Have you been Jeeped?, by Taju Tijani

Yemisi Yuppy is a BB—bum and boobs—-category. She is appetizingly endowed with beautiful, big boobs and lodestone bum. Men covet her asset madly. She is all magnet to the sexually restless. She is a near perfect damsel that would offer value for money on a warm four poster bed. Men no longer intimidate her. She has had them all! The good, the bad and the ugly. The wealthy, the rich, the villain and the famous. One thing still intimidates her. What still collapses Yemisi Yuppy is the collapsed value of our degenerate Nigerian universe. Yemisi Yuppy has been Jeeped!!!  Yemisi Yuppy like millions of Nigerians loves Jeep. She covets this awesome machine madly. The epicurean-inspired philosophy of today’s Nigeria which has had Yemisi as a helpless victim is still shaping the hearts and minds of Nigerians toward idolizing a street car named, Jeep. We all want to drive Jeep.
Social metricians will say that the roaring 90’s was the affluence decade when “Pathfinder”, “Explorer”, “Escalade”, “Hummer”, “Infiniti” and “Pajero” crept into our social discourse. That was the outrageous decade when ritualism and ritualists became synonymous with Jeep. Nobody can argue against the obnoxious fact that our primitive adulation for Jeep—–a sure sign of affluence—–ratcheted up membership of ritualists in Nigeria.
Millions of Nigerians like Yemisi Yuppy derive orgiastic fantasy, confidence, social acceptance, self worth and inner strength from Jeep. It is an exacting aberration that is daily devaluing our moral values; numbing our conscience, plunging us into the vortex of bestiality and judging us as a value-degenerate society of ritualist-murderers and blood hounds ever ready to strangulate fellow human beings just to own a Jeep. Yes, we all want to drive Jeep. We have learned to accommodate, bear and live with the resurgent class of men in black and blackened Jeep who are the approximation of this nation’s description of wealthy personalities. They are influential outward but are vampires inside their Jeep and in the death chamber of their esoteric groves. Yemisi Yuppy owns three beastly-looking Jeeps. Rewards for hours of dissipation of body heat. Still, her slavish, coveting soul could not breathe easily. Yearly, she dreams of new awesome model to feed her somersaulting material-driven values.
Nigeria is a nation of degenerative addictions. Our shameless idolisation of money is numbingly familiar so much that it had lost the timeless echo of its pathological bewilderment. Of a truth, our inexorable process of economic, political and social decline has given us sure pretext to go after the mammon called money even if we need to look for it in the graveyards. Pastor Adeboye cannot be ungodly in the veracity of his testimonies from his Holy Ghost Festivals. He said that many Nigerians still eat from and sleep in graveyards just to get money and buy a Jeep.
They all want to drive Jeep. These money seeking fools are the victims of our social and economic violence and equally a poignant testimony to the damage caused by societal deprivation, poverty and the self-fulfilling government agenda to keep its own citizens in deep ignorance, neglect, and slavery. Many Nigerians are victims of a cultureless and alienating society of Marx’s impoverished industrial reserve army. Many of us cannot assert our freedom and selfhood in the totalitarian tissue of Nigeria’s society. In spite of our addiction for wealth, there is yet no trend in rising national affluence. A staggering one hundred and thirty million Nigerians still live in humiliating poverty. Yemisi Yuppy still asks Jide about his Jeep. Jide asks Kunle: hey dude, where is your Jeep? Jide and Kunle are both in a dilemma. The addiction for Jeep and its new money language is herding people like Jide and Kunle into an endless rat race in an attempt to be like Yemisi Yuppy. They have both stumbled on a cure. Both have raided and plagiarized all the anti-poverty doctrines in the Bible. Nightly and with suicide bomber eagerness they are throwing wild sorties on the realm of invisible wealth. Their inner man is restless. In nightly vigil, they fight hard to dismantle the companionable poverty that had coiled on their destiny from birth. Like Yemisi Yuppy, they want to drive Jeep. We all want to drive Jeep. Hey dude, where is your Jeep? Seriously, have you been jeeped?
tajutijani@hotmail.com.