What kind of leader first makes survival unbearable, waits until elections approach, and then presents relief from that suffering as evidence of compassion?
How do we say thank you to the one who afflicts, then cures? How?
The elders of my place are masters of simile. When situations or things are similar, they go philosophical. Proverbs and metaphors are the languages of the elders. I pour libation to operate in their orbit today. My earthworm has venerated the soil, may the earth open to me. Àṣẹ!
The shell of a peanut resembles the tiny coffin of the smallest mouse èlírí (Ohun tó jọ ohun la fi ń wé ohun; èpo ẹ̀pà jọ pósí èlírí). Objects are compared on the basis of their similarities. The elders knew the power of comparison long before literary scholars gave us names for its devices. They knew that one thing could illuminate another; that an image from one age could expose the absurdity of another.
Did they have the Nigeria of today in mind when they made that postulation? Did those who have gone beyond know that a day would come when men would play God, punish the people with severe hunger and then turn round to offer relief?
Elections are around the corner. In less than five months, Nigerians will be on the streets to elect new locusts or retain old ones to torment them for another four years. Will our case be like that of people who learn nothing and forget nothing? Or are we going to break the yoke of hunger, deprivation and poverty that those we elected to lead have tied around our necks?
Why do we allow the same people to lead us repeatedly down the same bush paths? What blocks our sense of recognition each time? Greed? Ignorance? Fear? Or have we simply resigned ourselves to fate and told our tormentors to do with us whatever they wish?
A video was posted last week. The narration that introduces the video reads: “The person who invented the word ‘wonders shall never end’ had Nigeria in mind!!! Senator Peter Onyekachi Nwaebonyi went to campaign in Izzi, Ebonyi State, but there was no bridge connecting him to the town. So, he stood on the other side of the river to solicit votes. I’m speechless.”
The senator involved, represents Ebonyi North Senatorial District and is the Senate Deputy Chief Whip – a principal officer of the upper chamber! He is.one of those defending this government and its economic waywardness. Incidentally, he won his party’s ticket to run for a second term as the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for the January 2027 National Assembly election! Will he win? Will the same people he spoke to across the river like a wretched dibia line up to vote for him?
I hazard a guess. Between now and January, there will be a makeshift ‘gada’ (girder) over the river to enable the people from the other end of the river to ‘exercise their civic responsibility. The ‘gada’ will be ‘commissioned’ and the people will be told to vote for the ruling party’s candidate for a better tomorrow. The argument will be that the senator needs to consolidate so that he can bring the goodies of the ‘Renewed Hope Agenda’ of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to the people. Doomed!
Senator Nwaebonyi is not alone in this perfidy. Aso Rock Villa ‘himself’ has entered the same panic mode. Nine months into the expiration of the first term, the Villa suddenly realised that Nigerians are hungry and suffering.
Then it decided that something must be done to ameliorate the situation. So, the Villa went for the kill. It set aside a whopping sum of $1 billion for palliative care. But the Villa got ‘smarter’ this time around.
Realising that the noun, palliative, has become useless in the lexicography of Nigerians, the Villa opted for something more descriptive and bombastic: Household Prosperity and Empowerment Social Protection Project (HOPE-SP)!
Now we should clap. Our husband has suddenly realised that there are poor families (households), and there is the need to make life easier for them (prosperity). The man with the torturing phallus knows now that the poor families need to have something in their hands (empowerment) to secure their members against the ills that accompany acute poverty (social protection). Hence the programme (project) that will ensure that the people remain hopeful while the Villa perfects the outcome of the 2027 general election. Welcome hopeless HOPE-SP!
Why do men play God? And why do gods punish humans? We answer with the simile of our elders: “Ohun tó jọ ohun la fi ń wé ohun; èpo ẹ̀pà jọ pósí èlírí”
Ancient Greek has a god named Limos. Limos personifies hunger, starvation, famine and anything that deprives humanity of basic needs. The “father of Greek didactic poetry”, Hesiod (700 BC), says that Limos, though considered the son of Eris, the Greek goddess of strife, has no known father.
That was not all about the god of hunger. Like a typical bat that is neither a bird nor an animal, Limos has no specific gender. The god is not hermaphrodite too. In some Greek mythologies, he is depicted as a man and in some cases as a woman. The Greek’s god’s life is shrouded in mysteries from ancestry to gender and laced with pathological sadism!
The best description of Limos was given by the Greek poet, Semonides of Amorgos (seventeen century BC), who says that the god is “a hostile housemate, enemy of the gods”, who has the capacity to creep into the people’s homes, unnoticed!
One Greek myth says that when the goddess of plenty, Demeter, set out to punish King Erysichthon for cutting down a sacred tree to build a storage barn, Limos was readily available and he inflicted Erysichthon with insatiable hunger and appetite.
The situation got so deplorable that Erysichthon spent his entire fortune on food, sold his daughter for food and when the hunger would not abate, devoured his own flesh and died subsequently!
A sadist of no mean repute, the greatest pastime of Limos is to afflict the people with hunger, create a small farming environment and tie the people’s hand behind them so that they could not assess the crops in the field!
