Okhai Ojeaga

A true Human Being.
#YALI

[Okhai Ojeaga @Zokhain]

@RSA_Observer M

[Elnathan John @elnathan_john]

I have watched this video three times and my jaw is still on the floor.

[Okhai Ojeaga @Zokhain]

@J_Chiemeke It was a slow a steady decline. Many standards that we held dear was eroded on the altar of money. I would say that the very good sense of judgement of our people is facing a battle with sponsored propaganda spins that promotes mediocrity.
Abeg I have a lot to say but not on X.

[Okhai Ojeaga @Zokhain]

@maxvayshia Yes. I will be. But in Port Harcourt. Working in Warri now.

[David Ornstein @David_Ornstein]

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Manchester United sack Ruben Amorim as head coach. 40yo Portuguese informed of decision & goes with immediate effect after 14 months following breakdown in relations. Darren Fletcher expected to take over #MUFC on interim basis @TheAthleticFC https://t.co/kEAu5Wv8F7

[SizweLo @SizweLo]

After a few years of writing on South Africa’s economic and social stagnation, I’ve learned something: people don’t want to know why things happen. They want to know who is responsible.

For example, when I wrote about how Eskom’s problems stem from its commercialisation in the 1980s, how restructuring a utility for profit created the very incentives that make looting rational, my readers yawned.

That wasn’t the story they wanted to hear. They needed the reason for Eskom’s struggles to be greed and incompetence instead of policy.

This pattern repeats everywhere. If you suggest that deindustrialisation and financialisation explain the country’s stagnation better than government failure, you’ll watch people’s eyes glaze over. But if you mention a corrupt tender, an incompetent minister, a stolen billion, now you have their attention.

All of this is because moral explanations are emotionally satisfying in ways that structural ones can never be.

Moral expositions offer the clarity of heroes and villains, devils and angels. They suggest simple solutions: fire the corrupt, put the thieves in orange jumpsuits, and elect better leaders.

This is human and satisfying because it turns chaos into a relatable story: There’s a thief, catch him.

On the other hand, structural explanations do the opposite. They’re abstract and involve everyone. They suggest that, often, what many observers see as “good policy” might have negative effects and hint that we’re all embedded in systems that reward certain behaviours regardless of individual integrity.

Most of all, they offer no easy fixes and no satisfying release of punishment.

Because what if the theft was made possible long before the thief arrived? What if the system itself was quietly redesigned over the years to turn public goods into private loot? What if the problem isn’t just who stole, but why stealing became so easy, so profitable and so normalised?

I once thought that if I could clearly explain the structural causes, people would understand. Now I realise the resistance isn’t only intellectual, it’s also psychological.

People need culprits because such culprits can be publicly shamed and even removed. But in reality, for any change to happen, systems have to be transformed, and transformation is uncertain and often exceedingly complex.

When I write about deindustrialisation or financialisation, I’m pointing to why. And I’ve noticed how often the response is polite impatience: “Yes, but who’s to blame today?”

This is why mainstream media gives people what they want: corruption scandals, government failures, incompetent officials. Not because journalists are stupid or compromised, they mostly are, yes, but also because that’s the narrative frame that resonates with the public. It gives them someone to blame.

And here’s the strange part: many people who consume and parrot these narratives don’t even trust the media delivering them. This explains why they get excited and feel validated when they hear the same things from a different source, like an independent journalist or analyst, one that makes them feel like independent thinkers rather than passive consumers of mainstream narratives.

At a theoretical level, there’s a deeper pattern at work here, one that the philosopher René Girard spent his career examining. Girard argued that when societies face crisis and unbearable tension, they instinctively resolve it through scapegoating: the community unites by directing all its anxieties and frustrations onto a single figure or group.

The scapegoat doesn’t have to be innocent. They might actually be guilty of something, but their guilt becomes vastly inflated to carry the symbolic weight of everything that’s gone wrong.

This is precisely what’s happening in South Africa’s public discourse.

The crisis is real: economic stagnation, mass unemployment, infrastructure collapse, deep inequality. These create unbearable social tension. But their causes are complex and systemic: colonial extraction, Apartheid’s spatial and economic architecture, global financialisation, policy choices spanning decades and governments, and the behaviour of both public and private actors.

These causes implicate everyone, offering no clear villains and no gratifying resolution.

Enter the scapegoat mechanism: Rather than face that complexity, the collective focuses blame on identifiable culprits: corrupt officials, cadre deployment, state capture, incompetent ministers.

Are these people actually corrupt or incompetent? Often, yes. But their failures become the explanation for everything, bearing a weight far beyond their actual role. They become vessels for all our rage and disappointment.

Notice something crucial here: the corruption narrative unites almost everyone. Business leaders, academics, opposition politicians, and even many ANC supporters all agree on blaming “the corrupt.”

This unanimity should make us suspicious. When everyone agrees on who the villain is, you’re likely witnessing scapegoating rather than analysis.

