Nigeria is a ring of iniquity. And, the iniquitous didn’t start with it today. For several years, I covered the activities of several military governors and administrators in Oyo State. Each of those well-trained minds came with their peculiarities. Colonel Ahmed Usman (God bless his soul) was particularly voluble. Whenever he spoke, it was as he felt; he had no euphemism for whatever came to his mind. Anytime he did that, his media handlers were left horrified, scrambling and begging reporters for a soft landing. At a point, whispers of unwholesome deals were disturbing his sleep and the man came out full blast at a public function: “Even if I took anything, you don’t know that oga dey front, oga dey back, and all these people you see around me, dem no dey collect? If I chop alone na for the throat here e go stay.” He was right that time. If he said the same today, he would be right with the present administration of our election. It is a bustling bazaar.
On Saturday, you heard the Igbotako, Ondo State, woman who said she and everyone around her collected money and voted. The woman was asked by a television reporter what she had to say on the governorship election that was under way. She got possessed by the spirit of violent truth, and she sang: “We have voted. Voting is going on peacefully; there is no wahala; no fight. We voted and we collected money. All of us; we collected money; money for our votes…” She was about to say more but the people around her said enough! She was hushed up. And you could hear inside of her the voice of Sutpen, William Faulkner’s innocent character in ‘Absalom, Absalom!’: “What did I do or misdo?” The woman is the definition of innocence. She must be in some trouble now with the merchants of votes.
Second Republic governor of Ogun State, Chief Olabisi Onabanjo, wrote a popular column, ‘Ayekooto’, for the Nigerian Tribune. That was an unusual name. Ayekooto, when literally translated, means “the world rejects truth.” There was a creature called Bird of Truth. It used to live with man, conversing freely with him. But the bird told man too many brutal truths leading to its deportation and banishment forever to the bush. Because there is no vacuum in nature, the place of the deportee at home was filled with the presence of Parrot. This one is, however, different. It only mimics man. It says only whatever man says. Parrot is then asked why it hides its truth in monotonous mimicry, its reply is one lone word: ‘Ayekooto’. It became its name till tomorrow.
Naïveté or childish ignorance is a connotation of innocence. Jacques Maritain who stresses this in his ‘Dantes Innocence and Luck’ adds the second connotation of innocence: “integrity or incorruption, untouched original purity.” I think the ‘simple’ woman of Ondo represents Maritain’s both senses. She put in plain words what people of the world say in tongues. There is no election here, what we do is buying and selling. Or, in more graphic words, the people have come to realize that it pays to do with their votes what street whores do in their dingy holes.
The woman said there was “no wahala, no fight.” There couldn’t have been. Was it not a matter of cash? It is what the Yoruba call owó rèé, ojà rèé (money is here, what to purchase is here); it is in Hausa too: Ga kasuwa; ga kudi (see market, see money). Right buyers and right sellers always bond; they don’t fight unless there is a conman among them. But in this election business, all the thieves preserve their honour. They, therefore, do not fight. My people also say that in the Christian church, there is no reason for fisticuffs: you say your prayer, I say my Amen (Ìjà ò sí ní sóòsì; s’àdúà kí ns’àmí). At the polling booth, there is no more fear; everyone knows their place and their role. There is a vote to sell, who has come with the biggest cash? If today’s relationship between the voter and the voted is sustained, we won’t need policemen for elections again. Thugs will be useless, they will be out of job.
It is amazing how elections here have evolved; it is now big business. Politicians have borrowed sense from slave merchants of 19th century West Africa who bought captured people from raiders. Today’s slave raiders are a multi-layered lot. ‘Stakeholders’ of influence negotiate with candidates and their sponsors; candidates mobilize ‘stakeholders’ who pay agents; agents round up the actual voters and sell them to the candidates. The paid voters are shepherded to the polling booth, they vote like the Ondo woman – but unlike her, the paid voter does not go on the rooftop revealing the secrets of the market. It is pay-and-go and clean yansh like the brisk business of the street slut.
The Ondo woman was not stupid. She was just plain innocent and down-to-earth. To be down-to-earth is to be unpretentious. We should thank her, even give her a national award. In her honesty, she gave us what we’ve been searching for concerning our democracy. What is the right definition of what we do that we call elections? She has defined our democracy in a way no political scientist could. And, if I could reconstruct her thought, I would write that what we call democracy here is a government of money by money and for money.
A winner has emerged in the Ondo contest. The man won not necessarily because he was the best of the pack. He won because he was the one whose pocket best aligned with the demands of the electors. Politicians have stopped making promises of good governance. You don’t get pressed and go to the one-night stand and proceed into needless toasting. It is foolishness or inexperience. Pay the right price; if there is a competition, outbid them and get the prize. Fasting is for the foolish; the wise never get famished.
PDP clears Zamfara LG polls; APC sweeps Ogun LG election; Ondo governorship poll: It is 18 over 18 for APC. Those are current headlines. What do they tell about our democracy?
