By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
I get more phone calls and text messages than all the mobile telephone networks in Nigeria put together.
Yes, I am that large.
I am sick and tired of being sick and tired over one single telephone network playing tango with my divine mightiness.
It must rank as the 8th wonder of the modern world that MTN had the temerity and total lack of respect to deactivate the line of The Poet one diabolical morning in this year of Our Lord.
The volcanic annoyance that welled up in me was larger than the Richter scale as I was determined to fight MTN both physically and metaphysically.
On the physical front of the fight, the annoyers at MTN must understand that Muhammed Ali called himself “The Greatest” only because he never fought with me.
And going metaphysical, I need to warn the deactivators of MTN that during my father’s burial in Umuchu the otumokpo-medicated night masquerades, alias Achukwu, armed me with enough rustic Molotov cocktails and occult Scud missiles to unhinge even the science of MTN telephony.
The excuse MTN gave for tossing my line was linkage to NIN, or lack thereof, not minding that I had done the NIN-linking like all other Nigerians on so many occasions that a crack mathematician like Chike Obi will find very difficult to count.
It’s not funny at all that linking phone lines to NIN is touted to boost security but not one of the bandits, terrorists and kidnappers has ever been caught – as though they are more invisible than amoeba.
It is so killing to the poetry in me that the prosaic characters in MTN do not understand that having The Poet in their network gifts them with the coveted primus inter pares among the 180 million phone users in Nigeria.
Only through me can MTN connect with the Dead Poets Society for I almost always hold midnight telephone conversations with the poets in the spirit world such as Uganda’s Okot p’Bitek who is always tippling with “Song of Lawino”, and South Africa’s Dennis Brutus who’s forever assuring me that “somehow we survive”.
Tell me, without me, how can MTN ever be in the good books of the ancestors – poetically?
This happens to be the month of August, the august month of the coming of GSM to Nigeria – whence I gave all my love to MTN, a love that is becoming quite unrequited like the love Samson of the bushy hair gave to Delilah.
Time was when a certain David Mark told anybody who cared to listen that the telephone was not meant for any Tom, Dick and Harry, let alone Maxim or his poetical constituency.
It was in August, 2001, under the watch of then President Olusegun Obasanjo, and the superintendence of Dr. Ernest Ndukwe, Executive Vice-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), that GSM licences were auctioned off in Nigeria for a hefty one-billion-dollar bazaar, but as far as I am concerned the moneyed telephone networks are at bottom just recharge card sellers that should not be allowed any gravitas to insult poets and annoy The Poet.
I refuse to be intimidated by the wealth of the MTN deactivator because beneath his flashy cars, super-duper suits and phoney elocution ticks the heart of a recharge card seller.
So let no recharge card seller get under the skin of The Poet again with line deactivation or I will use my powers that are heavier than Odumeje’s Indaboski Bahose to remind the lot that the military regime of General Sani Abacha had licensed about 17 operators before the demise of the dictator in 1998.
What am I saying? The return of Abacha or his ghost can nullify many things.
MTN takes pride in mouthing “Everywhere you go” but if The Poet subtracts his heftiness from the network the “everywhere” will be reduced to “nowhere”.
As Plato had written, “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
It’s the love that The Poet brought to MTN from birth that brought about the everywhere clout of the network.
If I should go with my poetic love constituency, MTN’s kaput like the dead old NITEL line.
It’s against every metaphor, simile, verisimilitude and onomatopoeia in poetry that when The Poet went to the MTN office to re-activate the line the crowd there was bigger than all the markets known to me such as Dugbe in Ibadan and Main Market, alias Otu-Nkwo, in Onitsha.
By the way, if MTN was operating in the time of William Shakespeare, the company would subject the great bard to waiting in such a fat crowd and thereby miss the inspiration to write “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Now I have to end by bringing on board the Irish wag Oscar Wilde who said: “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
I hope MTN has heard, even if their line is unreachable now, as they always say.
I will not try again later.
The Poet has spoken.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist and author