Lagos State and the drama of its embattled lawmaker and ex-speaker of its parliament, Mudashiru Obasa, appropriately answer to an idiom in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Insatiably curious about the mysteries of Wonderland, Alice had used the word, “Curiouser and curiouser” to express the mysteries of how she shrinks after drinking a potion. When Obasa emerged on Saturday to claim that he remains the speaker of the parliament, Alice’s wonder at the mysteries of Wonderland became a fitting description of the theatre of the absurd that Lagos politics is.
Before now, everything that emanated from the 13 January impeachment of Obasa was wrapped in rumours. Persuaded that evil and good exist contemporaneously, the Yoruba say, “Ìbí nbè nínú ire, ire nbè nínú ìbí.” This was what Ray Laurence of the Macquarie University set out to theorise in his paper, “Rumour and communication in Roman politics.” Tracing the literary and cultural history of rumour, the scholar deployed the Roman politics and society of old to theorise that rumours may not be totally evil as we assume. In essence, Laurence discovered that rumour is neither overly evil nor good. He cited an incident which happened in the 133 BC Roman society. A client of Tiberius Gracchus had suddenly and unexpectedly died. Gracchus was a Roman politician whose greatest renown was his agrarian reform law, which consisted in the transfer of land from the Roman state and wealthy landowners to poorer citizens. Gracchus had also served in the Roman army, fighting in Africa during the Third Punic War and in Spain during the Numantine War.
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So, at the death of Gracchus’ client, Roman plebeians originated and spun a rumour that the poor fellow had been poisoned. The rumour was brewed when, laid in state, the remains of Gracchus’ client were bespattered with sores. The huge crowd that gathered to witness his funeral and saw the sore-riven body concluded, without evidence, that the man had been a victim of poisoning. A seeming confirmation of this rumour immediately came when, at cremation, the poor soul’s body would not succumb to the torment of a burning fire. Manipulating this wide-spreading rumour, Gracchus dressed for weeks in mourning robes. He told whoever cared to listen that enemies of his land reforms had poisoned his client and, if he wasn’t careful, he could be poisoned as well. This widespread rumour helped Gracchus orchestrate popular opinion in his support for the reform, thus helping the poor Roman people access to land.
A very notorious rumour was spread about Obasa, like the Gracchus client poison rumour. As he fell from grace on 13 January in the hands of his own Julius Caesar’s Brutus colleagues of the Lagos parliament, Obasa was said to have flown into Abuja from America, where he was during the parliamentary coup. The rumour said that he had gone to consult with his benefactor, the Nigerian president. Who he also reportedly told that eedi was responsible for his fall. This rumour was in the mould of famous rumours in antiquities, like the urban legend of Rue des Marmousets in Paris in the 15th century. According to this: a barber and a pastry chef made cake trade with human flesh. Similarly, in Orleans, France in 1969, the rumour of the disappearance of young girls in fitting rooms inside Jewish shops was everywhere.
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On 16 September, 2018, I did a piece entitled “Tinubu the Ap’ejal’odo and his strange fish friend.” It was borne out of then ex-Governor Bola Tinubu’s leash-less powers in Lagos State politics. I was not aware of anyone in contemporary history who has possessed such totalitarian powers. He had the powers to conjure a Lagos dead to rise. That 2018 piece was illustrated with an anecdote of a fisherman and his wife. An ancient anecdote in pre- and post-colonial Yoruba society, it famously helped tame the greed of, as well as, any tendency within the society to play God.
Set in an African village, this story is that of a young wretched fisherman (Ap’ejal’odo) who was ravaged by failure. He was unable to catch enough fish over the years to rescue him from the pangs of lack. One day however, as he thrust his fishing hook into the river, it caught one of the largest fishes he had ever seen. Excited, Ap’ejal’odo pulled his awesome catch up the river bank and proceeded to yank it off the hook. As he attempted to carry the fish into his cane-woven basket, however, the fish began to speak like a human being. Ap’ejal’odo was at first afraid but he eventually pulled himself together and listened to the sermon of the strange fish. Singing, Ap’ejal’odo mo dé, já lo lo, já lolo… (Fisherman, here I come…), the fish pleaded to be rescued by the fisherman. It promised that if the fisherman spared its life, in lieu of this rescue, he should ask for whatever he wanted in life. Excited, Ap’ejal’odo let the strange fish off the hook into the river, having pleadingly asked it for wealth. Truly, by the time he got home, the ragged clothes on him and his wife had become a very big damask agbádá and Aṣọ aràn respectively, with their wretched hut transformed into a big mansion. The couple subsequently lived the life of unimaginable splendour and power in the village.