Hasn’t Nigeria gotten to the state of Erysichthon? What is the level of man-imposed hunger in the land? Are parents not already selling their children for food? How many have died because they could not afford the basic necessities of life – food, medication, and housing? How many have turned to beggars because the Villa and ‘his’ voodoo economic policies have turned poverty to State art?
In the face of the aforementioned calamities, what effect is the Villa’s HOPE-SP? Why is the project coming now that electioneering has kicked off? How many households will be covered? Where is the National Data Bank to regulate the disbursement? “Is this”, as a multi-billionaire I know is wont to ask, ‘not a case of someone helping someone?’
What is HOPE-SP in the face of hunger in the land? Thinking about this, my mind takes me to the small rat èlírí, and its nature of biting one’s feet before blowing air to soothe the pain! Why would a government inflict so much pain on the people and then turn around to introduce palliative measures?
The Villa has played too much God in our lives. Those who should have told the god in the rock that the streets are not smiling are the very ones who praise every economic misstep of the god as the stride to El Dorado! Now the chickens have come home to roost. The days of reckoning approach fast. The only answer the Villa has is for the people to queue up for HOPE-SP peanuts.
Sadly, the Villa expects us to clap as if we had not been on this same path in the past. Our now ‘compassionate’ husband thinks that Nigerians will never remember that there was once a ‘TraderMoni scheme’? To date, we don’t know who collected what, who paid back what, how much was given out and how much was spent in total! Those who handled the project have since retired to enjoy their lives.
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The villa, again, thinks we will not recollect that a government once spent billions of naira feeding school children who were at home during COVID-19! How about the money claimed to have been credited to citizens’ bank accounts directly? Who has this government asked questions about those day-light robberies? And if we may ask, how much has the Villa saved from oil subsidy removal?
We must call a spade a spade. The Villa must stop thinking that we are ‘as stupid as we look (someone else owns the copyright to those words). The god in the rock should not call the dog monkey because the two squat. We are not the proverbial obo Idanre (monkeys of Idanre). Nigerians are wiser now than the leaders think.
Pulling out $1 billion from our treasury during electioneering in the name of HOPE-SP is suspect. The Villa should come clean on what it intends to do with the money instead of hiding behind one finger called Household Prosperity and Empowerment Social Protection Project (HOPE-SP)!
Nothing surprises Nigerians anymore. We are home and dry with ‘stomach infrastructure, the Ekiti euphemism for politics of tokenism. We have heard the same Ekiti cliché of dibo ko se’be (vote and cook soup), the voters’ shadowing slogan for electoral bribery.
If my people in Ekiti could run after lorries conveying loaves of bread and packets of spaghetti as prices for their votes, nothing stops a Sule Igbira from collecting the Villa’s handout in place of his vote! Enough of dressing economic malfeasance in the borrowed robe of empowerment. No prosperity will ever come from the $1 billion HOPE-SP token, half of which will end up in individual pockets!
We have been told, several times, that the Villa equals Orunmila in wisdom. We have stopped arguing with them on that falsehood. When a man deceives himself, it is better he is left to swim in his own man-made ocean of delusion.
Truth is that only the Villa can explain why he elected to punish the people so much, perpetually. He alone can explain how he believes that the token handed over to a few people is the way to ward off the looming political crisis as the next round of elections approaches.
I asked those who are knowledgeable if Orunmila, the Villa-acclaimed mate, ever weaponised hunger against his people the way the Villa does. The men of wisdom directed me to the palace of the third principal Ifa Corpus (Odu Ifa Keta), Iwori Meji, where Agboniregun only punished the people with famine, temporarily, for the rudeness of the last of his eight sons, Olowo.
The lesson Ifa teaches here is that no wise god waits for the decimation of his devotees before he acts and halts their suffering. The sixteen Iyerosun Orunmila handed over to those who came pleading are the saviours of humanity in Yoruba mythology, to date.
I wish those close by would tell the Villa that the deliberate hunger of over three years would not be placated by mere sharing of our patrimony in a way that accountability will be akin to the proverbial bat trying to find its way in the daytime. I hope they will tell their god that this panic measure will be counter-productive because nobody trusts the administration again.
On May 30, 2023, I wrote under the title: “May Tinubu never need our pity.” Permit me to reproduce here the first three sentences of that piece because of their relevance to the HOPE-SP panic measure:
“From tomorrow, don’t pity me. I applied for the job, I campaigned for it, and I got the job, no excuses, I must deliver….” I chose to begin today’s piece with the words of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who was sworn in yesterday as the President and Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces. He spoke at the Presidential Inauguration Banquet and Gala Night held at the State House Conference Centre in Abuja on Sunday, May 28, 2023, a few hours to his inauguration.”
Almost three and half years after those words were uttered, I would like to repeat here, the concluding sentences of the same May 30, 2023 column: “The steps Tinubu takes or fails to take in days ahead will decide if indeed we have any hope of getting out of the present wood of despair. One can only hope that he would not one day in his presidency throw a pity party and expect Nigerians to dance to the rueful tunes therefrom. I bet, that will be in short supply!”
I hope that HOPE-SP will save the Villa the agony of an empty pity party given that Nigerians have long sold their dancing shoes for a measure of rice in the face of the excruciating Villa-imposed hunger!
