Tinubu’s third anniversary, Ogun deity and voodoo vote numbers, By Festus Adedayo

Tinubu’s third anniversary, Ogun deity and voodoo vote numbers, By Festus Adedayo

Seeing how empires die, strongmen collapse and kingdoms go up in ruins, Yoruba seek to showcase the brevity of life. In this, they attempt to demonstrate that all life’s attainments are perishable. In metaphors of the masquerade festival and the morning dew that perches on leaves by sidewalks leading to the farm (enini), they bring out the certainty of finality very succinctly. In two short allegories, they perfectly capture the fleeting, short-lived nature of political influence and authority. So, they say, the yearly masquerade festival will soon come to an end and the son of the Chief Masquerade will, like every other mortal, buy his fried bean cake and corn meal from the market square. They render this as, “Ohun t’ó ńtán ni eégún odún, omo Alágbàáà ńbò wá rà’kàrà jè’ko.” Within same trope of allegory, they personify and humanize the morning dew. Their aim to is to use the shortness of the reign and fleeing appearance of the morning dew as warning to human wielders of power. Unfortunately for this dew, its early morning conspiracy to reign eternally, majestically perching on leaves by the sidewalks to the farm, is governed by brevity. This, my people again render as, “Ìmò enini kìí di ojó alé.”

On Thursday, 29 May, President Bola Tinubu came out to observe the ritual rites of presidential office. He began his speech by addressing us as “fellow compatriots”. It is a tautology that he chewed ad nauseam in the speech. Language experts have faulted the syntax of “fellow” and “compatriots” cohabiting in the same line. They say the latter embeds the former. Not to worry. Such unnecessary and needless repetition into redundancy is what we get in the bargain in the action of our leaders. Africa and indeed, the Third World in general, suffers the affliction of leaders and tautologos. It is an epidemic of leaders who act like the sexually infirm. For this species of infirm male, when queried on why they cannot insert into the right hole, they boast of possessing the capability to make multiple insertion of threads into the barely visible hole of the needle, even in the dark. Were Tinubu to be tautologous in delivery of democratic dividends, it would have been more desirable than repetition of needless words.

Anyway, the speech carries a suffocatingly huge aroma of deodorant. Statistical and arithmetic figures have same bearings as the numbers of voodoo. To justify the punishing regime of fuel subsidy removal he imposed on hapless Nigerians on 29 May, 2023, which was followed by nil attention to the social and economic uplift of the Nigerian life, the president told us how that exercise turned the cycle. He said, for instance that the policy halted the frittering of erstwhile daily N18.4 billion subsidy and his government has funnelled same into healthcare, education, housing and critical infrastructure. You will need a powerful stethoscope or Jigi Bola to see these voodoo benefits in your neighbourhood. He said Nigerians lost over N8 trillion in three years in the subsidy regime, which was diverted into rent-seeking endeavours. Well said. On its flip-side, Nigerians recently lost, among many other opaque endeavours of this government, their N800 billion patrimony. It was mopped up from the masses’ blood, their earnings, into the president’s personal, amorphous Renewed Hope campaign for re-election programme.

That speech must be target at January and February next year. Yet another Nigerian masquerade festival is here again. It will be held in those months in 2027. As it is in traditional masquerades (Egúngún) where sacred cultural figures are believed to embody the spirits of deceased ancestors, election time also carries huge spiritual significance in democratic politics. In Egúngún festivals, costumed dancers with flowery clothes pay obeisance to the spirit of creation and pour libations for a greater tomorrow. As candidates of political parties file out to collect nomination forms in elaborate frenzies, they approximate masqueraders filing out to fulfil these sacred obligations. Masquerades emerge from their traditionally believed abodes in heaven to bless the community, seek the maintenance of social order, as well as physically and spiritually connecting the living with their spiritual ancestors. After each masquerade festival, the masquerader dances into the sacred, restricted ancestral forest grove, believed to be their spiritual birthplace and headquarters.

Three years down the line, we have seen the innards of the people we voted into power. In those three years, we have also seen those who posture as replacement for them. Like an admixture of wheat and chaffs, they all elbow one another in the struggle for power.

Now, it is becoming clear to President Tinubu and other wielders of political authority, borrowing from an old-fashioned literary phrase, that ‘the time is nigh’”. The reality of life’s natural sequence of beginning and ending, like a warthog face to face with a Comodo dragon, is no longer a distant reality. It is here. And the rat race by politicians to act right, speak right and position right has begun. Tinubu’s 29 May speech is in this mode.

Pardon my digression. Then, the president’s speech drifted into some economic ‘ifs’. If government hadn’t intervened, Nigeria would have “drifted toward fiscal breakdown, worsening poverty and severe economic uncertainty” the president said in apocalyptic drifts. If the president must know, those are actually the current experience of Nigerians with his government’s economic programme. While his economic czars say things are looking up, the reality for the people is the obverse. When confronted by damaging drifts as the president’s speech, Nigerians turn to the state of things before their self-proclaimed Messiahs’ intervention, for corroboration on how worse things have been.

Yoruba specifically do this. Turning to this deity called Òrìsà which proclaims itself a salvationist deity in their lives but has shown incapacity for salvaging them, they ask it to leave them in the pre-state it met them (Òrìsà, b’óò le gbè mí, fi mí’lè b’óo ti bá mi). For the Nigerian people, the state this Òrìsà met Nigeria on 29 May, 2023, shorn of this propaganda, is far more comforting. Market statistics will confirm this. To cover this reality with the shroud of reform is to return us to the Ibrahim Babangida era. At the height of his misrule, IBB’s economic reforms were perceived as wearing the visor of the Dracula and generally labeled as devoid of a human face. We face a similar situation today.