An Ode – Beyond the Politics of things in need of audience -By Jimi Bickersteth

‘I’ll warrant him for drowning, though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell, and as leaky as an unstanched wench”
William Shakespeare – The Tempest.

This evening, I was relaxing in the study, after a dinner of sliced mushrooms quiche, an open pie filled with a mixture of eggs and bacon, cheese and milk. The sun was already low in the sky; longer day, shorter night, I’d observed. It would soon be dark. Sitting here, a quixotic idea was playing out in my mind, about the nation, its leadership, the people and a way forward, as the sea across my waterfront residence presented an ever-changing series of tableaux.

A Wordworth’s famous lines,
‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,/ That floats on high o’er vales and hills…’ simultaneously, also flashed across my mind even as a ‘MAERSK’ marked ship hoved in sight, as it put to sail. Put together, it became a cinema of the mind, a kind of documentary that showed life in the raw. It depicted the shifting sands of the nation’s affairs in a quadratic manner; a situation that keeps changing, so that it is difficult to make sense of it or feel any confident about it. And it was taking the people and the government a long time to get it shipshaped.

In view of recent happenings, the nation in its present state and setting, had received great critical acclaim, upbraiding and condemnation, and, if you like, like me, you can add, in the most forthright languages, from the qualified and qualified, and the reactions were based on biases of where you were, and where you were coming from.

The opinions and biases showed vividly, but, without plausible reasons, why:
I) the nation and its ‘chief ‘change agents’ and coterie of advisers couldn’t fathom an advanced and organised state of human social development fit for the 21st century.
ii) the people have forever confined to live perpetually under the bondage of a scantily clad aria of substantive and procedural law, and debased moral standards of the ruling elites.
iii) Law enforcement continue to favour a reactive rather than a preventive strategy.
iv) a nation called civilised should permit such terrible injustices in and around its geospace.
v) the government and the main opposition party clashes on the question of corruptions, such that it had become what one would call, a classical example of colours and designs not matching or looking good together, and as such, had provided a perfect foil for the national foibles.

In consequence, of the (i-v) thereof, the nation, fortuitously, appeared, to have been tricked by unscrupulous politicians, their friends and allies, who, of course, were now rich, and squandered they did not know how much money in their luxury resorts home and abroad, moored yachts, and could sponsor all sponsorables with their ‘forgotten’ foreign accounts.

Meanwhile, the nation’s teeming mass of humanity, in its eternal syrupy love story with the political leaders, were still as poor as they had been sixty years before. The men and women on the street bear the brunt of economic mismanagement and copious maladministration, and, now, have began to speak of this angrily. The people speak angrily, it is true, but it was that kind of anger maintained by choice, like a relation whose unpleasantness has become, through the years, almost a luxurious necessity.

However, the people’s or at best, their spokespersons body and tonal language at the nation’s current dilemmas, which to them, had somewhat aggravated their individual livelihoods and wellbeing, With this angst, protestations and confrontations, there appeared on the horizon signs of imminent clash of clans, of people, against the educated and the learned, and those curly, draconic and unworking laws, that were cowardly betraying country. It is fast becoming a reality that principles and justice would fail, as the people in their frustration mass against them.

Living here, in this demoralizing scenario and destroying heat, year after year, did not make the people ill, it only sapped them slowly, leaving them rather numbed and silent. Silent so vicious, so terrible, so empty. The nation had spoken very little, because the polity had not called for much to be said, until now. But unlike ants and knowing and understanding that difference between silence, sight and sound, the circumstances in and around the nation have roused in them and are saying what was necessary.

The arousal was an ode to the irritating silence, equable silence, to the nation’s understood truths, about equality, equity, credible elections, balanced geographic delimitations and fair representation, genuine federal character and the other ‘unanswered’ national questions, that the people had to grow up and adjust themselves; and, watching the state of the nation, their ears acquired new sensitivity like a conscience and quietness that was troubling. Troubling the soul and the mind of the people, but not touching the ruling elites.

It was like the good people being awakened from sleep and still compos mentis, realised that they were part of a conspiracy of some kind that no one ever spoke about. Silence. The people’s real feelings were growing up, in a bottom-up resistance fashion, slow and complicated and obstinate underneath that silence. Amazing, that with all the beauty of education and verifiable claims to its acquisition by the vocal minority, still ignorant – that resignation in knowledge called irony.

