Abati Still On My Mind: Demons and Demoniacs of Aso Rock and The Ghosts Behind the Retarded Progress of Nigeria
Things do bother me more than they do the average person out there. I hope I am wrong on that assumption, though. I would be elated if more people are bothered by the current state of Nigeria than I have thought. Personally, I am bothered and burdened when I find myself helpless in a state of chaos. It is even worse when I perceive that the said chaos is not intrinsic but orchestrated through clever devious machinations of individuals or a group of individuals who created the chaos in the first instance, and are parading to possess the ultimate solution to the chaos. Yet, indeed, they have no solution to proffer other than just to hold the people to ransom and hold on to whatever means it has taken or would take for the creation and sustenance of the chaos. This is my perception of the situation in Nigeria. This is my perception of the leadership class. We are in a state of chaos. Our political elites are the godfathers behind the said chaos. Am I the only one seeing it this way?
You see, in a state of chaos, anything goes. People come up with issues, stories, conversations and even pseudo-intellectual discourses that simply transcend logic, ethics, culture and simple commonsense. Sometimes in projecting their views, they rely on irrationality and self-conjured metaphysical phenomena, which they and only they can understand. They speak from another planet, a planet that has no resemblance to anything others have ever known. They assume citizens are simpletons whose gullibility would goad them into calling the proverbial cow their big brother if only to grant them an access to a bite of the beef. They take people for granted, treating them with condescension and contempt. No, people are not stupid. They are leopards walking stealthily in the woods, it's not because they are afraid; it's just that they await their moment, the sacred moment when the deranged is pushed to the wall!
Ever since I read the article about the demons parading the state house in Abuja, I have been nauseatingly sick! This is more so when it came across from the pen of one of the well-known writers of Nigerian extraction! I asked myself, "Are we dealing with demons or demoniacs here?" I was hoping for a bigger noise against such an insult than I have heard so far. I am disappointed that people have seen it, laughed it to scorn, and moved on as if no one has been violated in the process. This ought not to be. From what I read (and known), I further came to the conclusion that there are too many demoniacs in our leadership cadre. I have to applaud Femi Adesina, whose rejoinder underscored my postulation. With his views, together with the response - a comic relief and lampoon, given by Senator Sola Adeyeye, I am beginning to be convinced that the psyche of the Nigerian political elites has not totally eluded redemption. There is hope for the Motherland. There is hope.
Really, Adesina's perspective provides a partial eraser to the bravado of baloney scripted to invade our literary space in this last two weeks or so. Demons, spirits, gnomes, and all the paranormal sightings documented by the Nigerian ace journalist, Reuben Abati, have to make any right thinking mind who is a lover of Nigeria cringe. With Mr. Reuben Abati's writing, we get a renewed insight into our world of anthropomorphism, the age-long academic concept that describes the deliberate translation of the celestial body into the terrestrial space, body and time and vice versa, just for the sole purpose of satisfying the spiritual appetite. However, anthropomorphism is just an academic exercise; but it seems the concept is now being taken beyond the horizon of reason in Nigeria.
Overnight I read the blog of my professional colleague and friend, Augustine Agwuele. If I may borrow, albeit out of context, some of his words, "I have been most confused by the language-use of (the elites) . . . that reveals not only a remarkable dissonance between scientific knowledge (fact) and cultural belief systems but also lays bare the tyrannical hold of culture in uniting, sustaining, and furthering obvious contradictions . . ." What a perfect descriptor of the condescending epistle from Mr. Abati to all Nigerians! If Abati were to be a Yoruba, I would have assumed that the gentleman must have been well schooled in the Fagunwarian tradition. We all recall the late Daniel Olorunfemi (D.O.) Fagunwa's Ogboju-ode Ninu Igbo Irunmole, which Soyinka translated as The Forest of a Thousand Demons, and the other four allegories in the sequel. We had fun reading all those enigmas, just for the fun of reading them. We never expected, even as children, to see the denizens of the spirit world roaming our villages, let alone our ultra-modern capital city of Abuja, not to talk of the Aso Villa, the "White House" of Nigeria!
