Convicted and sentenced to two years maximum penalty, Wilde was in jail from May 25, 1895 to May 18, 1897. He spent the term in Newgate Prison in London, Pentonville and Wandsworth Prisons and then to London to Reading Gaol. While, as a prisoner, he was being moved from Wandsworth to Reading, he faced the lowest point of his life when a crowd which spotted him on the train’s platform jeered at and spat at him. In his De Profundis, also known as Letter to Sir Alfred Douglas, which he wrote in his last year in prison and published posthumously, Wilde had written: “She (his mom) and father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honored, not merely in literature, art, archeology and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into synonym for folly.”
I told the tale of Wilde’s unravelling above to illustrate how human beings and nations unravel. In the last two weeks, the world saw America unravel, its dirty entrails revealed to the world. Before now, the narrative was that it was African and Third World despots and leaders who shared animal features with our ape ancestors. They reacted according to the stimuli of their whims and intrinsic human wickedness. They were emotive and made no effort to shroud their human passions and desires. Many African leaders have, over the century, been profiled as despots because they couldn’t tame their passions and emotions. They came across as wicked and self-centred, sometimes acting out as narcissists. No doubt a product of close to a century of colonialism, it was believed that some of these beastly leaderships the Third World produced could not be found in America. On the contrary, “God’s Own Country” was the manifestation of human purity and America epitomised the height of the purest of human character.
When a situation makes everyone equal in action, the Yoruba have allegories with which they justify it. One way they do this is to invoke the imagery of an African chicken’s pen. As a way of reducing the costs of daily sustenance, most African homes maintained pens. They are enclosures within compounds where livestock or pets are kept. They serve as immediate relief from the rigour of dashing to the market for protein. At dusk, these animals, especially the local livestock, are lured from roaming around compounds into the various pens/cages, lest they become prey to reptiles. Because this practice is replicated in virtually every home, when it is time to equalise human action, it is invoked as an allegory. It illustrates a sense of similarity; that, what is done beyond the shores of individual localities is the same, irrespective of any allusion to sophistication. This is found in the aphorism, “everywhere, without exception, at dusk, hens are packed inside the pen” (ibi gbogbo l’a tií ńk’ádìye alé).
This aphorism has served as an excuse for failure. It has also served as justification for horrendous human actions. It is a weak line explored to say that corruption or evil is innate in every man, no matter the clime or skin colour. Despots have invoked it to claim that their actions were normal human reactions. More importantly, the aphorism has served to legitimise and sustain that theory which says that, there is a beast in every man, apologies to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s musical line, “…this uprising will bring out the beast in us”.
Many analysts who got sucked into the theory of American leaders’ ‘righteousness’ and Third World leaders’ beastliness, find another aphorism as justification. With it, they explain racial leadership character differences. So, they ask if it wasn’t the same rain that fell on and nurtured the bitter-leaf tree into its repulsive bitterness that also fell on the sugarcane which in turn comforts man with its sweetness (Òjò tó rọ̀ sí ewúro náà ló rọ̀ sí ìrèké). The bitter-leaf, in this case, was African leaders who were demonised for almost a century as wicked and selfish. The sugarcane is American leaders whose perceived purity lifted their countries to the zenith of positive global reckoning. This subsisted until about two weeks ago when America’s self-imposed righteousness unravelled.
Mobutu Sese Seko illustrates this bitter-leaf leadership thesis. Born Joseph-Dèsirè, he was President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1997. Then came Robert Mugabe, who served as the president of the Republic of Zimbabwe from 1987. And Franci
But, how were we to know that America itself was the proverbial ‘physician, heal thyself’? The last two American presidents, especially Trump, deconstructed America so badly in the eyes of the world, making them not different from Third World countries.
As Trump is busy affirming the “everywhere, without exception, at dusk, hens are packed inside the pen” to the world, in Nigeria, former Rivers and Kaduna state governors, Rotimi Amaechi and Nasir el-Rufai, are struggling to deconstruct the thesis. At an “Impact of democracy on the national economy” in Abuja last week, both acted from the playbook of a typical adulterous woman sent packing from her erstwhile home. Underlining their “dogo turenchi” is the theme that, while the present government, from which they are estranged, is performing horribly, if they had played prominent roles therein, it would not have been otherwise. That submission attempted to deconstruct the “ibi gbogbo l’a ti nk’adiye ale” thesis.
Quite frankly, Amaechi and El-Rufai were dead right. Nigerians are too docile and possess incredibly short-spanned memory. It is these two limitations that Nigerian politicians capitalise upon to catapult themselves into power. When you add the infectious poverty that afflicts the Nigerian to the mix, you have at your fingertips zombies. Evergreen Anikulapo-Kuti got it right. “My people sef, dem fear too much…” he lamented. While many attribute this to the sparse blood spillage in our fight for independence, some say our docility is a product of our comfort. You cannot also fault el-Rufai’s claim that there is no internal democracy in the ruling APC. But, if I may ask, which party in Nigeria observes internal democracy? The former Kaduna governor had equally lamented that, “You cannot afford to have illiterates, semi-illiterates, and cunning people as your leaders. This is why we end up with the poor leadership we have today.”
