Institutionalised Human Follies from A Little Child to A Full-Blown Adult: A Study of Wale Okediran’s The Boys at The Border

Abstract

Universally, human existence is one that is mostly characterised by follies. The tendency to be involved in follies arise irrespective of class, status, culture, nationality, religion, gender and race. This becomes quite alarming because at every point in time, due to greed, graft and corruption, humans are constantly and restlessly looking for ways and means to be engaged in greed, corruption, graft and other related heinous acts. Africa, no doubt, has taken the lead as many of such cases of human follies are glaring, thus, making countries in the continent to be really giants in all ramifications of the word “giants”. It is against this backdrop that Wale Okediran sets The Boys At the Border, portraying how those who are crime fighters in Nigeria get involved in such follies and as such, move from the position of crime fighters to crime perpetrators. This work therefore, examines the theme of institutionalized human follies in Wale Okediran’s The Boys at the Border. The work makes use of realism as its working theory while adopting the qualitative research methodology. The work identifies those institutionalized oddities that are associated with customs and the military at the Nigerian borderline. It is evident from our analysis that corruption and other related crimes have been institutionalized as they take place in high places of our territorial boundaries. The work therefore, concludes that unless those in charge of maintaining law and order on our borders desist from these unscrupulous and incongruous acts, Nigeria as a nation will keep being like maggots in shit on the one hand, and on the other hand, will keep being looked at with great suspicion by foreign nationals.