Nigeria at point zero, By Festus Adedayo

It is either that Buhari and his Emefiele sidekick are antediluvian in their policy-making or have been deliberate in their projection of a chaotic aftermath, as Tinubu alleged. Either or both must be the reason why Nigerians would be dragged down to their feet, to point zero, by two key survival indices of our national life as this. Since the redesigning of the naira, Emefiele has been shuttling from self-reversal to making outright laughable policy contradictions on the naira.

I am watching the viral video of the naked young man inside a banking hall as I write this. His manhood is dangling like the pendulum of the Grandfather Clock of the colonial Nigeria days. He is totally naked, even as he shouts that he needs to withdraw ‘his money’ from the bank. I am aghast and disillusioned at the same time. I do not know what to think. My mouth is wide open. Before now, I saw a similar video. It was that of a semi-naked young lady. She too has peeled off her cloth in protest of the crisis of cash that engulfed Nigeria last week. She is close to revealing her total womanhood. She is a pathetic sight too as she constantly spews out her frustration. Her kids have not been able to go to school due to the crisis, she laments in Yoruba, asking to be given her money or get her account closed. What could have driven people to this level of Albert Camusian absurdity?

As I look at the naked young man, I am stunned. I am right now inside Akachi Ezeigbo’s Literature class at the University of Lagos. It is 1991 or so. The text that the then Dr Ezeigbo (now a Professor) asks us to read is the 1975 published Woman At Point Zero, written by the Egyptian psychiatrist, Nawal El Saadawi. It is a true-life narrative from Saadawi’s fieldwork research. Sacked from her position in 1972 as director of Health Education and Editor-in-Chief of Health magazine after a sexually suggestive piece she did with the title, “Women and Sex”, Saadawi resorted to researching on neurosis in Egyptian women. This necessitated her visiting the Qanatir Prison and interviewing twenty-one inmates. And it served as the building blocks of case studies for her 1976 publication, “Women and Neurosis in Egypt.”

However, one of the cases stood out. It was that of Firdaus, who had spent her childhood in a poor Egyptian farming community, with a father who abused her mother repeatedly. With clitoridectomy performed on her as a youth by her parents, she found out that sex was no longer enjoyable. Upon her parents’ death, life also became a monstrous burden for Firdaus. She thus became a chattel thrown from one man to the other, used, abused and beaten by the men she encountered. Crushed mentally and disillusioned, Firdaus then resorted to prostitution, from where she made a lot of money. Then she met a pimp called Marzouk, who had on his palmtop a tab on many political bigwigs in Egypt. He collected rent from each man he brought to Firdaus. At some point, however, Marzouk started to threaten her with police action if she did not give him a larger chunk of her earnings. Then Firdaus decided that she had had enough of prostitution, and became resolute about quitting it for another job. Marzouk however blocked her. One day, he pulled a knife on her, but Firdaus cleverly retrieved it from him and then stabbed him to death. She is arrested and sentenced to death by hanging.

On a day in 1974, after repeated trials, she agreed to meet the psychiatrist in Qanatir Prison, who had heard about Firdaus’ infamy through the prison doctor – that of an awaiting-death murderess who totally delinked herself from everyone in prison. Fridaus asked the psychiatrist to close the window, sit down and listen to her life story, as she was to be executed that evening. On finishing the tale, hangmen enter the cell and march her to the gallows. Firdaus believed she was sentenced to death due to the threat her existence posed to men: “My life means their death. My death means their life. They want to live,” was her last word to Nawal.

What links Firdaus, the two Nigerians in the said viral videos and millions of other in Nigeria last week, was the total frustration at the decadent status quo. While Saadawi is praised for her famous book’s ability to expose the subjugation of women in Middle Eastern societies, the author commended Firdaus, who she described as a martyr because, “few people are ready to face death for a principle.” So, those who were compelled to go naked last week due to the frustration with petrol shortages, cash scarcity and the spiraling cost of living in Nigeria, in what ways did they share Firdaus’ frustration, despondency and mental torture? Could their nakedness be described as martyrdom too? Or were they simply mad? Did they slide into depression? Was Firdaus not depressed too at the point in which she she stabbed Marzouk? How many Nigerians have started exhibiting traces of mental disconnect on account of the misrule of Muhammadu Buhari? Haven’t we been driven to the brink of sanity by this government?

