Seeing how empires die, strongmen collapse and kingdoms go up in ruins, Yoruba seek to showcase the brevity of life. In this, they attempt to demonstrate that all life’s attainments are perishable. In metaphors of the masquerade festival and the morning dew that perches on leaves by sidewalks leading to the farm (enini), they bring out the certainty of finality very succinctly. In two short allegories, they perfectly capture the fleeting, short-lived nature of political influence and authority. So, they say, the yearly masquerade festival will soon come to an end and the son of the Chief Masquerade will, like every other mortal, buy his fried bean cake and corn meal from the market square. They render this as, “Ohun t’ó ńtán ni eégún odún, omo Alágbàáà ńbò wá rà’kàrà jè’ko.” Within same trope of allegory, they personify and humanize the morning dew. Their aim to is to use the shortness of the reign and fleeing appearance of the morning dew as warning to human wielders of power. Unfortunately for this dew, its early morning conspiracy to reign eternally, majestically perching on leaves by the sidewalks to the farm, is governed by brevity. This, my people again render as, “Ìmò enini kìí di ojó alé.”
On Thursday, 29 May, President Bola Tinubu came out to observe the ritual rites of presidential office. He began his speech by addressing us as “fellow compatriots”. It is a tautology that he chewed ad nauseam in the speech. Language experts have faulted the syntax of “fellow” and “compatriots” cohabiting in the same line. They say the latter embeds the former. Not to worry. Such unnecessary and needless repetition into redundancy is what we get in the bargain in the action of our leaders. Africa and indeed, the Third World in general, suffers the affliction of leaders and tautologos. It is an epidemic of leaders who act like the sexually infirm. For this species of infirm male, when queried on why they cannot insert into the right hole, they boast of possessing the capability to make multiple insertion of threads into the barely visible hole of the needle, even in the dark. Were Tinubu to be tautologous in delivery of democratic dividends, it would have been more desirable than repetition of needless words.
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Anyway, the speech carries a suffocatingly huge aroma of deodorant. Statistical and arithmetic figures have same bearings as the numbers of voodoo. To justify the punishing regime of fuel subsidy removal he imposed on hapless Nigerians on 29 May, 2023, which was followed by nil attention to the social and economic uplift of the Nigerian life, the president told us how that exercise turned the cycle. He said, for instance that the policy halted the frittering of erstwhile daily N18.4 billion subsidy and his government has funnelled same into healthcare, education, housing and critical infrastructure. You will need a powerful stethoscope or Jigi Bola to see these voodoo benefits in your neighbourhood. He said Nigerians lost over N8 trillion in three years in the subsidy regime, which was diverted into rent-seeking endeavours. Well said. On its flip-side, Nigerians recently lost, among many other opaque endeavours of this government, their N800 billion patrimony. It was mopped up from the masses’ blood, their earnings, into the president’s personal, amorphous Renewed Hope campaign for re-election programme.
That speech must be target at January and February next year. Yet another Nigerian masquerade festival is here again. It will be held in those months in 2027. As it is in traditional masquerades (Egúngún) where sacred cultural figures are believed to embody the spirits of deceased ancestors, election time also carries huge spiritual significance in democratic politics. In Egúngún festivals, costumed dancers with flowery clothes pay obeisance to the spirit of creation and pour libations for a greater tomorrow. As candidates of political parties file out to collect nomination forms in elaborate frenzies, they approximate masqueraders filing out to fulfil these sacred obligations. Masquerades emerge from their traditionally believed abodes in heaven to bless the community, seek the maintenance of social order, as well as physically and spiritually connecting the living with their spiritual ancestors. After each masquerade festival, the masquerader dances into the sacred, restricted ancestral forest grove, believed to be their spiritual birthplace and headquarters.
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Three years down the line, we have seen the innards of the people we voted into power. In those three years, we have also seen those who posture as replacement for them. Like an admixture of wheat and chaffs, they all elbow one another in the struggle for power.
