Isaac Adaka Boro is not lying in state. He is haunting a state of lies. When his folks in the Niger Delta exhumed and re-interred him, they only performed a ritual that mocked reality. Adaka Boro, a name that rhymes in poems, fulminates in books and essays, chimes in songs and rollicks on dance floors, has never passed away. Boro has burrowed our lives and unearthed all our hypocrisies as a nation.
Nigeria’s best musician ever, Rex Lawson, paid tributes to his vision and valour. But the recent account of him came from the masterpiece of that carnage, written by General Alabi Isama. He told the story about how he was killed in the uniform, ironically not of Biafra but of Nigeria. In the damp and ominous atmosphere of the Niger Delta, Boro was searching a building for Biafran stragglers. But he did not know that an Igbo soldier stalked in the shadows, positioned himself and blasted the Ijaw hero to death. No one has contradicted Isama’s account. In the book, The Tragedy of Victory, Isama portrayed Boro as one of the valuable hands of the Third Marine Commander, under the feisty zeal and predatory cunning of the diminutive Adekunle. Isama was the chief of staff.
Boro represented a contradiction. He fought to excise his people out of Nigeria. Eventually, he exerted his soldiery in cementing the survival of that same entity he despised. A soldier from Biafra that tried to fulfil his subversive fantasy gunned him down. He became the distorted vision of sacrifice but not the sacrifice of his own vision.
The contradiction was typically Nigerian. It is the soul of Nigeria, a rabid show of togetherness only exhibited by a zest to undermine that togetherness. We call one Nigeria, but we worship tribe and disdain Nigeria. The American poet of democracy wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Yes I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” Walt Whitman was emphasising the American obsession with itself, its self-renewing energy, its desire to melt together its various peoples and races in spite of its yawning differences. We can see the United States confront its turbulent divergences, its compulsion to morph from a mosaic to a melting pot. It is an imperfect attempt. It has shed blood, ruined families, but wrought a Michael Jordan, a Tiger Woods, and hoisted a Barack Obama.
Boro died in flesh that day the Biafran soldier extinguished him. But he regenerated powerfully. He abandoned the dust of nothingness. He came alive, and he became Ojukwu and his generals who gave the federal soldiers and Yakubu Gowon blood for every blood, flesh for every flesh, bone for every bone. For 30 months, the spirit of Boro hewed down the Nigerian tree.
When the war ended, we thought we were done. The ghost gave a reprieve, but he walked the night of Nigeria and allowed a honeymoon of illusion. We cannot, however, forget that Orkar and his fellow coupist plotted with Boro when they wanted to slice off Arewa in a fumbling fiasco. Boro also wanted it to fail, so the nation could look at itself and ponder its tragic hypocrisies. We tagged along shamelessly.
So, today, we know he was not killed that hapless noon of the civil war. He said to Nigeria, “I was he that was alive, and was dead. Behold I am alive till the end of time. I hold the keys to Nigeria’s hell and death.”
So we see it today. Why is it that we did not see the Niger Delta folks perform a ceremony of reburial in the past? Why today? It is because it is now that he cannot be buried. Today he is more alive. He is telling us he is alive and well and portentously so. He is alive in the Enugu State House. He growled with the subversives of Biafran dreams who attacked the government house. He chanted with them when they disdained Nigeria and brandished Biafra. They want back not just Biafra, but the shimmering beard of the Ikemba, his glistening pate and also the glittering dame, the svelte Bianca.
He is with Boko Haram, the young and virulent bigots who slit throats, burn down houses, waylay emirs, despise books and western education, kidnap Chibok girls, and loft high a leader online who celebrates his barbarities. He abides the contradiction of a body that despises books but uses the same literacy to propagate its sovereignty.
He spoke inelegantly with the Adamawa fellow in the sham of a national confab, who threatened to go away with northern Nigeria to join his neighbours. Boro took him seriously because he appeared to him in his dream.
Did we not see Boro when Yar’Adua was sick? Boro thwacked and flared all over Abuja and ignited the nation to give the top seat to an Ijaw son. Once he got there, he made sure the Ijaw son would not be a tower of grace. Rather he planted a seed like Boko Haram to germinate and sprout into a monstrous bower. Under the same son, we know that it is not about differing tongues alone that we bicker but also over differing gods. One God is better than the other, and it does not matter the humanity, the wisdom of their worshippers.
But then, we have seen Boro in the land of Oduduwa. They now call for regionalism. They want to be their own law and their own grace. Boro is holding sway. His is arming Boko Haram as he armed the militants of Niger Delta and the OPC and the MASSOB. No one should wonder how the arms get into the country. They come in spirit.
Boro may be no one’s hero. He did not walk his talk. But he is us, groveling in self-deceit today. We abide the lies. That is why he is not lying in state. He is flying in our face and instructing us. He is like the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who says, “I am thy father’s spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature, Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid, To tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word, Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood…”
Boro’s prison house is us, and we must shed ourselves of the hypocrisy before we can fly out of the cage. Then he can truly be buried and forgotten.
