It is not true that only women gossip. Men do it too— especially about the other s3x. At a meeting of male animals, Lion complains bitterly that he is not lucky with the wife he has.
“My wife nags and nags,” Lion laments.
“My own steals and lies,” Tiger says.
“My own is promiscuous. She sleeps with any male thing who can muster an erection,” Buffalo joins in the lamentation.
Yet another complains, and another, and another. But an amused Tortoise laughs and tells the beasts of the jungle that they should thank their stars for what they have. His own wife, he says, is worse than all theirs combined.
“What does she do?” the congregation choruses.
“My wife has no shame. She is shameless,” Tortoise bellows. A sober meeting ponders on Tortoise’s statement. They agree. A shameless person is the very embodiment of all the diseases of the world.
Nigeria is Tortoise’s wife. It is shameless –and that should explain the revelry which forever warm our bad ways and manners. Lack of shame can be the only explanation for the calm of the nation despite the rancid nakedness of these times. Last week was quite a mouthful.
The president said something in Poland that he is himself – not somebody else – then all local and international clowns and comedians waxed records of shame for us. The wife of the president, Aisha, dropped her own bomb in Abuja. She said 15.4 million Nigerians elected her husband’s government but the voters had lost that government to a mysterious two-man gang of power hijackers. She rebuked the men of Nigeria for being absent: “Where are the men of Nigeria?” She asked in a direct exposure of the ball-lessness of all of us who claim to be men. She charged us to stop “clapping” but stand up to fight the “two people” running our affairs aground.
Who are these unseen potentates? She did not name names, but clearly her hubby isn’t one of the two. The president is a hijack victim—like us, the unlucky, impotent voters. Just think about this: It doesn’t rain in Nigeria. It pours. Was it Buhari who has always thanked card readers for his victory in the 2015 elections who paid back on Friday with a rejection of the amended Electoral Act? Was it the integrity man we elected who blocked the law that was to make the cards compulsory in our elections? Or should we consult the mother of the nation for the right guidance on this matter too and we ask her: who did it – and why?
Things happen in Nigeria. There was a piece from Professor Olatunji Dare, communication scholar and master satirist. There was a speech from Bishop David Oyedepo, fiery priest and verbal pugilist. Both the scholar and the priest arrested us with written and spoken words. The first wrote what his fans said was a satire; the second satirised the ‘satire’ – even with the icing of identifying the author as ‘one Olatunji Dare.’
Satires are “comedy of outrage.” Nigeria itself is a satire – or plainly a parody of sanity. The egghead whose trade survives on the written words inflicted implicit outrage on his readers. The Daddy who (mis)read the printed comedy got it amplified on his priestly minaret; he read it out with an intricate introduction and an intriguing conclusion: The president must be truly not the president because ‘one Olatunji Dare’ wrote it on the back page of the president’s newspaper!
It was the president himself who struck the match of this shame. He declared in Poland that he was himself, saying – “it’s real me” – not some ethereal Jubril or Jubrin from Sudan created by a Jewish Igbo hibernating in a Jerusalem hole. The local Nigerian media heard their president and shouted Halleluyah – at least, Muhammadu Buhari personally said something about something. In the pantheon of saintly ancestors, our president sits among prefects. Ancestors, by their angelic stature, nature and calling address their beholden children only through mediums. And, so Buhari’s direct words were celebrated like long-sought rainfall in the Sahara. A shocked foreign media feasted on that free meal from our president. They did what General Theophilus Danjuma accused our soldiers of doing: They ‘colluded’ – almost adopting same headline to shame us and our simple president. Reuters’ treatment of the president’s video was particularly unnerving- not just for the insulting headline or the meat in the bones, but also for the comments that followed a tweet of the report.
What was the headline? It cast plain subversion as story title: “Nigeria’s Buhari denies dying and being replaced by lookalike.” Imagine the mischief! Our president never used the word ‘lookalike.’ He said he was “not cloned.” Or are the two words now synonyms?
The media behaves like that, especially these colonial press; they hear only what suits their headlines. I read that Reuters stuff and would have been angry but the comment of a reader ‘cooled my temper,’ The fellow asked Reuters: “Nigeria’s Buhari? Is there an American Buhari?” Great! I said, there is only one Buhari; any other one is a counterfeit. My president must give this commenting dude a General’s handshake. But you know South Africans are cousins of our homegrown wailers. They don’t like us, home and abroad; offline, online. One of them read that report and thanked his stars that he wasn’t a Nigerian.
He wrote: “I thought South Africa had problems; I change my mind.” Then some irreverent, idle white niggas swarmed the video like hungry ants would do sugar. One after the other, they repeated this rude, crude comment: “Exactly what a clone would say.” And that line became a song on the fingers of those children of anger. They went on and on raking Sudanese dirts from the bed of the Internet to insult their own world – not mine! Even respected Washington Post sang the song too. It tweeted that dirty line.
I talked about shame as a pet in Nigeria. Nothing great comes down to the Giant of Africa and keeps its minty character. Satire has been for centuries the bashful stone that cracks the crude balls of power. But here, it kicks, shames and puts itself on trial. In other places, its brilliant magistracy is enough to doze bulls in power. A popular satire is George Orwell’s Animal Farm—we all quote from it the few sober occasions we are tired of the inequality in which we live. There is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and its tale of moral midgets. There is Voltaire’s Candide. There is Hasek’s The Good Soldier. There is Shem’s The House of God with its agony of absurdity. There is also Cervantes’ Don Quixote and its mockery of fleeting chivalry. There is Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales which tells of the age-long three-some implicating politics, religion and pretentious piety.
Here, satire must not criticise with inverse jokes. If it does, it becomes the joke. Evangelical Oyedepo (mis)used Dare’s satire to interrogate the mystery of the elusive persona called Buhari and the world almost came to an end. Even the ace media satirist had to quickly hang a banner (as expansive as the sky) on the front page of his newspaper explaining that his satire was just a satire – almost like Buhari’s “It is the real me.”
We are a nation of irritable, shameless partisans. God spoke through Aisha Buhari, but we did not listen. Even the normally attentive media feigned loss of hearing. We won’t see that the presidential spousal admission of power hijackers is equal in meaning to Oyedepo’s satire of unclad ghostly power in Abuja. All we see is a contest for rightness or wrongness between My Lord Spiritual- Oyedepo- and My Lord Temporal – Buhari. We quickly remind Buharists who attacked Oyedepo of the warning: “touch not my anointed” (1 Chronicles 16: 22). But Buhari, even in his naked aloofness, occupies the other end of the anointing table, and so we tell Oyedepo’s believers that our president is also sacred, and should be untouchable even by the purifying implicitness of satire.
What we saw last week was a trial of language, power and religion, a query of the meaning of what should be meaningful. And while we fight over who should insult whom because of an absent leadership, we, like in Joseph Heller’s Catch -22, rationalize irrationality. We can’t be taller than the miserable midgets we are with our accommodation of anything to please power. Even when power rebags hardship and delivers it as uncommon benevolence; even when it rebrews and bottles crude cruelty as milk of presidential kindness, we still excuse it because we eat from its kitchen. And I am talking of the rich kitchen of Buhari and the other party.
As Michael Honig, author of The Senility of Vladimir P, notes, what matters here is not our tomorrow and the value of values. What matters is “how long the feast would go on, like fish gorging themselves on a whale’s flesh, even while the whale (is) still alive.” That is the satire of our naked shame which the combo called power and religion called us to watch last week — and we are still watching and fighting.
