By Chuks Iloegbunam
My late mother, Gwamniru!,
bless her soul. She used to tell us, her children, during discussions on
placing a finger on the truth of any circumstance or situation, that a man
accused of suffering from hydrocele or elephantiasis of the scrotum had his job
neatly cut out. If his scrotal sac wasn’t a mighty calabash filled with fluid
of indeterminate composition, he enthusiastically stepped into the market
place, abruptly shed his clothes, and danced in a number of directions, thereby
convincing ora na eze, or ira ni igala, or
the mighty and the lowly – in short, all comers – that his accusers were
disreputable scoundrels.
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| *Buhari |
Of course, the people, whose voice was the voice of God,
would never deny the evidence of their own eyes, to wit that the man allegedly
accursed with the deadweight of pumpkins in a difficult portion of the human
anatomy was, in fact, free of any such encumbrance. No one, except the deranged
or those previously afflicted by a touch of fencham –
characters never to be taken seriously – would ever again charge that, between
his thighs, was an outsized, water-laden keg, the sort that impeded movement,
and made the unsurpassed joys of strolling such a nightmarish contemplation.
Thus, if you accused Chuks Iloegbunam of owning no university
degree; if you swore that all that grammar he purports to blow on newspaper
pages was gathered listening attentively to white men and women during his
decade-long sojourn in the United Kingdom, or assiduously garnered by reading
innumerable thrillers of the James Hardley Chase vintage, he would have, a
straight and direct path to refutation. Chuks Iloegbunam would readily produce
his degree certificate, signed in 1980 by the then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ife
(now, Obafemi Awolowo University)
Professor Cyril Agodi Onwumechili, and two others – the Dean of the Faculty of
Arts and the University Registrar. If rats, blasted vermin, had eaten up his
certificate, or fire’s incendiary flames had reduced it to ashes, he would
drive for less than three hours from Lagos
to Ile-Ife, and get the revered institution’s authorities to give word that he
had, indeed, earned a degree there.
If, instead of taking this easy and rational course of
action, Chuks Iloegbunam chose rather the labyrinthine and prohibitively
expensive option of hiring a dozen or more advocates, attorneys, barristers,
lawyers and solicitors, to bring down the courthouse with a torrent of
polysyllabic casuistry and sophistry that is bereft of the tiniest particle of
evidence, to the effect that he has a B. A. (or a Begin Again), he would, of
course, cause the raising of a million eyebrows. He would lead people into
thinking that work was no longer being carried out on the appointed site. He
would incite people, his detractors and supporters alike, into the avoidable
temptation of thinking or believing that he was no more than a butterfly
pretending to be a bird. The entire development would leave him somewhat like
dirty linen indecorously spread on a clothesline next to a busy thoroughfare.
The surprised, the alarmed and the outraged may then have no alternative than
to consider the viability of posing that kind of question found in Blackie na Joseph,
a 1960s folksong by the inimitable crooner Okonkwo Asaa, alias Seven Seven: “Is
this your residence that we have entered, or is it some other person’s
residence that we have entered?” So asked the village belle, Blackie, upon
venturing into would-be lover Joseph’s house, only to find the place filthy and
disordered!
