By Sam Omatseye
In the tick-tock of its heralding hour, 2019 came already violated. The herdsmen were the midnight’s children who promised an omen for the innocent. At various times, they handed over the baton, sometime to the militant, sometime to the politician, sometime to the lawgiver, sometime to the holy of holies. And we witnessed the weak in their fragile forms: faint, feint, fight, soldier, surrender, squeak, silent. Families bowed. When a herdsman killed a man or pillaged a farm, the wife hid in sackcloth. When, in Kogi State, a woman was burned like a suya steak, the husband groaned in public. Journalists were whisked behind bars on phantom grounds, so their families pined for their breadwinner to come home for Christmas. All of these violations reached deep into the sanctums of the Nigerian home. So, rapes haunted and defiled in different dimensions in the past year.
For homes whose breadwinners disappeared, they lost their laps of luxury. Theirs was an economic rape. It even took international flavor when South Africans yielded to xenophobic impulses. For those who bled their franchise through electoral fraud, it was political rape. Some say it was cultural rape when cattle cantered onto sacred mountains in Ondo and Osun States and the sky flashed and rumbled with lightning and thunder as all the beasts fell and died. Many cultural rapes screamed online; privacies broke open. As poet Alexander Pope demonstrates in his mock-heroic poem, The Rape of The Lock, a rape does not have to happen only when the act fits into a standard physical definition. In his poem, a lock of hair was a subject of rape.
But all these were metaphors. The year, in its barbarous quest, had no respect for figures of speech. Human figures, especially young and nubile females, fell to the lubricious appetites of lawless men. So it gave us rape raw and brutal. Day after day, newspaper page after newspaper page, court after court, regions north and south, rape became a savage fest of our narrative. It was not just the rape of mature adults, but of various ages, or various estates, of various tribes. Father on daughter, brother tackled sister, Holy Father over lone flock. Grandmothers were aghast beneath red-blooded offspring. Two-year old, five-year old, early teen girls, they all became targets of an aberrant eroticism.
The randy male, like the power drunk government official, seemed out of control. The bullies molested at home, in schools, in churches and mosques, on the streets, in offices, at night, in the afternoon, and before the first light. The victim was already violated before the world knew. Evil as fate accompli. They took from the females what they could not give back: their pride, their dignity. Many were biological virgins while others lost their flowers again by the very absence of consent.
In a year where consent and consensus counted for little, the rape victim dramatised a year of the ravished. For that, she is the Nation’s Person of The Year.
The first runner-up was a close contestant. Her video act shook the cyberspace. Success Adegor was sent back from school because her parents could not afford the fees. It was not even a private school. But it was her school, and she insisted with the verve of childhood ambition. She expressed it in the defiant rhythm and accent of her Delta State pidgin English. She affirmed to the world that education was her destiny. They had flogged her body, but not her mind. She was ready to bear, with Christ-like acceptance, any beating so long as she walked through her Golgotha into her prophecy of enlightenment. She drew the attention of all, young and old, philanthropist and average giver. In a nation where education enjoys small budgets, and where the girl plays second fiddle, Adegor disrupted our comfort. In a few minutes video, the Sapele girl translated a little-addressed subject onto the frontline of national worry.
The second runner-up posts Muhammadu Buhari versus Atiku Abubakar. They gave the year its high script. Who would win the big prize? Both sides shook the country on campaign trails, with internet flurries, in fiery rhetoric and recriminations. Each thought he wrapped the nation in his grasp to become the next president. Atiku set himself up for an upset. But, in the end, the result upset Atiku who claimed he was rigged out of a hard-earned victory. The Supreme Court buried his hopes.
The also-rans are also captivating. We had the fake news of the year in which President Buhari was set or even imagined to have pushed the vocal Aisha to the back burner because his heart was burning for another woman, Hajia Sadiya Umar-Farouq, the minister of humanitarian affairs. It was part comedy of errors, part mischief as it showed how fake news can stir a nation up to the very intimacies of the presidency.
The border closure, another also-ran, for its show of the perils of open borders to an economy, but also the travails and triumphs of the opposite. It is our policy of the year.
The controversy of the year makes the list, and it was our angst over hate speech, especially whether it should be a law, or whether it is a law to strangle speech of any kind. It is an evolving saga.
Femi Otedola grabbed attention for putting his heart in his pocket. He is the philanthropist of the year. He saved lives. Peter Fregene, the famed goal keeper. “Chairman” Christian Chukwu, in his hey day, an unflappable skipper of the Green Eagles. Dreadlock maestro Majek Fashek who sent us a throaty rain of rhythm and pleasure. Also thespians Sodiq Daba and Victor Olaotan. He paid their bills.
Of course the gaffe of the year was a server, an imaginary machine concocted by the Atiku campaign. No one saw the machine except their political eyes.
Finally the gaffe of the year was a phrase that the Saraki family, especially former Senate President and governor of Kwara State, Bukola Saraki, will not forget. It is o toge, which means “enough is enough.” It was the nunc dimittis of a reign that peaked and expired with him. In Lagos, as Babajide Sanwo-Olu swept the polls as governor, it became o tope, it is thankworthy.
It was not always a happy year, but Nigerians are moving ahead as a new year shines with its pregnancy of new acts, heroes and villains.
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