Politicians take but statesmen give. The latter relinquishes perks and privileges to earn honour. Politicians, however, fight and grab their way to identity and power, amassing fortune to leave to their heirs, and their names. Whatever becomes of both.
The heir inherits by default hence he has no value to transact for worth, except the name, exploits and privileges of his father, which are sooner squandered and declined.
Reality, however, reveals many a heir of a famous father as an alcoholic, drug addict, sexuality freak and dilettante, among others.
It is not by accident but just deserts, that, several heirs to Nigeria’s greatest political dynasties incandesce, albeit briefly in their fathers’ infamy or repute before they burn out.
Saul Bellow may liken gifting such political heirs inheritances, to picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk or rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation, as referenced by his novel, Humboldt’s Gift.
Many who grasped these super-charged wires and serpents have been found to incandesce in acclaim for a little while and then they wink out.
But Nigeria’s ruling class forever takes care of its own, thus the preponderance of political heirs foisted across the country’s civil service and corridors of power.
Politicians believe its the surest way to preserve their infamy, or legacies if you insist, from transience and decline.
What do politicians think at death’s door? How much money they could hoard into their caskets perhaps. What would you think at death’s door? You, the unbidden offering on the politician’s altar of greed?
Greed, weaving its tissues of lust, wraps us in her shroud at birth. We grow out of the mould, startled by a pat, into a larger frame of the world’s excesses. Until we become society; and society flips us by the senses, moulding us from infancy into feral, garish cruciform.
The newborn grows into crucifixion in the house of the impoverished. He evolves through systolic throbbing of the heart at birth, oscillating between poverty and pain, power and weaknesses, ethics and amorality – vortices of a life foredoomed to a historical gyre of gloom and death.
The lucky child, however, extinguishes at birth in the home of the poor. Thus he is spared death in macabre warrens, like Ogun State’s dirt roads and dysfunctional hospitals. He is spared gruesome expiration as bone sliver, blood spatter and brain fragments, in Borno’s theatre of war and death.
If he doesn’t extinguish to lack of oxygen in the hospital labour ward or alagbo omo (traditional midwife)’s matted lab, he risks growing up to become a street-urchin, cult killer, armed robber, menial worker, prostitute, assassin – forever amenable to plots of a devious ruling class.
At the backdrop of his grisly narrative, his privileged peer grows into lush, ornate extravagance; the latter, born into the aristocratic divide is, however, feted on affluence and ravaged by wealth.
He grows reprobate and unfeeling, weaned to extrude his savage lusts to the detriment of impoverished peer amid starving electorate – his family’s hound-meat, if you like.
At election time, he glistens the news pages in family portraits and carefully orchestrated political media campaigns. He is the darling child whose testimonial for ‘daddy,’ ‘secret philanthropy’ and ‘very Nigerian’ fashion sense, arouses the wonder and goodwill of ‘poor, silly, sentimental electorate’ as his father would say.
As you read, he uploads in careless abandon, pictures of his wild cavorting aboard his parents’ private jet, oft acquired with pilfered State funds. He throws the wildest fête champêtres at home, where boondocks daughters become fair game to him and friends.
The privileged heir, like the fabled palace troll, mutates into tyrant royalty. Having assimilated the ethical decay of his forebears, he blossoms in cruelty and procedural violence. He illustrates his class’ ferocious passions in the ways and pattern of licentious Rome.
Each sadistic exertion by him establishes portents of his unprivileged peer’s future torment by the venal, occult ruling class.
Nigeria thrives by this macabre rite. Thus while youthful electorate clamoured for the ‘#nottooyoungtorun’ bill, the oligarchs, comprising politically party stalwarts, lent voice to the clamour, although at varying decibels and with vicious intent.
The oligarchs plan to retain their hold on power courtesy their rich, spoilt wards, thus they snigger at youthful electorate ranting about “taking over” or screaming: “take it back!”
The herd may vie for power but only patrician creatures and spawns, comprising drug addicts, sex perverts, trainee looters and Ivy League crooks, to mention a few, may enjoy such privilege.
The votes our parents’ cast put us in such bind. The votes we cast puts our children in worse bind. This beggars the question: ‘For whom did we cast our votes at the 2019 elections? Whose constitution rejected our tragic ironies?
This 2019, did you vote for the APC or PDP candidate promising a prosperous future, by the lure of money, and bigoted, poisonous politics? Which candidate projected a promising story of the future, a grand vision of possibilities that Nigerians could believe?
We face a far more difficult problem at our moment in history: the affliction of youth weaned on ferocious, ill, savage materialism. The youth, comprising foetal adults from two societal extremes: the haves and have-nots, coalesce in ghastly pursuits inimical to the Nigeria project.
How do we counsel them to be prudent, honest and just in their dealings? What do you promise youth that had been told that they can have anything they want without shedding sweat for it? How do you give them a new vision to deal with bitter reality?
How do we breed youth on the belief that success should never be about accumulating obscene wealth to show off but the right to live life more fully and engage more expansively, the elemental possibilities of human existence?
There is no gainsaying politicians worship money and feed the youths’ obscene lust for affluence thus emphasising the need for a value reorientation spanning schools, religious structures and the family as a social unit.
Nigeria may draw inspiration from the legend of the conqueror King Alexander. After conquering many kingdoms, he allegedly fell ill on his way home.
On his death bed, he realised how his legendary conquests and wealth were of no consequence. He longed for the little moment that amounted to life’s essence: to see his mother’s face and bid her bye. But sinking health would not permit him.
In his last three wishes to his generals, he said his first desire was that his physicians alone must carry his coffin, that, people may realise, that no doctor on earth can really cure anyone of any disease.
Second, he requested that the path leading to the graveyard be strewn with gold, silver and precious stones, which he collected in his treasury, that people may know that “not even a fraction of gold” would be buried with him.
“My third and last wish,” he said, “is that both my hands be kept dangling out of my coffin. I wish people to know that I came empty handed into this world and empty handed I go out of this world.”
King Alexander died afterwards. As the legend persists.
Many supposedly “great” Nigerian politician have died in common hours. Many more would die less honourably than a commoner.
They would never amount to a hair-strand on the world’s Alexanders, despite their conceit.