The nation had become like a tale any living Nigeria, rich and poor might remember like a poetry in motion all their life, eternally, grateful to their anti-hero politicians who do not have the qualities typically expected to lift a complex nation stringed together by a weak, non-existent philosophy. Grateful indeed! for a glimpse of the predatory adventurers bred when the nation was at its lowest and with it, enough nonsense in all its ramifications; the deceits, the mess ups, the grand heists, and corruption, in its Judicature, Legislature and the Executive, with, all ending as common criminals. And the anti-heroes completely anti the new king’s regime of ‘zero-tolerance’ for corruption and wastages. In fairness and for the purpose of balance, these were events that in actual fact, antedates the new king’s era.

At this point I put my thoughts back to the Savannah’s malleable surface of the globe, or imagined that I did; and suppressed my furtive speculation about a prosperous nation, about the fascinating underground structures, but not altogether. There was slowly growing in me another vision, a vision of the 2023, it was like a story from a child’s adventure book in its simplicities of luck and bad fortune and persistent courage rewarded only by the knowledge of right – doing.

I stole a glance at the window to the forecourt, a child was squandering the precious water that had to be bought from the well three times a week in the water cart. The householders were always expected to be niggardly with water, since there was no money to dig well in the courtyard, (and where there were, the water spewed were salty and reeked of petrol, the effect of contamination and or pollution), and now there was Junior swilling gallons of it. I saw there was no end to the strangeness and variety of these politicians, who for years made the land unhabitable and unfit for the plough.

Politicians who had no feeling for goodness, their ‘sound’ instincts were for the ‘useless stuffs’- emancipation, of growth and development, secretly in their hearts jeering at the gullibility all around, and gaining not so much a knowledge as an intimation of a wonderful future of this nation exposed until the dawn to the snares of magical possibilities. Perhaps, with this capacity of losing themselves, this was how the vision narrowed down in them, and, all with it, the true potentialities of the nation and its people.

They are always attending to the land’s lucrative busynesses of lawmaking and politics with half their attention, but their passion was directed into their individual business to which they pump the money stolen from the ‘commonwealth’. That ‘something else’ – how well Nigerians knew it! and how they distrusted it, and how one grieved for the so-called ‘Youths’, whose hearts were beating to the pulse of that dangerous ‘something else’, it was not the lack, poverty, deprivation, and tension of the last twenty years or so of ‘experimental’ Party Politics and the narrow escapes from near-war situations which nevertheless upped the ante in the take-over battle; the Boko Haram and herdsmen assaults, none of these things in themselves.

It was that oblique unnameable quality in life which, trying to pin it down safely in homely words, finally dismissed in the sour and nagging phrase: ‘Getting something for nothing’. That’s all they wanted. There wasn’t anything to be proud of in getting something for nothing. The surface sense was clear – an expensive democracy and its costing the nation a good deal of money. And its real sense the people preferred not to examine, for it was too wounding to their psyche and pride.
Politics here had made the people seem like a race of groping Cyclops unlike in saner climes, where it was like a well. Wells were a routine. One set a couple of men to dig, and if there was no water by a certain depth, one pulled them out and tried again elsewhere. No need to stand over the thing – the Three Arms square, like a harassed mother hen.

But for how long shall the nation put Its people in shoe-leather! The wages of the overrated legislators would save up for industrial development and Technical education. The RMFAC could rationalise the security votes and there would be more money to finance infrastructure further. Call it impatient common sense. Contradictory! Can’t make it out at all! Yet, this should be a crucial period of adjustment.

I saw a worried neighbour through the window of the study, a widow caring for her daughter, who was in the hospital with hydrocephalus (excessive fluid in the brain), herself in that same hospital was diagnosed of worry and breast cancer and had to have surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Extremely difficult for her to handle being alone, being in the hospital and at the same time that her ailing daughter was. This was one of many all over the place. Life was hard and unjust to her.

Time as this, the downtrodden deserves empathy, the ability to share someone else’s feelings by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. That was what was expected and required of the leaders, but, no, with the most curious feeling of dismay, they behaved as special breed. But, by nature empathy is implanted in the human DNA. But the self-styled ‘excellencies’, ‘h’onourables’ and ‘distinguished’ have purged theirs. That was why they could finger the pupils of the peoples eyes and they themselves would not bat an eyelid; unaware of the peoples feelings, thoughts and circumstances.

