Globalisation, Secret Societies and Good Governance (Part 1)

By 

Kòmbò Mason Braide, Ph.D.

[Port Harcourt, Nigeria]

kombra@amebo.com

An Ancient Preamble To 21st Century Hypocricy:

 “Judge not, that ye not be judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thine brother’s eye.

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

Ask, and it shall be given you; Seek, and ye shall find; Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

Source: “Sermon on the Mount”, an open-air speech presented near the Sea of Galilee, Northern Palestine (c 30 AD), by Jesus Christ (1)

A Digression For Those Who Have Eyes and Want To See:

In essence, our headache is how to deliver a simple overview of universal perception about the role (if any) and impact of secret societies on good (or bad) governance in a 21st century setting. In order to shed more light on our line of reasoning, we will take a brief peep at secret societies in ancient Palestine, the US of A, the UK, the EU, Japan and Nigeria. Specifically, we will direct our curiosity at the modus operandi and raison d’être of secret societies in universities in the US of A, the UK, and Nigeria.

From all indications, and from the above biblical preamble, the “holier-than-thou” syndrome has been on for quite some time. Curiosity and repugnance, evidently sparked up by ignorance, invariably leads to the “holier-than-thou” posture. Nonetheless, in the process of providing adequate illumination about arcane matters, the danger exists that “pearls” may inadvertently be “cast to swine”, and an escalating back-fire could follow. But then, we have been advised to “Ask”, “Seek” and “Knock”. And so, we will begin this trip from the relatively mundane, before we go to the transcendental, and finally crash-land on the weird. [Please ensure that your seat belt is fastened, and remains so, for as long as you read this piece!] Here goes:

The (Home) address of most of my four year old son’s best friends is: http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/. His favourite cartoon cyber-friends include: Courage (the cowardly dog), Dexter (of Dexter’s Laboratory), Officer Dibbles and TC (of Top Cat), Flintstones (the Stone Age family from Bedrock City), and of course, Sheep (In the Big City). My son simply cannot endure the purgatory of living a whole day without his mandatory buffet of the above menu of cartoon persona, who, for better or for worse, mould his character, and also balance his diet, especially at breakfast. Incidentally, I have finally resigned myself to appreciate that his migration to the Web (for satisfying his craving for those seemingly appetite-stimulating cartoon characters) was compelled by his exasperation with the maddening frequency of recycling of cartoon programmes by our local cable TV service provider. To his tiny mind, his immoderate solidarity, cheers, jeers and infantile felicitations with the inhabitants of www.cartoonnetwork.com must go on without let or hindrance, Daily: 7 days weekly, 365 days yearly; NEPA or not; NITEL or not; ISP server failure or not; no matter the gravity and size of my electricity and telephone bills!

His best friend in the cartoon universe is, Sheep (In the Big City). I must confess, I have always been intrigued by the conspiracies hatched in that cartoon strip by one General Specific and his able ADC, Private Public, who are very devoted members of a secret military organisation”. Their Executive Director of Research & Technology is a very foul tempered hunchbacked moron. The most amazing thing about General Specific and Private Public is that their so-called “top secret military organisation” routinely performs clandestine reconnaissance, intelligence investigations, abstract analyses, and high-risk espionage manoeuvres that are well known to every village idiot in the neighbourhood, and yet, they remain a secret military organisation” in the accepted wisdom of General Specific, Private Public and the rest of their crackpot team, who, incidentally, are perpetually in hot pursuit of Sheep in the Big City! I can now understand why my son relates to, and relishes that peculiar cartoon theatre of the unquestionably strange. It is very much like the universe of adult Nigerians!

Introduction & Aside:

Following his nomination for a ministerial appointment, Dr. Olu Agunloye went through a most pointlessly puerile screening process conducted by the Senate of the Federal Republic. Very predictably, he was made to react to the nuisance of juvenile criminality in Nigerian universities, polytechnics and other tertiary institutions of learning. The central theme of their inquisition was the phenomenon of so-called “cultism”, a term that is, by the way, simply and absolutely meaningless in standard non-Nigerianised English. Suddenly, as it were, the Senate of the Federal Republic realised the pain in the neck posed by certain criminal gangs of young adults (like Fryo) that inhabit our “higher institutions”, as if they were rudely sensitised by the mere presence of Dr. Olu Agunloye in the Holy of Holies, of their hallowed Chamber of “Ghana-Must-Go”, Otokotoid horrors and scheming. What else could be more nerve-wrecking to our sacred-hearted, illustrious, humble, honourable and fragile statesmen? Very clever. Very patronising too!

