Oyinlola’s crocodile and Fayose’s carcass

Praise and dispraise are two usages for which the tongue of a Nigerian politician can be put. This is a common perception among politicians themselves. In Nigerian politics, back-trackers are as common a sight as a fisherman daily sees shrimps in the creeks. Last Friday, Ekiti state’s former Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governor, Ayodele Fayose, reminded me of Alamu Atinsola Atatalo, one of the pioneers of Dundun and Sekere traditional music in post-colonial Yoruba Nigeria.

Atatalo reinforced the transition of the tongue of a Nigerian politician from one superlative extreme to the other, as defined by the esophagus. At a small level, Atatalo mirrored the typical Ibadan, whose tongue cuts through rough edges like hot knife on butter. Born into the Ajalaruru family of Opo Yeosa in Ibadan, the 1950s and 1960s saw him dominating the Ibadan musical scene, first as a Sekere and Dundun drummer, and much later as singer and drummer.

In two of his songs, within a short time span, Atatalo shot a woman friend of his down from the echelon of praise to the abyss of dispraise. In the first vinyl, apparently struck by the sweet piercing arrow of Cupid, the musician advertised this woman friend of his’ restaurant in such superlatives that you would want to visit it to have a taste of her highly burnished culinary prowess. Tatalo described the restaurant as located in Ayeye, Ibadan. He wasn’t done. It was the best place where quality amala and ewedu soup could be found in the whole of the city, he sang. The restaurateur garnished her soup with fish and shrimps, he said. Tatalo’s melodious rendering of this was done in a typical Yoruba superlative, so gripping that, finding the right word to explain it may be a barren exercise. He sang: “Sokotoyokoto l’o fi np’elo e, ede l’o fi npata. Iyawo Atatalo ti nbe l’Ayeye!”

Not long after, however, as he sang in his ”Afidikaleni” album, a passing train would seem to have put a wedge to the two love birds’ affair. Tatalo then flipped 360 degree. He sang about how this same woman, who had now become his ex, in alliance with her mother, had become a disgrace to motherhood. He was not done. Both mother and daughter engaged in shameless prostitution, he emphasized. The restaurant, which Tatalo once praised to high heavens, had now, in his words, become so slovenly in appearance and smelly that it was fly-ridden. Indeed, sang Tatalo, off-putting smell of gonorrhoea (atosi) urine oozed out of the restaurant, so much that no one could enter it! The immediate question you would want to ask is, how different does gonorrhoea urine smell from other smell?!

As the lead voice in the 1993 famous jingle of MKO Abiola’s presidential campaign sang, Nigeria is “On the match again!” Its politics is gradually rolling into another critical stage. Like soldiers at a ceremonial parade, everyone is morphing into formations. It is these formations that determine whether order, or disorder of the status-quo, would be presented to the watching crowd. Parade Commanders howl instructions, “Attention! Right Turn! Quick March! Halt! Present Arms!” By the time the Commander shouts the final, “By the left, quick march!”, it is time for the parade to march off to show the world its formation. The match then begins with a turn, starting with the left foot.

The above exactly is what Nigeria’s political parties are doing at the moment. So, last week, Nigeria’s two leading political parties, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) shouted “Attention!” It is a critical home-cleaning stage. APC’s appearance was superlative. So it seemed. Its Parade Commander, Bola Tinubu, shouted the “Attention!” After the removal of its erstwhile chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje, the party, at its NEC meeting on Thursday, took formation. The crucial exercise was the ratification of the appointment of Prof. Nentawe Goshwe Yilwatda as replacement for the former Kano State governor. Like the biblical lame by the city of Samaria, the PDP also wobbled to the city gate with its 101st NEC meeting, lest it be unnoticed.

