Senior Even If the Rain Rain Fire!

I remember him as if it were yesterday. I still meet his face “in every mirror, every chrome, and shine in the mall”, to borrow a line from Odia Ofeimun’s beautiful poem, “Giagbone”. More than twenty years, the continent of Europe, and the Atlantic ocean now separate me in time and space from the clack that still resonates in my ears whenever memory stirs. That clack is the sound of a bitch slap: the action that often comes after the shakara oloje threat, “I will slap your face o”, in Nigeria.
No, I wasn’t the victim. Kayode Oshagbemi, my friend and class mate, was. I stood there beside him in absolute terror, praying silently that the thick black hand that had just deposited visible weals on Kayode’s cheek would not extend the same courtesies to my own cheek. Vain hope! Our offence? Just being form three students in Titcombe College, Egbe, in 1985.

I don’t know what the situation is these days but if you were in secondary school back then, it was always a bad idea to be a form three student during the change of baton in the college prefecthood system. As mock exams approached, preparatory to WAEC, new prefects would be selected in form four to understudy the outgoing prefects in form five. Ah! If you passed through form three in the old school system, you must have memories of the first few weeks of this power shift! The school principal and his teaching staff were usually too busy preparing the form five students for mock and WAEC – every school wanted to record a high percentage of success – that they pretty much left the running of the school to the new prefects!

The exercise of power, of unbridled authority fascinated the new prefects to no end. Form three was always the testing ground for the Draco or the mini-terrorist in them. Form three block was always their first port of call: “all form three students, come out and line up in a single row!”; “all form three students, kneel down, close your eyes, and raise up your hands!”; “all form three students, wait in line after morning assembly!”; “hey you boy, come here!”  On and on went the terrorism of the form four students, exposing the weaknesses in a system otherwise designed to socialise the new prefects into leadership roles in line with the “leaders of tomorrow” line that was the sing-song of the General who was shoring up Nigeria’s wealth atop a hill in Minna in order to delete our tomorrow. One small act of resistance against the terrorism of the new prefects was the song:

Senior Pangolo, Senior Pangolo
Senior oni yeye
Ori re daru, ori re baje...

Senior Pangolo paid no heed, especially in boarding house. Things were much more precarious for a form three boarding student unless s/he had a college father or college mother in form four. And on labour day – secondary schools used to designate one day of the week for work in the evening after school hours – it was hell. In Titcombe, we called it “gratis day” or just “gratis”. The white missionaries of the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) who founded the school settled for that latin word to imply that the labour you supplied to the school as a student was free. It was in fact part of your training and preparation for life in the society of adults. Gratis day was no tea party in the weeks after the appointment of new prefects. The new labour prefect was often more ruthless, more vicious, and consequently more feared than any other prefect – including the head boy.

Senior Even If the Rain Rain Fire had apprehended Kayode and I for “wandering aimlessly” during gratis! A very serious offence indeed. It was just our tough luck to be caught by this ferocious brand new prefect who had earned that strange sobriquet within days of being made a prefect! The year he became prefect was one of those odd years of conspiratorial pathetic fallacy when even nature seemed to bear some grudge against those of us in form three and participated in our oppression. It rained. A lot.

The endless rain was God sent! Senior If the Rain Rain Fire loved it! As soon as the clouds gathered, tremulous, over the town of Egbe, he and some of his fellow power-drunk prefects would storm form three block and order us out. There was always some part of the vast sprawl of Titcombe’s compound that needed weeding or cleaning at that very moment! Often, it started drizzling minutes after we started swinging our langalangas furiously at the lush green grass that seemed to smile in bemused knowledge of the fact that she would be back, all green and blossomy in a few days time. We would look up expectantly at the prefect who, pankere cane in hand, would be lolling in the shelter of some verandah, away from the unwelcome reach of the elements. He would yell at us: “even if the rain rain fire, you will work!”

Luckily for us, the rain never rained fire. Unluckily for the prefect, he got a sobriquet that we called him behind his back till he graduated. We also mocked the bad grammar lodged in his war cry. Suppressed chuckles greeted his every utterance of “if the rain rain fire.” The more audacious among us would even whisper: “ibon!” To “ta ibon” is Yoruba argot for grammatical blunders in English. Oh, I mocked his grammar! I was still too young to understand that as my legs would later ferry my head along trajectories of predestination in life, I would find myself in a profession that would make me rethink that sentence of his as the stubborn insistence of the Yoruba genius to keep itself intact through the domestication of English.

“Even If the rain rain fire, you will work” was the best the prefect could do in English with the stubborn Yoruba expression: “ojo yen o ba ro ina, e ma sise!” If you are a Yoruba speaker, you will understand that the only way that the evocative sublimity and bucolic appeal of that statement can survive in English is, in fact, in the ungrammatical rendition of the prefect. Correct the sentence by making a subject-verb agreement and an entire world of cultural meaning collapses. Senior Even If the Rain Rain Fire eventually graduated from Titcombe and disappeared from our lives until...

