the male is fundamentally self-centred; an attitutde of mind largely engendered by the sociological factors of our present age.
The conditions of our recent colonial state had a levelling effect on our class structure, we were all uniformly subordinate to the English man whose administrative activity tended to cut across our social stratification, recducing us all roughly to one class, and often creating a new orientation of class structure in rudimentary from having no bearing on the traditional class structure especially in the South. The period includes the pre and post independence era, is the peiod of new social stratification based on new mentally among the male because our society is basically male oriented.
The conditions of a permanent state of struggle for social elevation, creates in the male an attitude of mind whereby his every action is subjective to the consideration that it assists or retards his march upwards. Under these conditions, added to which is the fact that the higher he goies the more unstable becomes his living standards, he is generally unable to meet most confrontations which might relegate him to lower status. At any price and at all costs, even of normally accepted values, he must maintain his level, so he becomes basically a coward against issues affecting his status. This is largely responsible for the exaggerated capacity for compromise amongst most Nigerian males. This is part of our difficulty with operating the democratic process, which is basically one of organizing order out of a fundamental system of self-sustained conflicts of interest, in which every interest has its own unyielding proponents.
In Nigeria, very few hold fast for long to any principle or loyalty which is not consistent with his own self-interest, and most males will shamelessly reject any stand which involves a threat of loss of status.
With females it is different. Generally they are divorced from the struggle in the sense that their status in invariable relative to that of the man they are associated with, so they have not generally developed the instinctive subjective attitutde to life except in the few cases of the career girls…
ADEBISI Samson