The Place Of Food In Nigerian Politics

 By Tony Afejuku

The essay you are about to read is culled from my Nigerian Tribune column In & Out of Monday, February 4, 2013. Its import is still as relevant now as it was then, although our current experience is readily and particularly worse than any calamitous calamity can be. Indeed, what we noticed then is nothing compared with what we have and observe today.

Our new Senate President, for instance, confirmed this last week with his gluttonous display of his extravagant gluttony on the occasion of his long-stomach birthday celebrations. The nicely nice brevity of the essay says so much in a few words about the longish-ness and long-ness of the monstrously monstrous politicians of protruding throats and bellies of bellies of bad belle bellies crushing the land and landscape from everywhere to everywhere.

Phew! Kindly have a tidy reading, dear, dear my readers – as my fabulous memories recreate my engagements in the art and science of spiritual and mystical silence in Jadavpur University, Calcutta (Kolkata), India where I was then as an erudite researcher-and scholar-at large.

What stories does food narrate? What does the eating habit of anyone tell anyone about anyone? Does one eat merely to survive? Does one eat merely to take care of one’s physical needs? Or does food help to promote one’s spiritual growth and advancement on this earth plane? Answers to any or all of these questions may be perplexing or illuminating or bad music to any hearer or listener depending of course on what one considers to be the chief purpose of food – or what should be the chief purpose of food?

There are those who would readily affirm that food is necessary only for one to take care of one’s physical needs, nothing more. For such an individual food only has the utilitarian value of sustaining and prolonging life on this earth plane. Without food to eat one is doomed in every sense of the word. No one can carry on any activity successfully without food. At best, one can only do so for a short while before the end inevitably comes.

But the present attention is not intended to be devoted to some key principles of food and dieting from a chemical or biological perspective. Nutritionists and other experts who know better than yours sincerely about the subject are everywhere about us for consultation gratis. They are ready to provide necessary and pertinent answers to such questions as highlighted above and others of chemical and biological nature – not raised therein or herein.

A prolonged thought on the matter has induced the present subject: the place of food in Nigerian politics. But let me first partake in the exercise of a small digression. Many of our scholars and critics who have examined and analyzed the creative productions of our authors – novelists, short story writers, autobiographers, diarists, poets, playwrights – have not devoted their essays and findings to the subject or theme of food in the studied works.

Even when, in the cases of those who concerned themselves with it, culture was examined from the perspective of an author and his overall aesthetic design, this was never done from any angle of food as a worthy subject of investigation. Even in current literary and critical engagements this lapse is still very much gaping at us, so to say. What does food or eating patterns of characters in a novel, for instance, tell us about the cultural attitudes of the people whose story is before us? What does the eating manner or practice of a protagonist in a novel or a play tell us about him or her? What do the various eating or agricultural products symbolize or add to the meaning or our enjoyment or otherwise of a work of literature?

Now we must apply ourselves to our politics (and politicians) and ask similar and even more penetrating questions. Several essays and books have been written on Chief Obafemi Awolowo arguably more than on any Nigerian politician, dead or alive. But how many of the essays or books or both have devoted significant spaces to the great thinker’s eating practice and habits? Before the great man wrote his seminal books and essays, what was his eating habit like? What food did he eat?

Even before and after his campaign tours, what was his favourite dish? And why this or that dish his favourite? In his moment of anxieties, what was his eating practice like? When he took his great and momentous decisions as Premier of Western Nigeria and as the leader of the defunct Action Group and as the leader of Opposition in the First Republic, how did his food and diet and general eating (and drinking) habit help or affect his decisions – politically, spiritually, mystically, emotionally and physically?

As a courageous, truthful and faithful leader and as a father of our nation, what place did food have in his thought? What role did it play in his eventful life even up to his UPN (Unity Party of Nigeria) years and beyond?

We can ask the same questions about his contemporaries and fellow founders of modern Nigeria. But we must skip them (and the military chaps as well) and concentrate on the current breed of the players of our politics. What do they eat and what do they drink? How much does each State Executive and our President budget for food? What do they eat?

What is their eating habit like, each and every one of them? Considering the nature of hunger and anger in the nation today, we must ask them these questions and more. Further silence and apathy from our end must cease. We must not allow them to eat and drink our land and country dry. Whatever huge appetite each and every one of them has must be translated into huge thoughts and significantly mighty dividends for our blessed country, which we must not allow them to turn into a badly cursed place or worst cursed place on earth.

There are many fairytales about the monstrous appetites of our politicians everywhere, fairytales which signify the monstrosity of their politics and misgovernance. And technocrats who joined the monstrous professionals in the good but now wretched hopes of helping them to make things better for our country have themselves grown monstrously long bellies which already are forming part of the fairytales of food politics, which we must associate with Nigeria’s age of gluttony and debauchery, an idea we must contribute to comparative political thought.

We shall make it an enlightening political orthodoxy to influence generations. All the learned persons, historians and other clappers and upstarts on the corridors of current political incorrectness shall applaud it endlessly. What gluttonous extravagance and seductions of Babylon constitute the hideous landscape of our politics that task to the limits the marvellous forbearance of our refined thoughts soon to be humoured no more? Swine!

*Afejuku is a professor of English, University of Benin (08055213059).