The Scourge of the Moving Targets Silently Singing in the Shrouds of the Gulf -By Jimi Bickersteth

The trip toward 2023 has begun and the nation began to count loudly. The pounding of our hearts kept pace with the counting. The birds in the trees around me awoke to the dawn and twittered as they foraged for breakfast. On the other side of the perimeter fencing the city came to life. A train whistle shrieked, wagons rumbled over cobblestones. Men on the wagon tops. Shopkeepers came out of their homes, breathed the crisp morning air deeply, and headed for their businesses. My wife dragged the sleeping children out of bed and made them ready for school.
Arcane ritual. The nation’s
Politics – No vision. Such a silly and dull game. A game in which one must be lucky. The card has to win or lose. How do you get good odds. Even at that one must watch it, so that one’s intuition is not defeated. Soon the nation would be soaked with sweat, and tears and passion’s nectar. It would be more like war with verbal weapons and combatants trying to overpower and destroy each other. After which nothing would be settled and nothing resolved. Politics – treachery – scandal.

Politicians make us all pawns in the greater game of history. But no one can stand in the way of history. So bad this days that government with all its inherent and extant powers can’t frighten or intimidate, no more. A government is just a puppet these days, a symbolic representation. The beginning of tragedy, Goethe’s Faust. The season when ambitious persons surrender moral integrity in order to achieve power and success for a delimited term.

In the night, I could hear the rustle of leaves against the window pane and the small noises of the house settling itself into sleep and darkness as I lay in my bed, unable to sleep. The night was hot. Through the open window, opened to their full extent to let some air in, the moonlight coming in made patterns on the white Persian rug. Somewhere in the bungalow, a clock began to strike midnight. As I began a recap of the campaign rally held here in Benin earlier in the day.

It is said, to be great is just not to stir without great argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw when honour’s at stake. The chief host, the state governor, an agreeable freckles on the brim of his nasal cavity and an unbecoming attitude which was clearly a concession to the seriousness of the occasion had moved and tossed and bargained hard to win his newly found party ticket, and was looking like the cat that stole the cream.

Mother nature watching us with an expression of supreme disgust on our face. On this issue of defection and the crises in his former party, everyone always know everything. Then a pause — the pause that ensues on part one of conversation before entering upon part two. The part two, Nigerians! Cowards! Politics was our mistress and we give ourselves up to the pleasure of the moment and let the future take care of itself. The nation’s on the horns of dilemma. As the distance between the gulf of reality and truth and lie widened the nation’s burden of confusion and doubt begin to double. But it’s future would resolve itself.

In the search for democracy and good governance — freedom, liberty, equity and justice were all we want. At this point I began to wonder fleetingly about how politics could be the tools of destruction and devastation one moment and a saving source of money, profligacy, warmth and comfort the worst for wear. It would have been a good moment for a glorious prima donna rage for the nation’s political system churning out a list of ‘corrupt’ men. A sick system it was, a pampered potentate.

The sky was a vast gleaming canopy of stars in a country that had been festering on the edge of a precipice. The situation in the PDP and the APC were everything the nation had been led to expect, and worse. The potholes infested streets were jammed with hopeful prospectors, willing to sell their souls for a shovel or a spade, or even a coil of rope. Inspired, fanatical believers in anything, restructuring inclusive. People who were made nervous by selfish opportunism of the politicians. Non of whom would have been so impressed if they know how the nation came to this sordid pass.

From the meadows hills and plains come politicians in need of riddance that leap on the threshold in their enormous and almost incredibly opulent Cadillacs and G-wagons, painted in black as their inner minds were, some others in two tones, raspberry fool and azure blue, sweeping (with difficulty owing to their lengths) into the drive, and the ruling class disembarked into an atmosphere which fill the land with violence and deceit in the sea of ‘kwaraption’.

The result was the great crashing from the hills to a dithering blood letting sodomy, pouring blood out as dust with perplexity: the sea and the waves roaring. Men’s hearts are beginning to fail them for fear. People settled in their less, plant vineyards but not drink the wine, days of trouble, distress, wasteness and desolate. Prices have now reached a plateau after a period of rapid inflation and a state of little or no change following a time of growth and a global pandemic. But democracy, democratic governance – of the people and for the people — that’s a word that means different things everywhere.

