Nigerians must accord people like him their due respect
Something must be wrong with us as a nation. I don’t know why we cannot give honour to whom honour is due. What is it that Honourable Alex Ikwechegh, a member of the House of Representatives representing Aba North and South, did that no one has not done before? He assaulted an Uber driver who came to deliver a parcel in his house, and did not know the kind of respect such a place deserved. So what? Is that why we have been having storm in a teacup? And some people are making a fuss of that just because the social media has given them a near-free platform.
Apparently there is so much joblessness in the country, honestly. Otherwise, how could such a minor incident have become an issue to trend on the social media for days?
I wonder if those who are hammering on the issue ever read Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things fall Apart’. If they did, they would have known what a man that goes to a place and ‘defecates’ on the floor deserves.
If a driver comes to the mansion of a whole honourable member of the House of Representatives with a parcel for delivery, should he ask the honourable to come get the parcel from him, or he takes it right to as far as the honourable wants him to in the mansion?
What is getting me angry the more is that, even as the honourable took the pains to explain his status to the driver, the latter remained unperturbed or did not seem to appreciate what it takes to occupy such an exalted position in the country.
Yoruba people would say ‘biko to iberu, se ko to isaju’! Somebody help me, I can’t interpret it. The frog says when it gets to the matter of tail, forget it (opolo ni to ba de ibi iru, ka fo)! What I am trying to say is that when you get to this part of the proverb that I can’t explain, invite someone well grounded in Yoruba language to interpret for you or just read on.
But I think the driver overstepped his bounds.
Hear Ikwechegh, “I can make you disappear. Do you know who I am? I can make this man (driver) disappear from the whole of Nigeria, and nothing will happen. Can you imagine this rat? I am not going to give this boy one naira of my money”. Even if a rat hears someone threatening that he would make it disappear, that rat would run first, and complain later. Not to talk of a grown-up man like Stephen Abuwatseya, the Uber driver.
Even when our honourable made it abundantly clear that he would personally beat up the driver, Abuwatseya still did not get the message; that the person he was dealing with was not only a law maker, he was also something else.
Hear Ikwechegh again: “I am not going to call my policemen to beat you up. I will do that myself. I will show you that I am a big brother. I will tie you up, lie you down and put you in my generator house. Do you know where you are? Because you saw me sitting outside here? Look at this monkey,” he added.
At this point, should the driver not have realised that it was not a mere mortal that was talking to him? I am not a law maker; yet, I am already getting angry with the driver’s audacity. I can only imagine the embarrassment that our honourable went through seeing this driver exhibit such ‘I don’t care’ attitude in his home.
Every statement of threat that Ikwechegh uttered was fear-inducing. But not to this audacious driver. Tell me, should any reasonable man not have taken off from the premises without remembering to collect his money hearing such threats?
Since Abuwatseya had the temerity to overstay his welcome in the honourable’s premises, it was like daring his honourable to do his worst. But a
magnanimous Ikwechegh didn’t even go that far. A people’s representative could not have done that, despite the provocation. He merely gave him three slaps. Is that not kind of our honourable? If he were to act in line with section 1 subsection 1(a) of the Law of Impunity (as amended) that big people in Nigeria derive their powers from, he would have thrown him into the generator house or simply make some incantations to turn the driver to cat or fowl, preparatory to his eternal disappearance from the surface of the earth without trace. And without question, to boot!
To even think that it was snails that he brought to the honourable’s place; not loads of Ghana Must Go with fresh naira or dollar notes, consecutive numbers! So, he expected a whole honourable to come and collect snails by himself. Imagine, just imagine!
By the way, I hope you people now know why snails are expensive. Gone were those days when you would get to pick them anywhere on the ground. When people earning millions per month are now ordering for snails, why won’t the price shoot beyond the reach of the poor? That has already become a ‘no-go’ area for the poor now. But, the poor too are not just resigning to fate; they have switched on to maize which they now eat with relish. If our law makers have used the power of the millions we pay them monthly to take snails away from the common menu, “we”, the other Nigerians too have used our own little power to snatch maize from fowls.
