EXCUSE ME: Infamous Boyboy Bestiality

I have no clue about the origin

of the word boyboy in our lexicon, but the menace it has wrought on our national polity is as old as the English language from where it was coined. The word boyboy can easily be misunderstood for houseboy, but while they share similar operative traits the remunerations are usually very different.

To start with, boyboys are the high-end houseboys that oppressive regimes use as goons, full of brawn but lack brains, to cause chaos. History has shown that every dictatorial bad boy in power needs them to carry out their heinous acts.

During the Transatlantic Slave Trade, white traders and powerful African chiefs needed boyboys to smoke out their fellow blacks to be sold. These boyboys were informants that operated like rats. They were ever willing to be loyal psychotic sycophants, who could sell their birthright for a pot of porridge. Even in America, the most feared boyboys were the house slaves that kissed the behinds of their white owners at the expense of the field slaves. They foiled every escape attempt and leaked every secret, just to maintain their position under the master's table where they fed on falling crumbs

When colonialism took over from the slave trade, the need for boyboys increased in the African continent. The tyrannical colonial regimes all over Africa once again found native boyboys willing to do their dirty jobs. I am not talking about uneducated house servants or houseboys that served the District Officers or Governor Generals, but those that went to schools in Britain and France or other western countries and those that enlisted in the colonial army and police. For instance to repress the agitation for Independence in Kenya during the Emergency period of 1952-1960, the British found members of the askaris, the local British Home Guard, willing to castrate suspected members of the Mau-Mau uprising. The askaris knew how best to dehumanise their fellow citizens. They were familiar with the terrain and often times helped in smoking out the freedom fighters from their hideouts, exhibiting a known boyboy trait of sabotage. Majority of post-colonial African leaders were British or French boyboys, and these boyboys acted the script written by their masters and even took it a notch further in barbarism.

So the vicious cycle continued. Bringing this closer home, Nigerian leaders have never been short of boyboys because they too have been boyboys one way or the other. Boyboy begets boyboy; hence we keep seeing failure in regime after regime and administration after administration. No one perpetuated this boyboy mentality more than the military. The tradition of "obey the last command" is deeply rooted in the boyboy psyche. Hence we hear greetings like "I remain loyal sir" or "your boys are loyal sir". Such salutations turn boyboys to successful subjugators.

The power of boyboys has been on the rise over the years and no regime has embraced and celebrated the boyboy syndrome more than that of Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. Till tomorrow, we still have members of our civil and military societies being referred to as the IBB Boys. IBB boyboys could do and undo during his regime. It almost became like a cult follower ship.

It is the nature of boyboys to think for their handlers in certain cases, in other words they take matters into their crude hands just to please the master, the way a colonial askari would blind or crush the testicles of a Mau-Mau prisoner in exchange for a favour from his white masters. It is the nature of boyboys to outdo themselves in order to win juicy perks from their masters. This jostling for position to be the best boyboy often led to heinous crimes.

Though we have boyboys in all strata of our society, their corrosive power is felt more among our leaders and dictators, both past and present. While the general citizenry of Nigeria is fooled by a ruling administration, there is a pseudo government that is manned and handled by boyboys that hang around power and help the big ogas rape this country. This is not to deny the fact that there are also king makers beside boyboys who help ruin the country, matter of fact those we call kingmakers are super boyboys.

Now as Nigeria marches forward to the 2011 election, Aso Rock and other state capitals are filled with boyboys, anxious and willing to sink the country in cold blood just to get juicy positions. And when they eventually find themselves at the helm of affairs, no one will ask who was the infamous bad boy or ignorant boyboy that ordered or carried out the dastardly act of October 19th, 1986 of assassinating Dele Giwa, founder and editor-in-chief of Newswatch magazine, with a letter bomb? Because that single action was certainly the apogee of this nation's infamous boyboy bestiality, which set the tone for the rest that would follow.