I have wondered why the recent fuss over IBB giving a speech
at a literary event. In a conversation with a few friends, I pitched my tent
with the likes of playwright, Femi Osofisan. We should have ripped open the
Lagos skies and let the expired general to zoom in with his private jet. The
NLNG should have unfurled the red carpet. And they did.
After he must have graced us with the oratory of the
century, then we could plot his ambush. Maybe if we ignored him before the
speech, we could also collectively pooh-pooh him after the theatrics. Aren’t we
now pooh-poohing him?
But as it happened by default, we invested the man with more
mileage, a big dose of bravura and charm. He even basked in the highfalutin
spotlight and turned into a flurry of pedagogy. He became a teacher, our
teacher. He had the temerity to define for us what a critic meant. A critic,
according to the dear genius, is the person who knows the way but cannot drive.
Never mind that he meant it as an innuendo at Soyinka. He even lacked the
boldness to say in plain prose that our own W.S is a critic who cannot govern. He
settled for the cunning and subterfuge of words. But our IBB is not a coward. General
Theophilus Danjuma must regret tarring him with that description over the Dimka
coup. According to the story, IBB ducked and would not show up where death was
stalking. After all, discretion is the better part of valour. Wise man, IBB. And
while his critics raged, he knew where to drive the nation as president. He
careened us to poverty, desperation and tyranny.
Fela was not around to say “teacher don’t teach me
nonsense.” Of course, IBB, who has spent a better part of his life as a soldier
and general, understands that going direct is an act of suicide. Not being a
coward, he decided to shoot indirectly.
But that’s not my beef with the Soyinkas and all those who
railed against our own IBB delivering a speech to a group of literary icons.
Indeed, I just want to demonstrate that IBB is a surefire
literary genius, a god of words and a begetter of great quotes. He was not only
a wordsmith, he also was a dramatist, serving up himself as playwright,
producer, director and actor in some of the loftier scripts in our nation’s
history.
Take for instance, the phrase “a little to the left and a
little to the right.” Was that not a clear case of poetry in politics? He
marshaled that phrase to describe his locally brewed two-party system, with the
National Republican Convention (NRC) and Social Democratic Party (SDP). He turned
himself into a revolutionary of the party system in Nigeria. So great was that
invention that politicians with varying ideological colours had to flock
together.
Don’t say the man introduced prostitution to party politics.
That will be defaming the great revolutionary. Is that not why we have the PDP
today, the great African party with politicians from different hues whoring
together under the same roof?
The “new breed” politicians also came into being in his era.
In his great revolutionary spirit for the party system, he knew what we all
suspected: that the old and musty politicians triggered tragedy and suffering
among our dear people. They unleashed the civil war, engendered the turbulent
1960’s, careered the society down the path of poverty and corruption in our
society.
So, we needed a new crop of politicians, a vigorous new
tonic. He must be regretting that he had to reverse himself. He plotted a coup
against the same new breed by making them rely on the old and cranky
fuddy-duddies. A wise man, he knew the young could not inherit a different gene
from the breast they suckled on. He ensured that the young and vibrant
politicians could not breed except what the old bequeathed. A tear for them.
In one of his momentous speeches, he enriched the Nigerian
English with the phrase, “let’s use what we have to get what we want.” By that,
he inaugurated one of the great moral revolutions in our history: settlement. The
student could use what she had to get the grade she wanted. It happened before
then. But with that rhetorical grenade, it became a badge of honour. Ditto the
customs officer, the civil servant, the professor. Happily, a sedate nation
transformed itself into a generation of hirelings. The professor deployed his
ideas to write tawdry books as salesman for a decrepit soldier. The civil
servant, weaned on Murtala who made their jobs insecure, found solace in using
their positions to get what they wanted: posh cars, upscale mansions, holiday
in South of France. All on Grade level 13 salary. Unlike in the Western society
where people give bribes to get what they did not deserve, we started giving
bribes to obtain what were our rights. In IBB’s tenure, it was executed with
relish. Nobody got tried for corruption. It was not necessary. It was not in
the lofty spirit of the revolution.
Was it not in his regime that he put down the controversial
coup plot by Mamman Vatsa? He had said he would “crush with incisive skill” any
attempt to undermine his regime. It is fascinating that the word skill should
be associated with his regime. But he had a lot of skill, if you look at it.
