For King Amunisin, the Masanfani of Nigeria

SOME people have all the wealth in this world but are not even worth bathroom footwear in quality. They are so poor that the only thing they have is money. They are greedy to the point of lunacy and self-absorbed to the point of anarchy. They are the destroyers of the world, the merchants of pain who erect comfort on the sheer misery of other people. They open their mouth and proclaim the slaves in their plantation offspring of wayward breed; propped up by time and tide, they think their blood is pure. Their confidence lies in the confluence of their medicine men: they hope to climb Kilmanjaro hanging on a thread. They are dead men walking; power-drunk demons soon to dissolve in sulphur; comprehensibly evil men who make a living castrating the future of other people; compound fools who esteem power, money and fame to be their exclusive preserve. This society worships criminals who ought to die by hanging, handing them a corrupt crown and legitimising their history of rape and bloodshed. When cursed people are crowned, society dissolves into utter chaos. When you crown demons, why lament that the market is on fire and strangers have surrounded the farms? Are newly minted couples supposed to consummate their union in peace when the land is engulfed in gunfire?

Body, soul and spirit, the Amunisin are buried in thick darkness. They wield a smile in the public space but their mind is darker than charcoal; they are Lucifer’s designer babies, concerned only about their depraved selves. The Yoruba call such people Amunisin, the chief of slave drivers. “When Amunisin has built a house, the tenants are in trouble,” sang a Brother in my former place of worship, “and if he has a wife she must be a woman of prayer.” The Amunisin think no good of anyone except themselves: what they see when they look at the ‘workers’ on their plantation is the comfort of their wives and concubines and the luxury of their children, not the poetry of justice that demands a share of the soup for the fingers that cracked egusi. Proverbs to the dogs of the lagoon who invent the land’s doom. Beware when they sing your panegyric: life is about to take a terrible turn.

Jointly hunted game is jointly shared (apapin), but not in the world of the Amunisin who think their tongue is made for meat. The Amunisin, whether they head churches or lodges, have little time for the cultural wisdom that no land spreads under a lone eater, or that eating together provides no mirth when a member is hobbled by lack: they are Basorun Gaa in greed, King John in notoriety, Pol Pot in primitivism and Idi Amin in the conviction that you cannot run faster than their bullet. They cheat, rob and kill for sport, taking all the glory of the land while gorging themselves on the labour of others.

I have seen evil in this troubled land: lunatics issuing public statements lauding themselves, madder than Soyinka’s madmen and specialists. After committing egregious crimes for years, they hire praise singers who are soon going to perish in penury to burnish their rotten image. These are kings who eat choice food in the land of learners and even relieve themselves on star-struck maidens but fail to drop a dime, gone with the wind before the shocked bimbo is roused from sleep. Proverbs to the king of the land of learners. And to the ignoramuses on new market squares who jump to their defence, making light of the agonies of former slaves, joining demons to murder the innocent while shedding crocodile tears on the land and its trail of blood.

Ask the harmattan questions before you query the rhythm of rainfall. Call the hapless lot forced to live in distant lands because King Masanfani played rogue with his boat. Ask questions before you run your tongue into a hurricane. Ask questions: work with dates, not airtime and the talk machine that will run your future into a festival of arrows!

Fickle and little (wo)men have not fitted their mouth to their spoon. If the land is barren, they ask, why discard greener pasture? They forget their own immobility in their current poor estate; they forget that a soul is free only at the season ordained. They forget the thousands that have perished across many waters, dressed in the tapestry of hope; they dance to music forgetting the pain of the drummer. They forget the terror of life which forces the poor to choose between a rock and a hard place; they forget the resolve of the patient ones who bear every pain until their limbs can no longer heed the call of their mind; they mock those who are down even when tomorrow is no one’s Ludo. Three seasons ago the poet by water bubbles saw the slaves on King Fraud’s plantation: children born yesterday have appointed themselves teachers of their parents. This is yet another affliction under the sun.

I will not be part of the rabble defending evil for a cup of brew: desolation lies ensconced in the posterity of praise singers. As for those who habitually run their mouths, putting up stout defence of destroyers, I have just a sentence: your future will pay for your present. I have no plea for King Amunisin, whether he is director of souls or master of business: grievous diseases will end his feast of words, and thousands are waiting, knife in hand, to tear him to pieces once his eyes are closed in death. The Amunisin may have all the money in the world: they cannot escape the affliction of the he-goat. Their children will become orphans and their wives the chattel of other men. Death on joy day and destruction at a matron’s home await those who make other people’s lives pure misery.

May we escape King Masanfani, the leader who leads right into a hole; the no-good master who weaves garments of wretchedness for those he claims to love. King Masanfani, alias Amunisin Oloribiruku Somebody, inhabits every space in this clime: he is the spirit of work without profit, hope without answers, and utter wretchedness in grey hair.

My words are done: let the lunatics continue their public proclamations.

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