In the first morning after – and still in a state of strange and un-strange slumberous-ness in which consciousness was never lost – I woke up. I was still every inch in me intoxicated – if you don’t find this term un-befitting. This un-serious Catholic, this rebellious Catholic of numerous and many sins of the intoxicated sinner who was more than an intoxicated sinner woke up with the jingle of the Angelus in his ears’ lobes – sound he had not heard for a pretty long time longer than a pretty long time.
Was his morning real? Was my morning real? Real or not real my intoxication flew me to a state of exaltation when, in Marcel Proust’s immortal words, “the slightest beauty flies to one’s head and gives one, though in every-day reality it could do no such thing, an almost dreamlike pleasure.” But in my intoxication and exaltation I saw myself as one who astonishingly intoxicated his thoughts with those of one who behaves and acts as if it is his destiny to live forever. O Marcus Aurelius, remind this mangrove denizen to remember that it is not the lot of man, any man, to endure physical immortality no matter his dreamful or dreamlike mirror of it!
As a celebrant I was not tipsy and what I saw and witnessed as other people, friends and guests and family members saw and witnessed was not a dream or something from the shadow or mirror of a dream. For example, the architect, poet and environmentalist, “Dr. Nnimmo Bassey, the trade unionist, dramatist and playwright and creator of the 1970s up to the 1990s super-exciting national television drama Hotel de Jordan Mr. Jonathan Ihonde, the rugged comrade and leftist lawyer Dr. Osagie Obayuwana, who was a great attorney-general of Edo State and other sound scholars and professors and personages from diverse callings, disciplines and backgrounds who graced the event clearly indicated that the witnessed reality was the real Reality of white mangrove lilac. And the white mangrove lilac was turned into a reverence to whiteness by the chairman of the event – Professor Mon Nwadiani, an Anglican gentleman-priest of the University of Benin Education Faculty. His hymn and deification intoxicated me. It was an afternoon that strolled slowly to sunset, and I felt flooded with grandeur and splendour. It was the beauty of the landscape of my charm and glamour. It was the real Real, as Professor Ibrahim Bello Kano would say. The befitting spectacle of everything affected and moved one as though it were music competing with the actual music on display and which one was humming.
And I remembered one-liners and short paragraphs out of the common from Professors such as Igho Natufe, Kayode Soremekun, Grace Okereke, Gbemisola Adeoti, Tanimu Abubakar, Abubakar Liman and others and others and others I must amaze and astonish here by the “intensity of my gratitude or my admiration.” Their respective pre-luncheon words that found me well before the event of stupendous stupendousness contributed to the glories that told me that my hosts were exceedingly right to provide me and my and their select friends and guests and family members to luncheon tables on sun brightening day of wet June that beamed with delicious warmth of sunshine that luxuriated the bright water-colour atmosphere. Why should I not be intoxicated?
My feelings are so far totally subjective – and rightly so. To dream as I have done is to be intoxicated, which is in tandem with the correct picture of my destiny. “He who does not go to the farm does not eat sand.” The traditional royal diviner divined, foretold, this a long, long time ago at my birth in line with my destiny. “He should and must stay a-far from politics. It’s not in his line, although he is from that acknowledged birth-line.. Book work is his star and line.” I could not obliterate the picture of what was foretold before I knew rightly the picture of the colouring of a dream that has since matured. My career was my career from the beginning to the end of the divination. I am intoxicated and exulted. I am not imagining imaginations. And what does it matter if I imagine imaginations?
Now the intoxicated celebrant cannot but stammer. The ugliness in the land, the new ugliness in the land – your country my country our country-stupefies him stupendously. How should he react henceforth in this column to the new currents everywhere at this time? Unimaginable and unprecedented hunger undoubtedly is our lot now. How many retirees and pensioners are weathering or can weather the storm now? How will they respond or how are they responding to their ego now? The ugly monster called hunger, this incomparable monster is beating and whipping everyone in the class of the new vulnerable whose vulnerabilities cannot but compel them to see and picture Nigeria’s democracy as the democracy of masterful monsters of misery. Didn’t the spokesperson of President Tinubu’s immediate predecessor tell us a few days ago that their regime deliberately did not obliterate the luxury of fuel subsidy because the obliteration would have prevented the new president from winning the presidential election?
What an irony that the big brained and gala-mouthed Garba Shehu did not know or realize that his statement on behalf of his principal was the statement of a malicious weakling in power! So Buhari wanted his successor to torment the people further with hunger, rising prices, exploitation, war ritual murders, democracy of madness and of absolute maliciousness and monstrosity and miserable misery. President Tinubu’s mold must not be General Buhari’s mold. But how wrongly wrong our new president may prove us to be! As a matter of fact, one can picture President Tinubu crushing Nigerians with hideous policies. Have we not been told that his regime will no longer fund our public universities and professional bodies and academies? The implication of this is hideously dire. Let me not allow myself to be a pessimist on this score. I will thus let it be pro tempore. But our new president is yet to start pretty well. His Renewed Hope is gradually becoming our Renewed Monstrosity and Renewed Misery. And it is also becoming our Renewed Luxury. Some fellows, retiring and retired ones in particular, will soon dispose of their cars. Because in order not to do so, they must re-define and re-divine their present and future in Tinubu’s Nigeria that will soon hurt severely their humanity – going by his courageously courage dictatorship that compelled him without vacillations to obliterate fuel subsidy in his first outing. About such a vital issue his super dictatorship did not have to be in agreement, total or not total, with the wishes and concerns of the people who are ever denied severance allowances at the end of their toil for their father and motherland. What a life of strife!
Now why has the intoxicated celebrant left the cherished world of dreams he saw and enjoyed to look for food for our people whose situation causes him despair? His intellect is not for him alone but for the masses of our people as well. The food I find for my imagination I should share with our people especially now that I am a septuagenarian – in order not to wander “like a heavy cloud between past and future.” O Zarathustra, I hear you! O Olu Obafemi, Da Sylva and IBK, I also keep on hearing your loudly sounding words! What I will make of them privately or publicly is what you want them to help make of this new septuagenarian.
To be anchored next week.
Afejuku can be reached via +2348055213059.
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