One thing’s certain. It really never means what the Greeks originally meant by it. In assuming power, the nation’s politicians are altered, and no longer the modern conscientious men the people voted for, their smile held all the radical smile and craft which had enabled a long line of their predecessors to fail. Man aren’t the same when it comes to jewels; are not the same when it comes to power, jewels and power had caused Man acute misery. There is always a trail of violence to follow such things. Deaths, bloodshed, murder.

Power, a potent and dynamic force, having a strong effect. There are different kinds of civilisation, and I think we’ve all got a bit of savage in us — if we can think up a good excuse for letting it rip in the Potemkin village we’ve all created. The thing people don’t seem to want in our politics, nay, anywhere, nowadays, is anyone who’s got a bit of common sense. I often think that that’s what the world really needs — just a bit of common sense.

Common sense to be able to resolve arguments and conflicts over the place of Democratic norms that has become a monument in our culture. Arguments about border walls, the way we social construct people and concepts, language barriers — rising tensions over security of life and property despite an increasingly boisterous diverse populace. We grapple with our divisions like never before, as we aspire to embrace our diversity like never before.

This fumbling and gambling politicians with their Knaves of hearts, distraught, dishonest wolves in politics. One would have thought in a game of politics every player would be honest, on every game, every card. One’s sympathy goes out to the poor people, it was just their bad luck to have fallen in love with the politicians when they were at their worst, possessed by such passionate fury that they had become irrational and obsessed by their idea of revenge.

The Edo state’s capital’s main street like the Ipodo in the Ikeja area of Lagos, (I humbly note that Edo is not Lagos,) children whose memories of childhood were only a blur, were playing up and down the street, waving and shouting. Their raucous cries filled the air. They were mostly the unwanted offspring of harlots, or children and wards of peasants and downtrodden. Mostly children of two worlds who belonged to neither. Boys and girls who had defied everyone, society and family and who badly need the nation’s help.

Benin, a microcosm of Nigeria, like elsewhere in the federation, a mixture of squalor and magnificence. Banks reared their vast newly built magnificence. Hotels, modest hotels, beer parlours and shacks, bar and restaurants had a good modernistic façade. Innumerable small shops presented a collection of cheap plastic goods. There were sewing machines, and spare parts for cars, Marwa tricycles and motorcycles: pharmacies displayed flyblown proprietary medicines and large notices of penicillin in every form and antibiotics galore.

In very few of the shops was there anything that you could normally want to buy, except possibly the latest Swiss watches, tens of which were displayed crowded into a tiny window. The assortment was so great that even there one could have shrunk from purchase dazzled by sheer mass, supervised by practical and enterprising men and women. It was a self-help etho in view of leadership absence for a people who can’t trust the leaders discretion and have bluntly refused to be bogged down by its ruling class’s deceits and the menace of colonised transparencies.

The PDP, the APC, Labour or NNDP had shown severally like other politicians of its ilk who never saw or noticed anything outside themselves, relishing the convenience of office with the air of a man who had at last pulled the cork out of a bottle. They know everything or pretend they do, but, that the nation requires enlightened ruler, with pure democratic principles. Light and Time Will tell. It was going to be a classic confrontation. It’s more like fishing, this election stuff. I think you don’t know what catch you’re going to get, what you’re going to drag up from the sea. It’s the quality of the response. But, even in the momentousness of confusion and uncertainty, may the better candidate win.

The campaigns, masquerading once again under false colours to keep up the fiction, got the people’s whose attendance at the campaign rally venue was better than wandering in a coma of misery and whose loyalty so often compels silent endurance. They got promises of a flashing stream of wonder and delight. The people were reacting according to their several dispositions — excitement, trepidation, a certain amount of giggling that were purely nervous in origin and there were some who were merely quiet and thoughtful at the disorderliness glee and the dishonesty on parade.

After the campaign, I stood there listening to the whispers, giggles, footsteps, chants, and good nights. Then silence closed — or a near silence as the different people, different aims and different interests that had all converged dispersed, and went on hurrying in different directions with different feelings and understanding of the politicians.

