Power is Crooked

When I was in Armitage High School, I witnessed a shit-stem called “New Council.” it is a time when the forthcoming senior students are newly given period in office as school councilors, whilst the outgoing cohort is busy preparing for their final exams.

Since the new regime is one that had suffered a great deal of unfairness in the hands of many councilors prior to them, they’ll want to get even, but because the ones that meted out the injustice on them are not there, they’ll ludicrously dispense their anger on the innocent lower-graders and green-leaves, as if that will reverse anything.

The egoism and vengeance of the era is manifested in diverse forms; from the bombastic rhetoric of the ‘Wannabe-Soyinkas’, the torturous early morning wake ups, intimidating enforcement of prayer times, the arrogant drumming of the resonant gong, very harsh lunch and dinner regulations, constrained evening games to the eleventh-hour rush at the bathrooms; from night studies to juniors to bed and lights out; the school feels like a penal complex and every junior student was doing time. You may even become a target for refusing to share your provisions with a certain broke councilor.

I remember sweeping and scrubbing the whole of "Fulladou Kunda’ [a male dormitory], at night whilst everyone was at the hall enjoying the ‘Musical Night’; and this punishment was simply because of a negligible misconduct, but I later figured that my crime was grave because I denied this dude a tin of canned beef. I also remember being asked to kneel on piercing pebbles whilst holding a chair up in my hands, because I refused to be the only one who does the stupid toilet for three Sundays running.

No junior student takes pleasure in this pain in the arse; in fact we all wish the chapter was completely crossed out. However, as soon as you get closer to your time in power, you become blinded by your desire to rule, and trying to selflessly use your accrued resentment to change the shit-stem will no longer occur to you; you only want to even the score, but with a completely innocent group of players, so shit becomes absurdity in rotary motion.

I don’t know if “New Council” lived on because I didn’t get to enjoy my own period of influence; I moved to Nusrat, but the reason I am telling this story is that I became an adult thinking those days are long gone, but to my surprise, I am seeing the same shit in corporate circles and that sucks; is like humans dissent only when they are trivially at the bottom, but give them a small dose of authority and they’ll start to behave in very selfish ways, doing exactly what they used to gripe about; burning their bridges behind; being unfriendly to the very people they were beneath with, even if those people were their very best friends. Humility was apparently something they advocate but never had.