Sex, the powerful and us

When the British colonial lords left Nigeria, two things they gave us and which we have per fected their usage are, one, a structure that baffles in its theoretical beauty and institutions that, on paper, are terror to the lawless. Such structures and institutions are ones that tackle corruption, the ones that spell in unmistakable terms the penalty for larceny, for traffic offences, for electoral wrongdoing and several other mankind limitations. It is apparent that the brutish nature of man would need some laws to tether him to the point of civility, an advantage that animals, our pre-historic brothers, do not have.

Thus, before the colonial slavers left, we had taken time to study the process of ensuring the birth of those institutions and structures. We copied the West’s table etiquette, its gaits, its sartorial make-ups, its suits and jackets, not to talk of the curious but appealing-to-the-senses knot of the white man’s ties. But in all these, the brackish African antecedent which presents in his affront to the discipline of the flesh, has risen in its wrath to confront this emerging Western gentlemanliness. T. M. Aluko, in his One man, one wife, has spoken eloquently about the war of our Janus-faced trajectories. When the world began to follow the path of democracy, with all its talks about good governance, accountability, faithfulness in office and allied components, the Nigerian picked every other bit but standoffishly told faithfulness and chastity to go jump inside River Niger. It is the unpopular issue of discourse this morning.

Sorry, this is not the preacher’s corner. This ‘preacher’ is even unworthy of such acclaim. But we should all be bothered by the profanatory grip that sex has taken in both public and private lives in Nigeria today. I reckon that in advanced democracies where we picked the principles of good governance, faithfulness and chastity in both private and public lives are the kernel of respectability and the foundation upon which millions of people entrust their tomorrow in the hands of their representatives.

A very recent history that holds comparative relevance for us is the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky saga. The story of the American president’s illicit romance with a White House intern nearly threw him off the lawns of the White House. This comb for chastity is replicated in all Western world. The moment an American public official is found to have profaned his marital vow by engaging in inappropriate relationship with the other sex, even if he is cousin to Christopher Columbus, the American people ensure he thuds heavily on his ignoble canvass.

This may sound very silly and inconsequential but the spirit behind it isn’t. We cannot hypocritically accept all the kernels of good governance and jettison chastity. Are we descendants of the he-goat family? If we plot the graph of a good society, we would find it there. A public official who jumps beds and lies to his wife is very likely to be shifty with his promises to the populace. Vows by the feet of the judge to administer the country or the segment entrusted in his hands with all his might and mind are likely going to be broken on top of an amorous liaison. Do we think that the West is a fool? Those seemingly little things like resistance to chastity have destructive potentials. More than anything else, the West is most likely aware that, being a spiritual thing, pollution of the sacred spiritual vow of marriage could corrode man’s strides.

I am aware that this topic is an unpopular one and chastity is rare in the land as virgins are seldom found in a girls’ hostel; that semen of amorous public officials pollute the sacristy of government houses. In the war between modernity and our animal libido, the latter wins. I am aware of a former president of this country who is said to mouth the Christian speaking in tongue like a rote at morning worship services and the next minute, he is floating atop somebody else’s wife. Go to virtually all Government Houses today, the menu would be incomplete without an a la carte of school girls laced on the tray for the chief executives and their amorous combines. It is one frightening phenomenon that enfolds us all into an animal category. Teenage girls have had their tomorrow pork-marked by this rampaging blight and ladies have picked life-long afflictions on account of it.

Who knows whether this is the corrosive acid that has frustrated all attempts we have made to leave the jungle Daniel Defoe constructed for humanity long time ago? Don’t get me wrong. America is today one of the greatest homes for sex and its aberrant manifestations. It is home to lesbians and gays. Sex, in the Western world, is for the asking as you pick ferns in a plantation. But the West carefully makes a demarcation between its leaders and such libidinous herd, just as America spells out the terms of the training its leaders receive, by its unwritten code that only Ivy League graduates move their baggage to the White House. The West also sieves you through its strainer to ensure that if you have or live such smelly life of collecting Daughters of Discord as you find in Government Houses today, you do not stand the chance to congregate in their most hallowed places.

Unfortunately as Nigerians, we don’t scour through the herd. Even at voting times, we allow such camels as homosexuals, wife-beaters, 419ners, mentally deranged, murderers and other criminals to pass through our needle’s eyes. Don’t we know that, in the thinking of psychologists, a man’s past defines his future? Because we do not care, our security apparatus is also jobless in that regard. Today, we have ex-murderers, ex-convicts, sado-masochists, paedophiles in positions of authority in Nigeria. And we expect such messed up pots to brew our white pap? Do you think if Barak Obama had lived half of the brackish life lived by Nigerian leaders, he would have smelled the tag of a presidential contender?

