Ijebu lowo ana o ‘Jiboye
Moni Ijebu lowo ana o ‘Jiboye
Imale saseju o f’ata taaba
Anabi maje nf’ata taaba
Something new always comes out of Nigeria. And it is not always cheering news. When it is not about the triumph of triviality, it is about the astounding venality and the resort to crude and brazen thievery among the political elite.
So it is that Idris Okuneye, aka Bobrisky, by his appalling indiscretions, his lack of social grace, his gender-manipulating mischief and his transvestite one-upmanship, has worked sections of the Nigerian elite to such a fury of indignation that one began to fear for his life in or out of jail.
Yet at the end of it all and after so much froth and bilious rage has been worked up, we are not nearer the truth than when it started. We have not been able to make a dent on the fundamental issues. We have not been able to establish what drives a damaged young man in a damaged society. It is the proverbial tale of an idiot, full of sound and sound bites but signifying nothing.
Enter a retired don from OAU Ife who wrote to remind the columnist that the first example of cross-dressing in the famed university happened in the eighties. It was a boy who was the product of a famous liason between two distinguished professors( names withheld) who have now gone to meet their maker. Our man wanted to know whatever became of him or her.
So, let’s get this clear. It is not Bobrisky’s egregious brutalization of the naira that has earned him a jail term without the option of a fine. It is his open and ostentatious gender transgressions in a patriarchal and harshly gendered society. Having quietly watched his dressy antics with mounting indignation, the presiding judge must have rubbed her hands in relish when presented with the opportunity to deal with the importunate upstart.
After all, it is not only Bobrisky who is involved in this perpetual dressing down of the national currency. There are traditional rulers, statesmen, leading politicians, iconic clergymen and notable society ladies equally implicated. But just one glaring and notable example will be enough. The road to justice is often paved with asphalt of injustice. As it is said, men are hanged not because horses are stolen but so that horses may not be stolen.
From all available evidence, the fear of the law has been driven into the heart of the most obdurate and uncompromising naira abuser. But it is not surprising that having degraded the phenomenon of naira thrashing with that singular judgment, the fundamental issues or the foundational problem remain.
The problem is what to do with a dominant permissive culture in which anything goes. To put it in another way, how much more can our permissive culture permit? It is useful at this point to distinguish between a liberal society and a permissive society.
Whereas a liberal society encourages freedom of speech, freedom of association and mass participation which deepen the democratic process, a permissive society is a decadent, debauched culture which must rely on harsh, authoritarian measures to maintain its leash on the society. Hence the fear of and phobia for cultural refinement in any permissive society characterized by vulgarity, crass hedonism and the hankering after the morbid pleasures of life.
A famous saying goes thus: “Whenever I hear the word culture, I always reach for my gun”. This quote is often misattributed to Hermann Goering, the Nazi leader and strongman. But he could as well have said so. A crack pilot and daring aviator, Goering emerged from the First World War, a celebrated hero of the German people.
But he soon lapsed into a life of sybaritic pleasure and sensual self-indulgence piling up flesh until he became a huge mass of corpulent and bejowled monstrosity. He was an early German prototype of our own Bobrisky. To finance his morbid sensual propensity, he raided art houses and private collections until he became the wealthiest collector of priceless art in Nazi Germany.
Despite the ominous echoes of contemporary Nigeria, we must return to where the rains started beating us. The opening quote of this essay is taken from a real life drama which took place a little over sixty years ago in the historic junction town that happens to be the writer’s ancestral homestead. The old Yoruba aristocratic nobility did their things with grace and measured dignity. They appreciated singers who sang their praises by pasting coins on their forehead.
But there were occasional snags. In this particular instance, we found a celebrated local musician of the raara genre imploring his wealthy benefactor to do the needful on the grounds that the coin he pasted on his head the previous evening had turned out to be a counterfeit of Ijebu provenance as counterfeit coins were known in those days.
“ Ijebu l’owo ana o Jiboye”. But the famed singer also quickly cautioned himself against excessive zeal or fanaticism in the pursuit of legitimate grievance. It is excessive zeal which caused a Muslim zealot to perform post-fecal ablution with peppered water. “Imale saseju o f’omi ata taaba”, and the bard ended by begging God (Anabi) to spare him the same ordeal. The singing went on with its punctilious refrain until the rich man did the needful.
