Chimaroke Nnamani: Captain Dey Comot For Ball? -By Khaleb Ogbonna

It was a hot Sunday afternoon and as characteristic of boys growing up in the village – before the advent of the influence of European football on weekend leisure time – we had organised a matchday live, and as peers who grew up together despite the age difference we all lined up against the neighbouring community, armed with our bare feet and non-uniformed jerseys to defend our much talked about footballing skills.

With no clear team name defining this homogeneity of unskilled enthusiasts, yet amidst the array of local footballers was a conspicuously proud Onyekachi, who had a band tied around his arm.

To say that the worst of us represented us was to be charitable to the word worse, yet with an ego the size of an elephant but the efficiency of a sloth, we team members endured his rag-tag mimicry of the skills of the Brazilian idol, Gaucho Ronaldinho. Onyekachi killed off every effort we made at scoring with his obsession of trying to showcase his dribbling “skills”, entertaining no one but himself.

The high point of the match was when we unanimously decided to substitute him, not to enable his theatrics again, he blurted out “Captain dey comot for ball”. It was a moment of unbridled roaring laughter for everyone who initially did not understand what he meant, not for want of knowledge of pidgin, but for the surprise at who made this man a captain over us. It took a good look to discover that he actually had laced his arm with a piece of rag from his grandmother’s old wrapper, wearing the hood to become a monk.

The story above mirrors that fate of Nigerian political Twitter enfant-terrible-in-chief, Senator Chimaroke Nnamani. Unlike Onyekachi who was among his peers, Chimaroke who lacks knowledge of his mates and prides his collection of mental supremacy among people who should be his grandchildren just walked out of the political field of play for his open personal arrogation of powers beyond that apportioned to him.

In completing the Onyekachi story, which gives the proper context to the pertinent case of Senator Nnamani who has just been defeated by Kelvin Chukwu of the Labor Party, the younger brother to the late Oyibo Chukwu who was murdered a few days before the initially scheduled senatorial elections for his district. Onyekachi, was born and brought up in Ajegunle in Lagos, but was sent home to stay with his aged grandmother for a while. Due to the poor orientation he must have had about ‘village boys’, he never failed to unleash the word ‘omonna’ on us who he felt the mere sight of good roads and high-rising buildings in Lagos gave him an intellectual edge over. It also did not matter to him that we – some of us who relocated to the village from other towns – spoke the English language better and performed far better than him in class, but being a ‘Lagos boy’, an ‘Alaye’, gave him an edge (although at nothing) over us.

Below is a screenshot of one his ‘captain dey comot for ball’ kind of question which he asked someone. The type the genZs will ask ‘who dey breathe?’

A lot has been said about Chimaroke and boring us with what they mean would be preaching to the choir, but what needs to be said at this moment is his arrogant display of respect for no one, from Peter Obi, to Ohaneze ndi Igbo, his party the PDP from which he has been rusticated, to the G5 governors, among whom is his own soon-to-be ex-governor who resuscitated his career from the dry bone that it once was. Sans frontiers is his insult of common intelligence, his uncouthness and his unstatesmanlike use of words; Senator Nnamani lacks common public decorum and sees himself as a god who should be worshipped.

He relishes so much in the past that he throws down the gauntlet of being a member of the ‘99 governors who had class. Albeit for a few, a majority of the 99 governors set the template for the present democratic failures experienced in Nigeria today, of which a good example is that one of them, the then governor of Lagos has masterminded arguably the biggest assault on our democracy, trying to barge into power by being President.

Nnamani’s biggest audience is Twitter and there he never fails to deride the interest of the Igbos he also claims to represent, throwing caution to the wind he endorsed Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the APC against his party’s Atiku Abubakar. At the moment, he follows more and engages only in comments from people outside his constituency, particularly the Yorubas and Hausas.

As it is, it is apt to say that unless INEC creates a senatorial district on Twitter and conducts elections on the restricted tweets of Senator Chimaroke Nnamani, Captain ‘don comot for ball oh!’