Your Excellency, The Chickens Are Home To Roost -By Festus Adedayo

In the next few days, specifically nine days from today, the party will be over between many of the current state governors and their mandates to steer the ships of their respective states. Four, or in some cases, eight years which, on May 29, 2011 or 2015, looked like yesterday and the day of their accomplishment which seemed like an eternity, have ran their full course! Juxtaposed with the seeming brevity of human life and man’s fleeting sojourn in this earthly assignment, the time to exit the Government House, for these privileged few out of about 180 million Nigerians, in the lingo of the holy writ, is nigh. 

One of the philosophers whose essays speak to the brevity of life and the certainty of time is Seneca. One of the three core Stoic philosophers of his time, the two others being Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, Seneca was also a playwright and an advisor to Nero, who has gone down in history as about the most despotic and cruel emperors to live on earth. Seneca’s most venerated epistles are De Brevitate Vitae (On the shortness of life) and Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, (Moral Letters to Lucilius). In On the shortness of life, Seneca gives man what looks like an urgent reminder about the sure, irrevocability and non-renewability of time. Time, I hope we all know, is man’s most important resource. Broken down to its basics, Seneca’s teachings almost rhyme with the Nursery poem we used to recite by rote those days: Tick, tick says the clock; what you have to do, do quick!

From time immemorial, the problem of time has fascinated and engaged man, through thinkers of those ages. Philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant as well as scientists like Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein have sought to come to terms with the concept and problem of time. What is time? How come it is so elastic, so fleeting and yet to important in the life of man? Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, born 544 BC, seems to succinctly speak about the brevity of time when he said that “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

So, for these governors, their time will be up in about 216 hours from now. What lesson does it hold for us as human beings, for those in position of authority, those aspiring to this sacred office and those who are on the verge of stepping into the shoes of these men who would soon be yesterday men? The most important lesson therein, as I said in the preceding paragraphs, is the lesson of Tick, tick says the clock. It is the lesson of running the race as if it will end today or even this hour; the lesson of what I call, positively immortalizing self by the minute.

Like all men, most of these governors assumed that they were Lords of Time and that the so-called brevity of time was within their gubernatorial jurisdiction to decree out of existence. They never saw the office as a sacred bestowal worthy of being used to immortalize themselves in the hearts of the people. Rather, it was a tool to re-enact Nero’s cruelty, amass, at the expense of the state, the notorious wealth of Haitian despot, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and harangue their enemies. Baby Doc who ran Haiti for 16 bloody years, was said to have spirited over $120 million from the wealth of the impoverished Haitian nation.

The first reality that will dawn on the exiting governors in the morning of May 30 is that the colour of life after office is dark, very dark. The second reality is that, of all the gifts of existence that providence may bestow on man, power is the most un-enduring, the most perishable and the most treacherous of man’s earthly friends. If providence bestows on one wealth and it vamooses like the billows of vapour, wealth will still abide by man. Put rightly, when a man who was hitherto wealthy ceases to have wealth, wealth does not leave him in its totality, at least not immediately. He will still have the shadows of wealth ensconcing him round and about. For instance, the imposing cars, the clothes, what is left of the stupendous mansions that have not yet been sold to repay debts, may still abide. The wealthy man could drive his magnificent Posh car about, to the admiration of an unsuspecting world. He alone will know that it is a mere shell. So also with other earthly gifts of health and fame. Not so with power. The moment power vacates its holder, it does so with precise abandon and abandons him immediately. The paraphernalia leaves, the adulation leaves and the ex-holder of office is as bare as naked fire.

The ex-governors will witness this in its manifest crudeness and cruelty. They will suddenly begin to see a consistent casualty of loyalists who will abandon them to their fates. In droves, they will move to the next dispenser of largesse and because, in this clime, government is the hugest dispenser of unearned cash and prebends, the migration to the port of next meal will be so humongous, so sudden and enough to make anyone with a faint heart lose the rhythm of his senses. If you ever sight human traffic round the ex-governor, it is probably the people feel that the governor still has remnants of stolen money that could be squeezed off him. This is not to talk of the EFCC cell that many will make their second homes, like a common felon.

Many of the former governors will be very miserable and downcast post-May 29. Yes, their financial situation has been highly enhanced by their stay in government and they still retain sizeable chunks of that stolen cash, the collapse of the ephemeral human wall they erected round themselves in the last few years would give them emotional upheaval. In 2007 in Enugu State, I learnt the cadence of this realization which is encapsulated in the Igbo proverb which says that he who holds the palm frond is one the goat migrates towards. The Yoruba also have a similar proverb which has been used serially to justify treachery; they say won kii ya’go f’elesin ana, meaning, no one vacates the road for he who rode the horse yesterday.

What more, the governors, who were “men of timbre and caliber” will soon find out that they are not as indomitable as they seemed to be while donning the majesty and power of office. From May 30, except for the vermin of corruption which has eaten into the marrow of the Nigeria Police and which will allow paddy paddy manipulations, the governors’ security would be removed, leaving probably their police orderly. Those DSS men who could not sleep because H. E. was sleeping, the policemen who cordoned His Excellency’s Government House Empire, will leave in droves to begin afresh with today’s rider of the horse. The siren affixed to their convoys, which they blew even while going to the toilet, will lose its trenchant nuisance and the reality of financing the logistics and fuelling of a senselessly-long convoy will dawn on them. No one will teach them the need to downsize the nuisance.

From May 30, a cache of fraudsters will mill round the governors vacating their offices. Because they are generally known to have stashed illicit money in China, America and suchlike countries, a chunk of which was paid therein by foreign road contractor allies in the crime of fleecing the Nigerian people, corporate fraudsters will swarm the former governors like ants crowd round the pee of a diabetic. They will be waving in their faces irresistible offers to buy over companies. In the process, the governors will be duped of the huge heists they made from the Nigerian people. For some of them who had bought properties and companies through partners in crime while they were governors, this is the time they will feel the texture of treachery. Their proxies, in whose names those properties were bought, will play Peter the Apostle on them. If only late Governor Abdulkareem Adisa could talk, he would have told you his encounter with such an infernal proxy while in Oyo State.

On the whole, these men who straddled the Nigerian stratosphere like pestilence, will witness the Yoruba wise saying which says that the Egungun (masquerade) festival, with its lavish wining and dining, will soon be coming to an end and the son of the Chief Masquerade will also queue like everyone else to buy akara (beans cake) with which to eat his corn meal porridge. The governors will find out that nothing differentiates them from the vagrant next door; their poo-poo smells as unbearably as the mad man on the streets and they are subject to every existential battle that every other man fights. Gradually, they will realize that they should have made life more pleasant to live for the people while providence entrusted the baton of power in their care.