Last week, I quoted the title of a 1965 editorial of the Nigerian Tribune: ‘White elephant elections.’ I wonder what the writer of that piece would scribble if he were alive today and witnessed what we call elections. We pour bastard money into elections even when what we do is elect without elections. There were pretences in the past. These days, we think pretence is for the faint-hearted. We simply tell the people to come and be bedded if they would eat and their children would not starve. And they come well-behaved like captured slaves on a straight line – or like the guiltless volunteers on the firing line of Baltasar Engonga, popular s3x star (tsar) of Equatorial Guinea.
As I write this, I take a pause, and then a rush to Ayi Kwei Armah’s ‘Two Thousand Seasons’. Its prologue keeps reading like an epilogue to what I call my country: “People headed after the setting sun, in that direction, even the possibility of regeneration is dead. There, the devotees of death take life, consume it, and exhaust every living thing. Then they move on, forever seeking newer boundaries. Wherever there are living remnants undestroyed, there lies more work for them. Whatever would direct itself after the setting sun, an ashen death lies in wait for it. Whichever people make the falling fire their aim, a pale of extinction awaits them among the destroyers…”
Nigeria’s journey towards the setting sun did not start today. With its democracy, it is a train that is plainly headed towards ashen waste, the falling sun. It is choking, killing and very expensive and we are all paying, even the rich are crying. The Japanese have a proverb which will be hated if said here: “If you get on the wrong train, get off at the next station – the longer you stay, the more expensive the return trip will be.” Indians have a counter proverb: “Sometimes, the wrong train takes you to the right station.” Do not listen to the Indian. It worked for India because the Indians dropped off their wrong coaches very early in their lives. Here, we are in a wrong train, pulling deathly coaches, facing the wrong direction. This democracy. There is no right station where it is headed. Unfortunately, cheap or expensive, we are not even thinking of any return trip. We all pretend that all is well. We sing Alleluia to the operators who packed sheep with humans and shut the door. All na passenger (wón k’éran m’éro). The interior blurs all lines between what is third-class and what is first. The experience is the same.
‘The Morning Train to Ibadan’ is the title of a foreigner’s experience of Nigeria sixty-two years ago. One morning in 1962, John Henrik Clarke, an American journalist, took a train from Lagos to Ibadan. The train left the Lagos Terminus at exactly eight o’clock in the morning and arrived Ibadan at 2.20 p.m. Between the time the journey started and the time it ended, enough of Nigeria happened for the newsman from America to write about.
And he wrote: A beggar strolled into the train, “pleading for the price of his morning meal.” The man thought he deserved some pity. The train got to Yaba, passed through that part of Lagos and had its first stop at Ebute Metta. The American noticed that the beggar left the train here “and three more got on.” The newsman added that at Agece (Agege), another beggar boarded the train “carrying a sign saying he was deaf and dumb.” The train continued its journey to Ibadan. The passenger noticed the train panting. At another time, it “started jerkily.” Things weren’t exactly right. Was it with the train or with the driver? It made several stops and started in the middle of nowhere. And while it did this, the American said he noticed that no one, except himself “seemed to care why the train had stopped in the first place.” Some were busy eating, many just chatted away in the overcrowded third-class cabin while the journalist sat taking mental note of the fainting train and its carefree passengers.
The train got to another station and stopped. Our American guest noticed that one of the deaf and dumb beggars ended his tour here. If all the man wrote is a drama, this is where I cite as the denouement. What happened? The journalist saw the beggar shedding his deaf-and-dumb costume like a snake does its skin. Snake keepers call it molting or ecdysis. The beggar got down and “was met by friends. He took off his sign and stood by the tracks, laughing and talking as other friends came up to greet him.” Now, to be dumb, is it not to lack the capacity to speak? The deaf is the one who has ears but hears nothing. But this deaf-and-dumb dude laughed and spoke heartily with friends! Nigeria must be a country of the impossible; our American guest was utterly disappointed. “Hereafter,” he wrote, “it is going to be difficult for me to believe that anybody in Nigeria is really deaf and dumb.”
No one is really deaf and dumb in Nigeria. No one has ever been. Our country is a nation of drama and jokes. Nothing shocks anyone; no experience mocks anybody. Only foreigners like that American journalist get worked up and take us seriously. Did you notice how the beggars came on and off the train? For them, the train ride was not a journey, it was business. Everything was transactional, their presence, their cries for pity, even their innocence.
The American’s train experience happened in 1962 – two years after independence. Sixty-two years after that journey, tell me if the train of Nigeria has stopped fainting, stopping and jerking without explanations. And whether Nigerians have started getting bothered by anything beyond their eating and chatting, saying nothing. Sixty-two years after ‘The morning Train to Ibadan’, tell me if beggars have stopped faking blindness. Or that the deaf of the last century has not given birth to newer generations of the deaf and dumb. Tell me what has changed and if something will change. Nothing will change because nothing is real. Not election. Not democracy. Not politicians. Not even the country.
And the future of where we are? I will tell what I know: Again, I quote Ayi Kwei Armah, but this time, from his ‘The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born’: “When you can see the end of things even in their beginnings, there’s no more hope, unless you want to pretend, or forget, or get drunk or something.” There is no country. What is Nigeria is void; pitch dark darkness.
Lasisi Olagunju is a columnist with Nigerian Tribune