Nobody Holy, they said?

Allen Avenue, Ikeja.

I know the words that will secure a murder acquittal - even in the face of overwhelming physical proof - in Nigeria. They are two words and they are sacred: Nobody Holy. So there you go, if you have been found commiting a vile, terrible offence, you know what to say now. Don't say I never did anything for you.

At the centre of everything that is implicitly wrong with Nigeria is the belief that all citizens are part of a social contract of criminality, an unspoken vow of communal wrongdoing. The origin of this quite ridiculous view can perhaps be traced to an obvious source of misconstruation: the Bible.

The average Nigerian has a weird relationship with their belief base or what they'll otherwise call religion, the uncertain nature of our country often requiring them to make decisions from time to time that are not in line with the tenets of their faith.

Nigerians want to love 'God' but this country will not allow them shine, so bible verses like, let he who is without sin be the first to cast a stone and all men have sinned have cut short of God's glory, appeal to them.

It is the collective reinforcement of these verses and the ever-delapitating nature of our social fabric that encourages what I now term Nobody Holy-ism. For example, in justifying the backlash against musician, Naira Marley, after  Naira had categorically said that internet fraud was reparation for the evils of the the slave trade, colleague, Davido, simply opined: Nobody Holy.

When one of the artists signed to his label assaulted a social media influencer,  the artist while admitting to the assault also resorted to the same defence, "Nobody Holy."

Every time Nobody Holy is used, we allow a chance slip away to confront wrong in our society, and often the users of this defense are those who might be classified 'privileged,' because when a Nigerian without privilege commits an offense, we are not prepared to make the allowances that we make for our faves.

So we go on losing grip on our common sensabilities, our moral compass gets further skewered and we become more contemptible versions of ourself as persons and as a nation regularly because nobody holy and every man na sinner.

Want to justify child rape: 'nobody holy'; what about corruption? 'the country hard and nobody holy my brother'; the guy dea scam old market women; 'no caste am, na better guy and nobody holy'. And on and on.

I don't know where we are headed honestly, most times, I just sit and wonder how much blows we have dealt to ourselves and how much more I can take, Nobody Holy is the last straw for me, I might be not be a pious, God-believing, church-going pontiff but I sure as hell am not a criminal, I didn't assault anybody and I did not commit any crime.

And as our collective will to be better disappears, I feel,  rather keenly, a sense that our nation is at risk of imploding., weary beneath the strains of all our willingness to allow just a little more evil slide. That collectively, we might just wake one day, and our country may have descended into a sort of apocalyptic mess from which there is no coming back. And when the anthropologist and archaeologist of the future try to rationalise how a potential sub-Saharan African superpower blessed with material, human and natural resources folded up, they may find only two words to explain the quandary: Nobody Holy.