After a few years, and the couple being barren, the wife entreated Ap’ejal’odo to go fishing again and call out his fish friend to again rescue them from the social shame of barrenness. As he thrust his hook into the river, it caught the strange fish again and the earlier process was repeated. This time, he asked for a child and the strange fish granted it. Over the years, he magisterially summoned the fish through the same process and the fish kept bailing the couple out. Then one day, as Ap’ejal’odo and wife were waking up from their magnificent bed, a blinding and intruding ray of the sun meandered into their bedroom. Enraged, Mrs. Ap’ejal’odo couldn’t understand the temerity of the Sun. Couldn’t it respect the privacy and majesty of the richest couple in the land? She angrily asked Ap’ejal’odo to go meet his fish friend and ask that they be given the power to control the audacity and impunity of the Sun and other impertinent celestial forces.
Off Ap’ejal’odo went to the river bank, thrust his fishing hook into the river as he again invoked the strange fish. And Ap’ejal’odo made his plea via his famous song. The fish was peeved by the fisherman’s greed and audacity: “You were nobody; I made you somebody and you now have everything at your beck and call. Yet, you want to compete with God in majesty and you will not allow even a common Sun to shine and perform the illuminative assignment God brought it to perform on earth!” The fish then angrily stormed back into the river and as Ap’ejal’odo, downcast, walked back home. His old torn and wretched dress suddenly came back on him; his mansion transformed into the hut of the past and the couple’s latter wretchedness was more striking than that of yore.
Suchlike stories helped to shape the moral man. The African cosmology was governed by anecdotes, lore and mores, which prescribed moral codes. For centuries, these sustained and reinforced the associational and moral forte of Africa. Anecdotes that restrained a potential emperor from treading the path of ruination were told to children, even in their infancy; the same about petty thieves who came to ghastly ends. For instance, the destructive end of greed was foretold in pre-colonial Yoruba society in the emblematic story of Tortoise and the scalding hot porridge on fire he stole and covertly put on his head and covered with a cap. It burnt his scalp and became the cosmological explanation of the Yoruba for Tortoise’s baldness till today. At the end of the anecdotes, the story teller would ask the children what moral the narratives taught them.
Let’s keep the above Ap’ejal’odo anecdote in a bank. We will make use of it presently. Since the rumour broke out that Obasa said his predicament was an affliction, linguistic and syntactic surgeries have been done on the alleged Obasa word. Was eedi or asasi responsible for the coup against him? Or that he met his waterloo in the process of proxy-fighting the battle of the president? Both, metaphysical afflictions, are very strong Yoruba words that some users of the language, unable to find its appropriate synonym or a fitting cultural or spiritual etymology, concocted the Gaeco-Latin word ‘hubris’ for. Whatever you may settle for as the appropriate force that hit Obasa at the apogee of power, eedi and asasi are both words for external afflictions or calamities. However, while eedi is a spiritual affliction that makes the victim to act totally out of sync with their ordinary self, asasi, a stronger force, is programmed to ensure that it runs its full course on the victim until they meet their final denouement. Example of eedi, Yoruba believe, is a boy who rapes his mother while asasi, an invocation, consists of the invocator ordering the victim, in a distinct voice that could be heard only by them, to, for instance, go jump to death inside the well.
In Yoruba mythology, supported by an anecdote, Eedi was reputed to be a ghommid, a one-eyed part-human, part-otherworldly creature who deafens its victim to other voices except the victim’s. When men are led by the hubris of presuming themselves to be God as Obasa was, which leads them to commit fatal errors that subsume them, they are said to have succumbed to the fatal affliction of eedi. When Eedi is in operation, its victims don’t listen to wise counsel.
