It all began when we, or actually, those that purported to represent, or rather foisted their will on, us wielding their martial argot, were faced with a choice between a grin and a grimace. Since we lacked the necessary collective forge to counter their hijack, their particular preference became our obligatory assent. Silence, they say, connotes consent. Distress sometimes speaks in silence, and silence many a time spells powerlessness.
It all began when we, or actually, those that purported to represent, or rather foisted their will on, us wielding their martial argot, were faced with a choice between a grin and a grimace. Since we lacked the necessary collective forge to counter their hijack, their particular preference became our obligatory assent. Silence, they say, connotes consent. Distress sometimes speaks in silence, and silence many a time spells powerlessness.
“One way to destroy a people is to allow only the fools to survive.” – Obi B. Egbuna.
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“Weak and incompetent leaders prefer to ride a crippled horse.’’ – J. J. Rawlings
Between two warriors! One: a pin-up persona from the savannah, carrying a beaming face which looked like coating a propensity to coax and fox. The other: a gangly figure from the Sahel, with a scowling mien which seemed to coerce and compel. A smile can say so many things, but one knows where he stands with a frown.
We could not parse the grim, prefectorial visage of the parsonical, the ferial figure of beneficence. Oh how we needed some excitement, even a little diversion, if not outright distraction, especially after an interregnum of enervating ennui. We went for the fanciful fib, we christened it enigmatic, yodeled it as festal. We bought an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, a misnomer - a package of mutually exclusive concepts which our mystique marketers branded benevolent dictatorship, or visionary realism. We paid the indemnity in our fantastic failure and our abysmal regress.
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Today, a quarter of a century-plus down the road, we suffer our pick. We reel from the germ that touched us from the gilded hand of a poster man. We have a deadness of culture and social slide staring us everywhere we care to turn. We grope and thrash about gasping for mitigation.
Our charming hero, the alibi man, the proponent of the euphemism called dwindling resources, dazzled and dribbled us through one byroad after another bush track. But we cooed in adulation. He was so emblematic, so inimitable, so hypnotically hip. Only a countable discerning few were not amused, and they consequently suffered severely under the mechanism code-named FID (find, identify and destroy), which was to be advertised later as a doctrine of opposition strangulation and junta preservation by a one-time military governor of the mid-west ministering for a more brazen successor bulldog brutality and sadistic despotism.
We could forgive anything and forget everything once those fey smiles homed in on us. Everything could be waved aside and explained away. Including a letter-bomb assassination (the first peace-time bomb incident in the country, the prime model of the present spectre of detonations everywhere); improper executions based on charges propped more on the crutches of ego; and a mindless misadventure like swimming with a sinking Sergeant Doe in Liberia. We could live with it all. After all, we had been charged to use what we had to get what we wanted. And were we not enjoined to feel free to argue and debate? What else could be more liberating or exhilarating?
Anything could be tinkered with. Even protocols underpinning and insulating our sovereignty. That was how certain imported measures, touted as salutary, were instituted to whittle down the spirit and self-belief of a commonwealth of multi-million proud, hyperactive, even if hyperbolic, marching men and women - strong, sophisticated, assertive, ambitious representatives of a resurgent race. The Orwellian notion of suffering as an instrument of power and control and domination of the environment was the main motivation. It was a police measure, combined with the bizarre mix of FID’s patronising plank: the Machiavellian brand of co-option or de-animation.
Our enchanting warrior was not without a sensitive barometer. After all, he did warn that he was not just in office, but also in power. His sensors did not fail to pick the pullulating underground frothing with the molten magma of angst, if not wholesale resentment. He went after them. First the most crucial symbol, the teacher, the form master. He accused them of teaching what they were not paid to inculcate. The bright and beautiful ones, who would not stand the perceived affront, the pugnacious, condescending, pretentious intellectual holler of a soldier, an adept only in the art of organised violence, on the hallowed grounds of the academia, picked their pride and their brain and drained into voluntary exile.
And those who did not flee among the intelligentsia, the professional class, the rampart of civil society, only a few could find the nerve not to retire into internal hibernation.
Then he turned on the middle class pulverizing them into such a penurious shape that they had neither the leeway for creative contemplation, nor the latitude to cross-pollinate with the critical material base. Everyone was sucked into the sump. Living took the gangster name of hustle. The conquest was complete. Babylon had reincarnated, brandishing its trademark banner of hedonistic bazaar and lavish ostentation and impunity the nearer the nabobs of power and the shrine of their golden calf – and dreadful destitution and drudgery for the rest of the population.