To add my own lampoon, I think the Abati narrative is rightly suited for the month of October, and we better keep it that way. October is too dark. On this side of the Atlantic, the American world, it is the month that records the longest period of darkness. In fact, the last weekend of October is the darkest stretch throughout the year. It is to that effect that the last weekend is dedicated to Halloween, a gnomic and gloomy festival and season when the tales of the weird, the roaming spirits, and the scary are acceptable. The message is simple: enjoy the entertainment and festivities but please don't you ever believe any of them. They are fireside tales meant to entertain the young and the young at heart. Anyone operating outside that paradigm or peddling religionalizing them would quickly be clustered into the group of the buffoons and the ignoramuses. No, Nigerians don't belong in that group and no one can take advantage of our spiritual formidability and vulnerability and turn it into some religious claptrap!
Let us face it: Religion is the evil sister of backwardness and demons are always its alibi. Let me clarify that statement before my readers start to cry "foul" on me. As a born-again Christian, I take my faith quite seriously without christening myself into a Pharisee. There is nothing intrinsically bad about religion but inordinate religiosity, the kind we have witnessed in our nation as epitomized by this kind of writing of Mr. Abati, is deadly, corrupt, and anti-progressive. The redeeming quality in the story as told by Abati is that it has personally helped me to understand why the three elements Jesus Christ fought against throughout His ministry on earth were religious men, the anti-progressive elites and the demons in the society of His time – in that order.
My question is, when has it become so bad that we've started to take myth as truth or how come mere entertainment modes of folktales have become significant aspects of our spiritual and cultural belief system? Thanks to Adesina for debunking the myth of the Aso Villa demons. Abati did a bad job of rationalizing the past administration's failure to deliver. All the hooplas of "Oh, we now have a Christian in the helm of affairs," "Wow, what an educated president with a PhD degree ruling our nation" and all the dim-witted declarations following Jonathan's ascendancy to the presidency came like an effervescent bubbles accompanied by a bowl of promise but died with a truckload of disappointments. Unfortunately, Abati found the need to explain it; after all, he was one of the vuvuzelas of Jonathan's promise, a promise with the resemblance of the dreams of a dog – if they exist at all, they are never shared. Nigerians are not stupid!
You see, the Yoruba have always believed that when the filthy woman latches to the death of her husband as her alibi for not taking daily baths, we need to remind her that ever before she became a widow, she has always been a filthy skunk! Apparently, this woman has not been cozy to taking responsibility for personal hygiene. Abati has aptly demonstrated that we have a problem with right thinking in our leadership and although we are intelligent people, we are bad - very bad at explaining the inexplicable level of corruption, including nepotism, embezzlement, and everything that has birthed a lack of progress in our nation in spite of the unbelievable level of opulence and splendor with which Providence has endowed our nation. Because of their itching palms, our "princes" on the throne of our nation have left their citizens high and dry, naked in the amphitheater of life. It's so sad!
Folks, we have sunk so low in our corrupt practices and moral depravity to the extent that we have to find someone to blame and it has to be an element in our society that everyone knows about, talks about, understands a little, but which not a single one has ever seen, the Al. This is like beating the drum of a "rigged system" when you've already seen your failed past, your fake present, and your bleak future. This is one melodrama that has played so loud in our ears in recent months. It's convenient to blame the unseen forces on our leadership failure just as it is acceptable to blame an absence of national development on the fury of some alien spirits, the al-jinnī, to borrow the Arabic phrase or what the Yoruba call Iwin or Alujannu. Certainly, there has to be a solution to a system presided over by evil spirits; otherwise, as a people, we revert back to the same "forest of a thousand demons" long conceived in the folktales of our ancestors!
Holiness will canonize evil. A well-thought of, well-organized Aso Villa will laugh the gnome of Aso Rock to scorn. I am confident in that. We need a new way of thinking. We need to move into a new dispensation in our methodology of mentally processing things. We need to find ways to debunk myths and tall tales and separate childhood neurosis from advanced ways of logically analyzing issues of national magnitude. We need to forge a mechanism for accountability. We need to move right and move fast so as not to give up our rights to the "unrighteous" elites who are out to bamboozle us out of normalcy and sentence us to a lifetime of primitive thinking akin to what obtained in the darkest ages of our past. We need critical thinking that stimulates nation building. The problem is that when facts and fiction come into a conjugal relationship in governance, the product is leadership Armageddon and followership anarchy. We are at the threshold of cognitive anomaly, a treacherous verge – scary, but true!