My take is that indeed, Nigeria, America and many parts of the world are today facing an Autumn in good leadership. Global leadership is fast decoupling from the people who constitute its foundation. If Amaechi and el-Rufai had been in plum offices today under the APC, there would be nil or marginal differences in the people’s sorrow. Nor any complaints from them. Their comments above are the usual initial traps politicians set to seduce electorates penultimate launching new parties or entering into alliances. Both Amaechi and el-Rufai were in office when the Muhammadu Buhari government dealt incalculable blows on good governance. It was the most opaque, naive and directionless in Nigeria’s history. Yet, we didn’t hear any hoopla from the duo.
On the whole, Trump is teaching leaders of the world that indeed, “everywhere, without exception, at dusk, hens are packed inside the pen”. As Trump’s Third term ambition grows, it will trigger a wave of African leaders also nurturing perfect alibi for sit-tightism. This brings me to an intersection to disagree with el-Rufai’s claim that the present APC leadership is illiterate. I agree more with ex-youth and sports minister, Solomon Dalung, who recently said that the combine that surrounds power today is educated but lethal. Cunning and sadistic, yes, they are. It is why I am of the opinion that it will be difficult to dislodge Tinubu from power.
Rather than sounding sanctimonious, el-Rufai, Amaechi and the Nigerian opposition will need to abandon rhetoric. I am sure that what God deployed to drive Satan away from Heaven wasn’t mere demagogic narratives. What the Nigerian opposition needs to do to drive away the Morning Star is to recreate an American Donald Trump as an aspirant for Nigeria’s No 1 office. A Trump clone will dislodge the current ruling establishment. In Trump is a symbolism of leadership madness, unconventionality, criminality and unorthodoxy. Don’t our people say it is only a meek face that gets riven with pimples (Ojú tó rọ ni rore nsọ)? Yoruba reckon with this when they say, you must deploy madness to cure madness. While campaigning for votes, Tinubu himself said you cannot snatch the kernel from the palm-nut with rhetoric. What Nigeria’s opposition needs to dislodge the kernel from the hard palm nut is a stone on the floor and another stone to smash it at the top.
Ganusi and the fire this time
All over the world, musicians are reputed to have patented argots, slang and jargon that signposted global conversations. In the tiny Island of Jamaica, the unkempt, locked-hair, weed-smoking, reggae music singer, Peter Tosh pioneered the word ‘Rasta’ as prefix for devotees of a new religion that began to reign in the West Indies. That religion believed that His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, formerly Abyssinia, and the last Emperor of the Empire, was “King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah and Elect of God”. In a musical track titled “Rasta Shook Dem Up” released in 1966, Tosh patented the usage of the word for worshipers of Selassie named “Rastafari.” It was derived from Selassie’s pre-monarch name, “Ras Tafari Makonnen,” “Ras” having come from an Ethiopian Semitic word meaning “Duke” or “Prince”.
In the early 1980s, when Yoruba Awurebe music icon, Alhaji Dauda Adeeyo, alias Epo Akara, was accused of couriering Indian hemp to Abidjan, Cote d’voire, his traducers had an upper hand in spreading the news. He had to denounce it in a track he called O wa l’Abidjan. In it, he sang that he was engaged in legitimate sale of Ankara clothes which was a major trade in the French-speaking country. A new kind of cloth style became known as L’Abidjan in the Southwest of Nigeria then.
About two weeks ago, Yoruba Fuji icon, Wasiu Ayinde, unwittingly added to the lexicography of the Southwest. His mother, Animotu Sadia, had passed and among a beehive of people who flooded his Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State home for the burial were Islamic clerics. In Yorubaland, clerics at such occasions, whether Christian or Muslim, have come to be synonyms with scavenging for perks and food. Islamic clerics are the most notorious. I remember that while growing up, a very unflattering but predominant phrase that was bandied about was, “If an Alfa goes to an occasion, how to know that the event was fruitful and he ate to his fill was that the Alfa’s elbow would be soaked in oil” (Bí Aafa ba lọ òde, bí òde bà dun, igbunwo l’a tí mọ, torí yíò mú epo dẹdẹ ni!).
An apparently clandestinely recorded video had Ayinde complaining that the flood of clerics to his house in the guise of condolences, was stomach-driven. This was not the novelty Ayinde pioneered. The lexicographic enrichment came from the musician’s usage of a barroom, society’s lowlife slang to describe the scavenging. He said the clerics had chosen his house, rather than his father’s house at Fidipote area of Ijebu-Ode, to “Ganusi.” Ganusi can be used either as a noun or verb and has literally shut down the social media in the various mutations it has suffered.
Many people have done a syntactic and lexical examination of “Ganusi” since then, many times without fruition. It is most probably a weave of two words “Ga enu” (prized open like a trap) and “si” (to) to arrive at a word which conveys the meaning of a deliberate ploy to fill the tummy. Such act of prizing open the mouth is deliberate, purposive and tendentious, while not being real as it is concealed. Ayinde was obviously communicating a tendency that is getting worse in society where everyone has become a scavenger of the other person.
Though uttered at the height of frustration with nectar-sucking propensity of virtually everyone in Nigeria today, an Islamic cleric who angrily replied the musician reminded him that Ayinde, being a beggar (alagbe) – as musicians are known from time immemorial – was equally a scavenger.
