By Festus Adedayo
Native Brazilians arrest monkeys with what is called Cumbuca. They make a hole in a gourd that is big enough to accommodate the hand of a monkey. The gourd is then affixed to the ground of the place monkeys infest. Placed inside the gourd is usually a banana for the attraction of the monkey. The monkey then hops down the tree and aims to grab the banana. Expectedly, the monkey will foolishly hold on tight to the banana, his hand closed. With this, the monkey cannot take the banana out and will not leave his place of imprisonment. He will be there until he is made into a delectable barbecue. I will relate this presently.
Habeeb Okikiola, a.k.a. Portable, the weird head housing a huge cerebrum, proposed a thesis which I want us to examine together. In a viral video, Portable pleaded with the EFCC not to get him arrested. In the last three weeks or so, the EFCC has upped its proficiency in arresting those it labeled mutilators of the Nigerian currency. Last week, Pascal Okechukwu, famous socialite, popularly known as Cubana Chief Priest, got his full comeuppance. He was arrested by the EFCC and dragged before a Lagos Federal High Court which granted him a bail of N10 million.
Before then, in January, Nigerians were treated to the salacious broth prepared by Betta Edu. Edu is the suspended Minister of HumanitarianAffairs and Poverty Alleviation. The 37-year old Edu had been enmeshed in allegations of fraud involving the sum ofN585.189m. As we speak, Betta and her accomplices walk the streets free. There are strong allegations that the Edu you see is a butterfly, a mere façade covering a roiling colony of maggots in the Nigerian presidency. And that the EFCC’s dilemma in not replicating the clinical accuracy and Concorde-speed conviction it attained with Bobrisky in Edu, can be likened to a chemistry which the Yoruba forged between the shrub and the forest. It is their own simple law of gravity, their Archimedes Principle, if you like. So, they say, if you pull too hard on the shrub, it will pull the forest (Ti a ba fa gburu, gburu a fa’gbo). And trees will fall over trees.
A line from Sudanese novelist, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North also interests me. Salih’s is a classic postcolonial Arabic novel published in 1966. The line is, “I am no Othello, Othello was a lie…I am a lie.” The book revolves round a man called the “traveled man,” an African who just returned from schooling abroad in the 1950s. He came back to his Sudanese village of Wad Hamid, located on the Nile. He had just finished writing his doctoral thesis themed ‘the life of an obscure English poet.’ I found this ‘lie’ line the most profound of Salih’s conversations. What gave life to that conversation? When he arrived home, the unnamed narrator meets a villager named Musrafa Sa’eed, the main protagonist of the novel. Sa’eed is described as “a monstrous product of his time.” One drunken evening, the narrator encounters Sa’eed in his real self. So he asked him of his past. Sa’eed gave that curt reply of “I am a lie”.
“I am a lie” is almost synonymous with the life of a butterfly which my people call the “labalaba.” The butterfly is Janus, the double-faced god. When you think it is attempting to perch, that is when the poor fly is on the verge of taking off. In painting an ample picture of the ephemeral nature of the butterfly, my people conjured an incantation to explain its fleeting life. “Yio ba’le, yio ba’le ni labalaba fi nwo’gbo” they say. The life of labalaba is like a joke. A lie.
Like Sa’eed, Nigeria’s season of migration to the double life of a butterfly – the season of lies – seems to have come. Such seasons come and go like the ever changing colours of a chameleon and unfold like the rainbow. Beginning with the drama of power in Abuja last week which involved ex-Kogi State governor, Yahaya Bello and the Nigerian state; the clowns in Ibadan who attempted to take over the Nigerian state; to the EFCC’s most recent tickling fancy in arresting “currency mutilators”, Nigeria has entered a full plumule of its season of migration to lies.
Last Friday in Ibadan, I sat beside former Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academics) of the University of Ibadan, Prof Adigun Agbaje. It was at a reading and review session of Cyber Politics, a book authored by Omoniyi Ibietan, a man trying to cultivate a forest of a thousand – and one – grey hairs that could rival Wole Soyinka’s! And Agbaje propounded a thesis which seems to explain some of the labalaba stories that erupted in Nigeria in the last one week. He began by asserting that the politics of meaning is changing rapidly, not only in Nigeria but all over the world. In other words, the meanings we ascribe to political issues are fast changing their frontiers.
The politics of meaning was put in context by Michael Lerner in his 1997-published book, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility In An Age Of Cynicism. Lerner drew on ideas presented in the Bible, Jewish teachings, and his experience as a psychotherapist to examine the roots of discontent of many Americans about their political system. He also describes how values get lost in broken politics. Agbaje took on Max Weber’s classical definition of the state. The German sociologist had submitted, in what is widely regarded as a defining characteristic of the modern state, that the state alone has a monopoly of violence. In political science and sociology, the Weber definition of the state has influenced several theses of the state being the only one in possession of the right to authorize the use of physical force.
In what appears very elementary reading of Lerner and Werber, Portable, last week, explained the shifting sand of meaning and the power of the state. While begging EFCC not to arrest him, the weird musician had said that, “after God, na government; forgive me if you have videos of me spraying money.” The EFCC has over the years indeed shifted in meaning. Whenever he was to be vilified, opponents to the politics of Nigeria’s first president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, a.k.a. Zik, mocked him as having fallen from an Olympian height of Zik of Africa to Owelle of Onitsha. In 2003 when President Olusegun Obasanjo established the EFCC, criminal elements among the political class, like roaches at the sight of a hen, scampered for safety. The fate of the ones caught by the dragnet of the then no-smiling Nuhu Ribadu was akin to that of a man who carries a faggot laden with a thousand bees – “o ru’gi oyin!”. Inspector General of Police, Tafa Balogun, became jelly when rounded up by Ribadu boys.
Ribadu’s adulterous romance with politicians can be explained. One by one, he unwittingly renounced all his lofty crime-fighting credentials. Today, Ribadu sits at table with same persons who dreaded his dragnet and takes orders from a man he almost hounded into jail. The lion is castrated and the sons of impala tug at the King of the Jungle’s naked “blokos”. From running after Yahoo Yahoo boys on university campuses, to pursuing social nuisances who defile the Naira, the EFCC’s season of shifting meaning, a migration to hubris, has come full throttle. I think the assignment given the anti-graft agency by the law is too monstrous for this fleeting role it casts for itself.
Festus Adedayo is a Public Policy Analyst.
