A
calculated insult and the guilt preceded his death, stealing from the actual
murder all its potential impact and drama. There never was a crime more
dramatically rehearsed, and the tale only provides it could not have been
otherwise. Yet there are no clues to be uncovered, no enigmas to be revealed;
for this was a murder almost predicted like its predecessors.
As a principled
and astute politician, even though he agreed to serve in former President
Olusegun Obasanjo's cabinet, Chief Bola Ige did not preach to Nigerians. But he
provoked questions and left us in no doubt as to where he stood . He shared
none of the current tastes for blurred conflicts, ambiguous characters and
equivocal opinions. Nor was he disdainful of strong dramatic situations
building up for firm climaxes. From the critic's point of view, the plot of
Ige's senseless murder in December 2001, in its high velocity treachery,
summarizes modern Nigeria in one word: "shame".
In his
epic novel, Shame (1983), Salman Rushdie, the Indian born controversial
English writer, paints the picture of a disconcerting political hallucination
in Pakistan, which he calls "Peccavistan" - existing fictionally as a
slight angle to reality. The major thrust of the novel is that the shame or
shamelessness of its characters returns to haunt them. Yet the recurrent theme
is that there are things that cannot be said, things that can't be permitted to
be true, in a tragic situation. To this end, fiction and politics ultimately
become identical or rather analogous. That so banal and damaging an emotion
could have been so manifestly created from within the Yoruba nation itself, was
a ringing surprise to us keen observers of that macabre drama. But the truth or
falsehood of the accusation or counter-accusation is not of the first
importance. |
| *Bola Ige |
The
critical issue that must enlist our concern here is Nigeria's sick criminal
justice system and the poverty of integrity of its police force. Eighteen years
after the well-planned assassination of the Chief Law Officer of the world's
largest black nation (Chief Bola Ige was a Minister of Justice and Attorney
General of the Federation when he was killed), his killers are still walking
the streets of our cities without challenge. In this sense, Nigeria is back in
mediaeval times. The Orwellian qualities and nightmarish implications of the
investigations make one sick since the whole exercise is as absurd as it is
puerile. Only in Nigeria that a patriotic, brilliant and hardworking lawyer who
turned in a prime suspect to the police for prosecution, be arrested and
arranged by the same police before a court of law just to engage our false
sense of judgement. Did the police not declare Fryo wanted in connection with
Ige's murder? Only in Nigeria would a prime suspect in such a heinous crime be
declared winner, released from detention and sworn in as Senator of the Federal
Republic in an electoral contest for which he did not even campaign.
The
senseless and cowardly assassination of Chief Ige therefore serves to reassert
the vulnerability of men and women and to poignantly underline their impotence.
For, it is a well known fact that the vulture that eats the flesh of its
neighbour knows what awaits it at death, as even the eyes that weep still see.
To portray a credible part of moral degeneration is deadly enough in itself;
yet, to do so in a dimension and style requiring undiminished pity is to court
disaster. The attempt would be brash even in fiction or epic, with all of their
additional resources for portraying subtle changes and for building sympathy.
Little do we know that because we lack the intellectual precision and moral
discipline to dissect with admirable lucidity and illuminating temper, the
insularity and complexity of our turbulent society, we have resorted to
primordial solutions to our national problems. Our recent experience in the
hands of the military is replete with the shameful fact that almost two-thirds
of our men and women of conscience and nobility of outlook or high integrity
were either murdered or banished into exile in foreign lands and the rest
condemned like guinea-pigs to a life of forced idleness in our stinking,
unhygienic prisons and police cells.
If we
detest our memory of the unparalleled crudity of that dark era, what do we say
of the murderous clouds hanging ominously over the entire nation in a so-called
democratic dispensation? The truth is that Nigeria is still detained in the
past. For the police not to have unraveled the enigma embedded in the mockery
killing of the Attorney General and Justice Minister of the federation,
eighteen years after, shows that nothing has changed. From Dele Giwa, Chiefs
Mashal Harry, A. K. Dikibo, Chief Funso Williams, Abayomi Ogundeji, the Igwe
couple, etcetera, the story remains the same: fate makes everything invisible
and works its inexorable course. Remember the story of the emperor who wore no
clothes? Only the innocent saw that he was naked. Why waste our time asking who
killed Chief Bola Ige while the obvious question should be: why was Chief Bola
Ige killed? It is patiently disastrous that our integrity as a nation has been
consumed by a democracy gone mad. And if we are to grasp reality in the face of
madness, it is the reality of Ige's death that we must grasp. But this is one
reality that sears us whenever we attempt to comprehend it, and so we try, by
the use of our superficial investigations, to prove that the reality does not
exist, despite our emphatically underlined knowledge to the contrary.
We watch
humanity grotesquely tormented, cruelly and with mockery impaled. Nearly all
the characters suffer some form of crude indignity in the course of the
tragedy. Yet, indeed, the overriding critical problem in this matter is the
conspiracy of silence among the people of Nigeria. In spite of our pretensions,
Ige's death confronts us like a raw, fresh wound where our every instinct calls
for a thorough examination. This problem, moreover, is as much one of political
will and courage as of dramatic effect. Whether we believe it or not, our lives
and freedom are hostages of our limited knowledge of the day after, the
waywardness of chance and the decay of our national institutions. It is only in
fighting for others that we can circumvent these limitations. President
Muhammadu Buhari was said to have promised to revisit these cases of high
profile killings. More than three years after his promise, nothing has been
heard from the presidency. Can anyone get justice in this country? Why was
Chief Bola Ige killed?
*Amor, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja
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