The politicians, some of who feature prominently or who had been fingered in the avalanche of probes ravaging the nation, including governors, senators and HoR, and all of who without exception have pooh-poohed the course and advancement of the cause of the nation as long as possible through an unwillingness to face unpleasant facts squarely — greed and weakness behind the façade.
All in all, the whole thing’s like snarl of tangled wool. The nation-state has been led to incipient disasters which had turned it to a failed state. Supremely unexciting. In my opinion, the nation needs a ruling class with a knack for tenacity, unusual foresight and the vision of intelligent and efficient planners to plan and make it a place of distinction than the helpless and hopeless one it was globally known for, in the hands of a ruling class who, apparently, have no ideas at all, even the vaguest, of what might have precipitated the tragedy befallen the nation.

Well, from the material point of view, the ruling class had done very well out of it. If they ever retired, they would have a good assured income from the commonwealth for the rest of their lives. They have seen to that, by appropriating for same. To know when to leave the stage, to know when to go — that was one of the great necessities of life. To go before one’s powers began to fail, one’s sure grip to loosen, before one felt that the faint staleness, the unwillingness to envisage continuity effort. But the politicians don’t quit because of the power craze!

They had no original mind and an unusually dull grasp of facts.
Dull — that word again. Politics, the sort of thing almost everybody drifts into, particularly, if you have no special bent for anything. All this chopping and changing! Làá kó to jẹ́, jẹ́ kó to làá, literally saying, split before you eat, eat before you split. Dull. Struck again by the fatal word. Don’t mind the Freudian slip, it’s just that sometimes one particular word seems to crop up all the time.

How would you have liked to be a Nigerian politician. I’d found it terribly dull — oh, I am sorry. The ruling class though thought it can be the most exciting thing in the world. Different folks different strokes! I don’t agree with the ruling class’s who didn’t know everything, though, they might think they did, and their pure show and exhibitionism could not hide or disguised. Well, life would be very dull if we agreed with each other on every subject. The nation shall weather it, no doubt, as it had weathered other storms, I may say, have aroused considerable comments. The nation kept going round and round the mulberry bush. Something over and over again.

The ruling class carry on so thoroughly well — exactly in the same old fashion and leadership absence. One succeeding regime carry on where its predecessor leave off — like new lamps for old Aladdin, you know. But does the nation want that? I thought to myself: no new experiments, nothing revolutionary. Anybody with any creative feeling at all must want to make changes. I mean with changing ideas and conditions of life generally. For me rubbing my palms and having a genie appear, like it had for our politicians, I’ll ask for: world class health services and facilities, 24/7 electricity, qualitative and compulsory education at all levels, offering the best in the land to its vast sea of humanity, peace, security and prosperity in that order, the first gives the last, the absence of which had become a sad fatality. That was what is making the nation what it is.

The nation really wants its politicians to pour new life into it. Some dynamic and perceptive personality out of this drabness. Men with enough experience and stimulating ideas who would not hedge, never be dull — Nonsense, I must get that word out of my mind. Not the class that often looked rather like perplexed Boxer dog. It wouldn’t do, to let the ruling class get above itself. Mind you, you don’t want to rush at things. Take it steady. Steady is what does it!

Nonetheless, ‘We the people’ must save the country from the political parties or more accurately to save the country for the parties. The country is all we have. Hmph! But then people would have to choose where they wanted to go, and no one had ever bothered to train them how. The funny part was that the press wasn’t given the real meat of the matter. But, the nation just have to take up that snarl of wool and pull out the one colour that we seek, the colour of tranquillity and progress.

Ah! The nation must be permitted to unburden herself of the difficulties, rebuffs and frustrations which she has in dealing with her offspring — still, the people, complacent or bored or a kind of hybrid of the two, were far harder hit to all appearance than its ruling class, though they managed apparently without difficulty to be completely themselves, unperturbed and with no sign of strain or of collapse — call it resilience, and did not appear to resent the fact. What people will feel is always fairly incalculable because they will all feel differently and make a choice at the election proper, but would their choices matter, would the result count?

In this wise, what is our politics? Whither the nation? (again our stumbling block of a question — why?) That’s a pretty question. To answer it, you’d have to have a gaggle of international constitutional lawyers on the job — and they’ll probably disagree. You could argue it a lot of ways. But the real essence of the matter is, that if you or I happened to think about it, for all practical purposes we’ll doubt if any legal machine exists that could get them away from us, the intricacies of law are quite incredible. A people deserves the leaders they get.