Skill at unleashing bans on protests. Skill in closing down media houses. Skill
in clamping down on human rights activists. Skill in flattering and entrapping
radicals with ripe fruits of money and position. Skill at creating parallel
organizations to federal ministries, ala MAMSER in place of information
ministry. DFRRI in place of works and rural development ministries. He also
used deft skills in knowing that most human beings had a price. In short, skill
at patronages.
In the same spirit, his skills lifted the nation’s crude
educational standards, such that we had fewer good teachers around, with the
so-called brain drain inaugurated during his glorious years. We developed a new
crop of exports to the world.
Dis na una bank O!
make una use am well O! He could relate with the despised and lowly among
us. Soyinka and Achebe have earned much praise for domesticating the English
language. What about doing it officially? In setting up the People’s Bank, he
asked Tai Solarin to head it. And he located his quote in the poor’s lair at
Ajegunle, in the language they understood. Never mind the bank never got
well-funded, the poor never got much loans and Nigeria largely fulfilled Scot
F. Fitzgerald’s immortal words: “the rich get richer and the poor get
children.”
As his regime wound down, he decided to “step aside”. The
great general left with only half his heart. He left the great exponents of the
language to analyse what he meant. Where was he stepping aside to or for? Up
till today, the great poet has left those lines with their many-layered
reverberations and meanings.
Shakespeare has many such elliptical phrases and so does our
own W.S. But one thing we are grateful for is that he left power like the great
democrat that he was, and still is.
The great democrat, on one evening, waxed lyrical before
reporters. “We are not only in government, we are in power.” This was in the
maelstrom of the June 12 crisis. He looked youthful before the television
camera, his eyes darting, impishly, his feet bouncy as though poised for
ambush. He taught political scientists, in practical terms, the distinction
between government and power.
He left his language on the tablets of crime. Where is
Anini? He asked the Inspector General of Police, when the duo of Anini and
Osunbor became maniacal cult figures in the nation. They haunted the peace and
brought a barbarous new chapter to armed robbery. What is routine today was
novel when Anini started it. The question was a deft way for IBB to shift blame
to his head of police. He is not a coward. He goes for the jugular. But he did
not condemn the crooks? He just asked for their whereabouts.
So IBB was the man of letters. His name was even unique.
Reporters called him by his initials. No leader adorned his office with such a colourful
name. He was loved so much the media called him Maradona, after the footballer
who scored with his hand. Even in illness he was colourful. Radiculopathy, the
disease that afflicted his foot, was a mouthful that titillated a nation’s
consciousness. Not since AIDS has a disease grabbed the headlines.
His words were accompanied by a great many dramas. He looked
a drama, his effeminate voice, sly gait, impish grin, gap-tooth, stocky build.
Remember the IMF debates. That was his debut play. The great playwrights turned
with envy in their graves. Lorca, Brecht, Beckett. We all debated, dueled on
newspaper pages, crossed swords on televisions, jousted in seminars. In the
end, he said he was not going to adopt it. He made his finance minister console
us with the no victor, no vanquished speech. Then what turned out to be an
anticlimax became a great climax when we learned he already implemented them
anyway. The Maradona, the dramatist, the coiner of words had conned all again.
We also remember the various transition programmes. He used the
device of burlesques as he raised many a politician and ended up bringing them
down from the high horses he placed them. They became like Chief Nanga in Achebe’s
A Man of the People. IBB made
politics great fun, burning our foreign exchange, enriching a few and
pauperizing everyone else.
When it was all said and done, he described himself as the
evil genius. He even knew how to pick the words tha fit him. Does he have a
parallel in history? Can anyone doubt why he could not be shortlisted for the
Nobel Prize? After all, Winston Churchill won the prize on the strength of his
speeches. There were only two differences. While Churchill was white and
English, IBB is black and Nigerian. Secondly, Churchill ended a war and a
tyranny with his rhetoric. He once said, it is better to jaw jaw than to war
war. IBB burned a nation and capsized a democracy with his jaw jaw. Hurrah,
IBB.
Published in The Nation newspaper of Monday, October 15,
2007.
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