Madmen and specialists

Sam Omatseye

This is the season of Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s master artist, whose works, whether as a playwright, a novelist, a poet or an essayist, have dramatised the Nigerian harried existence. He has poeticised Nigeria either in the mocking tones of comedy or in the depressing ether of tragedy. As we celebrate his 80th birthday, we also mourn the Nigerian season of anomie, as we have morphed into a nation on the edge of a precipice. His oeuvre broods over his country.

Nothing demonstrates this atrophy of hope as the harmattan dust unleashed by the President Goodluck Jonathan administration in the name of democracy. It is the hobgoblin of impeachment. Ordinarily, we can say impeachment is a legitimate weapon of politics to oust any elected officer, whether governor or president, who has breached the moral code of office and drawn the cathedral aura of the people’s mandate into the cesspit. So, to impeach legitimately is to affirm the people’s will, but also to retrieve the high ideal of the vote. It is the re-legitimation of the people’s will and the sublimity of democracy as a popular revenge. It is a reminder to the incumbent that he is flesh and blood, human like all of us, and he cannot soar into tyranny or fall into contempt at will. It is a milder form of the Roman tradition where a slave lurked behind an emperor during a triumphal parade and whispered: “Remember, you are only human.”

Yet, I can say that in this inchoate republic, we have had quite a few impeachments, and I can say we have never had any, no matter the political party, that actually carried the inviolate encasement of the people’s hurrah. It has always been politics as revenge, sometimes with the hue of atavistic butchery.

But never before in our history has this weapon become so savage in its intent as the gale that the Jonathan administration is flinging open from his house of storms. The Acting Governor of Adamawa State, Ahmadu Fintiri, exemplified the low moral standard with his celebration when he arrived the national headquarters of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Abuja. “I have delivered,” he crooned with self-satisfaction. What did that mean? “As a loyal and obedient party member, I came on a courtesy call to my party and the National Working Committee as my first assignment after the battle to remove Governor Murtala Nyako, who had stolen the mandate of the PDP under which he was elected. I came here to bring back the mandate and I have handed over to them (party leaders) the mandate.”

Clearly, the ouster had nothing to do with higher ideal of integrity in public office. It was just an act of partisan malice. For Governor Nyako had many sins before he defected from the PDP to the All Progressives Congress (APC), and they were legion. Yet, I cannot say all were unconstitutional sins. I found them very nauseating. How do you turn your office into a nepotistic fiefdom advertising your husbandry of wives by making them special advisers, or how do you turn fecund with about 1,000 special advisers in the name of stomach infrastructure? How do you turn your son into a political gladiator just because you have one, and you can flex any paternal muscle? Those were some of the things that the public detested about the man, and all of these permeated the Adamawa body politic as a PDP man. He was not impeachable then. Suddenly his sins as a PDP man were saintly until he became an APC man. He did not have body odour until he found another lover. The trial, like the trial in Soyinka’s best work, A Dance of the Forests, created optical illusion. Is Nyako being tried as the PDP sinner or as the APC defector? Who was innocent here, who was the madman? Was it the man who was tried, or the accuser? Or who was the specialist? Was it the person who claimed he had control of the judicial process and turned it upside down, or the man who fled because he knew justice had tumbled over? In Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists, the border is nebulous. Was it not the same house that gave Nyako a vote of confidence in the halcyon, back-slapping days when he had committed the same offences over which he recently fell at the guillotine? By impeaching him, were they not carrying out the absurd theatre of self-impeachment, an act of legislative self-execution?

So, what we are seeing, however, is a play of giants. Jonathan is the giant here, but not a giant of moral grandeur. He is a parody of the giant of the television advertisement standing him with Mandela, Obama, etc. But he is a giant, who Soyinka mocked in a play of that title. So, it was clear Fintiri was not acting for the Adamawa State people, but his party leaders in Abuja, and who is the helmsman of Abuja? Unless we lie to ourselves, it is President Jonathan. Was that not why Nyako scurried there, cap in hand, to see if he could save him? He forgot that nobody ever begs Jonathan in this matter. He, a snake with sly venom, never forgives and never takes responsibility. Fat with prey, he snorts quietly in his nest. Nyako just learned that lesson after wasting his pride in a servile visit to Aso Rock. If you knew brother Chume well, in Soyinka’s Jero Plays, you won’t have a doubt. He watches from the stealth of his abode his opera of Nigeria. He does not have to have wonyosi.

So, why not Nasarawa, why not Edo, or Rivers, etc? But we forget that his first target has been Rivers State, but he has consistently failed. He is still hopeful. But what is at stake is not the party victory now, but the Nigerian democracy or our survival as a nation. Jonathan does not have a conscience for consequences or an acute sense of history. That would have subdued him to sobriety. If you succeed now, does democracy succeed? Politics is a contest for power, but malice and contempt for the dignity of the constitution are dangerous. They uphold the cynical high point of technicality over substance. You don’t win a people from above, but from below. Jonathan wants to conquer rather than win the hearts of Nigeria. You don’t know when a soup is over-burned by staring at the surface bubbling appetisingly. Any such strategy is superficial. It is flirtation with death for this democracy like the King’s horseman in Soyinka’s play of that title. It’s not the road for us.



 - In Touch, The Nation Newspaper, 21/07/2014