February 15, 2010
Nigeria is a very interesting country. We are a country where suffering goes so very much with lots of smiling. We are a land with such restlessly patient people, where anything does go. Not the least of these being, as we were told not so long ago by a now, not so loud Aondoaka; the novel phenomenon of e-governance, involving the virtual transportation of Aso Rock to anywhere in the galaxy, of which the royal Saudi hospital is just one example of, and Bush house in London another, still. articleadslinks
Many Nigerians, and not a few with good intentions, have welcomed the “doctrine of necessity” at the heart of the National Assembly’s resolution that made the man from Bayelsa with such good luck and an impatient wife, our head of state. The application of that doctrine, in this case though, is quite akin to that of the Reverend Father who christened meat fish during a Lenten period and was thus absolved of all sins against the Church as he went ahead to feast his gluttonous mid-section. To say that the barely 15seconds interview, which Yar’Adua, supposedly, gave the BBC equates to a letter via which power was transmitted was more than following the dance steps of the doctrinal drumbeats of necessity. It smacks more like the doctrine of idiocy. But maybe the National Assembly is really more to be commended than blamed?
The ball actually had crossed to the court of the Federal Executive Council to take steps that could have seen Yar’Adua’s seat permanently forfeited by him, once a panel of medical experts considered him unfit to continue ruling, so to speak. But perhaps only the lady, who had set the ball of rebranding rolling, had the balls to hit the ball squarely towards the president, where it should be headed?
Who knows, there are several “perhapses”, and “maybes” that might be deserving of engagement in themselves, but which are not what I take to be my point of concern at this point in time. The fact that the speech of transmission was that from the BBC really got me into deep thinking. In this information age and time of communication technology, half a century after independence from Britain, the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria would choose to address, the world (we are assuming here that it was he who spoke; not a few people including my good friend Uche Onyeogocha have declared this itself to be a lie), he could not find Voice of Nigeria or Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria. It had to be the British Broadcasting Corporation!
This laughable situation took my mind to one of the Gbedu, numbers of Abami Eda himself. I am talking of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. His Africa Shrine where he held court as “Chief Priest” was known as Gbedu to the initiate. There are several songs that he never publicly released. Only those that grooved Yabis Nites on Fridays or “gbaduned” Comprehensive Show on Saturdays or those that bought the bootlegged tapes in those days from Mr. Tee at Ikeja roundabout would know what the world still misses with Seun Kuti’s siblings stopping him and Dede Mabiyaku from releasing those pulsating rhythms and philosophically deep songs. Most of these songs are know by their acronyms to the initiate. Examples include: Akunakuna Senior Brother of Perambulator (ASBP); Clear Road for Jaga Jaga (CRFJJ) and; Big Blind Country (BBC). There are no prizes for realizing that it was to BBC my mind went.
In BBC, Fela sang a lot about rebranding. He complained that “I see all our fine, fine women, dem dey perm the hair of head”. He rather called on the beautiful ladies to plait their hair in the traditional African manner. Beyond the social commentary on rebranding, the song however had political questions stated in the vintage Fela fashion. He said; “na one-eyed man be king, in the country of the blind”. But he further noted that since everyone in the country was blind, how would they know if the one eye the king is supposed to have is actually not just a hired eye?
The Nigerian political elites are our one-eyed king. Comprising “distinguished” and “honourable” ladies and gentlemen in the National Assembly, loud-mouthed Attorney-Corporals and Ministers of mis-Information who speak out only after the expiry dates on the label of discourse is in itself in dispute, and a host of their hangers-on in the parties of thieves and societies of crooks where they share our collective patrimony; they have all as one body hired the eye of the imperialist overlords seated in Washington, London, Paris, Brussels and Tokyo.
Yar’Adua’s sickness is but a metaphor of a sick nation or more aptly put a sick elite class that can not give even minimalist push towards national development. This is at the heart of the rebranding that they ask us to pursue.
Rebranding is what Jonathan Goodluck amounts to in a sense and that is in the sense of: “the more things change the more they remain the same”. The rebranding Dora posited –how for goodness sake would pepper rest without a Minister of Information coming up with his or her own pet project?- is to make Nigeria still more marketable for the forces that marketed SAP to us and to whom the future of our country already was marketed to. There is however much more than just one form of branding and rebranding.
In the times of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, blacks were seen as sub-human. The white slave masters went to the extent of branding, each slave as their property. This entailed impressing hot iron with the owners name or trade mark on the bodies of his slaves. Rebranding would amount to a change of ownership from one slave master to another.
There was a time that the sun never set on the British Empire and dominions. Nigeria was one of the colonial properties of Britain then. This was in the diaper-wearing age of modern imperialism. The twentieth century saw the imperialist brand of colonialism replaced with that of neocolonialism. Perhaps what rebranding amounts to is when rather than succumb to the Gatling guns or trade we the subjects off for ogogoro, beads or looking mirrors, power at the highest echelon of what is supposed to be our country is transmitted through the BBC. The one once branded a slave by the master rebrands himself as being worse than a slave.
The Nigerian elites might be scum, worse than slaves, but the wretched of the land’s earth are not blind, nor are we deaf. We can see, and we can hear. Today the sound of thunder is mooted by the necessity of their idiocy and their rebranding the continued sale of our country’s sovereignty. But as Walter Rodney would say: “this act in itself will not delay their day of judgment”.
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