In the course of this republic, we have fallen under spells of catch phrases, some of them benign, some meretricious and others ominous. But always ferociously funny. They have all entertained, enthralled and terrified. Whether it was a doctrine of necessity, or stomach infrastructure, dibo ko sebe (vote and make a pot of soup), naka sai naka (Your own is your own) or Olule, or even emilokan, the political facility of the Nigerian political society to conjure a term seems infinite.
No one, however, has had such a long shelf life as the word cabal. It is not only enduring here, but around the world, except that they do not wield that phrase from phase to phase. Maybe because those societies, especially in the west, do not calculate with the same level of feline cunning and ferocity as our own cabals do or are imputed to perform.
In western political experience, they sometimes use a less sultry word. During the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, they called the men around the 16th American president the Trust, especially when they wrote an agreement ahead of the elections to cooperate if they lost the next elections so that the civil war plan would not be compromised. That was a good cabal. These days, Republicans have coined a term, the deep state.
We do not use the term without temerity or with uproars of joy. It reels in a furtive, serpentine tunnels. You never utter hello and cabal in the same sentence, except for mordant irony. The word had its origin in arcane Jewish text and it was called Qaballah. Referring to it in her mammoth Nobel Prize-winning novel titled: the Books of Jabob, Olga Tokarczuk paints how its invocation fuels a religious riot and pogrom in the 18th century. But cabal came into limelight, or shall I say lamelight, when five men in the age of the English King Richard II worked out the Treaty of Dover between England and France, and the first letters of the five men’s names spelled CABAL. Their act and combined initials initiated a sacred stain. They profaned the word.
If anything, it shows that cabals tend not to have respect for what is sacred even if that sacred goal is to help humanity. This essay does not always embrace mystics. For instance, Achebe, in his Arrow of God, undermined the gods by privileging material evidence over received opinion. In his review, Soyinka, a man who loved the mystical, lamented Arrow of God’s “dogged secularization of the profoundly mystical.” I thought Soyinka was warm there, if we took away his lament. In his latest novel, Soyinka makes mincemeat of the mystical shysters.
In democracy, though, nothing is more sacred than the popular will, celebrated sometimes to subversion by philosophers like Rousseau and Disraeli. Rousseau’s sanctified bloodshed and tyranny in the French Revolution, and Disraeli’s a cavernous class divide in Britain. Nonetheless, they all applauded the people while the people had no say in the matter.
That is what we are seeing with the shadowy cabal in Nigeria. In what this essayist termed Emilokan and Emilokan 2, I hinted at this cabal before the Kaduna State Governor Nasir El Rufai elucidated. While many are crediting Asiwaju for lifting the veil, the credit goes to Aisha Buhari, who had yelled years ago over some baboons who were “chopping” after the monkeys had perspired. Not her words.
The posse pussyfooting in the dark alleys of Aso Rock is gradually being unveiled. A certain young man said he is not one of them. But we know one of them now. He is the justice minister and attorney general Abubakar Malami. He will not admit it. But we know them by their deed. While many poor cannot feed because they cannot spend the money they earned, the same man went to court to ask for the same money to be kept out of the hands of the common people. That is a violation of the common touch. Gods are not sacred in a democracy, unless through the people’s voices. As they say, the voice of the people is the voice of God. Even when the people make mistakes, God lets it happen to teach the people a lesson, if they want to learn. After the founding fathers finished their meeting to make the United States constitution, the media asked Benjamin Franklin what they produced. “A constitution,” he said, “if you can keep it.” No democracy is given.
But it is not in any man’s place to appropriate the power of God and foist policies on the people. That makes Malami what we might call a public enemy. He is the only one who has exercised the effrontery to negate a popular will.
Jesus said when he was hungry, they gave him food. When he was naked, they clothed him. When without a shelter, they built one. Jesus’ end-time prophecy of deprivation and succour does not apply to men like Malami. He is the one who did not provide. Jesus said if you did that good to any of the poor, you did it to him. Not a Malami. Men like him remind us why we have never had a good attorney general since the dawn of this republic.