Until I encountered him again last year in national news. The newspapers screamed: “Two Kogi Local Government Chairmen Kidnapped – three cops killed.” Kogi rarely makes national headlines and thus rarely attracts my attention as a commentator. But I read the news anxiously this time. The names of the kidnapped chairmen were given as: Mr Ernest Abbah of Igalamela LGA and Mr. Ropo Asala of Yagba West LGA. Wait a minute, Ropo Asala? OMG! That’s Senior Even If the Rain Rain Fire! I made a few phone calls. Confirmed! That was him alright. My prefect back in Titcombe! The kidnapped men were subsequently released but barely had I had the chance to heave a sigh of relief than Senior If the Rain Rain Fire hit the news again.

Apparently, Senior If the Rain Rain Fire and some other Kogi state officials set the state back by over 2 billion naira. The EFCC came calling and the case is still going on as I write. They have been charged to court in Abuja and the allegations are grievous. My school prefect alone stands accused of pocketing 20 million naira in one instance and 216 million naira in another instance. That makes it 236 million allegedly stolen from one rural LGA by just one man! The other accused people in what is beginning to play out as the biggest money laundering scandal in Kogi state are Mr. Samuel Abiodun Ojo, a gubernatorial candidate, and the Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs Mr. Tolorunjuwon Joseph Faniyi, a senatorial hopeful from my home town, Isanlu.

I am detained here by the case of Senior If the Rain Rain Fire for the simple reason of its archetypal implications in the broader context of Nigeria’s national dilemma. Here is a man in the generational age bracket of 35-50 years. That is my generation. In past essayistic efforts, I have explored the social history of this generation in terms of the regimes of discipline and socialization that shaped her in her formative years in primary and secondary school. This is a border generation, the last in Nigeria to have been trained with the syncretic values of the missionary-colonial-traditional order. Dewdrops of memory.

This is the generation that was trained by teachers who, now in their 70s and 80s, are dropping dead in pension queues in the state capitals all over Nigeria even as the morons they trained are now planning to blow ten billion naira on a birthday party. Reader, you remember this teacher and his values, don’t you? He was a Spartan jolly good fellow who truly believed that his reward was in heaven and toiled so selflessly for Nigeria. Reader, do you remember his well-starched khaki shorts that reached down to his knees, stopping just where his long socks started their descent into his well-polished black shoes? Reader, do you remember that he pressed the khaki shorts so hard with his charcoal iron that the edges - called "gator" in local parlance - almost cut like a razor blade? Dewdrops of memory.

Reader, do you remember the starched short sleeve white shirt that your teacher tucked in and his immaculate black tie? Do you remember his glistening black hair, about half the size of the African American Afro style? His wife combed it for him every morning, faithfully putting the obligatory "parting" either in the middle or on one side of his head, just before he went to the schoolyard for morning assembly. Reader, if this teacher taught you in primary school, do you remember the pride in his eyes as he watched you chant, “H-I-P for the Hip, P-O-P-O for the hippopo, and T-A-M-U-S for the hippopotamus, hippopotamus?" He was proud because he saw  the future of Nigeria in your strides as you marched to your classroom at the end of the morning assembly. Dewdrops of memory.

This was the teacher who taught the generation of Senior If the Rain Rain Fire – my generation – during our formative years. He it was who beat us black and blue if we so much as stole an orange or a mango from the school’s orchard – Titcombe had a fantastic orchard. How did this generation transform from one that wasn’t allowed to steal oranges and mangoes in secondary school to one that can only now rob Nigeria in billions in less than two decades? I stated earlier that I am interested in Senior If the Rain Rain Fire’s current narrative because of its archetypal value in the national scheme of things.

Senior If the Rain Rain Fire’s generation (35-50 years old) is now fully in charge of Nigeria. Think of Dimeji Bankole, Dino Melaye, and most of the looters in the National Assembly who fall within this age range; think of how many state governors are in this age bracket. Local government administration all over the country is virtually in the hands of members of my generation. President Jonathan may be supervising the lunacy of his ten billion-naira independence anniversary budget at the top but you can rest assured that the cashnivores who are now out with all kinds of carving knives, waiting for anticipatory approvals and mobilization fees are members of my generation. Where and how did my generation lose the plot? Again, how did we make the transition from the character who dreaded the consequences of stealing an orange in the orchard in secondary school into that monumental looter who could brazenly steal 260 million at the local government level or blow 9 billion in the Federal House of Representathieves?

Our report card as a generation is so abysmal that, increasingly, the task of writing our social history now carries the singular responsibility of serving up our unfolding failures as warning to those politically-conscious Facebook and Twitter Nigerians in their 20s. It is, perhaps, no longer wise to assume that Nigeria’s salvation can come with my generation. We have contributed too many illustrious looters to the pool of decadence at all three tiers of governance. Our failure is neatly summed up by the colossal generational tragedy that is Dimeji Bankole. Those increasingly vocal Nigerians in their 20s who are firing up Facebook with political agitation have a choice. My generation loots exclusively in millions and billions. When they eventually shove us aside, and assuming that Nigeria is still standing, will they learn from our failures and change course or will they loot in trillions?

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