This is without prejudice to moslems whose religion allows them to have four wives. Obafemi Awolowo, God bless his soul, knew the destructive potentials of a leadership that is sans chastity. His lieutenants and friends would tell you that you dare not bring your osere (entertainers) to where he was or else he would throw at you his wedge. I must however acknowledge that promiscuity in high and low places is as old as man. No wonder the Yoruba invented that inscrutable name, pansaga, for it. Its scourge of pleasure, aside other fripperies of life, is one of the reasons why public officials misbehave in office.

Cast your mind back and produce a list that power-wielders have destroyed: our sisters, our mothers, nieces and daughters. I am not even talking about the appalling diseases that nature has poisoned sex with to which it gives us a requisite dosage, but the spiritual stagnation of a people that results therefrom. Or you, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, think the spiritual is nonsensical? We cannot be hypocritical about the conditions of a good society. Let us begin to spell them out. A leader who cannot put a rein on his organ, sleeps with our daughters and our mothers, is not worthy of our respect and votes. Let us recreate a society that equates adultery with murder and stones such by the entrance of the city gate; let any known leader with such rapacity of the flesh be brought for tether to drink hemlock. It is becoming obvious that this is part of the assortment that denies us of a country where all things are bright and beautiful.

The bad wiesse news

In the last few weeks, I have been very bothered about President Umaru Yar’Adua. Not bothered that he is sick, nor that he had just returned from Bad Wiesse, Germany to attend to his health, but that he is replicating that under-developmental shroud of his health situation from those that he purportedly serves.

Since that infamous – pardon my brash disrespect for elders, stupid! – Umooru, are you dead? statement from ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigerians have been genuinely bothered about the health of their president. Bush telegraphs have even rainbow-lized it. While some say it is a heart disease, some say his liver is the problem; to some, it is his kidney, and to others, it could be anyone of the terminal sicknesses.

Whichever one it is, our president is human and like every human being, he is entitled to his own health calamity, as all of us have our own share of providence’s baggage of sicknesses and diseases too. So why shut the lid on the nature of his? This reminds me of Sani Abacha and his constant inhuman desire to project the Chaka the Zulu image of a king that is infallible and impervious to diseases. It is a mirror of underdevelopment. I am sure every American can recite by rote the health dossier of George Bush; it is a public document.

When the President’s media sorcerers now told us that he had gone to Germany to treat “a feverish condition associated with malaria,” I went straight to the john to puke. Even Ibrahim Babangida, with smiling bayonets and epaulettes, who barged into the Villa with a smoking gun, told us in the 80’s that he had radiculopathy and we empathised with and prayed for him. Even if Umooru has HIV/AIDS, to me, and to us all, it is immaterial. Many of us carry in our pouches worse ailments. Does anyone know which I carry or which you carry? Didn’t Voltaire say that diseases are older than medicine and all needs existed before relief?

This country is not a poem

For about few weeks now since the Senate committee on the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) began its probe of the territory under pint-sized Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, the revelations therefrom have brewed an inexplicable nihilism about the future of this country in me. Ranging from revelations of government land and house bazaar by El-Rufai, Olusegun Obasanjo and even the hangmen Senators themselves, I have come to the painful conclusion that we all – the leaders and the led – are implicated in a post-colonial malady that only God can cure. It confirms to me that this country, apology to ‘dreadlocked’ poet, Aj. Dagga Tolar, surely isn’t about the rhymes of poetry, the aesthetics of prose nor the good rhythm of goodliness.

I have asked myself repeatedly what a sane man would need over a million square metres of land for, why the former minister’s cronies would rescue scores of land allocations into a selfish kitty and why the mentality of us all is grab and grab. Up country bumpkins like us could be forgiven for not accessing the gravity of this charge: one of most of those plots of lands goes for over a hundred million naira.

But all those are little when you realize that, while this heist was unfolding, El-Rufai was busy demolishing houses that belonged to artisans, men and women trying to eke out a living in the FCT. When you also realize that but for providence’s frustration of the calculations of evil men, El-Rufai would have been Yar’Adua as some power cabal had thrown him up as successor to Obasanjo. When you realize the clinical finish of their behemoth machine which had gone to work to grind to pulp all allied contenders for the Villa, you would understand the enormity of the misfeasance.

Last week, however, I saw everything clearly on my Ouija. El-Rufai had said that, in spite of the thousands who became homeless, marriages that hit the rocks on account of the demolition, scores who lost their lives to the hopelessness that followed, he had no apologies to offer. My Ouija said some screws are missing up there. Can you see why the thesis that men in office need to go see the psychiatric doctor is evergreen?