The Supreme Court smoked Malami out of the hole like a rabbit in a village square. He did not want to reveal himself. But he did it with the bravado of guilt. He exercised the courage of his own infamy. He freed himself from hypocrisy, in the mould of Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost who proclaimed, “All good to me is lost.” Yet, when the APC had its rally in Kebbi, he was the last person anyone would expect to materialise. Indeed, he peacocked in the VIP roll call before a sea of human faces hailing the man he is trying to scuttle.
Maybe he does not count himself a public enemy. The concept was complicated in a famous play by Ibsen, Public Enemy. It is titled in irony. The man regarded in that play as enemy of the people is actually the one who pits himself against a conspiring, thieving elite who want to profit from the people’s misery.
But if Malami is a public enemy, he is not alone. The LP presidential candidate and his PDP co-traveler engaged in adjectival conspiracy by saying that what Nigerians were suffering is ‘some’ and ‘little’ inconvenience, respectively. Inconvenience is not when I am hungry or have no shelter or death stalks me in the hospital. That is agony. Inconvenience is when I have to park my car and walk over three houses instead of one to my destination. This suffering is not about destination, but destiny. Both men either do not understand simple English or they are playing partisan mischief from interiors of tendentious tyranny at the expense of the people whose votes they seek.
The other enemies are a group of faceless political parties who threatened to boycott the election if Buhari reversed the naira policy. They are jobbers who become parties because they want to be part of the party. It was their time to deal. No one will miss them if they boycott. No one even knows them. Ebenezer Obey sang, “Oja Oyingbo ko mo p’enikan owa o – Oyingbo market does not notice anyone’s absence. They should exercise a fundamental right: the right to lose.
Of course, the big enemy is Mefi himself, the CBN chief. He is a man of numbers without a soul. But for most part, he is a marionette. He is obeying the strings from the shadows. The nebulous posse like Malami and Co are pulling the strings and he is obliging like a puny puppet. I pity him. He is reincarnation of June 12 Arthur Nzeribe, except that Arthur had more cunning, and was able to play his masters as much as they played him. Mefi’s is naïve servitude.
Another enemy is closer home. I refer to media gatekeepers who cast headlines and shape stories to play down the suffering of the people because of their contrarian spirit against one man. As I said on TVC Breakfast show last week, it will be interesting how history will tell the story of the role of the media in this political season.
When the late Yar’adua’s health plunged the country in a constitutional turmoil, someone we know asked what did Yar’adua do to his wife that she would not forgive him but allowed him to go through all that ignominy. By the same token, I wonder whatever did Buhari do to this posse of Aso Rock shadow men that they cannot forgive him and are ready to risk some of his solid legacies because of the hatred of one man. This was the man they loved when they wanted power. They now suffer from what Tacitus calls the fear of gratitude. Because they fear one man, the world must suffer. They are no different from Putin who wakes up with a hyena’s happy sneer at the depredation of Ukraine because of his fantasies of ego.
They have tried a number of times. First, they dissolved the APC hierarchy and started what Akpan Udo-Edehe called the search for a consensus candidate. The Akwa Ibom man did not even survive it or the APC. Then they changed the primary rule from open to delegate vote. That also fell into the ditch. They moved on to choreograph the primary for an anointed man. That also failed.
What kind of massage are they applying to the President’s soul that they want to hurt him? I recall V.S. Naipaul’s comic caper, The Mystic Masseur, about a fellow who managed to impress the people he healed all kinds of diseases as a masseur. Or the Leader who is massaged by a woman sent by a group known as Little People in Japanese author Hakuri Murakami’s tome titled 1Q84. It does not end well with the mystical recluse.
Buhari does not deserve his cabal. Neither do Nigerians.