What afflicted Obasa during his imperial reign as Lagos Speaker could not have been either eedi or asasi. While it has a tinge of both, it is in a class of its own: the ex-Speaker invoked the power calamity upon himself. Like the Ap’ejal’odo, Obasa was inebriated by the alcohol of power and accomplishment. When I began to hear stories of his audacity and imperial attitude in power, I thought the spirit of youth jumped on him. It is only youthful exuberance that allows unthinking suicidal jump into vanity. In his advocacy for being the Emilokan (It is my turn) to climb the stool of Lagos governorship, Obasa failed to adhere to a famous counsel of late 19th century Irish poet, Oscar Wilde. Wilde had said, the commonest thing is delightful if one hides it. But as Wilde again said – a man cannot be too careful in the choice of their enemies – Obasa entered into self-idolatory, telling whoever cared to listen that it was his turn to be governor of Lagos. He then courted countless enemies bent on ensuring his self destruction. He seemed to have read a lot of Wilde’s. The temptation of Lagos governorship being too much for him, Obasa succumbed to the Irish poet’s counsel that the only way to get rid of a temptation was to jump into it. He acted like the anecdotal Ap’ejal’odo who unthinkingly, in spite of his earthly favour by his fish friend, wanted to be God.
Obasa could not be blind nor deaf to the trending news that Seyi, son of the Senior Ap’ejal’odo, the Capon of Lagos and Nigeria, is interested in that same stool of Lagos governorship. Didn’t he know, at the risk of citing Wilde again, that behind every exquisite thing that existed, lies something tragic?
While the hubris demonstrated by Obasa yesterday through his “triumphant” entry into Lagos will seem curiouser and curiouser, not only wasn’t it not novel, it was taken directly from the surreal playbook of Lagos politics. At a time when the whole Nigerian power calculus was against his presidential ambition, aspirant Bola Tinubu bit the bullet in Abeokuta on 3 June, 2022 when he proclaimed that it was his turn to be Nigeria’s president. Someday, if he dares to write his memoir, that ex-aspirant will need to tell the world whether that statement was spilled out of valour, boldness or was some metaphysical recitation.
Obasa’s bold comeback yesterday can only be one of two things: That he is poised to bite the bullet like Tinubu did in Abeokuta in 2022. Or that he is a proxy battle axe of the president himself. What is clear is that, his wasp that is dancing on the river has a drummer weaving the rhythm underneath the waters. Rumour had it that Obasa’s removal didn’t get the president’s approval. He was thus miffed at those who carried out the MKO Abiola wise-saying on him by shaving his head in his absence. Methinks, if the soup you cooked loses its savour, why cast the blame on the plate with which it was served? An Ap’ejal’odo will no doubt have a totalitarian tendency. Earlier, the rumour was that the Senior Ap’ejal’odo had cut the wind from his sail by de-linking him from access to Aso Rock. Another rumour is that, being an Ap’ejal’odo who is not satisfied with how his fish god friend had made him president in spite of his myriad earthly foibles, Tinubu, being the Imam, still wants to be the Sarki. In other words, the whole of Nigeria being under his suzerainty, the president is irritated by the Lagos Sun’s audacity to shine and now wants to use Obasa to teach his Lagos mentees the lesson of the omnipotence of imperial power.
Obasa’s poise to fight his mentor’s mentees, either proxy or otherwise, may be a re-hash of Ap’ejal’odo heading for the river bank to meet his fish god friend to complain about the temerity of the Sun. It could also be a clone of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In Jewish and Christian tradition, Nimrod was the leader of the people who built the Tower of Babel. He was a hunter who established his kingdom in the land of Shinar, later known as Babel or Babylon. At some point, Nimrod and his people began to puff up in rebellion and pride against God. God, we were told, broke up the people’s language into several variants, so much that there was no longer amity among them. We were also told that the builders attempted to construct a tower that would lengthen to heaven so that the people could have direct handshake with God.
Perhaps, some political adversaries of the Master Ap’ejal’odo of Lagos and Nigeria, bent on sending the greedy fisherman, who wanted to be God, back to his old ragged state, are poised to spin a spell. To achieve this, they chant the incantation, “as the early morning mist on the leaf cannot last till evening, so will you scatter” (ìmòtú, ìmòjo, ìmò eni kìì d’ojó alé). In the flexing of muscles over Obasa, the imperial power of Lagos and its surrogates may yet be feeling the arrows of the spell.
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
