Iro npa ro fun ro! That’s my late maternal uncle’s favorite expression of frustration and resignation in the face of certain benumbing and overwhelming situations. There is no easy way to ferry the deep recesses of the Yoruba world covered by that expression across into English – one lie is telling lies to another lie? One lie is deceiving a fellow lie? – so I’ll just zoom in on one of the contexts in which my uncle usually blurted out that favorite expression of his – always followed by hisses of irritation and the inevitable “shior”.
Say there is arbitration by elders in one of those numerous issues that could pitch one market woman against another in the village. If, in the narratives and counter-narratives of the circumstances of the dispute, my uncle encountered such an amazing quantity of lies and untruths as to render the situation completely farcical, he would wield that Yoruba interjection like a newly-sharpened cutlass: “Ha, iro npa fun ro nbi o.
Iro npa ro fun ro in my uncle’s philosophical deployment is much more than a situation in which one enterprising lie tries to outwit an equally smart lie by telling it a lie. For my uncle, iro npa ro fun ro is a world regulated by its own logic and internal dynamics. It is an imperium of farce built with blocks of lies and falsehood. It is the congealing of human experience and the daily rhythm of life into a permanent intercourse of lies and falsehood, the result of which could be devastating when it comes to define what an entire nation calls reality. Looking at various fragments of Nigerian reality that have assailed one’s psyche in recent times, it is obvious that one no longer has the luxury of worrying that our nation-space has become an imperium of iro npa ro fun ro. Rather, the fear is that this incubus has even acquired chthonic dimensions, eroding and replacing the underlying bases of one’s experience of nationhood. A few examples will suffice.
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Anambra. Always good to start excursions into national farce from that auspicious location. No need to rehash the story of Charles Soludo and Tony Anenih, his offshore Godfather. No need to revisit Chris Uba’s sense of a fundamental violation of the territorial integrity of his fiefdom by Soludo and Anenih. Forget the kind of money of dubious origins that all the aforementioned actors in the Anambra script have been throwing around. Forget all of that and zoom in on Chris Uba’s sense of personal injury at the possibility that some Nigerians might even be remotely entertaining the thought that he is a criminal, you know, like that Soludo. Hear Chris Uba: “Please, I want Nigerians to judge between me and Soludo who among us is a criminal in this country".
I am not interested in the pure inanity of Chris Uba’s statement. I am interested in the sort of national ethos that authorizes it and enables its crazy logic. How does a man who kidnaps a state governor in broad daylight, sends his thugs to burn and destroy public property worth millions, subverts the democratic process by rigging every member of the state House of Assembly into parliament, steals whatever he wants from the state’s treasury whenever he wants it – how does such a man get to grant a national press interview and invite all Nigerians to jury duty? Well, he gets to do that because there are too many layers of iro npa ro fun ro meshing into the weft of reality in Anambra and Nigeria. First, Chris Ngige, the man he kidnapped, was functioning as Governor in full national knowledge of the fact that he was not elected. He was single-handedly imposed on the state by his kidnapper.
And which laws did Chris Uba really break if you look at it too closely? Do not forget that iro npa ro fun ro involves layers and layers of farce congealing into reality and acquiring a crazy logic of its own. At the time of his assault on Anambra state, for instance, Chris Uba was acting with full presidential backing. Thanks to Obasanjo, the Nigerian state had more or less recognized Chris Uba as a sovereign citizen of Anambra – vested with the full apparatuses of statehood and hegemony. Was King Leopold of Belgium a “state” or a “person” vis-a-vis of the Congo? Was Chris Uba a “state” or a “person” under Obasanjo? You know the answer. Where the state cedes sovereign authority to a citizen as Obasanjo so brazenly did to Chris Uba, was the super-sovereign citizen not in fact doing law enforcement by invading government house to dislodge the ‘legitimate interloper’ that he had unwisely installed there? Perhaps, the public property that got destroyed and the people who died were all collateral damage in the bid to restore order as it inheres in the personhood of a man in whom the President had vested sovereignty?