Two former governors of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) were on two different television stations that same last week. They were invited by their interviewers to assess their party’s parade and see whether any mileage was made against the ruling party, the APC. Olagunsoye Oyinlola and Ayo Fayose, two ex-PDP governors were guests of the stations. The two however presented binary opinions, words and opposite, if you like; antonym and metonym, optimism and pessimism, hope and despair. It was praise and dispraise on parade. While Fayose was a self-appointed mortician and pall-bearer of the political party that catapulted him from rank obscurity to fame, wealth and eventually years of dalliance with the EFCC, Oyinlola saw hope. A man who understands the colour, contour, tone and tenor of order, disorder, rupture and suturing done on military parades, retired military general, Oyinlola, literally said that, unknown to the public, what Nigerians saw on parade as a superlative matching formation of the APC was cobbled together with a lethal steel rope. It is different from reality. The tails of the crocodile and that of the lizard may look not dissimilar, when you lift both, you would see the difference, said Oyinlola. If you watched his interview on Arise television last Thursday, you would get that drift.

This is where I saw Atatalo in Fayose. “The soul of PDP is gone, the spirit is gone; it is only the body that remains…The people who have defected from the party have left it in a carcass. The PDP has messed up,” Fayose said during the said interview. Having successfully predicted the calamitous end of the Nyesom Wike/Siminilayi Fubara liaison right from the start, Fayose again assumed the role of the Sangoma. Looking into his Ouija board like the Siberian mystic, Grigori Rasputin who was often associated with hypnosis, on that television programme, Fayose the political diviner predicted the 2027 presidential result: “The APC will come first; Obi will come second; ADC will come third and the PDP will come fourth.” And our elders say, if the eye of the fox is stricken by a boil, should the hen be the one to say it?

He spoke so damningly of the party which made him like Alamu Atinsola Atatalo did of his abandoned liaison, that the interviewer asked why he didn’t leave for the APC of which he spoke so glowingly. As Fayose spoke, you would see the proverbial glutton. When the glutton was given a piece of meat to chew, refusing, he said it was a mere bone, but when asked to throw the bone away, he lamented he would be losing a chunk of meat. Cloning the theatrics of the glutton, Fayose said he would not leave the PDP. The Ijesa of western Nigeria have a figurative description of his kind of political dissemblers who wouldn’t cut the weed in a plantation but, sworn to prevent others, collected their cutlasses. Ijesa’s evergreen musical icon, Adedara Arihunral’oja Oba described them as “Ko se, ko se, ko j’olure se”.

At a time when honour and dignity are in short supply in our clime, soldiers are still seen as occupying the highest cusp of the remnants of that stern and fine breed. In the interview Oyinlola, a retired military General, granted, he was Fayose’s admirable converse. While admitting that the turbulence that hit his party was life-threatening, he did not see the bottle as half empty but half full. As Nigerians see the infectious smiles of defectors from opposition parties to the APC, Oyinlola said there might be no visible chains or manacles on their feet or arms, but democratic despotism was on rampage. “It is a game of deceit,” he submitted.

To illustrate how the gale of defections pans out, Oyinlola gave the analogy of two deceitful hunters on expedition. One crew is the one that holds dane guns, cutlasses and matchete while the other called the “forest encircling hunting group,” holds sticks, stones and any other objects with which it makes sufficient noise and discomforting howls to unsettle the animals from where they are holed. It is a perfect combination. But because the two are steeped in deceit, in Oyinlola’s analogy, while the “forest encircling hunting group” shouted “it is coming” the one at the other end replied, “I have caught it!” So, when comparing notes and the one who claimed to have caught the game was asked what was caught, the other asked what it was he told the crew was coming.

The rout of political parties by the APC is prosecuted in its crudest unfairness, even if hidden. Yet, we need opposition parties to regain their strength. In 2014, same Oyinlola propounded the unfair treatment thesis. It was the anecdote of a Mrs. Obinde which he called the Maltreatment of Obindo – “Iyanje Obinde”. The woman it was whose husband died suddenly. So poor that the family could not afford to fund his funeral, Mrs Obindo was pawned by her husband’s relations for enough money for the funeral. Mrs. Obinde lost her husband, lost her dignity and her freedom. Of course, what is on parade today is political chess-gaming and those who volunteer to play this game could be said to have entered the forest of the heartless. It is a game of the soul-less, It is a forest whose initiates warn mothers to warn their children from, lest calamity befall them. Though politics is the world’s largest chess game and those who play it know that it is a game played by those in whose veins blood does not flow, Nigeria’s is done with masterful soullessness .