Now, it is becoming clear to President Tinubu and other wielders of political authority, borrowing from an old-fashioned literary phrase, that ‘the time is nigh’”. The reality of life’s natural sequence of beginning and ending, like a warthog face to face with a Comodo dragon, is no longer a distant reality. It is here. And the rat race by politicians to act right, speak right and position right has begun. Tinubu’s 29 May speech is in this mode.
Pardon my digression. Then, the president’s speech drifted into some economic ‘ifs’. If government hadn’t intervened, Nigeria would have “drifted toward fiscal breakdown, worsening poverty and severe economic uncertainty” the president said in apocalyptic drifts. If the president must know, those are actually the current experience of Nigerians with his government’s economic programme. While his economic czars say things are looking up, the reality for the people is the obverse. When confronted by damaging drifts as the president’s speech, Nigerians turn to the state of things before their self-proclaimed Messiahs’ intervention, for corroboration on how worse things have been.
Yoruba specifically do this. Turning to this deity called Òrìsà which proclaims itself a salvationist deity in their lives but has shown incapacity for salvaging them, they ask it to leave them in the pre-state it met them (Òrìsà, b’óò le gbè mí, fi mí’lè b’óo ti bá mi). For the Nigerian people, the state this Òrìsà met Nigeria on 29 May, 2023, shorn of this propaganda, is far more comforting. Market statistics will confirm this. To cover this reality with the shroud of reform is to return us to the Ibrahim Babangida era. At the height of his misrule, IBB’s economic reforms were perceived as wearing the visor of the Dracula and generally labeled as devoid of a human face. We face a similar situation today.
Earlier, the president descended into the comedic world of skit-makers. At a theatrical show at the International Conference Centre in Abuja, after receiving his certificate of return and flag as the APC presidential candidate for the 2027 election, he said, “I shared the pain with you. I know what it takes to reform this economy that was in tatters. If you lost sleep, I lost some too. If you have lost weight, I think I have lost some too.” Reform has become the proverbial tortoise who is always blamed for every leadership incapacity.
The truth is that the president was mocking us. We understand that that statement emanated from the contradictions constructed by speech writers. Speech writers create parallel universes for the principal, different pseudo universes within a multiverse that are unreal and fake. What pain did or does the president share? The pain Michael Oyedokun of Ahoro-Esinele in Oriire, Oyo State suffered as blood-sucking bandits stuck their daggers to his throat? The pain the woman with an 18-month baby stuck to her back inside the forest has suffered for two weeks now? The pain the children in captivity suffer as venomous snakes play ludo beside them, sun pelting the captives and rain mercilessly pounding them inside the evil forest? Or the hunger that has riven millions of Nigerian families, tearing them asunder in the last three years? The pain families of breadwinners who committed suicide because they have been de-masculined by the economic downturn this government created three years ago?
In that same 29 May speech, the president had some voodoo figures to bandy. All Share Index has risen. Companies are declaring profits. 2700 kilometres of highways and major roads constructed. Lagos-Calabar Coastal highway. Sokoto-Badagry. Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano road. Renewed Hope Housing scheme. They sound so mechanical, so alien like the Ali and the Angel story in the famous classic fable of the New Oxford English Course primary school textbooks of the 1980s. Ali was a Smart Alec, a merchant of tricks who told the whole village he had brought them an angel. He lodged the mythic angel in his bedroom and demanded that, to confer authenticity, villagers should file in to view the imported celestial being for a fee. The caveat he gave was however that, only the pure-minded, bereft of sin, could see the angel. One after the other, afraid of being tagged impure, they all claimed to have seen Ali’s angel.
The president’s voodoo-like figures of national economic progress will seem to have hidden the three-year nauseatingly smelly odour of under-performance and rot that jams the noses of Nigerians. The president and his team can enjoy their voodoo. Nigerians know the facts of their situation. My people say that two interlocutors cannot suffer the losses resulting from a lie. If the one telling the lie doesn’t know he is lying, the lie’s recipient must know they are being lied to. But the people remain still and unfazed like the sword in a scabbard.
