Home OPINION COLUMNISTS Anger Everywhere By Yusuf Ozi-Usman

Anger Everywhere By Yusuf Ozi-Usman

The world, and more appropriately, some parts of it, now stink to high heaven with sadists: people who take to anger easily and are ready to remove their clothes to fight naked in the markets with anybody, including the mad ones. Those are they who are ready at any given time to throw insult, any kind of insult at anybody that just as much as blink an eyelid at them.
You can feel it or even experience it. Now, everywhere you turn, anger is visible with everybody speaking bad words to one another as if the world is going to end with all of us insulting ourselves to death. From amongst the politicians in and outside the government, the big and small ones, those in social circles, at our homes, at workplace and, in the place it originated from-motor parks, anger has taken over the erstwhile serene and tranquil environment.
As a matter of emphasis, you wake up these days, and what you hear in most part of the day are unpalatable and unprintable (but now being boldly printed) words from unexpected places: leadership, elders, teachers and, again, from the people such words originated from-garage boys or gutter dwellers.
As a matter of fact, it is only a person that is angry that would use such words as stupid, foolish, rude, irresponsible, tribal or religious bigotry or pettiness, ill-mannered, silly, liar, and similar others on his fellow human being, and adults for that matter.
For instance, on Saturday last week, a text message was sent to my cellphone in error by an unknown person, and what flew from the wording of the message were loads of insults…”you are stupid, you are irresponsible, a liar; I have never come across such a big buffoon like you, etc.”
I quickly sent a text message back to inform the sender that he or she had delivered the message to wrong number. He or she never responded thereafter.
For example again, if you go to the social network today, the type of insulting words used by mostly, faceless writers, on some of the Nigerian leaders, such as governors and ministers, would make you shed tears, that is if you are the soft-hearted type.
And, the anger is being elevated to high pedestals now, as the President of the most populous nation in Africa would now practically engage in the use of gutter or garage-boy language with just any citizen that tries as much as mention anything negative against him and or his government. It is frightening also that very senior citizens of this country, are also up, using gutter or garage-boy language on the leadership of the country, with particular reference to President of the country, all in the name of politics.
While on this, I do remember and recall that when the first Nigerian executive civilian President, Alhaji Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari was in the saddle, there were all kinds of vitriolic attacks, in words, hauled at him. I don’t remember that President Shagari or his close aides ever returned any of the bad jibes even when it degenerated to calling him “Shee Shaa” or weak President or thief, mostly by the ever sarcastic Lagos/Ibadan media outfits!
Even President Barak Obama of America is known to have received a load of abuses from ordinary Americans, and there is no record to show that he or his aides ever returned fire-for-fire.
There was this past American President who was reported to have been openly called “a monkey” by a common American street urchin at a public function, and his response was: “thank God you now have a monkey as your President.”
But in Nigeria of this millennium and, obviously, the era of insults, we now have a President that believes in an insult-for-an-insult, an eye- for-an-eye, a-tooth-for-a-tooth and tit for tat. He and his aides have all the time in the world to engage in such petty political rumblings and still have enough time to carry on the gargantuan responsibilities of tackling the monstrous security challenges, creating conducive environment for the development of the nation’s infrastructure, providing jobs for millions of jobless ones, ensuring the return of industrial fortune to the country and so on.
And in far away Zimbabwe too, just this week, 89 year old President Robert Mugabe told the main opposition in the recently concluded election in that country, after winning the election, to go hang; meaning that the opponents are a complete nuisance that deserve to get perished. This is against the fact that a government that operates without the opposition has no business calling itself democracy.
Of course, that, no doubt was Mugabe’s way of throwing mud, using, clearly, gutter and or garage-boy language.
My worries about the anger that is now permeating the world space, through the manner of our communication with one another, even between husband and wife, between child and parents, etc, may look inconsequential and childish, but I am still wondering why human beings are so much aggressive now, both through the way they speak to one another and physically.
Why is it that some minimum of decorum and care and respect are missing in the way people interact with one another now?
All these as if we have forgotten about an African proverb which gives a graphic explanation of how it is difficult to differentiate a mad man from a gentleman when the two fight each other in an open market place.
And what manner of offspring would the supposedly respected adults in the society whose stock-in-trade is the use of gutter or garage-boy language raise?
I’m just wondering.

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