The PDP situation today is analogous to the case of the man who is down and needs no fall. All it needs to do is to take stock, do a soul-searching reflection and soberly trudge on. One of the things it has to do is to clear its waterways of the water hyacinths, the free-floating plants often found on the surface of rivers, ponds which the Yoruba call “Ojuoro.” These have blocked its freshwater bodies from receiving breaths of fresh air. The Fayoses are the water hyacinths which it needs to clear off so that it can begin de-novo. In doing this, the PDP would have eliminated a set of people which foremost Juju musician, Ebenezer Obey, while propounding the philosophy of gluttons, called the multiple feet-shuffling phenomenon (Ese giri). Thus goes the philosophy, as propounded by Obey: In the home of a freebies distributor, there is always multiple feet-shuffling (Ese giri ni’le Anj’ofe). Upon the expiration of the freebies distributor, the multiple feet-shuffling ceased. Now that there is no feet-shuffling as the free candies have expired, it is the time that the PDP can know its friends and plan for a genuine future devoid of the Fayoses.

Political parties, especially ruling parties, are most times enclaves of the “Anj’ofe” crowd politicians. But, life itself is in binaries. There is the winter and summer. Life is sometimes acrid and sometimes sweet. For the “Anj’ofe” politicians, life must be yummy all year round. Life is not about winning all the time. Sometimes, you lose. Once the Anj’ofe politicians’ political parties lose, they seek to nectar in some other places where it is sweet. They are the epicureans. Founded by the Greek philosopher, Epicurus, holders of this view emphasize the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain as the ultimate goals of life. The Fayoses are what the Yoruba compare to the lower jaw which is always consumed by consumption (ari’re ba ni je, agbon isale). It is even complimentary to call their kind of politics epicurean. In actual fact, their brand of politicking is reckless hedonism. They do not want to go through any period of lack or pain and we all know that that isn’t the architecture of life or existence. The APC whose leadership Fayose and those who bailed out of the PDP are now carrying with gluttonous relish was also once out of power and many of those in the party didn’t bail out. Bola Tinubu, for instance, didn’t. If Tinubu had openly courted Goodluck Jonathan when he was out of power yesterday, would he be sitting on that glorious seat today?

When Fayose was impeached as Ekiti governor, he was struck by a restlessness comparable to a junkie’s as he sought political roof over his head. He moved from the proverbial masquerade cult’s “Igbale,” (Ile eegun) to Oro cult’s roofing shard (Ile Oro) seeking refuge. It was this same PDP that eventually offered him its umbrella for a second shelter. That benevolent party is now a carcass that is worthy only to be spat upon. While he sees his benefactor as carcass, to Oyinlola, that party is still the crocodile, with a hefty tail.

Today, the APC, still following up on Ebenezer Obey’s musical philosophy, is the Mongudu, the cooking pot. Some other interpretations call Mongudu the maggot. In another of his track, Obey philosophized on the concept of the Mongudu. “Elephant (Erin) died, Mongudu munched it; Buffalo (Efon) died, Mongudu ate it. However, when the pot (maggot) died, it found no one to savour its meal,” he sang, garnished with a sonorous symphony. The warrior’s death is on the battlefield and the swimmer’s is right inside the waters. Someday, the APC’s Mongudu, too will die. A time there was when the PDP was at this glorious juncture that the APC is today. Its recklessness and power drunkenness made it fall by the wayside. I hope it has learnt lessons from this and is prepared to move on stronger. Let the political hedonists know this.