Jonatan Korsintin

By Chuks Iloegbunam  

A rich man looked at all approaches to his life and found every one of them particularly daunting. Dispirited, he exam­ined all routes from his person. Each held the dreadful promise of his extinction. He shuddered. A veteran of many of life’s excru­ciating struggles, he decided on remedial action. He, therefore, consulted oracles and diviners, sorcerers and stargazers, astrolo­gers and palm readers, mara­bouts and prophets.

At the end of his inquiries he got a distinct message from the spirit world. His problems were complicated but not impossible to surmount. He only had to abstain from sex for six straight months and his deliverance would be automatic. The man smiled. He had spent more than half his life kicking the can of sex around. He had fathered children in more places than he cared to enumerate. Surely, after an al­most endless stretch of sexual freedom, he could manage absti­nence for six month, a mere 180 days.

Fortunately, he had only one wife. Explaining the lay of the land to her posed little difficulty. As for the army of consorts, gold diggers and freeloaders who masqueraded as a part of him, they could go to blazes and burn to ashes. His wife made a useful suggestion. She said that sleep­ing in separate rooms thencefor­ward would prevent the flesh’s weakness from throwing a span­ner in the works. Given that the man was no hater of the bottle, he could come from a binge any night and, finding himself on the same bed with the wife, pounce on her. The man agreed. But he was the kind of man who liked the spectacular. Instead of a new bed in a separate room, he built the wife a duplex, tastefully fur­nished and fitted with combina­tion locks she could operate even by remote control, to thwart all intrusions.

Abstinence began in earnest, with the man blocking his phone from the calls of vixens. He got home early everyday, per­formed the prescribed rituals and hopped into bed, without giving in to the temptation of watching blue films. That could lead him to masturbation and the prohib­ited outcome of spilling semen all over. The first month passed rather quickly. All correct. The second month was even more fleeting. As for the third month, it seemed to have lasted only a fortnight. However, the fourth month came scowling. He no­ticed a kind of glow on the wife’s face that suggested a disagreeable development. But he kept quiet. When, however, he espied the wife spitting indiscriminately, he was perturbed.

“Darling, you can’t possibly be pregnant, can you?”

“Whosai? That’s as impossible as the earthbound crushing the airborne.”

“Thank heavens.”

There were many other things to thank as time went on, includ­ing the fact that no pregnancy could be permanently screened with a basket. It soon became obvious, even to the blind, that Madam was pregnant. Who­dunit?

A few people were sum­moned, including some of those that had prescribed the absti­nence. One of them, enraged by the sacrilege, arrived with a cane that transformed anyone hit with it into a leper. He was sure the culprit deserved the disease of outcasts. It was this man who put the question to Madam.

“Who did this to you?” He pointed disdainfully at her protu­berant stomach, as though it was the decomposing carcass of a pig. But the woman’s carriage didn’t betray any suggestion of unto­ward behavior. She had turned out in an ankle length gown with an embroidered bodice. Her face was exquisitely made up. Large gold earrings dangled from her ears spreading soft light about her cheekbones. Her necklace could have been diamond. She had put on a special perfume that wafted across the room, domi­nating the disagreeable smells of some of the rustic inquisitors about. The only disgusting thing about her was spitting every so often into a handkerchief. She took her time.

“Madam,” said a diviner around whose left eye was a thick line of white chalk, the appropri­ate eye for seeing demons.

“We don’t have all day. Which frog was of such bulbous eyes that it inflated your belly in this season of abstinence?”

“Jonatan!” A hush swept through the room as its occu­pants exchanged meaningful glances. The man with the lep­rous cane quickly folded and thrust it into the folds of his gar­ment. A number of people shift­ed in their seats. The Oga of the house, warned from the onset that he was not to utter a word but wait to witness how belit­tlers of sacredness are punished, sat with unseeing eyes, shak­ing his legs tali-tali. The woman sensed that her revelation had swallowed the contingency of re­sponse. She left the dumbfound­ed crowd after loudly emptying a generous glob of sputum, not into her handkerchief, but on the floor. One by one the inquisitors dispersed.

If Oga thought anything about the day’s outcome, it remained bottled up inside him. But he was bewildered by the Jonatan phenomenon. He recalled that the crushing and endless fuel scarcity had been blamed on Jo­natan. Likewise the power sup­ply that had drastically plum­meted across the land. More: some scientists had decided that the heat wave sweeping through the country was down to global warming. They got ordered to shut their traps; Jonatan was the real culprit! A 14-year old girl was abducted and taken nearly 2000 kilometres into forced marriage, a pregnancy and a brand new reli­gion. It was Jonatan! Jonatan was ubiquitous. He even went trans-Atlantic at one point, confusing those who planned to vote for Trump into switching to Hilary!

There seemed to be no end to what Jonatan would contrive. He had the temerity to foist on the nation a non-Igbo Sunday Ogochukwu Oliseh as the Super Eagles’ coach. The fellow ended up establishing a most success­ful record of failures. Jonatan had the effrontery to sneak into the Senate’s hallowed chambers and heist the 2016 Budget! After this brazenness, he assaulted the Naira, which was on the verge of exchanging one-to-one with the dollar, and rendered it four hun­dredth of the American currency.

The most calamitous angle to Jonatan is that he isn’t through with the country yet. He uncan­nily prompted this writer into dwelling on trivia here, instead of addressing “burning” national questions. Pray, what must be done to halt this Jonatan that has been causing, cursing and cours­ing things unspeakable to af­flict the entity? He has korsed so much damage that his name has become Jonatan Korsintin.

Well, Oga of the dubiously pregnant wife has an idea on how to repay those who sold him a fundamental lie. He owns a gun that is always fully loaded. Not the regular Dane gun, but a sten machine carbine! Except that his weapon fires the voting card, not bullets. And Oga has become partial to this recent admonition credited to Pastor Tunde Bakare: “You still have your PVC. So, when next someone comes with the promise of change, examine him properly and cast your vote with wisdom.”

 *Mr. Chuks Iloegbunam, an eminent essayist, journalist and author of several books, writes column on the back page of The Authority newspaper every Tuesday.