Muhammadu Buhari, Godwin Emefiele and the gangs terrorising Nigeria are the Marzouks in Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero. As the men drove Firdaus to the point of despondency and depression, so do these other ones do to us too. At that point, murder became Firdaus’ way of letting out her pent-up angst. Many more Nigerians are manifesting their own depression in different ways known or unknown to them. As Firdaus said, the lives of Nigerians mean their death and our deaths mean their lives, because they want to live by all means. Only God knows how many Nigerians have died or sunk into the abyss of insanity on account of Emefiele’s vengeful policy and Buhari’s conspiratorial abetment of it. Otherwise, changing a country’s currency is not rocket science. Nor is fuel supply such a Byzantine knot that should ground a country to its feet as this.

…the Yoruba should let Tinubu fight his political enemies alone and not allow him to use them as pawns and fodders of the war. When the going was good between them and we wailed and sorrowed, he pleasurably enjoyed the grisly groove. Any Yoruba who believes in Tinubu should feel free to vote for him on whatever index that sways them to him. It should never be on account of Tinubu being a crusader for the Yoruba or his innate Yorubaness. I cannot see any of such in him.

Tinubu himself, on Friday in Ekiti State, reified this theory that the twin evils of fuel scarcity and acute shortage of naira notes were weaponised to willingly breed chaos in Nigeria. Since the campaign began, Tinubu has been accused of going the way of parasites and like them, deploying his proboscis to feed off the pain of the people. You would think he has always been on the side of the suffering poor. In Ekiti, he said: “They locked up money…They’re doing it to get you angry so that you can become violent, and they will postpone the election to bring interim government.” Who are the “they” who will postpone election? The PDP, Atiku Abubakar or Peter Obi?

It is either that Buhari and his Emefiele sidekick are antediluvian in their policy-making or have been deliberate in their projection of a chaotic aftermath, as Tinubu alleged. Either or both must be the reason why Nigerians would be dragged down to their feet, to point zero, by two key survival indices of our national life as this. Since the redesigning of the naira, Emefiele has been shuttling from self-reversal to making outright laughable policy contradictions on the naira. The latest is that banks will now dispense N20,000 notes across their counters. Was it myopia or deliberate attempt at dystopia that bred earlier statements on banks-citizens’ transactions in the naira notes?

In the midst of these, Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai, appeared on national television, apparently as bearer of a sword aimed at the Aso Rock Villa. El-Rufai is always the messenger and bearer of acidic arrows and conflagration parceled as messages whenever the system wants to shoot its shots. In an interview with the Tinubu-owned TVC last Thursday, the Kaduna governor pursued further the allegation that the CBN’s currency swap was an incendiary plot to incite voters against the APC. This, he also said, was masterminded by an Aso Rock cabal.

Having gone to this extent of belling the cat, El-Rufai’s bravery or bravado then stopped. He struggled frenetically to exonerate Buhari from the “evil plan.” He thinks that the cabal is exploiting Buhari’s goodness and desire to have things done the right way. Whether this was a pun or euphemism, what El-Rufai manifested in that interview was the image of a Smart Alec who was trying to be clever by half. It is either he was saying Buhari lacks grit, a mind of his own, is a simpleton or is indecisive with the power he weilds. Otherwise, why would a president be as effeminate or lacking in decision-making powers as to allow some other persons to take decisions for him? Did the cabal also instruct Buhari not to attend Tinubu’s campaign rallies?

The truth, which many do not know, is that Buhari is only decisive when it comes to matters that have to do with himself alone. I doubt if he is decisive even his children. Certainly not with his “wife”. Just as he did in Ogun in 2019, Buhari has also told Nigerians to vote for whoever they want to. In 2019, however, he was emphatic that voters should vote for him to return to his Aso Rock pot of soup. Yes, voters must be told to choose whoever they want but that must not come from the mouth of a man who climbed to his position riding the crest of a political party. It is an anathema in party politics.

