Thanks to Prof. Wole Soyinka, we now know the protagonists he portrayed in his book, The Deification of An Area Boy. They are Nigeria’s 36 state governors.
A first time visitor to Nigeria would think that all about Nigeria is the state governors. Thirty-six men who could not conduct a simple election. Thirty-six men who do not trust one another that they had to implant secret cameras to record their own meeting.
Thirty-six men who could not agree on an issue and it would be binding on them without fighting and throwing brickbats. Shameful and cancerous lumps who call themselves 36 deities. They are the ones occupying the headlines. Any news without them appears to be incomplete. They enjoy the klieg and the blitzkrieg of it all.
It is indeed very sad that the custodians of Nigeria’s democracy appear to be these 36 men. The character of governance and democratic leadership is now defined from the prism of what the governors think; how they behave, what they desire and who they want.
They are now the new-found repository of our democratic values and norms. They are the modern day puritans and alchemists, imbued with clairvoyant ingenuity to excoriate our past and engineer our future. Their words carry authority and command. Their wish must be done, no matter who gets scathed in the process.
The President of Nigeria does not matter anything to them and they have no respect for that office. Our monarchs and royal fathers must come, genuflecting cap-in-hand if they want to be relevant in the true position of things. Our Senators and Representatives must do their bidding or be at risk of losing their positions. Autonomy should not be granted to local governments because the chairmen know next to nothing. Our state legislators must do what they desire or hell will let loose.
For we the ordinary Nigerians, they, like the colossi they are, have bestrode over us, and we in our spiteful docility, are grooving to find ourselves dishonorable graves. Our governors have been deified. They are the newest gods in town.
They misplace pride for dignity and misconstrue haughtiness for good breeding. There is truly no cure for their prideful vacuousness. They see no wrong in the abrasive way they conduct themselves in public and in private.
They are polluting the entire firmament with their putrid stench and hubris ego-trip; what the Greeks refer to as infractions by mortals against other mortals. Aristotle says it is a compulsive ambition by the powerful to harm the powerless, not because the powerless poses any threat to their acquisition of corruptive wealth and fortune, but the derivation of scrupulous pleasure in the realization that when they mistreat the powerless, they catapult their superiority and dominance to greater heights.
In one of his fables, Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist, told the story of the marriage of the gods. “The gods were getting married. One after another, they all got hitched, until finally it was time for Polemos (war) to draw his lot, the last of the bachelors. Hybris (reckless pride) became his wife, since she was the only one left without a husband. They say Polemos loved Hybris with such abandon that he still follows her everywhere she goes.
His advice? We should “never allow Hybris to come upon the nations or cities of mankind, smiling fondly at the crowds, because Polemos (war) will be coming right behind her.” Indeed, these men are gradually leading us into war.
Having been so monstrously endowed with power and perfidy, authority and autocracy, they see the rest of us as hapless creatures that must be conscripted as tools to advance the frontiers of their fiefdoms and dynasties. Like the typical Nigerian witches and wizards, they go only after the poor and the downtrodden.
When you hear of tumultuous noise in the coven, it is only but an altercation arising from sharing of their loot. When they fight raw in the public, they are not doing do because they want to better our lives.
Some of them, with no remarkable trace of academics or public service; the only qualification they parade before they are thrown to the pinnacle of stupendous wealth and corruptive enrichments being the climbing on the bandwagon of partisan politics. Of course, Politics is the quickest omnibus to getting rich and acquiring the appurtenances of power and position. Once initiated, they maim for fun and kill for a hobby to protect the spoils of their conquest.
Those who designed the concept of security votes for the governors had erroneously conceived that with it, transparency and accountability would be entrenched in the conduct of the affairs of government. With billions of naira as security votes and spent at their discretion, they ought not to dip their sticky fingers in the soup-pot of the state treasury. But as insatiable as they are, they are never contended.
With forged birth certificates and educational qualifications, many if them rig their way to power and say we the masses gave them a mandate. With the so called mandate as a weapon of mass destruction, they plunder their neighbors and desecrate our privileges. They break into our homes and defile our matrimonial beds: our daughters are turned into their mistresses by force and our sons are forced out into the streets to wage wars that are only beneficial to their slave masters.
When they embezzle money or engage in corruptive tendencies, they start a media war to dispose dissonance and cover up their tracks. They know that in Nigeria today to become a hero, you only need to sponsor a small crisis and say President Goodluck Jonathan and his wife Patience are after you, and then the entire country will sympathize with you.
If we do not have these governors checked; if we do not hold them accountable, for their deeds and misdeeds, this country would soon come to a boiling point. We must stop deifying these men. They do not worth it.