A track on Ebilokan: Alaye, pls I wan drop

Courage is the stuff of great leadership, says the enablers of our present predicament. Like the husband-seeking maidens singing “Carry me dey go, Baba carry me dey go my husband house,” they are urging  President Bola Tinubu to ignore naysayers and proceed with the “painful but necessary reforms.” And the president is paying heed. Consider his candour while receiving a delegation from the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA) led by Florizelle Liser, CCA’s President and Chief Executive Officer, in Abuja, on Thursday: “We are right in the middle of a challenging stage of our reforms. We have headwinds, no doubt, but we are not going back.”

It’s the 80s all over again. President Ibrahim Babangida struck the same defiant note, sticking to the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) that sapped the Nigerian economy of energy: “We cannot and should not abandon this programme midway because the pains of trying to re-introduce it at a later stage will be worse than the current pains.” And sounding just like the clowns on various platforms today, he added for good measure: “The reports we have received and which we would like the opponents of SAP to know is that the prevailing situation in Nigeria is by far better than in any other African country.”

IBB had wanted to address main challenges confronting Nigerian economy, namely the decrease in domestic production amid population explosion, dependence on imports for both consumer goods and industrial raw materials, the widening gap between the rich and the poor,  and the big role played by the public sector in economic activities without concrete results. He ended up addressing none, although he undertook the first major fuel price increase in Nigeria. With the introduction of the Second-tier Foreign Exchange Market (SFEM), the naira plummeted drastically.

Rights lawyer, Gani Fawehinmi, gave no quarter: “Policies shift from breakfast to lunch, and from lunch to dinner,” he told a popular magazine, deploring the IBB government’s guile. I remember the Fuji General, Killington Ayinla, issuing desperate commands to the president: “Fun wa lonje Babangida…” (Give us food, Babangida). Dissent was rife and some even turned Gospel songs into protest songs. They changed “Ki lo mu to mi wa, oun rere lo mu to mi wa (“What has He brought me? Good things”), a song lauding God’s goodness, into an aluta track: “Ki lo mu gari won, Babangida lo mu gari won, o le isu wole, o le ewa wole, o wa joba lori owo wa, Babangida lo mu gari won.” (What caused the increase in the price of gari? Babangida increased the price of gari. He outlawed yams, sent beans out of town, then became king over our money).

Sadly, despite acknowledging that Nigerians were in hardship (“Ki la wa na o? Agro la wa o!), Kollington’s junior, Wasiu Ayinde (K1), gave his accustomed false prophesies for which he would have been quartered in a serious clime: “ A a to, a tun seku, ko ni tan nbe.” (The goodies shall be plenteous, they will never finish). He would later predict that things were going to be “better” for the Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa after reminding us that “Ibrahim Babangida try o, e try o.” Yes, IBB tried, but he will never overcome the burden of timeless questions, including why he annulled June 12. There are things that you do for which you will explain till you drop dead, and long after you have rented a space in the grave. It is like the story of the attempted rape of a wife: the husband will keep asking questions until the wife flies into a rage, and long after she has calmed down.

And so now that President Tinubu is taking us on a perilous journey in a bus with bad tires and bickering passengers, I feel completely drained of sap. Our leaders’ songs remain eerily similar, bearing the same message of hope. Our leaders say they are driving us to the Land of Promise but the problem is that I no longer have faith, and I want to get down from this bus. People are usually bold when they aren’t the one feeling the pain. Late comers crack jokes, merrier than those who had to wait for them. The man who mistakenly defecates in the neighborhood well will be the first to claim that the water is clean again, but he will have little company. Even when the water is demonstrably clean, the revulsion in the people’s heart will defeat the clarity of the eye, making it look like coffee. Help! Government is carrying us where we no know and we wan drop sharp sharp. Na by force to reach that junction? Alaye stop, we wan drop!

In 2012, Jonathan backtracked and saved the masses, but with the time of hunger (Ebilokan), President Tinubu says no retreat, no surrender. We are on a journey into the forest of the heartless where a DSP with bullets in his bones will treat even nurses like his biggest bosses. In the past, Juju king KSA did not know if the national driver was driving him forward or backwards,  but I am positive that I am being driven backwards. During the Obasanjo years, Yoruba poet Ologundudu screamed: “Bola Ige! Ige wale, ile la a wa!” (Bola Ige! Ige, come home, it is homewards that one heads in times like this!). But the man of law and master of words seemed to have been led by Dzogbese Lisa among the sharps of Kofi Awoonor’s forest where “returning is not possible/and going forward is a great difficulty” though a murderer’s hand, like the Oswald the son of Mtshalli warned, lurked in the shadows. It is both in advance and retreat that the Yoruba know a  brave soldier at war but Tinubu is like Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo who does not want to be thought weak and may yet have a hand in the demise of the boy who calls him father.

Hear Ogbuefi Ezeudu: “That boy calls you father, do not bear a hand in his death.” The Ikemefuna of today are the Nigerian masses scheduled for slaughter by the IMF, the 2024 elders of Umuofia. When Nigerians cry “My father! They have killed me!” What shall Emilokan do? Will he draw his machete and cut them down, beat a retreat back home in pretended fright, or immediately begin frantic surgery? Proverbs to bones and isms. No one has ever prospered listening to the IMF. In the past, we could drink our gari with Peak milk while complaining about hardship. Today, such a thought is treason.