Now sweep forward to a decade after and the glorious mid-seventies in the old East Central State. This writer remembers with affection and nostalgia a courteous and impeccably mannered Igbo couple who always appeared at noon every Sunday at the plush ambience of the Presidential Hotel, Uwani, Enugu to treat the audience to wonderfully choreographed dance steps as urbane music wafted through. After each virtuoso performance, the couple would bow to rapturous applause and then disappear.
Despite the political and economic setback of the civil war, this was the high noon of the old Nigerian bourgeois class as well as its last snapshot. There was indeed a country, to echo Chinua Achebe’s famously ill-tempered Parthian. A lady friend told this writer of how she and her siblings living in Lagos would peep through the key hole to espy their parents practicing dance steps in preparation for a state ball on the invitation of the then president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was a childhood friend of the father. The couple left for the east shortly before the commencement of the civil war never to return.
So what has happened to turn an uncouth lout like Bobrisky and many others like him to national celebrities? In 1977 barely a week after FESTAC, Fela’s shrine was razed to the ground on the ground that his putative Kalakuta Republic was a grievous affront to national sanity and a menace to constituted public order. His iconic and well-storied mother was thrown down the stairs sustaining traumatic shock from which she never recovered.
It was the real victors of the civil war extending their dominion to the totality of the country they had captured as a war-booty. It was also a warning shot to the self-regarding and supercilious Yoruba segment of the political elite that the new conquerors would brook no nonsense from them as they settled down to enjoy the proceeds of conquest and rule the country as they deemed fit. After their true heirs returned on the eve of 1984 to put finishing touches to the project, the real battle was joined.
Since the remnant rump of the old political class had gone past their sell-by date, a new class project opened up with massive co-optation of all kinds of people to fill the yawning vacuum and vacancies. In order to maintain and sustain their hegemony even beyond the formal surrender of power which must take place no matter how long it took, the military sought to create a new political class in their own image.
It was the beginning of a forty-year political trauma for the nation. Even now, twenty five years after the formal cessation of military rule, the nation continues to exhibit all the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. As it was predicted, it was the Yoruba middle class that bore the brunt being at the vanguard and frontiers of political consciousness.
But as we have hinted earlier, it was in the field of cultural production that the devastation has been most evident. There has been a seismic shift in cultural production in Nigeria leading to a collapse of the old cultural order and its hegemony. In every age and society, the dominant culture, be it in music, performing arts, philosophy and ideas, is the culture of the dominant class.
The new military dominated ruling coalition needed its own musicians, its own praise singers, its own philosophers and organic intellectuals. Under the new arrangement, at least in the old West, Fuji and Juju music simply overwhelmed and muscled out the old Highlife. All subsequent efforts to revive this genre have come to naught.
Every musical tradition has its time and age and patrons. When he was asked how he came by the title of General, Ayinla Kollington retorted that it was from General Abacha himself. It would have been unthinkable for this to come from the urbane Rex Jimmy Lawson, the aristocratic Victor Olaiya, the headmaster-like Celestine Ukwu, the scholarly Victor Uwaifo and the fierily iconoclastic Fela.
Idris Okuneye, aka Bobrisky, has undertaken a risky venture. As a corrupted corrupter of youth, he is in need of urgent psychiatric intervention. He is both a victim and a symptom of a more fundamental societal impasse, a class project that has backfired. If we are to press the metaphor, it is a military messianic mission that has misfired.
The more serious worry and concern is how much farther an utterly permissive society can travel this road to Golgotha without a major earthquake. None of the permissive cultures we have studied so far has escaped interdiction at the appointed hour. How to pull the plug on the contemporary rot and decadence is the major task before the current ruling coalition.
It is unfortunate that since its inception, the EFCC, like a jinxed creature, has been snared up in a web of complicity and mendacity. The list of former chairmen lengthens in the shadow. When Ola Olukoyede joins that list of distinguished casualties, the crime-fighting agency would have lost the last shred of its legitimacy and credibility. That will be a tragedy for a nation caught in an ethical whirlpool.