Many APC stalwarts, like Ali’s victims, have seen Tinubu’s wonders. Regime fawners have, too. But the masses cannot. All they see, in the words of Rat Race, a track in the album of Victor Essiet of the Mandators fame album of 1988, is the “rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer”. For the masses of our country, in the last three years, Nigeria has been a concrete jungle, the like Bob Marley and the Wailers ululatingly sang about in 1973. Lead vocalist, Bob, sang, “No sun will shine in my day today/The high yellow moon won’t come out to play/Darkness has covered my light/And has changed my day into night/Now, where is this love to be found?/Won’t someone tell me ’cause life (sweet life)/Must be somewhere to be found…Instead of a concrete jungle/Where living is harder…”
Now, the figures, statistics of national progress and self-articulation which the president gave above, are gradually being gradated. From performance figures like the May 29 speech, we have now landed in election number figures. Realising the potency of numbers, the APC appeared smarter than all other political parties in Nigeria. With an apparent pre-knowledge of the Electoral Act prescription of mandatory online party voters register, the ruling party was the first to begin the warehousing of figures. It did this before anyone else woke up. At the end of the day, after primary elections that were visibly manipulated, the president was pronounced as emerging winner of the presidential primary with a total of 10.9 million votes. His challenger, an unknown quantity apparently put up as a figurine, Stanley Osifo, got recorded as having polled 16,503 votes. This has been said to be a pre-election allotment of votes, preparatory to rigging the 2027 federal elections.
Not ones to allow themselves to be marooned and outmaneuvered in the votes allotment abracadabra race, other political parties have gone on same roller-coaster. The ADC’s primary was equally fraught with number perversions that speak glaringly to what obtains in the voodoo world. In voodoo, practiced in New Harlem, West African countries of Benie, Togo, Ghana, Nigeria and regions of the Americas/Caribbean like
In Haiti, arithmetical numbers are equally used in rituals to tweak offerings, invoke spirits, and to put the pantheon of deity known as the Lwa in organised forms. Papa Legba, a principal spirit in Haiti, also serves as a vital intermediary between humanity and the spirit realm. Assigned figures are in tune with well-known voodoo symbols like 769 which represents death or 369 for human excrement matters. Some biblical Psalms chapters are also said to have magical efficacy. Gamblers, for instance, use Psalms 4, 57, and 114 as symbols of prayer for success. This was the precise voodoo tweak of numbers that the presidency, APC and ADC are embroiled in in the last few weeks.
What Nigerian politicians have adapted for their presidential so-called elections is not any more than those voodoo figures from Haiti. Our politicians see the figures as energetic keys to open the vault of power. New Orleans and Haitian voodoo practitioners must be envious of Nigerian political parties’ love for their ancient mystique of figures and numbers.
What drives the above drift is political power. It is no longer news that Nigerian politicians have discovered the huge and talismanic powers of political power. You must first seek it and all other things shall be added unto you. Political office in Nigeria is more profitable than highway robbery, more rewarding than money-doubling and Advanced Free Fraud. Armed robbery is today on the decline because a more rewarding, less risky robbery of the people is in politics. Nigerian politics today is the modern variant of money rituals of traditional society called Òògùn owó. It is why there is a huge traffic into politics and political offices and the rush into it is benumbing.
Unfortunately, this migration is dominated by an overwhelming number of self-seeking persons for whom the people are mere statistics. Yet, our fates as a people are embodied in their selfish pursuits. It reminds me of Maryse Conde’s novel, Segu. Set in the historical town of Segou, which is today part of Mali, Conde weaves her narrative around the life of Dousika Traore, the king’s highly trusted advisor, and his four sons. This quadruple is the sole force tearing at the fabric of the Malian nation. While Tiekoro, the eldest of Traore’s sons, renounces his people’s traditional religion in favour of Islam; another son, Siga rises in defence of tradition, but becomes a merchant; Naba gets kidnapped by slave raiders and Malobali eventually becomes a mercenary, a halfhearted Christian.
