By Alade Rotimi-John
The provocative and obscene celebration of birthdays by public personages is fast becoming a rude national pastime. The general Nigerian audience has bemusedly endured a siege of insults for quite some time now respecting the intolerable mischief of a lewd and soulless parade of stunts. There is a total extinction of all taste even as the celebrants are vulgar, gross and illiberal.
Aside from the moral contamination incident on the celebrations, their lessons are morbidly and intellectually degrading as they generally present a distorted or superficial view of the sordid Nigerian condition. Many of the ceremonies have laid bare the social insensitivity of the celebrants who are reputedly of high estate. Even as their object is to covet general praise and admiration, they have ironically received in large measure a backlash in contempt and in a free-flowing gnashing imprecations from their fellow men and women.
Men among us who are dull in company, dull in their closets, and
dull everywhere have bribed Nature to smile on them to foist them on us for
state offices which are beyond their ken or capacity. It is no cynical asperity
to confess the obvious abject lack of competence and capacity for the exalted
offices these men of power occupy in the realm.
What they cannot do by or for themselves, the law has been primed
or fashioned to do for them. They are generally an embodiment of imposture even
as their abilities are not formidable. They are essentially vainly proud and
overbearing even in their tomfoolery. Is not a leader one who looks with
concern on a people struggling for breath in the water and when they have
reached the depth, encumbers them with palliative as help? The notice which the
leader has been pleased to take of the people’s labours, had it been early
would have made a great difference. But it has been delayed until the people
have become indifferent or have perished.
One bane of the Nigerian society has been identified to be the
surrender by the intellectual elite class to the challenges of the vices of
philistinism, charlatanism, gross impunity, etc largely manifested by the
political ruling class. Men and women of pedestrian taste, of mean character
and narrow intellect have, over time, taken over the public or governance space
to the servile helplessness of persons overflowing with learning but who have
elected to stand in the slop or to self-satisfyingly drive private predilection.
Despite its recognition of the adversary as impertinent, shallow
and pedantic, the Nigerian intellectual class has by its flashes of silence
conduced to the general view of itself as being unwittingly in undignifying
collaboration with barbarity, effrontery, baseness and social depravity – all
of them being the trademark of the political ruling elite.
The
other week witnessed the lavish celebration by the President of the Senate,
Chief Godswill Akpabio, of his 61st birthday. A young Turk had arrived the
Nigerian political scene early and has achieved establishment respectability
reaching dubiously-enviable heights as an uncommon public servant. Everywhere
he has been, he tries to ward off the bad impression of egotism, vanity and
bigotry.
But last week’s celebration that was full of contrived pomp and
pageantry, has tended to egg on the banal way in which Senator Akpabio’s
foibles are perceived. Many observers of his ways and means have been
forthright in their appreciation thereof. It is partly Akpabio’s language or
choice of words that gives him out as impersonal, insensitive or morbidly
remote; and partly his persona. Celebrated persons even find his language
unacceptable. If all these sound excessive, they are merely one in a series of
volleys in a long verbal jousting. It has merely set the stage for what is to
follow. Offended by Akpabio’s exotic lifestyle and frivolous celebration, the
people seem to be echoing John Ruskin’s (1819 – 1900) comments on Whistler’s
The Falling Rocket:
“I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now; but
never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of
paint
in the public’s face.”
Akpabio has flung a pot of paint in the people’s face. Olisa Agbakoba, a former President of the Nigerian Bar Association was
corralled to lend his age-long credibility for being a forthright speaker to a
“colloquium” in honour of Senator Akpabio. Agbakoba gratuitously seized the
moment, glistening in his product knowledge and glittering in legal epistemology
wrapped up in nuanced anecdotes. It can only be hoped that the teaching session
of that event sank where it mattered.
Then this one! First, it came as a rumour. But now it is
confirmed. Former President Muhammadu Buhari is celebrating his birthday.
Unknown to many, Buhari is 81 years old. His dull and drab years as president
have tended to dull the public view or consciousness to recollect anything as
impudent as the celebration of a birthday in a season which parallel in
contemporary history be better forgotten or ignored. What has Buhari in common
with celebration except to arouse universal amusement? As some of Buhari’s
aides have had the impertinence to announce the celebration of their boss’s age
and acquitting him of all infractions, one hopes they will allow us to state
that the celebration is not fitting; it is offensive.
The nation is still gruelling under the sardonic condition Buhari
left the populace. Throughout his tenure, Buhari took a dim view of his charge
and of the people. He rewarded them with passivity, perfunctoriness and
benumbing coldness or insensitivity. No matter was urgent or demanded immediate
action under Buhari’s “the heavens may fall” regime. His wry wit entertained
only his fawning, sycophantic courtiers. Buhari came through often as one whose
vein of pessimism was deeply etched on his dour-faced facade. Buhari in his
sense of self-satisfaction has handed us a load of crap as parting gift. We are
still reeling under the weight of his Greek gift.
We conclude with a Jewish proverb:
“When the tally of bricks is too heavy, then comes Moses”
*Rotimi-John,
a lawyer, is a commentator on public issues (lawgravitas@gmail.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment