February 23, 2010
A little drama played out in the Federal House of Representatives – that space of legislation that has largely become a proscenium – sometime last week. The jamboree delegation that the House sent to Jeddah couldn’t present its report. Reason? The group hadn’t really been able to work on it since they returned to Nigeria. Of the six Jeddah safarists, only four were in fact in the House to give lame excuses. One had taken a private detour to Dubai on the return trip from Jeddah; a second jetted out to Madrid for another undisclosed business almost as soon as the group landed in Nigeria. A furious Dimeji Bankole gave the group an ultimatum to get its act together and report back to the house.articleadslinks
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(To be read to the accompaniment of Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s Sisesiqhingini – “Everything is so stupid stupid stupid stupid”
I propose to draw rather heavy conclusions from this business as usual scenario. I propose to explore certain ways of seeing – or not seeing – Nigerians by our fiends in the political rulership and the various vistas of demission on the part of the followership. For too long we, the people, have asked the question: when these fellas peep outside of the rose-tinted and alienated confines of their power-drunk world, what do they see? Outside of Aso Rock, the National Assembly, and Government House in the state capital, what exactly do they see?
The answer to this question is of course clear to every Nigerian. Our fiends in Abuja and the state capitals see nothing. Absolutely nothing. They are too blinded by lucre and the prebendal nature of public office to see the streets of Nigeria. Their useless convoys may ply our roads and disturb us with siren, they can’t see those roads. They did not accompany the poet, Olu Oguibe, on his psychic trip through this Nigeria:
I have cried so often with broken men
And peered into a million faces blank
Faces without bodies bodies without faces
The owners of nothing breakers of stone
The owners who are owned I have known them all
I have heard the wailing of a million
I have stood in the crowd where men
Mixed their sweat and wiped blood
From their brows cursing silently
I have stood in the middle of silent whirlwinds
And their heat has left its mark
I bear the mark of the masses on my brow
And if I curse
If I raise this single voice
In the midst of dust and curse
If I lend a tiny voice to
The rustle of this crowd
It’s because I’m bound to this land by blood
I’m bound to the dying mother the widow
The man with a weight on his loins
I am tethered to their moan they are my own
I belong with they who have no voice
They who trudge outside the gate
They who sigh in their hearts
Who only shake their heads
Because there is a cognitive dissonance that makes it impossible for a Governor, a Senator, a Rep, or anyone in Aso Rock to see this poet’s Nigeria, we must shift the question from what do they see to who do they see? Who exactly do our oppressors in the rulership see outside of their spaces of Bacchanalian depravity? Do they see you? If they do, how do they see you? And you. And you. And what’s going on in their heads when they see you? These are questions every Nigerian must begin to ask very seriously in our quest for explanations.
Unlike the first question – what do they see? – this second question has an affirmative answer. Yes, they see you. They see you because they cannot avoid you. You are their Personal Assistant; their driver; their gardener; their cook. They see you because you are the ones who dance and ululate by the roadside to welcome them to their villages as their convoys cruise in for the weekend; they see you because it is to you that they distribute bags of rice, sewing machines, sacks of salt, ankara, and even recharge cards at every election cycle; they see you because it is to you that they distribute guns, cutlasses, acid, illegal ballot boxes, and other things they need to capture power and move the country forward; they see you because you are the one their aides keep waiting outside of those gigantic gates when you go to Abuja to beg for help with your son’s school fees. They see you.
They see you in your individual instances of desolation and impecuniosity. But the moment you dissolve into that organic mosaic called “the Nigerian people”, you become that supine and hazy whole that they cannot bring themselves to respect or take seriously. The Yoruba concept of arifin becomes the only strand that connects the ruler and the ruled. Arifin does not lend itself to easy translation. Words such as contempt and scorn are poor and inadequate carriers of the meaning of arifin in all its philosophical dimensions. Arifin touches the very core of personhood, human worth, and value. To define it graphically, I must borrow one of the proverbs of the late Ivorian novelist, Ahmadou Kourouma: to be at the receiving end of arifin from your fellow man is to be as worthless in his or her consideration as the fart of an impertinent hyena trying to put out a forest fire with that anal discharge of gas. The fart of a hyena! That, approximately, is the worth of Nigeria’s collective peoplehood in the eyes of the rulers of Nigeria. Arifin, therefore, is the congenital inability of the rulership to take Nigerians seriously. How do you take the fart of a hyena seriously?
Frantz Fanon speaks of violence as the only determiner of transactions between colonizer and colonized. Nigeria presents a sinister pastiche of this relationship. Arifin is the only moderator of the irresolvable argument between the Nigerian and his ruler. Arifin explains why it is possible for one Rep to forget about the 140 million people who paid for his trip to Jeddah, take time off in Dubai to attend to his own personal business; arifin explains why a second Rep took off to Madrid before giving an account of their yeye trip to Jeddah; arifin explains the levity with which Dimeji Bankole handled the matter. He merely gave an ultimatum. He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand the unbelievable insult that his two colleagues – who went to Dubai and Madrid – had dished out to 140 million people.
He didn’t understand that he ought to have referred their case to an appropriate disciplinary committee that should punish them for dereliction of duty. Duty to the Nigerian people. Bankole’s reaction to the action of his two foolish colleagues is predicated on only one perception of things: they are wasting the time of his House. He wasn’t thinking of something much more serious than the time of his House: his two irresponsible colleagues had poured arifin on the Nigerian people. That sense of injury to us wasn’t even part of the mental equation because we are a people that Bankole and his political ilk in Abuja do not take seriously. Arifin! By the way, I hope the guy who went to Dubai did not add injury to arifin by making us pay for his personal jamboree. You can’t put anything beyond these people.
If you need further evidence that we are a people that these fellas in the political elite just can’t bring themselves to take seriously, you need not look further than Ojo Maduekwe’s rationalization of the trip he has just undertaken to Jeddah with five other members of the Executive Council of the Federation. The Minister’s explanation is so monstrously foolish that it can only be addressed to a people you genuinely believe are collectively not intelligent. When you are a member of a failed politico-military elite that has been unable to build a single world class hospital in Nigeria since October 1, 1960, it takes extraordinary arifin for you to open your mouth and declare that you and your indolent colleagues are going to another sovereign country to thank the ruler of that land in our names for taking care of one of you. Unlike your visionless and shameless selves, this ruler that you are going to thank has taken the same oil money that one you recently confessed he didn’t even know how to spend and built the wonderful facilities that you run to in your hour medical need.
When I was doing my masters at the University of Ibadan, there was the Laffomania comedy troupe. They presented weekly rib-cracking skits with the inimitable Hafiz Oyetoro. Even Laffomania took us, the audience, more seriously than these fools take the Nigerian people. Who next are they going to thank? Ojo Maduekwe and his fellow troubadours had better fly straight from Saudi Arabia to Germany to thank Angela Merkel for her hospitality when President Yar’Adua used to fly to her country for treatment. From Germany, they need to go to Spain and thank the Prime Minister of that country who also offered the facilities in his country for our Presidential medical needs even if that led to the death of our former first lady. They would also need stopovers in India, South Africa, and the United States to thank the leaders of those places who frequently open up their medical facilities to our rulers. On their way home, they must stopover in Accra and thank the Ghanaian President for also taking care of us with his country’s medical facilities: Dimeji Bankole’s wife delivered her baby in a Ghanaian hospital.
Alabukun ni fun eni ti o fi obo lo eyan, egbe si ni fun eni ti o gba! This is not so difficult to translate: blessed are they who dish out arifin; woe betide those who accept it. Thus, the Yoruba plant the seed of its own unraveling deep within the philosophical recesses of arifin. In the nature of things in this worldview, it’s never a question of whether arifin will always find authors. The more significant question is whether arifin will find takers. That explains why the Yoruba place the lifespan of arifin squarely on the doorstep of the taker: egbe ni fun eni ti o gba (woe betide those who accept it). These are some of the revolutionary and dissentient possibilities domiciled within our cultures that we often fail to actuate. For as long as you are willing to take it, there will always be authors of arifin. The obituary of arifin will never be written by the author of arifin; arifin’s funeral is the responsibility of the taker. Arifin dies the day you stop taking it. Our tragedy as people is not just the fact that we have always been willing takers of arifin from our traducers in the rulership but we have also been facilitators and legitimizers of our own abuse.
We take a snippet of arifin originally dished out by the political elite and transform it into national universes of meaning which subsequently imprison us. Consider the question of rotational presidency, an arifin arrangement that had all the trappings of elite arrogance, selfishness, and inconsideration in its conceptualization. A gang of failed and expired PDP politicians sit down in Abuja and come to an arrangement to alternate power and privilege between two geographical axes of the same cabal within the same political party. Absent was any consideration for what the preferments of the people of Nigerian might be; absent was any consciousness of the fact that their intra-party arrangement could collapse if Nigerians were ever to vote in another political party in a possible free and fair election.
Not only have we accepted and legitimized this PDP arifin, few of those discussing it in national spaces of discourse even seem to be aware that it is not in our Constitution; few seem to be aware of the fact that it is a private PDP arrangement. We discuss and ramify it as if it were an inescapable national destiny. Absent is any sense of outrage that we, as a people, were far from the minds of the originators of this concept who gathered around a table like some Europeans of yore did in Berlin in 1884 and partitioned an entire continent without a single African present. We have transformed the private arrangement of a failed but arrogant PDP cabal into a collective national imaginary. Our collective subscription to the symbolic authority of this PDP madness is a loud statement on how we have legitimized every arifin dished out by our rulership since independence. We, as a people, are therefore in perpetual contravention of the call to resistance within the philosophy of arifin: egbe ni fun eni ti o gba! We will never be taken seriously by the rulership until we claim it.
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