The ruling elites were immuned to the skyrocketing cost of living, maddening inflationary trends, mass hunger, crippling diseases, grinding poverty, brutal killings, maiming and general insecurity, which were some of the misfortunes the poor had had to endured over the years. Meanwhile, the ruling elites take home large chunks of the ‘commonwealth’ rather than help eliminate all tragedy, wipe away tears and not only give up for the future but also help facilitate a better and prosperous life.

Most Nigerians, without prejudices, really don’t follow or understood the logic of this democratic phenomenon, following the events that had been unfolding since 1999. Instead, they felt a thwarted misery – for what was the use of being miserable? They no longer believe in emotions that were not useful in some way, but drifting into a quiet acceptance of whatever was ditched out to it, like fatalism, but, as far as they were concerned it was a moment of divorce between the leaders and the led; but a divorce takes two, and if the partner doesn’t even notice it, what then?

To move the nation forward, there was the need for an attitude change on both sides, and particularly, on the side of the leaders; for, while they could not be described as stupid, they have showed no real inclination for serious application of themselves to the task of building a new national political, social and economic consensus for a national rebirth. At the moment, the people have been driven out of that inward refuge where everything was supposedly, clear and meaningful, and maintained the silence necessary when dealing with little-minded spoilsports with fear on the faces of the hectoring politicians like a child with night-terrors.

At the nation, before the recent calls for reorganisation, restructuring and power devolution, what was on offer was a temporary withdrawal from living. With the restlessness, #Lekkigate #ENDSARS and other agitations that had called the essence, definitions and style of the nation’s democracy and federalism to question, there were no wholesome changes yet. One found a private belief confirmed: that nothing could happen in this nation in neat, tidy events; everything must always drag itself out, everything declined and decayed and muddled itself along. Some argued that the king, was hired to sanitise the system when it went near-comatose and economically and morally bankrupt. He, irritably, was doing what he could, and what do the people expect, a miracle to order?

Arguably, I looked, in all fairness that it was PMB that was coaxing the empire back after the sixteen years or so of heists, high level corruption and miscarriage of justice, with that gentle, protective sympathy which was strange to power-mongers in spite of his perceived ‘lifeless’ and physical ‘weaknesses’. He had got all from the North to the South waited with bated breath in a condition of hallucinatory calm. The tension no longer pleasant and had now gotten the people to a feeling of anticlimax.

I think PMB’s administration had the notion in the inner recesses of their minds of:
a) the nation had to come back to the people,
b) its taking its place in the committee of nations and behaving sensibly, but in a tight and controlled way.
These had proved that the bourgeoisie scathing criticisms right is not clear unless the nation knows the antecedent of which. In spite of themselves, the power-mongers were affected by his tenacity and certainty. Each was thinking secretly: Suppose he’s right? After all, great inventors are always laughed at to begin with.

Now, looking at the grey clouds in the night sky, where the moon used to sit was a golden shade semblance of the sun in a circumference. The moon was up in the PHCHless night, and everything flooded with that wierd light that made the dank, blank darkness of the night lose its solidity. The plants in the garden were swaying and murmuring like a sea all around them. Life would seem flat and grey if the lopsided equations and high level corruption of the past was allowed to continue, and merely safe in that disorderly inner world of the anthill.

There was something in the air which had formed the people that everybody has the duty to better themselves and ‘get on’ seem like an anachronism. In a way, the wheel had come the circle: the difference between the two major political parties in the land by slight and almost illegible marks of being limited by own capacities; and as much as a slave to their ill-fed, backward, unhappy and sullen commune.

The leadership was the difference, but polarised; one with zero-tolerance for corruption and the other quite liberal and indifferent. It’s difficult for its people with everything in such a mess, and the people in their resentment and disappointment of the politicians Lilliputian and pedestrian strides seething with frustration and misery, physical misery, and had to tried hard to control that deamon of disappointment and anger.

‘What do you expect them to do’? To this the politicians would retort, ‘What do they want’? Of the ruling elites, I saw a leading politician whose attitude was that of being coerced to run, when asked questions of his intentions, forced to look outside himself and his private world. He gave that shrewd, slow look, hesitate a little, and then in a rather tired voice, as if talking about his ambition to contest were disagreeable. He looks patient, but behind the good-natured patience was another emotion, like a restrained cruelty; a personal cruelty and self-punishment of fatalism.