I don’t know how many people saw the picture of a malnourished fowl that I saw sometime ago, watching with palpable anger as some humans were
eating roasted corn voraciously. ‘With people like these, there is no way we fowls would not have kwashiokor’, that fowl must have said to itself. If only the fowl could talk.
The way some people are making a mole out of a mountain on this driver’s matter was the way they raised hell unnecessarily when another member of our esteemed National Assembly, Elisha Abbo, senator of the Federal Republic, representing Adamawa North Senatorial District, gave a nursing mother some dirty slaps in a sex toy shop in the Wuse 2 area of Abuja on May 11, 2019. According to reports, Senator Abbo had gone into the shop with three ladies to buy adult toys. One of them started vomiting in the shop. Trouble started as the owner of the shop told her she should have vomited before coming in. This infuriated the senator and one thing led to the other and he slapped the woman several times. You may be wondering what an Elisha would be doing in a sex toys shop? Elisha?
But I guess many of those who would have asked such a question then, or asked for Abbo’s head after the slapping-spree did so out of envy. The man was the youngest senator in the country at the time. Indeed, another reason we should be able to swear that he went to the place for first-hand experience to aid his patriotic duty of making laws for the good governance of the country, especially as they pertain to matters as the shop was set up to address. In other words, it was in line with his oversight functions as a law maker. As the youngest senator, he was expectedly inexperienced.
But Abbo knew his limitations. Unlike Ikwechegh, he realised he had a diminutive frame and therefore did not threaten to deal with the people he was quarrelling with by himself; he unleashed a policeman who promptly arrested the nursing mother. Ikwechegh, on the other hand, wanted to take advantage of his massive frame to personally deal with the errant driver. That was why he told the driver that he would beat him up himself. What is the point wasting such a natural endowment?
The point I am making is that, rather than people seeing Abbo’s matter as one of youthful exuberance, they made unnecessary issues out of it.
I digress.
What I am saying is that Abuwatseya deserved what he got. As a matter of fact, he deserved more than three slaps considering the condescending manner he treated our honourable. He even had the effrontery to tell him the number of times the honourable slapped him. Ha! Na wa o! This was a man who should be glad that a honourable (looking so fresh in the midst of economic downturn) slapped him with that soft palm, and refuse to bath in the next three days so the freshness of the palm would not disappear too soon from his cheeks.
Here was a man who should simply have turned the other cheek to the honourable for another dirty slap, counting the number of times the honourable slapped him!
And, as if the police had anticipated the drama, they swiftly arrested our honourable just because he had boasted that nothing would happen to him, even if the driver reported the matter to the Inspector-General of Police (IGP). Apparently he was not arrested for alleged dehumanisation of the Uber driver but because he disrespected the office of the IGP. But IGP Kayode Egbetokun could have been more tolerant.
After all, there was an IGP at the time many years ago when popular comedian, Baba Sala, threatened to give a masquerade a slap on the face, give the police a dirty slap on their cheeks and crown it all by stoning the judge (mo le gba egun loju, ma fo olopa leti, ma tun wa so oko lu adajo). Neither the Chief Justice of Nigeria then nor the IGP ordered Baba Sala’s arrest. That is why I said Egbetokun can do with a little more tolerance.
What is more? The representative has even come down from his high horse to apologise. What else do we want? We think it is easy for people of timber and caliber like Ikwechegh to apologise to the hoi polloi?
The only mistake he made was that he did not put on the usual well-starched ‘babariga’ that only our law makers can afford these days. May be if he did, Abuwatseya would have recognised him as one of the movers and shakers of the country, and therefore prostrate before handing over his parcel to him.
That is why he is the main culprit now. He suffered due to his inability to decipher that only a law maker of the Federal Republic could have been talking the way Ikwechegh was talking to him; and that should have made him to comport himself.
But the police and our people on the social media have decided to miscarry justice by nailing our honourable whose hands are soft; whose eyes seem mean.
