The word “obtain” has been on my mind lately.
Somehow, I had assumed, and was going to assert, that you will not find the word “obtainer” in the dictionary. Out of a sound instinct for self-preservation, I decided to look it up online, and there it was, denoting a person who obtains.
It reminds me, pardon the digression, of a story told me long ago by one of the most gifted Nigerians who ever wielded a scalpel. He had independently developed and perfected a technique that greatly simplified a traditional surgical procedure that cut hospital stay as well as post-operation recovery period drastically.
He shared with leading colleagues in the field the draft of a scientific paper he was going to submit to the leading journal of the trade and invited their comments and criticism. All of them said the technique was a revolutionary breakthrough that would cement his place in the world of surgery,.
Just as he was about to dispatch the paper to the editors of the journal, an inner voice told him to stretch his literature review back to the time of the ancients. So he repaired to the Medical Library, in Yaba, for a final check.
It is amazing what one could find if one just searched diligently and long enough.
To return to the matter at hand, I did not know that the word “obtainer” is in the dictionary. That finding gave me the confidence to use that word, pluralised, in the headline. From “obtainer,” it is but a short step to “obtainment,” which can mean the act of obtaining, acquiring, or getting something.
As words go, there is nothing special about the word “obtain.” It is one of the most ordinary words in the English language, used routinely and indeed almost reflexively in all manner of contexts. But it has never lain far from my political consciousness since the time when military president Ibrahim Babangida fooled the political class into embracing his duplicitous political programme, described by the noted political scientist, Richard Joseph, as “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited upon a people.”
A fellow who went by the name of Professor “Eric Opia dropped on the scene from parts unknown and became, just like that, a major contender for governor in the newly-created Delta State.
One of the primaries, later voided, was a contest not of ideas or programmes, but of which aspirant could dispense the most cash. And how the residents of Warri and environs, the major theatre of the contest, delighted in their good fortune! As reported by the perceptive Guardian political editor Akpo Esajere, the common salutation among the younger elements was no longer “Ol’ boy how you dey?” but “Ol’ boy, you don obtain?”
I was instantly fascinated with the locution. “Obtain,” one had been taught back in high school, is a transitive verb. It always goes with the object. But in the Warri usage, there was no subject. What they were obtaining — the object – was not stated. Yet, it required no imagination to figure it out.
Since then, the locution has been embedded in my political consciousness and journalistic bag of tools. And it has framed my perception of the absorbing, even if maddening national drama that reached a high point of sorts with the arraignment in Abuja yesterday of one of the principal actors, Colonel (retired) Sambo Dasuki, most recently National Security Adviser, and three of his aides on money laundering charges.
According to documents that trickled into the public domain day after passing day over the past three weeks, the security vote operated by the Office of the National Security Office (ONSA), Dasuki’s fancy title for his station, was reduced to a piggy bank from which the PDP and just about anyone who could peddle any ware or remedy, however dubious, could “obtain “on President Goodluck Jonathan’s say-so.
And many indeed are those who now occupy the gallery of obtainers. A broadcast licensee who hadn’t paid his employees for some 20 months – and probably still hasn’t — shows the President a proposal for publicising his achievements and boosting his re-election chances. For his pains he is directed to go and obtain N2 billion and some pocket change.
A high-living media mogul who runs his sprawling empire on the Mobutu Principle tells Jonathan that if his Administration had been alive to its responsibilities, Boko Haram would not have succeeded in bombing his printing plant. And since the Administration was re-building the UN complex in Abuja that the same Boko Haram had bombed into ruins, it ought to compensate him for his losses. Jonathan directs him to obtain a token contribution of more than N500 million from the piggy bank.
Some newspapers – you know them — print several hundred copies a day, for local circulation, just to keep up the pretence of still being in the business. Even if they were minded to, they were not in a position to suffer any losses when jittery security officials seized distribution.
Yet they were not averse to obtaining N10 million each as compensation for the loss they allegedly suffered from the disruption of their business.
One fellow who cannot be trusted to recite key passages in the most sacred texts without stumbling obtains more than N400 million from the piggy bank as “spiritual allowance.” Not to be outdone, a prayer warrior of indeterminate bona fides obtains the equivalent for intercession.
Expired political godfathers with no constituencies whatsoever also obtain, though it is not clear that they filed demands. The Arch Fixer who has been put out of the lucrative business that has sustained him for decades obtains, too, in the hundreds of millions.
To augment the paltry official income that comes nowhere near what he used to make as a top professional in private practice, a very senior administration official develops the habit of obtaining a princely N20 million a month from the inexhaustible piggy bank that Dasuki kept in the ONSA.
Funds for mobilising voters in the Northwest for Jonathan’s re-election reportedly came out of the piggy bank, plus hundreds of millions for accredited delegates to the PDP Convention from which Dr Jonathan came out as the party’s sole presidential candidate.
So did funds for members of the House of Representatives, for unspecified purposes. In the bazaar that was the ONSA, it was not necessary to specify a purpose for obtaining. It was okay to obtain for the fun of it.
I gather that the obtainers as well as the sub-obtainers are set to identify those who obtained from them in one guise or another. Watch out, all those “Abuja-based public affairs analysts” who toiled ceaselessly to take down and take out anyone who would not place Dr Jonathan in the same league as Nelson Mandela, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., Lee Kuan Yew and Barack Obama.
It has to be said to the great credit of the former First Family that, although the First Husband has been mentioned as the issuing authority for permits to obtain, there has been no suggestion that he personally obtained. He has had a piggy bank of his own anyway long before he took the top job. And the First Wife, a stickler for independence and propriety, kept a separate and amply provisioned piggy bank, I gather.
Say what you will, the Office of the National Security Adviser also deserves great credit for its meticulous record-keeping.
However the drama plays out, the Jonathan era may well come to be defined as the Era of Obtainment, when nothing succeeded like obtaining.
Trust the column to provide periodic updates.
NATION
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