This madhouse, but it’s got something – but when I get the hankering, I remembered I’m still alive and kicking when the crowd’s mostly dead or put out to grass. I guess, I’m writing of the nation as men do of the sea, or travel. The golden nation, where life seemed daring, wonderful and dangerous shimmering in my head like a mirage with its array and collection of its sorrowing witnesses of victims of the ‘black gold industry’, acknowledging it with my mind but not my imagination.

Shall the nation ever find its way among its many complexities and diversities. I paused to weigh my valour and discretion. Why? Well, when a nation had failed, its cruel to point it out. But making sarcastic remarks about it; one has to tread carefully to be objective, factual and sincere, without feeling a traitor to the cause. But, as it were, there is a kind of hysteric laxness all around the nation in spite of the world economy dwindling away, not losing money and not making any, and a slapdash promise of a future, that’s hanging a millstone around the necks of the nationals. But something in me says, the nation on the verge of discovery that would shake the world, it’s a question of persistence. I’m not a prophet, but I could sense it.

I could sense it and feel it. This might not be as thrilling a feeling for the 200 or so million people co-habiting in its land spaces, but it appeared sensible. Because it was necessary; and what is necessary has its own logic. One just had to look for it. It seemed like a kind of magic, as ways of thinking do that have not yet been given names and classified; an arbitrary process. Let’s get some food, and kill hunger, no point in being uncomfortable for nothing.

Still on the matter, in a moon to the audience, as graft, fleece, banditry, agitations and insurgencies becomes (‘Gbemu kóokú) (‘drink and die’) poison, and suddenly with ecstasy, ‘Fiat justitia Ruat Caelum – Let justice be done though the heavens fall was on the lips everyone. Some in the minority, with words and semantics began to wheel and fly around, as if they were puppets on a string, playing out a predetermined course without free will or personal choices. Without rational thought, happenings around the environment had revealed our impulses can be brought under control despite our genetic underpinnings. This was where the new birth, and the national renaissance came in.

The common sense question is not who was busted, but whether the allegations flying around were true, if yes, insofar as the accused owned up, it stands condemnable, and asking to show grace or asking for grace for people occupying exalted spaces where they could aggravate the pains on the people, whose lifestyles made the poor and ‘downtroden’ further uncomfortable was like crashing borders. One’s greatness is not in the office one occupies, or the group’s one heads, but greatness lies in one’s ability to rise above pettiness, ego and sensitivity and welcoming criticisms, in doing so demonstrating one of the strengths of a truly great person: humility. The struggles for emancipation was a people thing, not a bread and butter thing, and must not be toyed with for a plate porridge.

The nation that is perfectly passionate about change in the system must make the present moment a time to learn, not lose. Let Nigerians see the recent happenings as a dawn of the new era, and, look beyond the politics of things but reality of the fact that if you are in the people’s crosshairs, one must protect oneself and one’s comportment with honesty and discipline, simplicita! Rose will be rose! If the cacophony of the learned minority was allowed, PMB, would be all alone in the fight against corruption, and that would be like trying to dance a foxtrot with a people who only know how to waltz.

The truth be told, I feel that PMB’s life of resolve and discipline and rhythm not impulse was creating fears and making a whole lot of persons polluting the environment of change trying to reach for control and criticise government. But leadership was not a tea party neither was it a call to naivety or ignorance. The nation is not oblivious to the challenges the times brings, but they expect strong will and courage from their number one. And as long as he had the peoples back, the waves from the accompanying storms can’t take him under.

The people don’t want a waif creature, an ethnic chauvinist at the helm of its affairs dithering to and fro with beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of his digestion. They need hard rock principled stance. Yes! the criticisms shall be strident and cacophonous from those that have continuously benefited in the ‘business as usual’ crushing PMB was ‘dealing blows’, he must not back down, or cut back and start playing it safe.

The security forces must live up to their brief and bear true allegiance to the federation and their calling. PMB must not settle for such safety-stagger under the blows of criticisms, reel to and fro at the sputum, pushed to your tethers and wits end. They will be glad to quieten him and forgo the ‘struggle’, but he mustn’t give up the fight. He must save the soul of the nation from the patent mess all around.

The 9th NASS (the most docile assemblage of the Third Republic) a posteriori stood accused here of apostasy and dereliction or outright shirking of its responsibilities, as it continued to ‘sit’ there at the dome of the Three-Arms-Square, unconcerned, and perpetually on recess even with the damsel in distress. One could see the antagonism between them, and a little apart, full of dislike for each other, and other politicians on the other end, and knowing that the dislike came from the pressure of the outside world.