Real structural analysis is politically divisive precisely because they implicate different actors differently and require us to examine our own complicity.

The scapegoat mechanism explains why structural explanations feel so threatening. When I write about how Eskom’s commercialisation created incentives for looting, or how financialisation extracts value from the productive economy, I’m essentially saying: “It’s not really the scapegoat’s fault, or not mainly.”

Even if this is analytically correct, it’s psychologically intolerable because it removes the mechanism by which society manages its crisis. I’m asking people to face the void again, to sit with complexity and ambiguity and their own implication in broken systems.

The scapegoating mechanism obscures the structural violence of how the economy is organised, who owns what, how financialisation extracts value, how global capital flows work, and how privatisation and commercialisation create opportunities for looting that didn’t exist before.

These uncomfortable truths get buried under the satisfying simplicity of “bad people did greedy things.”

So we end up with a discourse that’s endlessly rich in righteous outrage but structurally impoverished. We know just about every corrupt official by name, but can’t really explain why corruption is systemic.

The country stays stuck, but at least we know who to blame. And perhaps that’s the point. The scapegoat mechanism just makes the crisis bearable by giving it a face, a name, a simple story.

The masses get the emotional satisfaction of moral clarity without the difficult work of structural transformation.

Until we’re willing to move beyond the search for culprits and sit with the discomfort of systemic causation, we’ll keep having the same conversations, blaming the same types of people, and wondering why nothing fundamentally changes.

[Okhai Ojeaga @Zokhain]

@maxvayshia You’re welcome.

[archivi.ng @StartArchiving]

In the 1960s, as Nigeria searched for a modern identity, a Lagos boutique redefined what it meant to dress Nigerian.

This week on Previously in Nigeria...

[Big Cuz @imohumoren]

Rick Dees and Weekly Top 40! You had to be there

[Big Sam @sjikeme]

Critics are professionals who have dedicated their time and expertise to the art form. They’ve studied the history and dedicated uncountable hours to the art form. Do we ask this questions of the political critics? Do they have to be politicians? Every society needs critics.

[mimi @mariasrainer]

Happy 61st anniversary to my favorite scene not only in ‘The Sound of Music’ but on film!

Filming for ‘The Laendler’ dance happened from July 21–23, 1964 and it stands as the epitome of romance to me.

[Okhai Ojeaga @Zokhain]

@J_Chiemeke Lol. I am tired.

[Afrocritik @afrocritik]

Afrocritik turns 4 today — four years of spotlighting, celebrating, and critiquing African art and entertainment!🎉

We’ve been a torchbearer for African creativity, and we look forward to doing much more. 🥂

Our statement⬇️
https://t.co/eFPBXSdrWx

[Okhai Ojeaga @Zokhain]

@Neemma_
Happy Birthday, Nimma! 🎉
Wishing you a day filled with love, laughter, and all your favorite things.
Here's to another incredible year of life, growth, and happiness!

[Mayowa @Mayoveli]

A man drives against traffic, an everyday infraction in Nigeria’s theatre of dysfunction.
The police opened fire and his young son dies. The nephew rages at a brutal, trigger-happy system.
Another woman tells her story, her uncle, a pedestrian in his prime, killed by a one-way driver and she weeps at the lawlessness that swallowed a father.

Two griefs, two traumas and one broken road.
This is the paradox of our existence in Nigeria, where one man’s coping mechanism becomes another family’s tragedy.
Where surviving the madness of the state often means becoming part of the chaos in the streets.

The first sees a state that kills indiscriminately and the second, well, she sees a state that doesn’t care enough to regulate or maybe a people that are often lawless.
Both are right and both are wronged.

This is what happens when the rule of law is not a compass, but a ghost, sometimes it appears with brute force, other times it vanishes into thin air.
Where law becomes a weapon in the hands of the state, and a joke in the hands of the people.
Where everyone becomes their own judge, and morality bends under the weight of personal pain.

Thomas Hobbes warned of this, he said that when there is no trusted, neutral arbiter, life becomes solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Here, that dystopia isn’t a prophecy. It’s everyday news.

Each individual is processing trauma, unfiltered, raw and irrational.
One channels it into outrage against the police and the other against societal decay.
Both look into the same abyss, only from opposite ends and as Nietzsche once wrote, the abyss gazes back.

In this feedback loop of grief and justification, the lines blur.
To one, breaking the rules is survival and to another, it is murder.

My people, until we fix the system that breeds both the reckless driver and the reckless trigger-happy state actors, the one-way madness and the mindless bullet, this cycle of tragedy will keep replaying.
And we will keep mourning from opposite sides of the same collapsing bridge.

[Sky News @SkyNews]

🌍 Watch The World live with @SkyYaldaHakim ⤵️ https://t.co/4pn0ZC0iRl

[Okhai Ojeaga @Zokhain]

@BreakingNews Q

[Okhai Ojeaga @Zokhain]

@maxvayshia Happy Birthday @maxvayshia. Best wishes to you!