By Rev Fr Gerald Nwafor
Since the advent of social media and the monetization of social media content by the social media owners, society has gone bonkers in the name of content creation. I do not want to delve into the native doctors who were arrested, and their defense was I am a content creator. Anyway, the only thing I can say to that is “God is the only creator I know.”
Going further I wanted to address those people who go to the street claiming to be a native doctor and with their cohort pretending to strike one person who falls flat and starts acting dead. Then the native doctor would start chasing an innocent person to touch him/her with the magic wand. I have seen a pregnant woman collapse because she was having high blood pressure. I have even seen one person run into a fatal accident because of this useless and dangerous prank/joke. I have also seen where the public thought that the native doctor was real and beat him blue and black before his camera crew came shouting “IT IS A PRANK, IT IS A JOKE.” But too little too late: too much damage has been done.
Our people say that madness is good when it is in the middle (Ala na adimma na oke na abou). Too much of everything is bad. You need more from social media to the detriment of another person. I do not want to tell the governor what to do but I will suggest that those who created harmful content should be arrested. I was in the shop when a guy came and told a girl that they were from a big company doing promo and they would like her to put into the big shopping cart whatever she could in sixty seconds and the company would pay for that. The girl was so excited and many of us were happy for the girl because she seemed to be a nursing mother. She ran over to the baby’s section and got babies food and diapers and baby soap and oil. At the end of the 60 seconds, the stupid boy looked her in the eyes and said that it was a prank. Thanks to the good boys in the shop who said no way. The guy was forced to vomit the money and pay for those items. I was standing by to see the end. I do not know what I could have done but I was in support of the mob, so that next time know where to prank people.
We all need some kind of jokes and lighter moments. The people making waves on social media do not prank people in the first place. Look at Chief Imo, Sabinus, Oga Uwa, Mr. Macaroni, Bovi, Okon, Marci, and many others, they do not prank anyone to be popular.
The federal government of Nigeria should have been involved in this matter, but I do not want them to prank Nigerians because what the government is doing to us now is more than a prank. I would like to wake up one morning and the President would just announce that the state of emergency in Rivers State is a prank. That is the kind of prank I would support, and the people of Rivers State would laugh and laugh until they fell on the floor. Or the Senate convene one afternoon and say that the whole saga between Akpabio and Natasha was a prank. Those are the kinds of stories that would make a good prank and would heal high blood pressure and send away hypertension. If Mr. President would give another broadcast on May 29th this year and say that his petrol price increase from 350 to 1200 is a prank we would not mind, he can also add that the exchange rate would go back to 400 instead of 1500. The public would accept it as a good prank and go back without any quarrel. That having been said, any other prank from the general public should be banned. Many people are sick due to economic hardship; therefore, pranking them can lead to untimely death or unwanted calamity. I saw someone who got into a restaurant claiming he was a mad person and went straight to a table where a man was about to eat his plate of rice. He grabbed the only meat on the plate and threw it into his mouth. The owner landed him an unexpected uppercut and he was on the floor. His camera crew started shouting “It is a prank, look at the camera here.” Two teeth were missing from his front row with blood everywhere. It was at that point that I decided to write this piece before it was too late.
I am not against healthy jokes and amusing content, but I am against anything that would lead to the pain and embarrassment of anyone, especially an unsuspecting person. We have many things to make us laugh without putting people’s lives in danger. I want Wike to say that he is just pranking Fubara and this whole charade would end overnight. That would be a very good prank from Wike. Recently I watched Lamidi Apapa who claimed to be the new Labor leader. I don’t think that his prank would work because from the beginning people already knew he was a prank. So, if Apapa said he was pranking the Labor party it would not make a good Joke. I also looked at the President’s appointment list which looks like a joke to me but it would be a good joke if he would delete some Yoruba names and tell them that he was just pranking them; that would be a nice one too.
Finally, I saw the music banned by the Nigerian National Broadcasting Commission by Idris Kareem about the President and his son. NBC should immediately lift the ban and tell us that it was just a prank, that one we would accept also as a very good prank. The shake-up in NNPCL should not be a prank because Abba Kyari has been doing American wonders there for the past six years. I do not know what to say about Yakubu the INEC chairman who was fired last week. Yakubu did not try at all, but I do not know the next person. From my Nigerian experience have not seen a better INEC chairman starting from Maurice Iwu. So, I ask you: do you want Yakubu’s firing to be a prank or not?
