Lawan’s machina

Waka queen Salawa Abeni is not always mentioned in popular discourse today, but she saw a powerful vision years ago. Nigeria was under Mr. Maradona and Salawa Abeni realized that Nigeria had become the land of the maradonic, not a clime for those fickle in mind and intellect. In a popular track, Salawa posited that alagbari (crafty people, 419ers) would always trump fools (mugu), “using their money to eat aroso and ofada rice,” and to “do alubarika” (prosperity). Democracy came and Salawa was proved clinically right. Every election season since 1999, the alagbaris triumph over the mugus, spending their money at will.

As I write, APC delegates are having a swell time spending eating ofada with mugus’ money. They subscribe to no Sharia: they are drinking war on beer bottles and fried chicken with mugus’ money. For as Obafemi Awolowo University students often proclaim: Blessed are those that mugunize but cursed are those that accept the mugunization. Any guyman that is guyed has to be cut off from the land of the political living. The rules are well-known and the gods of politics give no quarter: they are merchants of state power, and state power cuts no deal with failures, except by way of historical reference. Per the Bard of Isara: proverbs to bones and silence.

This week, the All Progressives Congress (APC) senatorial candidate for Yobe North, Bashir Sheriff Machina, balked at the idea of stepping down for Senate President Ahmed Lawan, the zone’s current representative in the Red Chamber. Machina, who emerged the lone senatorial candidate while Lawan was busy selling groundnuts at the market of presidential ambition, won the Yobe North senatorial ticket with a hefty haul of 289 votes. He marshaled the delegates without challenge while the Big Man rallied the Presidential Villa, ready to rule Nigeria.  Machina has since naturally been under pressure from “the party” to surrender the ticket, although he insists that there is no provision in the party’s constitution for a person who didn’t participate in the party primaries to be given the ticket. Earlier, he had refused to fill the voluntary withdrawal form, saying he had no intention to withdraw from the race. Machina’s refusal to be Lawan’s lackey is about to sound the death knell on Lawan’s legislative odyssey, at least temporarily.

While hordes of presidential aspirants thronged the APC headquarters to obtain the outrageously priced Nomination and Expression of Interest Forms, the wise ones tied down governorship and senatorial tickets. You see, in Nigeria, the presidential contest is a gamble and political nights are long, very long, and the fundamental principle is that a guyman (conman) must never be guyed (conned).  But Lawan, heading to Ede, forgot to mend his eede, the homestead to which he must inevitably return. In paying no heed to the upstart Machina, Lawan apparently didn’t reckon that he might need a Deus ex machina. In literature, this is a device that saves an irresolvable plot situation. It catches the audience by surprise and brings the story to a happy ending. It also frequently serves as a comic device. Failure to tie down a lower ticket while aiming for a higher one is a mortal sin, one for which the guilty one can only be taken to purgatory as a matter of mercy. What tragic flaw causes anyone to fail to tie down the current ticket while aiming for the next level? Lawan’s loss is Machina’s gain, and the search for a Deux ex machina is now clinically imperiled.

Aspirant Bola Ahmed Tinubu was a master alagbari, and no mugu was going to enjoy a feast of ofada at his expense. Sensing that the crown was about to be taken away from him, Tinubu burst into hysterical shouts (as we say in Yoruba, o figbe ta!) under the Olumo Rock  saying: “It is my turn! It is my turn!”, but Lawan, slumbering in the comfort of consensus, treated himself to choice wine (metaphorically, of course), assured by the idaamu adugbos (troublers of the street) that his coronation hour was at hand, being President Buhari’s anointed and the overwhelming choice of the North. Alas, Lawan’s elephant, mugunized by the articulated tortoise masquerading as a broom in body and soul, was not meant for the crown. He mounted his Eagle Square throne, which promptly caved in and plunged into the depths of the earth. His ambition headed to the place where the elderly ones go. Alone and deserted, Lawan began shedding crocodile tears, saying that many of his colleague federal lawmakers would not return to the chamber of dreams, and shredding the Electoral Act that he and his gang foisted on the nation to their own hurt in their moment of legislative inebriation.

Is this a moment of clinical comeuppance? Lawan was the bloke who, last year, sat pretty in the Senate President’s seat as the Red Chamber orchestrated one of the biggest legislative robberies in Nigerian history. On July 1, the Senate passed the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) 2021, 13 years after its initial presentation to the National Assembly. Without batting an eyelid, Lawan’s Senate jettisoned the 10 per cent equity shareholding for oil-producing communities recommended by its own committee and pruned it down to a bare 3 per cent. It then earmarked for oil exploration in the North, 30 per cent of profits accruing from oil and gas operations by the NNPC in Nigeria’s South. Enthralled by this brazen act of political armed robbery, the hawks in the North hailed Lawan for “protecting the northern interest” in other people’s money. The North has of course always had its way with southern bribe takers, an infernal horde who cannot see beyond the rustle of dollar notes, the pain and anguish that awaits their people for all of time. They are content with plenty wine and women in seedy hotels. Apparently, many of the senators carry a gospel of northern protection via southern enslavement.

This is not a moment to rail at the greedily mad and madly greedy politics that makes a man with 23 years’ experience in Parliament behind him to want to snatch a ticket obtained by a fresher, and in the most brazen fashion. Nigerian politics is not about logic, rationality or any of those things; it is about power and privileges. This is why one and the selfsame person may vie for senatorial, governorship and presidential tickets at the same time, knowing that he is not mentally qualified for any but comforted by the “fact” that at least one of the tickets might enter. The essence of politics, quoting a late colleague of Lawan’s, is the pursuit of power. But often the power-drunk does not remember the power-drowned.