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It would have been so funny were it not so tragic. I refer to the late Dr. Femi Fatoba’s stinging and stirring collection of poems simply titled, ‘They said I abused the government’. In this slim collection of just 52 pages, the multi-talented artist, painter, singer, teacher, poet and actor pokes fun at the follies and foibles of post-colonial Nigerian society while also mercilessly criticising the bad leadership, corruption, inequality and crass materialism that are the bane of an otherwise richly blessed country. But then, Dr. Fatoba also writes poems about nature, love and friendship that reveal him to be a highly observant writer and a sensitive human being.

Let me quickly say that I owe the title of this column to another of Dr. Fatoba’s collection of poems titled, ‘Petals of Thought’, which was published in the eighties while I was still at Ibadan. The book was one of my constant companions throughout my undergraduate years until I most regrettably lost it in inexplicable circumstances. Dr. Fatoba writes with undisguised anger and impatience at the shortcomings of his country but you can also readily perceive that he is motivated by patriotic love and compassion especially for the downtrodden majority.

I used to know Dr. Fatoba from a distance at the University of Ibadan. His fair complexion, clean shaven head and lush, luxuriant beard was simply impossible to ignore on campus. Although I was in the Faculty of Social Sciences, I was a regular observer, and sometimes peripheral participant, in weekly poetry readings and expositions at the Faculty of Arts. On those occasions, Dr. Fatoba and some other lecturers of the faculty sacrificed their evenings trying to take us through the rudiments of the complex art of poetry. Although my memory fails me now, some of those who regularly participated in those sessions included Afam Akeh, Funmi Dukuya, Dapo Adeniyi and the late Sesan Ajayi. Of course, I soon quickly gave up any pretensions to poetry writing even though I continued to harbour a fervent passion for good poetry.

It was, therefore, with immense joy that I discovered the collection of poems under focus today in one of my favourite book shops here in Lagos. Incidentally, the collection had been published since 2001 and I was simply oblivious of it. Going through many of the poems in the eminently readable volume, I found myself wondering if Dr. Fatoba had some premonition about his abrupt departure from this side of eternity. Did he persistently excoriate the venality and lack of conscience of the Nigerian ruling elite so ruthlessly because their greed, complacency and sheer incompetence lead so many to early and untimely graves just as happened to Dr. Fatoba?

The renowned poet, dramatist and artist died on December 12, 2008, in a ghastly motor accident on the Ughelli/Patani road in Delta State. He perished along with four other colleagues on his way back to Ibadan from the Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island, Bayelsa State, where he was a visiting lecturer having retired formally from the University of Ibadan. This is another example that those who ceaselessly rue the absence of good governance in an otherwise hugely endowed country like ours are not just engaging in abstract academic exercises. The billions that are stolen by our amazingly rapacious elite deny the vast majority of good roads, modern transportation, efficient health services and other infrastructure that can prolong life expectancy and drastically reduce premature deaths.

Is it then any wonder that in one of the poems, ‘Like Weaverbird or Crow?’, dedicated to his fellow writers, Professors Femi Osofisan and Niyi Osundare, Fatoba explains why he sings the country’s anthem “with a heavy lump in my throat; Twisting and spitting the words as if they were parts of a curse?”. Among others he laments in this poem “the howling wind of want, felling men like straws on streets; or the recurring soldiers of fortune, who walk our backs with spikes” or “the sound of the rich man’s jet, roaring through the stomach of the poor…”

In another satirical poem on the state of the nation and our unending celebration of the cult of mediocrity, Fatoba employs the national soccer team as a symbolic depiction of the degeneration of leadership at all levels in post-colonial Nigeria. Titled ‘Prayer for the National Team’, Fatoba writes “…The centre-forward positions himself, at the rear of the net, saying it is immodest to be forward. The out-wingers do not chase the ball but delight in passing the buck; Our players in the mid-field prefer playing in the middle of nowhere; Lord you created those who don’t walk, who don’t run and never stand anywhere. Our right-full-back sports two left feet and the left-full-back kicks us in the back!”

‘They said I abused the Government’, the poem from which the book derives its title sees the poet at his ironical best even as he needles the government with seemingly harmless but unmistakably pregnant questions from his detention cell: “I asked the human tongs of Gestapo, How did I abuse the government? Did I say the government is deaf and does not hear the cries of her people? Did I say the government is lame and never lifts an arm in service to her people! Did I say the government is blind and does not see where she is going! Did I say the government is a cannibal, killing and eating her children? Did I ever say anything bigger than the small mouth with which I ask simple questions? Anyway, who am I to abuse the government!”

Pray, is a government that allows its citizens to die on abandoned death traps called roads or in ill-equipped, poorly manned health facilities better than a cannibal eating up its own children? Is Fatoba not justified in his barely concealed anger at the sheer savagery of the post-colonial Nigerian state? Much of what Fatoba lampoons in this collection are still with us undermining the potentials of Nigeria. These include thieving leaders, high handed law enforcement agents as well as hypocritical and decadent social mores.