We need an alternative narrative. Seriously, we do. I am not afraid of demons, but I am worried about the demoniacs. When the demoniacs are ruling a nation with the highest potential in the Black world, it's bound to invoke bizarre rationalizations for why the nation is sinking into the abyss. This group I call demoniacs is shameless and narcissistic. It has no modicum of vision for the future of our democracy, and ipso facto gives no damn about posterity. But before we are ever bamboozled into embracing such belief they are trying to propagate, I am convinced beyond all reasonable doubts that there are steps Nigeria needs to take as a nation, and all those paranormal spirits and circumstances dwarfing its development will be polarized and vanish into the sea of forgetfulness. Then and then can we, as a people, be translated from where we are to where we ought to be. Here are seven immediate remedies that come to mind:
1. Education, education, education. Ignorance, like the kind of belief that Abati's article underscores, is the product of a lack of education. Someone once said if you want to enslave a people, simply deny them education. But the good news is that ignorance is a symptom, not a disease. It is a human stupor whose medication is knowledge. Once quality education is applied, ignorance vanishes like the dew in the face of the radiant sun. Like in the two topnotch nations that are assured of a brilliant future in the next half a century, Singapore and New Zealand, the status and quality of education should be raised over and above those of other areas of national developments. The result is simply magical.
2. Wage and all and out against incompetence. You cannot put people in leadership cadres without adequate preparations, deliberate motivation and visionary stance for the responsibilities attached to those offices. National character for the distribution of responsibilities can be achieved with competent and motivated individuals drawn from all spheres of the society. Babs Fafunwa, for example, would have been a nonentity if he were to be assigned the duty of leading the Economic Unit in the nation's governance all because he happened to be Yoruba. However, because he was an educator, visionary and motivated, he was able to proffer progress in education during his time and no one would have done it better without that kind of a background.
3. Take care of public servants – past and present. The laborer deserves his wages, are age-long words of wisdom we read in the holy scriptures. Full salaries of retired people, government workers and essential service providers – teachers, civil servants, the police, the military, customs officers, other men and women in uniform, healthcare workers, technocrats, etc., should never stay in the government hand one minute beyond the midnight on the day they are supposed to be paid. A minimum of 10% interest should accrue for everyday a retiree of worker's salary is left unpaid. Pay the public servants adequately and see how well they will serve the nation. Pay those who have devoted their lives to service and as see how blessed a nation Nigeria would be!
4. Stage and execute war against corruption. The government should have a zero policy towards corruption. Any public figure found guilty of stealing even one kobo from the public treasury, for example, should face a swift, fair, fearless, firry and fierce tribunal that would recommend anything ranging from life imprisonment to public execution – from the messenger to the chief executive and everything and everyone in-between.
5. Revamp the economy. De-ethnicize the nation. Any Nigerian should live and work in any state, and claim such state as own once s/he has lived, worked and paid taxes there for a determined number of years. Build grass-root, non-extractive economies – develop technologies, agriculture, fisheries and support family and individual small-scale businesses. Make the oil industry secondary, or even tertiary, to nation building and the nation's economic investment interest.
6. De-religionize the country. Everyone has the right to his or her belief. Nigeria is NOT a theocracy and should never be. Any religious practice is a personal embrace of each individual. The government should have a zero role in religions. It should never, for example, sponsor pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia or Israel. The government will not tolerate religious extremities, violence or any superimposition of a religion over the nation.
7. Affiliate with foreign governments based on mutual respect and mutual benefits. The policies of one government towards Nigeria and its citizens will be exactly the policies of Nigerian government towards such foreign government.
This is my strategy for warding off those alien spirits. Thankfully, Adesina became the megaphone for unleashing the unspoken fury from our hearts. He is the audacious baby brother of the mythical Dada who has just warded off the malignant rudeness of his big brother's bully. Honestly, as earlier said, what I see in our nation are demoniacs, not demons. They are cheaters, not teachers. We have thieves watching over our national treasury; hallucination is their defense mechanism, forgetting that we were not all born yesterday. We are capable of seeing the fat man hiding behind the needle. Take my word for it, we do know.
Michael O. Afolayan
USA
