Death by invitation

In the Nigerian novelist, Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel, a 21-year-old youth deliberately orchestrates his own death. Here’s the first sentence in the section of the novel titled The Angel: “Today is the last day of my life.” He soon gets shot by a soldier provoked to boiling point. Habila’s setting is the IBB/Sani Abacha years, but many Nigerians are apparently still smitten by the bug of suicide decades later, as the story of the boy who plunged into waiting water from the cliff of the Third Mainland Bridge this week illustrates. How people deliberately invite death into their own lives can indeed be an interesting story. For instance, in saying that he still loves and wishes to marry one Fatima Danjuma who recently stabbed him with a knife, Habib Suleiman, a resident of Unguwan Rogo in Jos North Local Government Area of Plateau State, is apparently writing an invitation letter to death. According to Habib, Fatima stabbed him when she saw him around her area walking with another girl whom she thought was his girlfriend, but who was actually his friend’s younger sister.

Often when young men fall in love, their brain goes into Airplane mode, stripped of moisture. Mr. Habib Suleiman thinks he is in love, like the writer who filled a Higher Education notebook with poems serenading a termagant in those days of youthful stupidity. He wants to marry his would-be killer. The Yoruba have a saying for such a dangerous scenario: the pap vendor of heaven is advertising his wares (Eleko orun n p’olowo). This land is sinking and there are hardly any women around. Take Precious Chikwendu, the ex-wife of political loudmouth, Femi Fani-Kayode, for instance. In a recent interview, she claimed that her husband could not perform in six years of marriage, and that her four children were born through artificial insemination. This was the same woman who used to serenade the love of her life to the high heavens a short while ago, basking in luxury and never for once raising any issue of sexual dysfunction. In 2019, during an interview with popular IG pastor, Daddy Freeze, Nollywood actress Tonto Dikeh told the world how her husband, Olakunle Churchhill, couldn’t last more than 46 seconds in bed, and how her longest encounter was a minute, being the day she conceived her son King Andre. That is the tactic these days: once a relationship goes awry, the discarded woman accuses her man of impotence. Interestingly, the one-minute man and his new wife welcomed a baby in September, while the accuser and her next lover, one Prince Kpokpogri, have since parted ways.

Ladies who seek validation via social media, announcing their marital problems from the rooftops, with generous doses of false strokes to paint themselves as saints, are a curse to womanhood. No man who means to do well in life should approach for a relationship: they are shameless, ill-mannered and extremely cantankerous. They are hideous creatures seeking to be men without the benefit of biological composition. By their hairstyles you shall know them. What they really desire is a man who would take a fast journey to hell trying to satisfy their depraved lust. Many foolish men have been driven to hell trying to take up depraved sexual challenges.

But here’s my point: like men flirting with strange women, this land is currently in dalliance with political whores. In his gaudy book titled My Participations, former APC leader Bisi Akande revealed exactly why the 2023 agenda of his gang is a provocation. According to him, in 2011, he and his clique foiled the bid by the then President Goodluck Jonathan to ensure that the South-West grabbed the country’s number four seat. The following is easily one of the most egregious pieces of self-sentencing thrust upon Nigerians since 1999: “President Jonathan, immediately after the meeting (with political parties), called Bola Tinubu aside into a lobby to broach the matter of ACN support for a choice of who would become the Speaker of the House of Representatives. That same day, President Jonathan talked to me on phone about the same matter. He disclosed that PDP had zoned the position to the South-West but that only one Muraina and another Mulika won elections on PDP ticket from the zone into the House of Representatives. I quickly reminded him that, as at that date in the United States of America, while the Democrats produced the Senate President, the Republicans (the opposition) produced the Speaker of the House of Representatives. I boasted that ACN was capable of suggesting to him ten names of members from the South West from among whom to choose if PDP would be magnanimous enough to practice democracy the way it was being practised in the USA, from where we imported our presidential system. He seemed pissed off and stopped the conversation.”

Akande’s claim is extremely perverse. At the time he referred to, apparently without much reflection, the Democrats led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (with Joe Biden as Senate President/Vice President) controlled the US Senate while the Republicans led by Speaker John Boehner controlled the House. What Akande was asking Jonathan to do was akin to a non-congressional member of the GOP asking the then President Barack Obama to concede the Senate leadership to the Republicans!! Akande, like the clowns now harassing the landscape with pestilential swagger, clearly does not value blood ties. To practise democracy, in Akande’s warped estimation, is to deny one’s own people of their rightful position.

The PDP, despite being a blatantly corrupt contraption, still had the decency to zone the Speakership to the South-West but Akande and his clique did not love their people well enough to allow this natural choice to stand. They are the kind of people the Yoruba call akotileta. The position was for the Yoruba but they rose up in arms and pummeled their own kith and kin to stupor, gifting it to outsiders. Strangely, these same characters, 10 years later, are asking the same people they betrayed to support their beggarly aspirations. If this land goes their way, then let it be known that it has chosen death with its own hands. Anyone who can sell out his own community will sell out his country if given the chance.

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