With the brilliant ones in flight, as with the artist, the poet, the philosopher, the prophet, the shaman, the seer, the sage, the spokesman trampled under the totalitarian jackboot – all the kindred spirit, the national collection of alluvial deposits from the elemental flow, carriers of the primordial, eternal hump of inexhaustible native waters, the human ornamental flowers who string the delicate weave of society with brilliant colours, inspire its hopes and dreams, illustrate its ways and means, commemorate its triumphs, promote its common heritage and celebrate its communal laughter and joy – the social climate, like a left-over soup, became cold and stale, and the scum and the dreg, the fool and the phony, the misguided and the mal-imprinted, rose to the top. W.B. Yeats, the Irish poet, yelled it more than a century before: The best lacked all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity! Mobocracy: rule of the mob. Kakistocracy: government by the most unscrupulous and unsuitable. Idealism collapsed, and with it heroism. Values somersaulted – money and what money can get gained sway. Corruption democratized and seeped down to vulgarize, materialize and venalize the common folk, who until then were somewhat at a remove from the profane ways of the insensate, philistine elite.
The crooning community was forced to take the perpendicular in protest. ‘Crisis – people no get no food pon dem table to eat; Send down the Rain; Where’re the Prophets?; Gimme Likkle Sugar; What’s Gwan?; Let the Righteous Take Over; We No Wan’ No More Babylon Laws…’ But they too were soon to wash down the same drain to condense for compost collectors in lands across the seas. A quarter of a century-plus down the road of a nationhood.
Today, because we permitted everything, we accepted impunity. We gulped baubles. We elected a pan-national president and watched the ghoul and his nomenklatura desecrate a collective mandate. We watched them sully to a grievous death a kind man (and his wife) whose only offence was that he sought to exercise his citizen rights within the laws of the land. What were their reasons? First, unlike his traducers, he was a good man. Second, he was a game changer. He came with a peculiar enthusiasm to unmask their myth about poverty with which they had held the people down for so long. He was neither sectional, nor sectarian, nor hegemonic. He proclaimed the truth when he fingered the major problem of the citizenry, the society – the journey between the hand and the mouth. He proposed to reduce the distance and ease the difficulties.
This would redound in a restoration of self-confidence in the people, the foundation for a free, popular, participatory democratic enterprise and the motive engine for high productivity and national resorgimento. They knew that he knew them inside out, that with him the game was over; that those cleavages upon which they feasted at the expense of national cohesion and a true democratic culture were done. They declared that he was not a messiah, but actually they meant that he had committed rank suicide to side with the common folk. But the people were not looking for a messiah, but a man. And he was a man. The man his enemies can never become even after a thousand lifetimes.
We watched our mythical one percent – our loose coalition of baboons and bulldogs, millionaires and mandarins – fly by night into the prison to fetch out a Neanderthal character, coarse and crusty, who did so well to teach us a sound lesson out of the laws of diminishing return; who brought home to us in concrete terms the true meaning of Eric Blair`s theory and practice of oligarchic collectivism, dressing himself as Caesar leading his charge of towering coteries, cronies, confidants (the calibans he called stakeholders) in a class war to dwarf the citizen and take the country further away from him – bringing into his act enough personal animus and base bellicosity to do a dissertation on the compulsive megalomaniac impulse in post-military psychosis. He left grudgingly, imposing a confounding combination of a pious but sickly prince and a drab and dreary, artless, style-less, shoeless fisherman, who rode on a roller-coaster of luck on the wings of a bandwagon of national emotional deluge.
But did we sniff sulfur? Did we ever turn up our noses to show that whenever a natural, biologic process is subverted, the end achieved carries with it a stink? No, our olfactory faculties were so dulled by the opiates of the baubles that surmount us. That is why we live unsurely, work uncertainly and move in indirection. Why we fear to look at things straight and square. When we catch a glimpse of ugliness or an aberration we avert our eyes and pretend not to have seen it, so as not to be required to call it by its proper name. Those who call things by their true names discomfit us because they tend to force us out of the smug countenance with which we camouflage, without covering, our fear, our weakness, our fuzziness, our lack of frankness and will. Hence, we fail to reckon with the mystics of existence. That nature, whenever undermined, would eventually and inexorably reassert itself.
Because we accepted impunity we enthroned bullies and tolerated tyrants. We dined with thugs, who sold us on the fripperies of raw power. Because the larger society is run by bullies in cults, mafia, cliques and cabals of power monopoly, our children in schools took a cue to band into gangs and packs to terrorise their teachers and overrun their campuses. Learning crashed. Education became, and achieved, only one end. A barren ticket on which to fly back to society and take a criminal shot at the gauderies of position and power.
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