Lagos is where the action is. But the beat did not go on for mischief makers this time. Something quieted their quests. It reminds me of a day in my teenage years when I visited the WAEC office in Yaba to pick up past questions ahead of the almighty WASCE. A much older fellow had demanded deference after I insisted it was my turn to sign a register. He received not deference but defiance. Not in words but through a silence and the disdain of a smirk. My eyes were on him after I had registered. He registered after me, and his eyes were on me. I leaned on a wall overlooking a stairwell. I pretended not to see him looming towards me like a bush cat shadowing a quarry. He was within inches and raised his hand to strike and I ducked. His swing swished the air. Within seconds, he flailed and stumbled through the stairs and landed on his face. It was a comic spectacle if it was not ominous.
The man invoked age and accused me of throwing an older man. I was not the only fellow there. A police officer saw the humpty-dumpty crash. The fallen fellow, his nose broken and colored with blood and dust, did not have his way when he wanted me arrested. To placate him, the officer asked me to write a statement and dismissed me, not before I grabbed my past questions.
That is what happened to the #Endgovernance folks. They thought, like my failed assailant, that they were striking. In the end, they fell flat. But the injury was in the north. The Governor of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the BOS of Lagos, handled it with both subtlety and panache. He gave a broadcast. He ensured that it was not going to happen on his watch again. He did not mobilize people to counter the so-called men of the days of rage. He demobilized the citizenry. No need for grenades on the street. He executed a charm offensive and lobbed bombs of dove. He was a parody of Christ who said, in the world, you have tribulation. But peace I live with you. What we saw on the streets were fragments of the city, disgruntled young men, one of whom was asking the Tinubu government not to give loans to students. He wanted grants. He belongs to the ilk who we must tag “aje butter by fiat.” A poor man who wants to be a rich student. Ask anywhere where people get scholarship on the cheap. Like in the Olympics, you must excel before you exhale with the prize.
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They bayed for blood. The BOS of Lagos forbade the Abiku syndrome. They were not, like the #EndSars imbrogolio, going to proclaim themselves like in Soyinka’s poem when the elusive character snorted: “I am Abiku, calling for the first and repeated time.” The BOS of Lagos saw that they were looming on the street trying to breach his pavement, or as Soyinka puts it, “I’ll be the/ suppliant snake coiled on the doorstep/Yours the killing cry.” For the BOS of Lagos, J.P. Clark’s Abiku rendition will do as the bard croons, “Do stay out on the baobab tree…if indoors is not enough for you.” Many heard and stayed indoors and carnage was set at bay.
So, Abiku has a political resonance, as we saw last week when the group only saw the stirrings of an imbroglio up north to understand that it had careened out of their hands just as this essayist warned. They could not guarantee safety. Ben Okri’s Famished Road made the Abiku into a sanguine spirit who would not foment a cycle of tragedy, his Azaro loving their parents too much to let affliction fall on the family a second time. It was a testament to BOS leadership. He did not stop the freedom of expression, but he triumphed over the blood spill. He was not like Metternich, the Austrian despot that poet Lord Byron mocked with the following lines, “He had no objection to true liberty except that it would set them free.” The BOS would rather go with Cicero who wrote, “to stumble twice against the same stone is a proverbial disgrace.”
As we say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. He averted shame in our iconic city.
