But already the hunters are talking about pumpkins: If they share the meat let them remember thunder….—Christopher Okigbo
Christopher Okigbo, poet of all times, saw the total mess that nation-wreckers in the guise of politicians had made of the political freedom that Nigeria won in 1960 and pointedly predicted the violent collapse of the tragedy that had been imposed on the country by the alliance of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) and its unpopular partner in the Western Region, the cruelly denounced “Demon” - Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP). In his foretelling poem, “Come Thunder”, the poet of destiny who insisted that the poet should function “severally as priest, prophet, and legislator for mankind, as a man speaking to other men with a voice of moral authority strengthened by heightened sensibility”, indicated the inevitable end of the elaborate falsehood imposed on the people of Western Nigeria. Okigbo should know. He had lived in the city of Ibadan and knew well that that region of the country had an unquenchable spirit of rebellion against tyranny and impostors. In the “Path of Thunder”, Okigbo characterizes the impostors in Western Nigeria – and their allies at the centre - as an “elephant – the tetrarch of jungle”. This tetrarch, “who could pull four trees to the ground...with a wave of the hand” was eventually struck down in January 1966 by “the thunder”. In his “Hurrah for Thunder”, Okigbo celebrated the bloody end of the vagabonds, but he later warned that even the thunder should “wear a plume”.
But despite the violence that ended the lives and evil schemes of the “elephants” of the First Republic, by the Second Republic, the remaining elephants and their baby-elephants had re-grouped within the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) and said again to the “mongoose”, “I will strangle you…” However, as the poet insists, “the eye that looks down will surely see the nose”, hence thunder struck again in 1983. The story was not much different. It was the repeated attempt by the national coalition of rogues to “re-colonize” the west of Nigeria and the valiant efforts of the people of the region to resist, with their blood, their forced admission into the “national brotherhood of administrative incompetence” that resulted in the collapse of the Second Republic.
But, as the journalist in Festus Iyayi’s Heroes lashed out in frustration, “the black man is an eternal fool, especially any black man that has any advantage in the total arrangement of society” – or something roughly equivalent to this. Acting, the third time, in concert with a military that had become what one of their departing Chiefs of Staff described as an “Army of anything goes”, the same class of politicians, mostly in the latest mutation of the NPC-NPN trajectory, the National republican Convention (NRC), combined to abort the Third Republic even before it was born. However, the story was a bit more complicated this time. Some of the characters who ought to have been in the NRC were forced to join the Social Democratic Party (SDP) due to the imposed two-party system. Some, like Chief Tony Anenih, who avoids any socially redemptive scheme like a plague, became the chair of the SDP. He sold his party’s victory cheaply and dishonourably. Again, the opposition to the daylight robbery of the people’s mandate came from the same region of the country. The Third Republic eventually became a still-birth as the crudest and the vilest of thunders rolled back into power. The rest is part of our unenviable current history.
As the elephant again ravaged the jungle in Ekiti State recently, Okigbo comes to mind. And as Mr. Segun Oni and his minders in Abuja - who failed to publicly ask the blighted electoral umpire to follow her “conscience” until they had settled that she had none - talk about “pumpkins”, they should remember that such hefty electoral theft that they have just accomplished has never stood in the political history of the people of Western Nigeria.
However, the particular thunder that Okigbo predicted and lyricized in the 1960s has become thoroughly discredited. First, we didn’t pay attention to the poet’s warning that “the same thunder can make a bruise” and the thunder too never listened to the poet’s caution that it “should wear a plume”. It is a new thunder that is emerging in the horizon. The emerging thunder “can - also - break” - as the poet predicted.
How can the collapse of the present imposition be different from our earlier experience? What are the elements in the new configuration that would lead to the return of the people’s mandate to the rightful owners? Where are the possibilities of a new order in such a deceased system? How would the strategic errors and tactical mistakes of the opposition conduce to a new order? These are questions that will be settled in the immediate future. It will become evident soon that the PDP should rather have left the Greater West - old Western Region states - out of its foul “mainstream”. In holding down the region, the behemoth might end up losing its overall prize.
However, the gargantuan fraud perpetrated by the semi-criminal headship of the INEC in collaboration with the PDP is also a lesson for the “moderates” in the Action Congress. Those of us who sympathize with the AC because it is the least leprosy-infested part of the remaining fingers – apologies to the late Uncle Bola Ige – are not unaware of its serious limitations. Perhaps the greatest strategic error that an important section of the AC committed is the belief in the “inherent decency” of the present occupiers of power in Aso Rock. The lesson they should learn from Ekiti is this: You cannot make a separate (personal) peace with a collective threat.
The poet accompanies us. Condolences....
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