Symbolism with Simbo Olorunfemi
Email: simboor@yahoo.com Twitter: @simboolorunfemi
It is the case of a monopoly over yam and knife. Just as we were getting set to roll out the mat to usher in a new moon on Valentine’s Day, they pulled the knife on the dream, arrested the pregnancy in final trimester and dared the carriers of the dream to take on the yam without the knife. Only the goats would do that. The good people of Nigeria chose to walk away, rather than fall for the bait. The yam might still be in the custody of the goats for six weeks but it only delays the Expected Delivery Date (EDD). Six weeks cannot abort an outcome long assured.
Indeed, six weeks is a lot of time to cook up a storm and raise the bar on all manner of shenanigans. In six weeks, you can do a lot – move out of the rock, mix dollars with kolanut, flood the court with suits seeking to disqualify the opponent and stop the use of card reader, seek to ease out the Chairman of INEC from office, heighten the campaign for a rejection of card reader, fly the kite for interim government, and employ political subterfuge to pollute the waters with wild claims against the opponent.
In six weeks, you are able to visit Baga, when you could not visit Chibok. You suddenly remember that you are the Commander-in-chief who has lost part of his territory to insurgents. You can even aspire to win in six weeks, a battle whose direction was difficult to read in five years. As you hop from one palace to the other, you can unleash your wife on the nation to stone the opposition and diagnose those who are brain-dead.
Six weeks is a lot of time. It gives enough time for that rabble-rouser to move office from the headquarters of stomach infrastructure to the funeral parlour. Busy man – if he is not buying up newspaper pages to reel out Presidential funeral history, he is taking on his other role of explaining the intricacies of photographic manipulation. It must be a first in the history of Nigeria that a sitting Governor will take on the added responsibility as Special Adviser on Photoshop and Funeral Affairs to the President. One would think that a prophet gifted with a foreknowledge of what tomorrow has in its bowels will spend less time trailing a man he has already told us would never be President. Hopefully, he will soon come with an explanation on how General Buhari was ferried into Chatham House from the hospital bed using holography.
Six weeks is a long time. While other candidates are struggling to pick up the pieces of what remains of their shattered campaign plans, the President is on a solo run, dancing shoki with youths, criss-crossing the land in style. Wasn’t that the idea, in any case? We are already making progress. In only two weeks, we have exported stomach infrastructure to London. We have created ‘unemployment’ in front of Chatham House. For this transformation, we need to thank the eggheads behind the campaign. We need to thank the clowns masquerading as spokespersons of the Presidential campaign. When they are not polluting the airwaves with toxic conspiracy theories, they are hurling insults in the direction of anyone who disagrees with them. One character deems it helpful to his Principal’s campaign to tell us about the men who wear pampers for flights and those whose fingers shake, as part of his party manifesto. How the President ended up with men who mistake buffoonery and mudslinging for public relations is a study on the man himself.
It is no longer debatable who has done the most among the President’s men in elevating thrash-talk to a strategy and enshrining mudification as a Presidential Campaign policy The new kid on the block makes the other minders possible candidates for beatification, given his own capacity to pick a fight, double-speak and employ gutter vocabulary. He has completely immersed himself and the Presidential campaign he speaks for, in the mud, with little choice but to continue rolling in it, until the epileptic wheels of the court catches up with him. Nothing is sacrosanct enough to be kept away from the mud by this fellow, in his morbid desperation to pull down opposition. Along with the army of poorly-schooled, rabble-rousers unleashed on the internet as e-rats, they have done much more to magnify the damage of six years. They have been of little help to their floundering campaign, as they have persistently stoked the fire of ethnic and religious divide among Nigerians, throwing mud at everyone they disagree with.
It is almost unbelievable to think that this President was helped into office, only a few years back, with votes which knifed through many divides, uniting the savannah and the forest in one accord. The greater tragedy is that he ended up in the belly of ethnic jingoists and petty hustlers who have done everything to damage the bridge which ushered him into office. They have frittered away all that could have counted as goodwill for him, manufacturing more enemies, with each day, for their man.
If only he had the know-how to take on the hegemonic forces and vested interests, so that paper economic growth can translate to palpable and real development, perhaps that might have saved the day. Rather, he got sucked into the illusory world of power-point presentations from the voodoonomics laboratory of the Coordinating Minister, into mistaking a rebased economy as proof of performance. He got carried away with figures of drastic drop in rice import bandied by the Rice Minister, while tonnes of the same grain rolled into the country through unofficial border posts. Any wonder why the Naira has continued to take on a thorough pummelling when official statistics do not reflect reality on the ground. He is surrounded by folks with talent for blatant lies and outlandish tales. Folks who configured an omnipotent and omniscient opposition party responsible for all their ills and failure and sold it to their master. They built up a fictional opposition party responsible for Boko Haram, vandalising gas pipelines so that there would not be power supply, sabotaging fuel imports to instigate scarcity, cloning Voter Cards, hacking into INEC database, buying up local and international media, and influencing foreign governments and institutions to write off the government, when the real opposition is right under their watch.
Yet, if only he had done the right thing, would he be hopping from Baga to Mubi, at the very last minute? If only he had moved in the right direction, would he be seeking to do in six weeks what he has not been able to do in six years? If he had done the right thing, there would not have been the need to postpone the elections, there would not be a need for those foot soldiers to go to town, seeking a removal of the Chairman of INEC from office, and mounting a campaign against the use of the card reader, when their Principal had promised to keep the yam from the goat with the aid of technology.
The President’s men blew it, thinking this election would be one between their man and General Buhari. It is not. It is a referendum on the performance of their man in office. Making it about a man who towers above their Principal, placed side by side, only succeeded in making a midget of their candidate. They opened up their own flanks, exposed the deficiencies of their man and lost the plot, even before the whistle had gone. Where is the man they were eulogising in the same sentence as Nelson Mandela? What has become of the campaign to transfigure him into our Barack Obama?
They bungled that and decided to take on the man whose only crime is his insistence on being his own man – simple, disciplined, and a personification of integrity, every attribute much needed at this time . Every kobo spent demonising the person of General Buhari has been an investment in the promotion of his candidacy. The man now stands tall, an embodiment of a determination by the people to put to shame those sworn to keep the nation perpetually under their feet. Buhari has become the face of the movement yearning for a change in direction for Nigeria. They missed it. Thousands of death-wish wrap-around in the newspapers and attack adverts on TV cannot change stop the tide. Photoshop will not help. Theirs is a bad case poorly managed by men who will rather blame everyone than take responsibility. Playing Gbagbo is futile. The time has come to take the knife from their hands and separate the goats from the yam.
