“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity — W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
This week’s is no ode to aphorisms. But even this famous opener, by Irish poet Yeats, is incomplete to adequately do the job at hand.
Ace radio sportscaster, Ernest Okonkwo (God bless his soul!) always offered his electrified audience a golden advice, from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, when Nigerian football was well and truly domesticated.
“When you cheer a goal, you’re only reacting to an impulse,” he would remonstrate, his dramatic way of urging the fans to cheer the national team non-stop. “But when you cheer every movement that leads your team to score, you’re part-creator of that goal.”
Back then stars, with Okonkwo-exclusive monikers, like “Chief Justice”, Adokiye Amiesimaka, “Mathematical” Segun Odegbami, “Chairman” Christian Chukwu, “Block Buster” Alloysious Atuegbu, “Quicksilver”, Slyvanus Okpala, among others, were in full flight.
Yet, a third aphorism is part of the teaching infrastructure of creative prose. ”You never know the true character of a man,” goes the saying, “until he is in crisis.”
These three sayings about capture the current Nigerian season of hysteria, in which the unwritten code is yak to no end as to the Armageddon to come, when common sense dictates reasonable quiet, lest a fatal distraction, of those trying to fix this economic miasma, which has worsened Nigeria’s crisis of nationhood.
In this theatre of din, natural or contrived, the sane voices are mute; hopelessly drowned by the passion of loud vacuity, as it was in Yeats’s Ireland of 1919, in the chaotic run-up to the war of independence against Britain (1919-1922)
That Ernest Okonkwo charge: better to rally as part of a solution, than staying aloof for the sweet blame game, is true of the ball fans of his days, as of present-day Nigerians, on the political front. To both generations, the appeal has fallen on deaf ears.
Not a few expected Muhammadu Buhari, the Leviathan to, “open sesame”, snap his magical fingers; and send vanishing all the systemic rot he inherited!
That has not — and couldn’t have — happened. But that it hasn’t has birthed a loud lobby of finger-pointers, hell-raisers and wilful demonizers, with a queer epiphany: the new demons are not the old crooks that sacked the common till but the braves now working hard to fix the problem; with Buhari himself as demon-in-chief!
That is why Goodluck Jonathan, that best-forgotten presidential bumbler, would merrily vomit the rubbish he did at the PDP Abuja circus, and still expect right-thinking people not to squirm. No surprise there — Jonathan’s child, from his eternal infantile blather, is always the supreme father of his man!
Of course, that you know the true character of a person, when in crisis, is as true now as it was in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the 1954 novel in which the best of British public school boys (metaphor for the best of western civilization) descended into feral brutes, just because they were marooned in a strange environment for a few days.
This Lord of the Flies analogy is especially piquant. It would appear even the best of Nigerian media commentariat (symbolic of the best of polite minds in the polity), lexical flourish and all, has succumbed to this gripping hysteria with, of course, different motives and motivations!
A rich media medley, indeed: the plain paid-to-bleat mischief-maker; the gross ethnic baiter and supremacist to boot; the “restructuring” neophyte, all worked up to a tizzy, growls it’s his newfound faith, with its sure quick-fix, or Armageddon, in a fit of fatal fixation; and, ode to hysteria — the sheer pest of blogosphere and cyberspace, which just yaks, yaks and yaks, with neither rime nor reason!
This screeching dissonance, fired by a falsetto of high emotion, is a neat tie-back to Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”!
Yet, when the history of this troubled era is written, an ugly profile of the Nigerian elite would leap off the books. Indeed, today’s elite are not unlike a grotesque Shakespearean drama, where Roman patricians become the rabble, and the rabble become the patrician — such is the tragic descent of temper, in the Nigerian media.
Nigerians griped, as Jonathan and gang pawned the last family silver, on the altar of benumbing greed. Yet, for ethnic, religious and even clannish reasons, this same people now shun a common rally, to nail corruption, the common vicious enemy.
Sadly, the signals were early enough — of a self-abdicating elite over a nation-slaying monster (simply because that elite is so rotten it knows no other way); and a media that merrily surrenders its sacred historic duty to that elite’s profane hysteria.
Father Matthew Kukah, Catholic Archbishop of Sokoto, fired the first salvo by cooking a controversial broth. He claimed, with great sophistry, that fighting corruption, on such frontal scale, was mutually exclusive to running sound governance. He called on Buhari to forget the past and move on!
Christendom Nigeria — at least, the vocal minority — took the cue: culpable indifference. Both holy father and sacred bastion echo the holy cant in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Brutus killed Caesar not because he hated Julius but because he loved Rome! Father Kukah doesn’t hate corruption less. He only loves Jonathan more!
But pray, after the Jonathan debacle, what was more lethal to the polity than corruption? And shouldn’t the Church be the unapologetic partner-in-chief in that war?
Then, Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB came with its searing, equal-opportunity hate; and the best a distracted media, arrayed in ethnic combat formations, could do was face the looming danger from the one-shoe-fits-all prism of self-determination — no crime to be sure!
But IPOB’s right to “self-determination” has pushed others’ right to the same principle: in an Igbo quit order and ultra-dangerous anti-Igbo song in Hausa, reportedly circulating all over the North! Hate begets hate. Hysteria begets hysteria. Cynicism trumps cynicism!
The latest hysteria is the “restructured” utopia to come. That utopia, in magical post-Nigeria, would purify the most corrupt former Nigerians, and make them white as snow in their new ethnic homelands! Call it the political equivalent of the biblical transfiguration!
No wonder, separatists are speaking in a rich range of tongues, under the broad canopy of “restructuring” — secession, balkanization, disintegration, regionalization, greater autonomy for states, etc.
Pray, on which spot, on this long and hazy continuum, do you and your lobby stand?
On the restructuring front, a Yoruba Gerontocrat Army decrees an attack on the Igbo, by the “North”, is an attack on the entire “South”. Yet a counter order, from this great Southern Army: by October 1, every Yoruba and northerner must quit the South-South!
Great southern solidarity there! It doesn’t get more bathetic, does it?
Unfortunately, in this fit of high hysteria, Nigeria loses the historic opportunity to rebuild a saner polity, from the ashes of Jonathan-era ruins.
Still, the culprits are less the PDP-era crooks, bitterly licking their wounds; but more the starry-eyed romantics, doubled over in sweet lamentation over the present, in a quixotic voyage to a magical future!
