BY FESTUS ADEDAYO
PRINCE Adekunle, the Yoruba Juju music maestro of the 1970s, once sang that a tree which falls in the forest cannot kill someone right inside their home; nor could a fallen rafter kill a bystander in the forest (Igikìídál’ókokó pa aráilé; àjàkìíjìnk’ó pa èròònà). We have found this not to be absolute. The falling tree and rafters of Western Nigeria once killed a bystander in First Republic Nigeria.
FCT Minister Ezenwo NyesomWike is a phenomenon. He is someone many love to hate. When the Secretary of the APC, Dr Ajibola Bashiru, recently asked him not to import the brand of troublous and fragmenting politics of the PDP into the APC, he meant that Wike is the troubler of Nigerian politics. Wike’s anger is unexampled, his choleric outbursts phenomenal. He is a phenomenon in Nigerian politics, regardless. These have pushed me to undertake a psychoanalytical study of the Wike phenomenon. In doing this, my mind hovers over the negatively phenomenal child called Àjàntálá.
In the ancient Àjàntálá mythology, Yoruba reproduced a counterpoise of the western Frankenstein monster. As folklore and a cultural signifier, the Àjàntálá was a misbegotten child, a product of his father’s disobedience to the un-science of, though life-shaping, ancient epistemology and practices of his people. Àjàntálá’s hunter father had disobeyed the widely held myth that when hunters’ wives were pregnant, they should cease hunting. The belief was that, if they shot a cantankerous game, it may, in anger, displace the foetus inside their wives and become a perilous child. This was the process that birthed Àjàntálá.
In the Amos Tutuola version of Àjàntálá’s story (Àjàntálá, The Noxious Child: 1986), the baby spent 23 years inside his mother’s womb. A few days before he was born, as his mother walked the bush path, the child began a conversation with her, even cavalierly suggesting its name at birth.
Àjàntálá became a burden to those who birthed him and his neighbourhood, the way Wike is a burden to the APC and the PDP today. Even those who did not purchase paid out of the bill. At his naming ceremony, the 8-day-old child disrupted the proceedings, gluttonously consuming every food in sight and causing huge pains to his parents and all his naming ceremony attendees. As he grew, Àjàntálá manifested malevolent streaks, whipping his parents at intervals and beating to stupor a Babalawo, who was engaged to provide spiritual succour to his raving-mad Satanic theatrics.
The truth is, Nigerian politics is not for the lily-livered. It is only the Wikes who understand it, who can survive it. Give it to him: Wike has colossal mastery of Nigerian politics. Nigerian politics is a weird life comparable only to life in the wild. It has face recognition with Thomas Hobbes’ famous phrase of a ‘nasty, brutish and short’ life. It is home to a vast array of wildlife. Monkeys, tigers, leopards, lions, and reptiles of different hues inhabit the wild. So do they politics. These animals are consumed by a daily struggle to assert the jungle as their individual fiefdom. Indeed, the less said about politics’ sores, the better. Apart from its dense vegetation of plants, vines, and shrubs, the wild is a jungle.
The jungle, in the words of my people, is the forest of the heartless (Igbóòdájú). In politics, brothers stab brothers and bloodlines are helpless to rescue. Joining Nigerian politics is like entering the uncharted space of the jungle. In it, there is an inversion of the norm. Betrayal is a virtue, honesty is a vice. Politics’ rules abhor rules, its order reeks of disorder and its beauty, manifest ugliness. Nigerian politics makes politics ashamed of its own virtues. It is where yellow is white, where worldly cunning is a virtue. In the wild, birds eat the carrion of fellow birds. Boa constrictors swallow fellow snakes. Hyenas pierce their incredibly powerful incisors into the raw flesh of vulnerable lions of the same cat family.
While urging those who cannot withstand the dog-eat-dog life in the jungle to flee its red-hot furnace, Yoruba Apala music legend, AyinlaOmowura, once warned that, “as we proceed into the jungle, the forest of the heartless, let mothers keep an eye on their children. Lions live in this jungle. Let lesser animals beware!” In another line, he admonished anyone whose mother was late and thus bereft of motherly spiritual tendering, not to proceed with him into the jungle because loud-sounding, frightening thunders herald the entrances of initiates into the jungle. He could have meant Nigerian politics.
The wild is also not amenable to the logic of everyday life. To illustrate its unpredictability, my people capture it in a saying that if you wander far enough in the wild, not only will you come in contact with a hunchbacked squirrel (abukéòkéré), a snail with horns (ìgbínt’óní’wo) like that of an efòn (buffalo) or an àgbánréré, the rhinoceros, would walk past you.