They “screened” Dr. Olu Agunloye and satisfied their vacuous egos that he passed their “joke-joke” test for ministerial appointment to any or all of the following ministries: Power and Steel; Solid Minerals; and Education; or so they thought. Well, the distinguished screening wise men of the Senate were way off the mark. General (Chief) Olusegun Obasanjo like a seasoned hunter, jungle expert and world authority in “Government by Ambush”, appointed Dr. Agunloye to the Ministry of Defence. Ha! Ha! Ha-a-a-h! “Screening” interview my nyash! Sheep in the Big City!

The choice of the theme of secret cults in the “screening” process was not unintentional. In fact the general insinuation was that Dr. Olu Agunloye is a (or was a one-time) “Cap’n”, and was (or is, or could be) a very active/staunch member of the Pyrates Confraternity. The Senate was applying a well known Machiavellian ploy by placing their victim on the defensive, by subtle resort to blackmail, arm-twisting and intimidation, typical of the practitioners of our very own home-grown, new-wave, diarchic, “nascent” democracy.

Once upon a time, roughly three years ago, this same Senators also “screened” late Chief Bola Ige (SAN) for a ministerial appointment (in the Power and Steel Ministry), and actually found it obligatory not even to bother to ask him any questions at all. Instead, they clapped for him, gave him a standing ovation, while he took a dignified bow and left, unanimously confirmed as suitable. For the records, Dr. Olu Agunloye was Chief Bola Ige’s very able Special Assistant: both at the Ministry of Power and Steel, and at the Federal Ministry of Justice, indeed, throughout Chief Bola Ige’s tenure as a minister in the present government. Suddenly after his death, for whatever it was worth, the revelation was made, in a rather “holier-than-thou” manner, that Chief Bola Ige was a member of the Rosicrucian Order. And so what? Who cares? Fair weatherism!

Specifically, Dr. Agunloye’s interactions, liaisons and relationships with known Pyrates, such as Nigeria’s only Nobel Prize-winner, Professor Wole Soyinka, are very common knowledge. Dr. Olu Agunloye was the pioneer Corps Commander of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) who, in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, left an exceptional legacy of excellence that has remained impossible to equal. In spite of this, that legacy was deliberately and systematically eroded, degraded and bastardised to a point of complete worthlessness and redundancy after it was speedily relocated to the Nigerian Police Force, ever since Dr. Agunloye’s forced exit, and the subsequent selective persecution, witch-hunting, and vindictive retrenchment of several supposed members of the Pyrates Confraternity in the FRSC: Pre-emptive sanitisation of the Nigerian Police Force. Ha! Ha! Ha-a-a-h! Sanitisation my nyash! Sheep in the Big City!

At any rate, Dr. Agunloye’s performance at the Senate ministerial “screening” session was, from all indications, and as expected, First-Class. But then, some pertinent questions materialise:

Ø       What exactly is a “secret society”? Is the definition universal, or is there a Nigerian version?

Ø       What constitutes acceptable or allowable inter-human transactions and relationships, within a democratic milieu that supposedly respects basic human rights like the freedoms of association, expression, belief, and thought processes, as guaranteed by the Nigerian Constitution?

Ø       Does it not sound rather primordial and even ludicrous, when placed within the wider global perspective of the 21st century, that the Senate of a supposedly serious minded civilised country (Nigeria) could brazenly waste precious tax payers’ time, indulging in asinine trivial pursuits, speculating about issues that should, at best, be taken as strictly personal, or indeed be relegated to the realm of paranoia, or metaphysics, or group eccentricity?

Ø       Can the government (Executive, Legislature and Judiciary) of the Federal Republic of Nigeria supervise, or monitor, or approve or disapprove of it citizens’ choice of beliefs, or association, or opinions, or idiosyncrasies without necessarily infringing on their fundamental human rights, like the Taliban-enforced Sharia in Afghanistan? Is it possible? Are standards shifting or not?

Ø       What exactly is the big deal even if it is true that:

o        The President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, General (Chief) Olusegun Obasanjo, was/is a member of the Ogboni Fraternity, as per the allusions of the predictable loser of the 1999 Presidential elections.

o        Chief Bola Ige was a member of the Rosicrucian Order.

o        Dr. Olu Agunloye was/is a member of the Pyrates Confraternity, at UI, or/and MIT or/and now.

o        US President George W. Bush (Jr.) and his father, while still students at Yale University, were members of the Skull and Bones Fraternity (founded in 1833). Similar “old line American” families and their descendants initiated into the Skull & Bones Order include the Sloanes, the Paynes, the Perkins, the Davidsons, the Harrimans, and the Rockefellers.

