Igbos say tomorrow is pregnant. Amaechi means no one knows tomorrow. Fate doesn’t pretend not to be fickle. But we never learn. Not the here today , dead and rotting tomorrow scary finality of this earthly sojourn- we know that in all likelihood we will be eaten by worms or vultures. But the ubiquitous everyday swings in fortunes and circumstances, that volatility that makes life and living so precarious that pomposity should not be found amongst men. And with it tyranny and all acts of inhumanity.
There is then, after all, a pragmatic reason why the Bible demands us to treat our neighbours as ourselves and to pursue peace with all men. When the simple and meek stumble and fall people mourn and lend help but pride and cruelty sets their victims up for inevitable mockery and vengeance. Looting the national treasury is really cruel. Being close to the ground makes falling less dramatic and less calamitous. The disaster Humpty Dumpty faced on falling was his weight. The problem many politicians in Nigeria face when they fall isn’t just grotesque abdomens and vulgar appetites they must maintain.
They steal and stash away enough to keep those ballooning and proliferating. People fall from power and influence here and look like flat tyres or deplumed peacocks. Heavy with vanities, their falls come with not just harrowing castrations but humbling circumcisions. A few months ago Tompolo and Dasuki were principalities. If you knew them you knew gods. In the midst of general poverty and pervasive arbitrariness many prayers of ordinary people can be answered by strong men. Today, Tompolo is at large and Dasuki is prostrate and seemingly helpless. Socialism thought about it , about leveling everybody.
But it didn’t dwell on the guarantee of human dignity beyond communal ownership of factors of production. It is important that some don’t enslave others and turn them into addicts of ‘stomach infrastructure’ but it’s more important that basic human rights of all are recognized as basic common goods and preserved jealously. Because those who will clamour, with manacled hands, for the sanctity of the rule of law someday are those who once treated the law with the derision rotten farts normally attract. One day it will be the turn of some leaders of Jonathan’s TAN who a few months ago pranced about and spat into the faces of paupers and billionaires to teach us the rule of law.
John Rawls was wise and we must embrace his helping hand. His original position is a philosophical device that must guide the choices we make even though it was crafted primarily for principles of distributive justice. Permit a little extrapolation and creativity, he wants us to imagine that before we were born , before we knew whom we would be and our advantages and handicaps and interests, we had to decide how our community would be organized. How social goods, justice, will be distributed. He believed that our conception of justice behind the veil of total ignorance of the original position would be very objective and fair and should make the world a better place.
But here we are, with our greed and shortsightedness. Some would want to loot the treasury and stack in Switzerland communal wealth while their neigbours are slaughtered by hunger, malaria and boko haram. Their supporters, possessed by naivety, will lend them sophistry- they are saints because many other thieves are still on the loose . Even those who should have respect for money because of what abject poverty taught them while growing up, fall into public positions , and take profligacy and thievery to the public treasury. They steal so much because they want to fix the whimsicality of tomorrow. But tomorrow will always be elusive.If we embraced Justice as fairness then how much care would we have wanted for disabled persons if we weren’t sure we wont be born with disability? Wouldn’t we have preferred spending 50% of oil money on education and health alone if there was a good chance we would be born into a motherless babies home? So that education and health would be totally free for the poor and looters will have much less to steal. And the few who cornered the oil blocks that belong to millions would have known that such cynical self-centeredness even if ‘sanctified’ by an approval process was monumental evil.
Fortunes will fluctuate and Mama Peace can attest to that now, her flock of vain fair weather friends , nectar seeking women, have scattered. They were with her in Korea with their vanity and frivolity when she was seduced by a worthless doctorate into thinking that the world had fallen into a delusion that she had made great contributions to humanity. Some of them are desperately worshipping the new gods in town now . Turai , before her, suffered a similar predicament but Dame didn’t learn from her woes.
Were they not huddled together eating and belching and egging her on while she freely shed tears of mockery because Chibok girls , their maternal instincts told them, were characters of a fairy tale , the work of mischievous political opponents? Shouldn’t we then learn that all such glory and all the eulogies are always works of sycophancy? Why do we get bloated, so bloated that we have to die many times?
Godfathers have mushroomed. They have tried to fix tomorrow and failed. Their godsons will swear to oaths of allegiance they will repudiate once they sniffed power. Chris Uba went as far as Okija shrine. Peter Obi put his faith in man and has been left as high and dry as Orji Kalu. Theodore Orji will soon learn that what befell Orji Kalu has not been eradicated. Trust the people and serve them well and forget about owning tomorrow.
So rather than build lavish governors lodges in every moribund state in Nigeria and have dissembling governors eat ‘guguru’ in dirty gutters or wash black pots in bukkas before elections to fool the people, why wouldn’t we do the prisons and insist that doctors are available for prisoners for 24 hours. I don’t know what kuje prison looks like but Olisa Metuh should know and tomorrow it could be the turn of those blaring vuvuzelas and waving brooms now.
Why wouldn’t we then think about falling since we hate to think about dying?
Two years ago, when Abba Moro supervised the prisons , the doctor in Kirikiri maximum prison came to work when it pleased him and demanded 250,000 naira bribes before he would write referrals for sick prisoners he could not treat. He could abandon the prisoners for a whole week. Then Abba Moro was busy organizing recruitment scams that consumed prime lives and didn’t care to improve the prisons. Tomorrow we will definitely hear so much about how the prisons’ conditions are so inhuman that our lords cannot be confined there. Let our ‘ogas at the top’ lament our social conditions when they are still at the top!
Because the valley of the shadow of tribulation is never far from us, and even the mighty are not exempt . Because one day we may go from having the power to conjure the postponement of national elections to having to malinger to secure bail. We can go from being a law unto ourselves to being fugitives of the law.
Tafa Balogun did the bidding of his principals, hounded the rich and the poor, and had 18 billion naira in the bank, yet ended pitiably. Nuhu Ribadu had to flee, he couldn’t confront his persecutors. When he returned, he didn’t sit still. So when fortune turned around and headed his way he had somersaulted into another wilderness. Power is hopelessly ephemeral.
Okupe must have seen tomorrow, because he was banging tables, cursing and swearing in Aso rock that Jonathan would never hand over to Buhari. That was long before Orubebe. He now wants to be forgotten. Fani Kayode won’t agree he committed a pathetic blunder, he didn’t see this coming. Did he? This tactical jumping from one party to the other can go so wrong. He was hired for a reason , to provide non stop volleys of obscenities. He can’t even stop now. He has to live with the heart flutters the travails of Metuh must have left him. History is filled with lessons.
Abacha never had to shout even to engineer an earthquake. Many knew why almighty Diya cried like a baby. But Abacha died very easily, like a butterfly. Money and guns had no chance to intercede for him. Tomorrow is deep. Some of those for whom he was a deity, who brutally forced millions into submission to their god, became not mere mortals but scorned lepers. Even after Omenka became a vagrant fugitive his victims’ spells of nightmares didn’t stop. The coward had to run into oblivion .
Mustapha wasn’t an ordinary chief priest because chief priests of taciturn and extremely cruel gods lose their humanity. The supreme court affirmed his innocence . Kudirat is dead, he didn’t kill her. We know who killed her but we don’t know who sent who killed her. 14 years is the time to move from nursery school to a bachelor’s degree. He complained about being held in solitary confinement , in a dark underground cell, for about 3 years and I shook my head.
Social justice is the business of all. The afflicted and downtrodden must be spoken for because it is the right thing to do. And from the point of prudence, standing against evil is an insurance policy.
VANGUARD
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