Climbing The “Fraternity Ladder”: Ambitions, Wickedness and Nothingness

Fraternal Ladder Climbed

University Campus Grown Fraternities (UCGFs) in Nigeria are usually a ‘dead end’ for the benignly ambitious and serious man but for those gifted with niggardliness, low cunning, meanness with a heavy dose of unrealistic dreaming they are “El Dorado(s)” exemplified in the highest. The main goal the fraternity member who cannot make better than his job pay grade in real life but wants to be a mega-whatever, getting to the top of the fraternity becomes “the” mega-achievement. Take a look at the former heads of UCGFs and show yourselves the ones who ever became a mega-achievers or even worse who became a mega-achiever by being the top helmsman all by its self. There is nothing like that, nothing.

Climbing the fraternal ladder to become the Uno Numero is a dream many within UCGFs harbour. Any decent fellows whoever wore the crown at the top of the fraternal ladder often did so most reluctantly and without campaigning in elections for the spot, lobbying pernicious cliques that hold power or even doing the job at all when sworn-in. Those who sit at the top of the ladder through nefarious ambition would typically have an easily provable long history of psychopathy, a reputation for personal intellectual confusion, embody self-references of grandeur and display deep-seated admiration / desire for ruthlessness. For in their own eyes, the evil of the UCGF is actually goodness to society and mankind as a whole.

The man bent on becoming the Uno Numero of a UCGF puts in all his expendable thoughts and energies into fulfilling that dream. It is this very ambition of the fraternal ladder climbers that keeps the UCGF going and growing. The UCGFs do not grow through the bona fide or positive but unconventional conditions of progress but purely through arbitrary agreement and wanton expediency.  Michael Corleone who could kill his own brother or friends to achieve absolute power becomes the prototype for the “brother” who wants to sit at the top of the fraternal ladder.

It is a great blessing to UCGFs in Nigeria that the Nigerian Police Force and its forensic capabilities are very far behind the basic acceptable global standards; many controllers of UCGFs would have been hung or serving life sentences without parole for their sins. The handful of men that own the UCGFs by way of a very perverse status quo and feed fat from it financially, allow the arbitrary governance and expediency to reign unrestrictedly for good reasons. Firstly, if UCGFs were run by a thoroughly decent internal ‘rule of law’, the laws upheld and enforced would enable the general membership of the fraternities to kick out any abusers and misusers of the system, even their “spiritual heads” and the conclaves that support them. Secondly, nefarious ambitious men, as a rule, are more willing to break the rules brazenly to protect the perverse status quo, as a condition of climbing to the top of the fraternal ladder.

It becomes clear that those who are ambitious to become the top shots of the UCGFs instead of being cunning and ruthless at their levels are actually slow-thinking upstarts that are being subtly used by the few men who own the UCGFs to do their very dirty and obnoxious work. The poetic justice that emerges is that the ambitious ladder-climbers only realise their untold sacrifice and folly, after sitting at the very top of the fraternal ladder and left it. The realisation is very painful for some. Good and reliable friends nastily betrayed, bright lights dismissed or derided, excellent projects sabotaged, reason and common sense burnt to ashes for the ascendancy of folly, criminal activity celebrated, rape a show of genuine manhood and so forth and so on. The pain is in the question, “why did he enforce and support such despicable deeds?” Power!!!

Yet, the perverse status quo continually grows more sinister and toxic with time because increasingly the tell-tale signs psychopathy and unscrupulousness are now the desirable requirements for initiation. The depth and scope of evil practices and manipulation by those few men who really control UCGFs have evolved beyond their own wildest dreams. If you want a bully, an assassin, a thug, a psychological abuser or a spy, simply recruit one or many. The days when good grades and unqualified good character were the main criteria for initiation into UCGFs are somewhat prehistoric today.

As members of UCGFs rise to the top of the fraternal ladder and see the mirage, the nothingness of their achievement, they look to their counterparts who have climbed to the top of one of the many transparent social or professional ladders in society and call them ‘lucky’ with emotional emphasis. The money they steal while in office from the UCGF and its members is no satisfying compensation or comfort. Whether being lucky in this sense is climbing to the top of the ladder and getting something worthy and tangible for it or not having to be so nasty to achieve virtually nothing or anything at all, who knows.

Being a ‘King of Nothing’ is quite a feat especially while being so destructive to achieve it. Or what do you think?

Grimot Nane

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