o        Both Charles (Prince of Wales) and his father, Philip (Duke of Edinburgh, the husband of Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Head of the Anglican Church worldwide), including many past Archbishops of Canterbury, several serving and retired clergymen all over the world are Freemasons.

o        Sir Cecil John Rhodes established an under-cover secret society, in the guise of the Rhodes scholarship scheme at Oxford University, for the final control of world power. Former US President William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

o        Knights of the Roman Catholic Church zealously aspire to belong to the elite Opus Dei, a tight-knit mafia-like cabal of the Vatican.

o        Inner circle members of The Bilderbergs, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC) exclusively admitted from the US of A, Canada, Greece, Western Europe, Scandinavia, Turkey, and Japan conspire to politically and economically dominate the world under their “New World Order”, recently called “Globalization”, or “Global Union”, or “Global Economy”, or “Global Order”, and similar terms. They plan diligently to create an “American Union” (AU) comprising all of North, Central and South America, including the Caribbean Islands, by 2005. The AU will function just like the European Union (EU). They have invented a new term for an expanded NAFTA, which they call the “Free Trade Area of the Americas” (FTAA).

The Council of the Americas, at its Quebec conference in March, 2001, stated very categorically that it plans to complete the FTAA by the year 2005. It is obvious that they were really talking about the AU.

o        Many world leaders are members of the Bohemian Club. They meet annually at the Bohemian Grove in California, where they worship a giant concrete owl, as they pace around a sacrificial table in their medieval robes, chanting ancient pagan hymns. They include central bankers, business syndicates and cabals, the richest families, and the like.

The two families that are really in charge of the Bohemian Club are the Rockefellers and the House of Rothschild in the UK and the EU.

o        One stepping-stone into all of these secret societies is the Skull & Bones Fraternity at Yale University. Clearly, the stranglehold that they have on the US Government, the news media, industry, trade unions, universities, foundations, the Supreme Court, and several other facets of the financial and business world is very tight and enormous.


 Bluntly put, it is none of our business, just like we should not give a hoot as to why someone decides to become a Quantum Physicist, or a member of the Eternal Sacred Order of Cherubim and Seraphim, or a celibate monk, or an undertaker, or a comedian, or a nude model, or a “night soil man”, or a snake charmer, or a belly-dancer: It is none of my business. It is none of your business. It is none of our business. Period.

The fact remains that, irrespective of the details of one’s choice of actions, such actions must be exercised within the framework and constraints of the law, and without jeopardy to other people’s fundamental rights. Any conflicts that may arise as a result of the finer details of one’s choice of actions, thoughts or speech, should be resolved according to the law of the land. What the law has not bothered to do to date in Nigeria is to come up with an explicit definition of what Nigerians sheepishly, care-freely and simplistically call “secret society” or “secret cult”. Instead, we wallow in a miasma of subjective perception and sporadic sentimental outbursts whenever those issues arise.

Whenever the issue of “secret cults” in universities and other institutions of higher education in Nigeria is mentioned or discussed, the innuendo is invariably expressed about the status of the Pyrates Confraternity as the precursor to later-day diabolical gangs of campus bandits, kind of “secret campus organisations”. The stereotypical and radically flat logic goes something like this:

Ø       The immediate symbolic reference and subliminal triggers of the Pyrates Confraternity worldwide are its logo – the skull and crossed bones.

Ø       It held (or holds) its meetings at mid-night. Non-members of this weird gathering of young men do not know what transpires in the nocturnal meetings of the Pyrates Confraternity.

Ø       Therefore, in view of all of the above, the Pyrates Confraternity must really be a diabolical “secret society” in its very essence.

Ø       And as it is the oldest of such “secret diabolical organisations” within Nigeian tertiary institutions, it must be the one and only (original) Grandmother of all campus “secret societies” – “secret cults” – in Nigerian higher institutions of learning!

How rather simplistic! Sheep in the Big City!

Certainly, the menace of gangs of criminal young adults (so-called “secret cults”) in our higher institutions of learning can not be shoved aside. Its nuisance is real. Nevertheless, in order to address the problem satisfactorily, it is crucial to get a clear understanding of its dynamics. It is mandatory that we desist from the usual platitudinous assumptions and emotionalisms typical of such analyses. Indeed, Dr. Olu Agunloye gave the distinguished Holy Men of the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the very key to the solution of their problem: the aspirin for their headache.

He told them very eloquently and insightfully that, in seeking an effective resolution of the dilemma of juvenile criminality in Nigeria’s so-called “tertiary institutions”, a more multi-dimensional appraisal, a more holistic view, less cliché-ridden generalisations, a less pedestrian and tunnel-vision methodology and a less “holier-than-thou” posturing must be applied. The limitations of the Nigerian condition, and the various quirky signs of our social dynamics, conveniently codified as the “Nigerian Factor”, must all be incorporated in the assumptions, evaluations and recommendations, for addressing the matter optimally.