… the Yoruba should let Tinubu fight his political enemies alone and not allow him to use them as pawns and fodders of the war. When the going was good between them and we wailed and sorrowed, he pleasurably enjoyed the grisly groove. Any Yoruba who believes in Tinubu should feel free to vote for him on whatever index that sways them to him. It should never be on account of Tinubu being a crusader for the Yoruba or his innate Yorubaness. I cannot see any of such in him.

And then in Ekiti, Tinubu switched from parasitism to weaponising ethnicity. He conspiratorially worked on the Yoruba people’s psyche for his selfish gain. It is similar to what, in argumentative pitfalls, is called argumentum ad misericordiam – the appeal to pity. Knowing that, like every other ethnic group, the Yoruba desire to have their own speaking their language inside Aso Rock, in Ekiti State Tinubu played on that yearning selfishly. He chose to appeal to the people’s emotion by touching that sensitive emotive chord of the people. Speaking in Yoruba and beginning his statement with that three-fold repetitive strategy of discourse, which ancient Yoruba elders employed to ram home their thoughts, he has been quoted to have asked the crowd: “Eyin Omo Yoruba! Eyin Omo Yoruba!! Eyin Omo Yoruba!! (Yoruba people!) Whose turn is it? Relax. If you hear rumblings; if someone is not pursuing something, then something is pursuing someone. This coming election is your election. Is that not so? It is the election you will use to liberate yourselves… They lie. We are not servants.”

Now, there are many strands of issues woven into that charge to the Yoruba. The first question to ask is: How Yoruba is Tinubu himself? Or, put differently, how Yoruba-empathetic has he been, especially since he helped bring the Buhari affliction on Nigeria in general and his people in particular? First is that he sits on a Lagos State that has shown repeated disdain for the Oodua conglomerate, one of the bequeathals of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. His Lagos State – as spearheaded by him – has disconnected itself repeatedly from any collective aspiration of Yorubaland. Aside Oodua, the Amotekun security outfit is another of such. When Akin Ambode attempted to change that narrative by pulling Lagos into Oodua and attending Oodua’s meeting in Ibadan, a source told me that Tinubu hectored the governor out of it, shouting “gedegbe l’Eko duro!” – Lagos stands alone.

Again, when Yorubaland was going through hell in the hands of Fulani herders, the children of Awolowo never heard a word of empathy or show of sympathy with their tragedy from Tinubu. When Akesan market in Oyo got burnt, I am aware that he didn’t even send a word of empathy. A few weeks after, when similar calamity befell a town in the North, Tinubu was there with his trolley of empathy and a N50 million donation. Again, a few years ago, Tinubu was in the Akure home of Pa Reuben Fasoranti, ostensibly to commiserate with him over the death of his daughter. To douse the narrative of her being killed by Fulani herders, Tinubu asked “where are the cows?” But on Friday, a few kilometres away from where he asked where the cows were and where the daughter of the Yoruba patriarch was killed, Tinubu wanted the same Yoruba people to help go to war with him if he is not made president. We should remind him that the children of those friends of his who have now become his enemies because they don’t want him to succeed them, were the ones killing our own children and parents and mauling them to their deaths without a word from him.

The scenario of Tinubu and Yorubaland is akin to that of the selfish Oluode (Chief Hunter) who, aware of famine in the village, with the existential challenges it poses to the people, goes hunting for game and devours them alone like a cat does, without sharing even the animal’s hoof with his neighbours. Yorubas explain this as “Ile njo, ole nja, aa ri Oluode; o np’eran, o n da je bi ologbo.” The cat mirrors similar selfishness. A Yoruba aphorism which explains this selfishness of the cat says “apa’dele ni o je ka mo p’ologbo ns’ode.” (“The cat pretends that it doesn’t kill whereas it does but devours it on the rafters”).

So, the Yoruba should let Tinubu fight his political enemies alone and not allow him to use them as pawns and fodders of the war. When the going was good between them and we wailed and sorrowed, he pleasurably enjoyed the grisly groove. Any Yoruba who believes in Tinubu should feel free to vote for him on whatever index that sways them to him. It should never be on account of Tinubu being a crusader for the Yoruba or his innate Yorubaness. I cannot see any of such in him.

Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.