In the moon to the conscience, one saw things through the histrionic gestures of the elected Representatives, displaying considerable histrionic talents, but the other side of life, clear and a little distorted, with it, the strain of fitting these two worlds together. The NASS leadership approach to public administration was antithetical to modern methods. The ‘paid holiday-makers’ and their dramatic rise to leadership often gave every appearance of learning and was expected to give apotheoses of most perfect development of legislation, but their appallingly difficult circumstances showed that certain problems were apparent from the onset and their motives, as would soon become apparent were completely selfish and ego-driven, and with scandalous recklessness.

In this aphorism, the Savannah and its Antheap seemed dead, a mound of hard, peaked baked earth, it was suddenly very much alive, for there was a fresh outbreak of ideas, and was dampening the floor of the hill. The Savannah’s anthill would have to be rebuilt again soon, because the ants who had spent years bootstrapping themselves through life and the borers would have it eaten through; even as it changes all the emphasis of persistent conflicts, agitations, insurgencies, injustices, insensitivity, recklessness and the brazen thieving from the public till.

That would only be fair to a people bent and straining under the weight of a heavy load of shame, of lack, poverty and deprivation amidst the embarrassment of riches all around. The hill had to be rebuilt with strong thatch and good walls, plastered this time with mud, so as to make it harder for the anteaters, rats and cockroaches. The new found political gangups, alignments and realignments were amusing indeed. The politician may say of a companion one day that he hates so and so, and the next: He is my friend. This is one of the ways of friendship, and just as real as amiability or being alike. That was how a relationship is, shifting and changing and are kept by the fabric of social life, devoid of principle. It’s bad for the evolution and deepening of the nation’s democratic experiences.

And now it was certainly almost too late to admit that something that had always been considered as a learning curve and a sort of temporary whim or makeshift, like someone who learnt to enjoy an inferior brand of tobacco when better brands are not available as a permanent feature of the nation’s ethos, of its character. It questions the nation’s moral rectitude and fibre, even as it cast stains on societal etiquette and sense of goodness, right, justice and well-being.

The nation gave PMB a rocket for doing the needful in that mood of obstinate disaffection, and without allowing the people’s anger to dictate the politicians actions, whereas, both should know that crises and decisions faced them. They must be decisions that would be favourable to an instinctive respect for, learning and people with the determination to ‘ get on’, for a people leaving one purpose for the other, yet no purpose.

In this season of renewal, reconnecting, rebuilding and reconstruction, the nation’s politics had changed, but its peoples mindset hadn’t. The corrupt mentality is still fresh and ardent. The nation can’t enter a glorious tomorrow if it insist on carrying the baggage of yesterday with its shredable items. A nation focused on yesterday can’t have a better tommorow.

The exposé of endless Boko assaults, agitations, pilfering etc (Egbìrin òtè bi a nṣe pà kan, nì kan ru) and the unusual anonymity of the ermine of the bench was an expiration of a season of being hidden in the shadows. A problem resolved is a springboard to future success. The nation can rebuild the wall brick by brick through collective actions, attitudes and habits. Imagine the endless possibilities when all began to think Nigeria first.

To our compatriots on either side of the great divide, the right or the wrong camps, who had been caught up with the how’s and why’s of the clampdown on corruption, agitations, and afraid and dread the new wave of the war for unity and peace be reminded that fear and dread make us supersensitive to government, particularly, at this time of misinterpreting its motives.

Without questions, it’s difficult not to be, especially, when it is procedurally wrong putting the presidency in the dock without first separating them from the system. However, let’s occupy our thoughts with ways in which we can all be helpful to the new nation’s rebirth and consciousness.
But the vision of change is a picture of what ‘can be’ rather than ‘what is’ and of breaking bad habits before it finally break the nation and put it on the back-heel of history.
I rest my case!

Meanwhile in the absence of ombudsmen and social conscience, millions of people like a variety of trapped insects across the labyrinth of streets alive with a series of movements and steps that match the speed and rhythm of the Savannah’s music, an elegantly phrased Aria. They go through the motions of dancing to the lyrics, the orchestra,-politicians a motley Crew of third-rate comic actors with a chaotic hubbub of creativity and corruption of public moral; and everyone interpreting the dances to suit their taste and hearing, and the nation continued to manage a kind of modus vivendi.

#JimiBickersteth
Jimi Bickersteth is a writer and blogger.
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