Morality, Law, and Yoruba Mind

13 Feb 2009| By Dr SC Spinoza

All rational societies enact, maintain, and enforce some forms of laws because the body of the laws constitutes the internal restraint upon which social, economic, and moral order, peace, and progress depend. Experience and research have repeatedly shown that the threat of punishment alone is not the reason most people in any society elect to obey the laws of their society. Rather, most people choose to obey the laws and to respect the instituted authorities in charge of the laws for two basic reasons.

First, they understand that the law is a part of the moral foundation of the social order, and that committing crimes undermines the moral foundation of their society. They have been taught at home to do right and to avoid doing wrong so that their society can function. Therefore they view committing crimes as doing wrong to their fellow community members and to the collective society.

Secondly, most people in rational societies are rational human beings who understand that obeying the laws of their society serves their own rational self-interests; they have internalized the reality that if everybody were to disobey the laws, then the society would be turned into a state of anarchy where the war of all against all would be the acceptable norm, thereby making gainful and productive employment impossible. They understand that if everybody were to do as they pleases, then the political and social institutions that serve their basic daily needs would be rendered useless and ineffective. They simply obey the laws out of the understanding that it is necessary and beneficial to do so.

The opposite of the above is the reality in all Yoruba communities of Nigeria. Because there is no conception of morality in Yoruba culture, every Yoruba man behaves as if he is the law unto himself. His mother and father taught him from childhood that morality is for the fools while the law is for the faint-hearted. Therefore every Yoruba adult is frozen in his or her childhood memories about morality and law. He or she is self-centered and thinks in terms of what is there for me and me alone. Even when they deal with their mothers and fathers or wives and siblings, the Yoruba people think of their own self-interests first.

They often build walls of fear, anger, hate, exploitation, delusion, dishonesty, perversity, and negativism, from which they unleash their learned self-centeredness to the rest of their Yoruba communities. Often, their immoral and unlawful behaviors and antisocial tendencies have no respect for sacred objects or age and sex or filial propinquity.

Adedibu, a 100-years-old Yoruba man, murdered inside churches and Mosques and ordered his thugs to rape both 9-years-old Yoruba girls and 90-years-old Yoruba grand mothers. Olusegun Obasanjo, another 100-years-old Yoruba man, engaged in sexual orgies with his own son’s wife, Mojisola Obasanjo. And Mojisola Obasanjo’s father, Otunba Alex Onabanjo, was also involved in sexual immoralities with his own daughter, Mojisola Obasanjo. These kinds of incestuous exploitations are not only prohibited by the moral sense of all normal societies, they are also prohibited by the laws of such societies. But the Yoruba culture approves such abnormal and immoral behaviors because the concepts of law and lawmaking are alien to the Yoruba mind. Everything and anything goes in the culture because every child therein is taught by the parents that committing crimes and engaging in immoral acts pay and lead to fulfilled life.

This Yoruba criminal and immoral proclivity also helps to explain the behaviors of Yoruba people in law-enforcement positions and positions of power.  Wherever you see the Yoruba people in positions of power, you see in action their childhood memories about morality and law.  Either they falsely accuse innocent people of committing crimes which their paymasters committed or they are busy covering up crimes in collusion with the defendants. Recall the constant “I am following orders from above” by Bayo Ojo, the Yoruba Attorney General of Olusegun Obasanjo’s murderous Yoruba Administration in Nigeria from 1999 to 2007. Further, recall that all the murders of the high-ranking Yoruba politicians are yet to be resolved in courts of law.  By either covering up crimes in collusion with other Yoruba criminals or losing important evidence or admitting cooked-up evidence or bearing false witness and testimonies in courts of law, the Yoruba men and women in positions of power show this characteristic abhorrence for law and morality in Yoruba culture. They appeal to the inbred dysfunctional and crude form of self-centeredness taught to them by their Yoruba parents. The result is immediate financial self-interests override the collective well-being of the Yoruba communities, and by extension, the entire nation is reduced to a state of anarchy and disorder whenever a Yoruba man or woman is found in charge of the affairs of the nation.

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Supporting Articles:

Treasonable Sex!

Attorney General, Chief Bayo Ojo, Indicted by UK Tribunal