In other words, the observed aberration of premeditated juvenile criminal deviance, alias “secret cults”, in Nigeria’s universities, polytechnics and even colleges of Education (formally, Teachers’ Training Colleges (TTCs)) cannot be conveniently distanced from similar cases of premeditated middle-aged, or menopausal, or geriatric criminal deviance prevalent n the wider Nigerian society. Any such distinctions are simply acts of wilful and selective amnesia. The pot can not call the kettle “black”. Definitely, a snake cannot give birth to a lizard. You cannot plant yams and reap mangoes! Or could it be, as a friend of mine repeatedly reminds me that, “every society must have to contend with, or accept an inevitable and irreducible minimum dosage of hypocrisy for its good, and for the preservation of the sanity of its members.”

One cannot help chocking with laughter at the mere thought of seeing the same Senate that has consistently applied thoroughly Machiavellian cloak-and-dagger type “caucuses”, coordinating intrigue manoeuvres, operating on the fringe of absurdity for the better part of its lifetime, habitually and routinely extorting blind allegiance, dogmatic partisan loyalty, fanatical master-slave interactions with their followers, disciples and chosen “political sons”, also having the brazen impudence to talk about “secret cults”. Imagine the same political “Godfathers” of all manner of cantankerous Area Boys, Area Men and Area Madams, (the new breed, re-groomed, high-flying, revamped, and reworked former Area Boys and Area Girls, now) “party faithfuls”, appearing shocked by their very own mirror image as reflected in two or three hopelessly short-changed generations of Nigerians, unfortunate enough to be following their lucky generation. The same Senate, some of whose members overtly resort to pure diabolism, blackmail, and fetish intimidation (still swearing and taking blood oaths on coffins and in cemeteries in this day and age!) for the recruitment, and engagement of their close political associates and disciples.

The same Senators, most of whom are bona fide and committed members of ultra-secretive exclusivist and parochial “inner caucus” political, or/and religious, or/and spiritualist, or/and social, or/and business organisations and/or real or imagined  mafias like those of Kaduna, Ijebu Igbo, Langtang, Port Harcourt and Minna. Some of them, alumni and operatives of the Babangida School of coup-plotting, influence peddling and political manoeuvres (so-called IBB Boys); some of them, in the Abacha School (so-called Abacha Boys), and some of them, OBJ boys, remotely controlling formerly penniless gubernatorial, and other political aspirants, from time to time manufacturing strange “consensus” candidates, designing and “fixing” political machinations, defining political correctness and “enforcing” group allegiance.

These same buriers of whole live cows and rams, regular participants in some of the most clandestine late midnight policy-modifying meetings and clause-smuggling collaboration at various hideouts nationwide and worldwide, including regular “consultative meetings” at Aso Rock Villa in Abuja, in Mecca, in Rome and in Jerusalem, under the cover of prayer meetings and Holy Pilgrimage. The very devoted clients of consultant priests, babalawos, prophets, mullahs, overseers, marabous, Holy Ghost Fire Prayer Warriors, magicians, hierophants, alfas, “casters and binders” of metaphysically robust curses and enchantment. Voodoo politicians talking about “secret societies”!

Ha! Ha-ha-ha! Ho-ho-ho! Very, very funny. Very much like the intrigues of General Specific and his “secret military organisation” in my boy’s cartoon universe: Sheep In the Big City.

Now, please loosen your seat belt, and kindly log on to http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/. Click on, or select “Sheep In the Big City”, and enjoy the jokes, maybe, until Easter, when we will once again be reminded of the incident at the “Last Supper”, when the Shepherd told his flock, The Original Twelve:

“Take, eat: this is my body.  … Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many, for the remission of sins.”

Sheep In The Big City!

 (This is the end of Part1 of a series to be continued …)

References:

1.        Saint Mathew: Sermon on the Mount”; The Holy Bible; New Testament; The Gospel according to St. Mathew Chapter. 7; verses 1 ~ 8; (King James Version).

2.        Saint Mathew: “Sermon on the Mount”; The Holy Bible; New Testament; The Gospel according to St. Mathew Chapter. 26; verses 26 ~ 29; (King James Version)

3.        Sutton, A.: “America’s Secret Establishment”; (1986).

4.        http://www.bcpl.net/~dbroida/cole2.html: “The Rhodes Scholarships: A Giant Step for White World Domination”.

 

 

K.M. Braide (Dr.)

 

Sunday, 24 March 2002.