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This is all dizzyingly crazy but that is precisely how reality works in an iro npa ro fun ro society like Nigeria. This, in fact, is the alienated mental universe that Chris Uba (and his ilk all over Nigeria) inhabits, hence the surprise that people could possibly perceive him as a criminal like Soludo. Unlike Uba, Soludo came into his millions without first receiving the gift of individual sovereignty and personal statehood status from the Nigerian state. That makes all the difference. The catch in iro npa ro fun ro happens when all this nonsense becomes so normal that even a sophisticated citizenry loses the ability to recognize farce. Consider this anecdote. I was so amazed by Chris Uba’s statement on Soludo that I decided to use it as the outgoing signature in my yahoo email account. No sooner had I posted something on a number of Nigerian internet listservs than someone excerpted the statement and proceeded, in all seriousness, to try and answer Uba’s stupid question: who is the (worse) criminal – Chris Uba or Charles Soludo? Unbelievably, the thread gathered steam. Chris Uba did in fact succeed in getting some Nigerians to do online jury duty while losing sight of the gigantic farce of the entire situation! And these were mostly Nigerians abroad. Sometimes you wonder what is wrong with those of us abroad. What next? Babangida would throw a similar national challenge, asking Nigerians to determine who the greatest thief is between Obasanjo, Abacha, and himself and we would all oblige him and rush to our keyboards to vote?
Iro npa ro fun ro has other manifestations in our national life. Consider the age scandal that attended the recently-concluded FIFA under-17 world cup tournament hosted by Nigeria. Since the birth of that tournament in 1985, I have never met any Nigerian who believes that we use age appropriate players for that and other age-grade competitions. Let’s face it: we have always cheated in these competitions. So, what was the problem this time? Adokiye Amasiemeka told the truth at the wrong time. The Amasiemeka controversy, his lynching online and in other spaces of national discourse, and the hysteria of self-styled patriots all point to another disturbing dimension of the corrosive essence of iro npa ro fun ro. All of a sudden, an entire nation seemed to be saying that a policy of being truthful and honest at all times is wrong. Honesty is no longer the best policy. Well, not at all times. We somehow inserted two new verses into Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 – a time to be truthful and a time to be untruthful; a time to be honest and a time to be dishonest. The patriots were of course on hand to add for good measure that being honest and truthful at the wrong time amounts to national betrayal.
Other things followed. We were assured by the iro npa ro fun ro peoples patriotic party that Nigeria was not alone. Other countries cheated too. Bla bla bla. As if there could conceivably be any justification for dishonesty. As if one country’s dishonesty excused ours. Na only Nigeria cheat? Add this casuistic claptrap to other brain-dead postulations one often encounters online such as “na only Ibori steal? Na only Bode George steal?” and you begin to take the full measure of how deeply iro npa ro fun ro has come to define our society from top to bottom. Otherwise reasonable online commentators have even stretched iro npa ro fun ro to the absurd level of looking under their pillows for ethnicist explanations of corruption in Nigeria. If the EFCC releases a list of corrupt people and I look at it and see only one or two names from my ethnic neck of the woods, the only perfectly logical and intellectual explanation I have for that is that other ethnic groups in Nigeria are biologically more prone to looting whereas my own superior people are biological strangers to looting. Go to listservs and you encounter attenuated or incompetently disguised versions of this crazy thesis.
There is the case of our friend, Dimeji Bankole who has just successfully weathered another one of his embarrassingly regular scandals by using the iro npa ro fun ro approach. News broke out that he might have recently purchased eighteen new bullet-proof cars for his convoy. Out came his media aides with strategies of denial that mirror the Nigerian tragedy. As usual, Bankole’s political foes and enemies of progress were at work to pull him down. The cars are an old story, already explained earlier this year or sometime last year. Besides, the purchase didn’t include eighteen bullet-proof cars. It merely included some bullet-proof cars. Approval for bullet-proof cars is not easy to get o. Even sef, there was budgetary approval for the cars. On and on went the constipated explanations. As if there could be any justification for Bankole’s convoy becoming a priority last year- if the vehicles were indeed purchased last year. As if there was anything you couldn’t get anticipatory or retroactive “budgetary approval” for in Nigeria at that level. As if Bankole was not expected to exercise sound judgement and reject the cars at that particularly inauspicious time against the backdrop of the impoverization of the Nigerian people that he and his PDP cohorts are responsible for. As if telling us that the cars were purchased last year makes the whole thing any less silly and annoying. Can these people ever gauge the nation’s mood correctly? No. They’d rather let one set of lies tell even more lies to another set of lies. Iro npa ro fun ro. Shior!
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