The nation’s been hit by a political schemozzle, never knew what hit her, it fell forward. Proper mix up, I struggled a moment with my feelings, as I thought, this sort of thing on the telly or in films, farfetched — that’s what you’d think, can’t really happen in the full glare of the law. Robbery, killings, Boko haram, herdsmen, violence, murders, double crossing, defections, carpet crossing. All preposterous — but that side of life inevitably exists in the nation’s status. Naturally, the nation should have been the ruling class’s first concern. It has to be. To be responsible for its care and safety of its people and in a lesser degree for that of their spouses and cronies.

It has been an anxious and difficult time for all and with the pandemics and global economic meltdowns in tow, distressing happening — and a good deal of apprehension. We’re inclined to leave things too late and with official reticence hung about them like a cloak. We account it a merit. It isn’t a merit. It, leaves too many loose ends. This was in the nature of parenthesis. It’s a grave handicap in life, the lack of foresight and good vision and scrupulous about human life.

The nation by a fortuitous series of chances became the centre for the attentions of various undesirable — interest and persona. The difficulty, is how to clear out of the way extraneous matters: Boko Haram, heists and corruption, matters which, though criminal in themselves, obscure the most important thread — the thread of survival in the jungle. To all of this, the nation’s eyes held nothing but interested inquiry.

The nation had held on to the past for too long, and that’s just what was wrong with it. A nation is for to-day (any thing short of that brings with it backpacks of complications), and its development dynamics must be attuned to to-day realities, not this succinct perjure in a surge of nationalism affixed to sixty years or 106 years ago. A certain amount of tradition is good but never too much.

A nation-state is a creation that should pursue and carry out ideas, new ideas and carried them out to the best of its inherent capabilities and collective abilities; modify them where and when necessary, particularly, where the ideals and objectives have not produced the results it expected. Try to make the best of both worlds: the past and the future, but the real stress is on the present. That’s how it’s going to go on, how it ought to go on. Run by people with ideas — ideas of the present world and day. Keeping what is wise from the past, looking forward towards the future. You’ll find it written in the Bible. Their old men dream dreams and their young men have visions.

For the records, conditions in and around the nation were unspeakably squalid. I passed a line of cribs and I’m sure the political class did too, which were really just mean sheds where the lowest grade of prostitute worked for virtually nothing. I compared the sheer opulence and grandeur of the FCT Abuja with what I had just seen. It hardly seemed fair. Who is going to preach about social responsibility to our politicians. No one. That is why I was so unhappy with the state governors always hiding behind the presidency. So upset at the shape things were taking, that I could hardly bring myself. It really wasn’t fair to the civil servants and pensioners to forget to pay their salaries and pensions or Aafu (half) it.

What a hot afternoon. The politicians and the electorates sat in conclave. It’s very sultry and oppressive to have politics as the most lucrative and fascinating avocation in this part of the world. It makes the politicians insensitive, self-centered and their dignity and composure feel grand and with a certain sense, I think, of their importance, everything, but the rare quality of unexpectedness and a trifle brusque mannerisms. The people have passed a verdict of diminished responsibility on their ruling class for all those in fact, upon whom the fierce light beats, as a poet has put it.

Today, the nation seem quiet like an empty house at the theatre, with people spaced out by the box office as tactfully as possible, to make them look like an audience. Dreadful! Walking towards the motor park, there were very few people about in this quiet country road on a Sunday.

PS
My eyes strayed to a copy of a
book — French — called Candide — with — er — illustrations. Expensive book lying on my armchair. It’s a classic. A savage satirical denunciation of metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Nothing can be so without there being a reason why it is so. The consequence of this principle is the belief that this actual world must be the best one humanly possible.

I stared hard at the three fat goldfish in the aquarium in the sitting room. Lucky creature who didn’t have a care in the world. In contrast, it’s as if the politicians have put a brand on the people’s- hearts. Unfortunately our people take their illusions about the politicians and good governance to the grave.

#JimiBickersteth
Jimi Bickersteth is a super blogger and writer.
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