To Papa Elelubo on the borders of Agbonrin village where Baba Lekki was threatening to set himself ablaze in a manner reminiscent of the Mongolian official who, having failed to meet his own target of delivery of housing units to his beloved compatriots, promptly detonated himself. In the old contrarian’s case, he was paying the supreme sacrifice for his perennial failure to ignite a revolutionary apocalypse that would have made the Kymer Rouge of Cambodia a child’s play.
It was a hot and sweltering mid-March morning. The rains have refused to come as if divine retribution has been added to the secular punishment of outraged humanity. The caked and parched soil tells its own story. So does the foul fetid odour of stale sweat oozing from the armpits of rural hoi-polloi. But the agrarian folks remain as sweet and sunny tempered as ever. They have come to see off an impossible troublemaker, or so they think.
Clad in snow-white apparel like the devotee of a local deity, the old man cut the figure of otherworldly soberness as he fixed the crowd with an unnerving gaze. The fools have come to watch him die, but if he asked them to come out for the aluta to end all alutas , they will laugh him to scorn.
“The common man is an asshole”, the old crook mumbled to himself, as he beheld the pulsating crowd many of who were already impatiently asking him to do the needful and spare them the long rigmarole. A menacing-looking thug with missing incisors suddenly hauled out of his pocket a huge wrap of prohibited weeds and began chewing on it in neurotic boredom.
But it was the crazy boy Okon who bearded the old lion in his den. He had been sitting quietly in apparent remorse at the imminent departure of his old mentor when the mad boy jumped up as if stung by an insect.
“Baba, now dat you don dey go, dat Ikorodu woman I been dey see with you before before, make I begin dey knack am?” the boy demanded with a lewd stare.
“Okon, you are a counterrevolutionary petit-bourgeois scoundrel. May God punish your grandmother”, the old man screamed at his delinquent ward. At this point as if on cue, a frail man with an unsteady gait stepped forward and in ancient Egba accent, accused Baba Lekki of having swindled him fifty years earlier by giving him a counterfeit coin.
“Alagba, owo ijosi, owo Ijebu renwa”, the frail man mooed, pursuing pre-colonial intra-ethnic hostilities.
“Ah Muda, but they say you died a long time ago!!” Baba Lekki retorted with a contorted grin. At this point, an impatient spare parts trader shouted. “When is this Baba going to die now? I no dey dis dem Yoruba Iberiberi show!!” Baba Lekki lost his cool at this point.
“Ah stupid man, you are waiting for your grandfather to die for Nigeria? Na other people’s child dem dey name Abegunde, abi no be so? Yeye people!!” the old man thundered as he detonated some foul-smelling, eye-stinging gas from an old cylinder which sent everybody scampering for safety.
“Chineke!!! I for don reach Alaba market but for dis yeye Yoruba crook”, the Ibo man said as he took to his heels.