Like the four sons of Traore, Nigerian politicians are tearing at the fabric of Nigeria. They are in conflict with themselves, with God but in bed with Mammon and Ògún, the Yoruba god who bathes with blood. When his worshipers are possessed by Ogun’s spirit, they invoke traditional chants, his Oríkì praise poetry, which celebrate him by the epithet of one who abandons the water flowing in his home but chooses to bathe with blood, “Òl’ómi n’ílé f’èjè wè“. Blood of the people are spilled in the process of politicking with the lives of the people. Could you imagine what Michael Oyedokun’s spilled blood is saying to those who probably played politics with his life? Like Ògún, many Nigerian politicians, especially the ones in office, have shed so much blood through their actions and inaction. In the pathway of Ògún, they are a fierce, dual-natured deity. They are a destructive force of war, as well as the creative power of Ògún’s ability to forge metal tools in the smithy.
Unfortunately, Nigerian voters do not know or possess the capacity to know the above. In January and February, 2027, we will still vote the same vermin that suck our blood, the Sàngó deity that licks our red corpuscles. And the tragedy of our nationhood will begin afresh like the Roman god, Janus’ eternal curse to roll the bolder up and down hill.
Yesterday, 30 May, was the 66th birthday of my former boss, Dr Chimaroke Ogbonnia Nnamani. Born that day in 1960, he was a day shy of his 30th birthday when he became the governor of Enugu State. I first met Nnamani sometime in the year 2002. The state was then roiling in the crisis that sparked from the Adoration tragedy, which occurred in the early hours of 7 March of that year. Stampede and pandemonium had broken out at the exit gates of this religious ground.
A massive all-night crusade, led by Reverend Father Ejike Mbaka, at the Government Technical College (GTC), had been its catalyst. At the end of the pandemonium, 14 worshipers were stampeded to death. It suddenly transformed into political barbs aimed at constricting the government. Mbaka claimed that a poisonous tear gas ordered by the governor had killed the worshipers. At the end of it all, a judicial panel of inquiry revealed that it was a political crucifix disguised in episcopal garb, erected to hang Nnamani.
This particular travail caught my attention in far away Ibadan. It was to be Nnamani’s baptism in political persecution. It opened the trough for many other persecutions in his eight-year governance of Enugu State. When we thereafter met, Nnamani confessed his admiration for my weekly newspaper catechism. And he landed the bomb: Could I work for him? My eventual movement to the Coal City in 2003 marked a strategic turning point in my life. I transited from being a naive student of practical politics, though its doctoral student, into a full understanding of what makes Nigerian politics tick. From Enugu, I learned raw politicking, grits and candour.
I left for Enugu with fear and trepidation. Nnamani was to later make me fall in love with the Igbo race. He was a workaholic who didn’t believe that impossibility was possible. His de-tribalised outlook was infectious, as he apportioned to every man measures that approximated their contributions. He had aides of all nationalities in his government. He later made me, a man who traveled across several rivers to arrive at the Coal City, head of the governor’s media team. I cannot forget his excitement when he learnt that I wanted to make Enugu my home and had started to erect a place to live therein. Enugu soil thereafter accepted the umbilical cords of two of my children.
For four years, I weathered the political storm of Enugu with Nnamani. His battles became my battles and his victories, my savour. He protected me like the Mother Hen does its chicks. At meetings when conferees naturally descended into their mother tongues, Nnamani jokingly cautioned them; “lest Adedayo assumes we want to sell him.” And as a riposte, he asked me to go pick one of the Igbo ladies as a sure way of learning the language. After my sojourn in Enugu, I had a life-long ostracism from the commune of ethnic profilers. Bad and good people exist in all nationalities.
Nnamani was too trusting and suffered the huge loss of his trusted loyalists, including the man who succeeded him. His developmental legacies in Enugu State are still akin to legends. They dot every corner.
Nnamani is a grossly misunderstood man. A man with his own foibles, like every typical man, he is Nigerian inside out and loves his people like an irredentist. He worked both as governor and senator for the upliftment of his Enugu and Nkanu people. It was that love that propelled him to work for the then incoming Tinubu government, at the detriment to himself; a love that backfired in his people’s disdain for the APC. The people occupying the federal government today, for whom Nnamani was crucified, seem to have forgotten him as he is left in political Siberia.
Here is a toast to a long life for and the continued great health of Dr Chimaroke Nnamani.
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
