Obasa: Lagos na wa!

LAGOS State and the drama of its embattled lawmaker and ex-Speaker of its parliament, Mudashiru Obasa, appropriately answer to an idiom in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Insatiably curious about the mysteries of Wonderland, Alice had used the word, “Curiouser and curiouser” to express the mysteries of how she shrinks after drinking a potion. When Obasa emerged on Saturday to claim that he remained the Speaker of the parliament, Alice’s wonder at the mysteries of Wonderland became a fitting description of the theatre of the absurd that Lagos politics is.

Before now, everything that emanated from the January 13 impeachment of Obasa was wrapped in rumours. Persuaded that evil and good exist contemporaneously, Yoruba say Ìbí nbè nínú ire, ire nbè nínú ìbí. This was what Ray Laurence of the Macquarie University set out to theorize in his paper, ‘Rumour and communication in Roman politics’. In essence, Laurence discovered that rumour is neither overly evil nor good. He cited an incident which happened in the 133 B.C. Roman society. A client of Tiberius Gracchus had suddenly and unexpectedly died. Gracchus was a Roman politician whose greatest renown was his agrarian reform law which consisted in the transfer of land from the Roman state and wealthy landowners to poorer citizens.

So, at the death of the Gracchus client, Roman plebeians originated and spun a rumour that the poor fellow had been poisoned. The rumour was brewed when, laid in state, the Gracchus client’s remains were bespattered with sores. The huge crowd which gathered to witness his funeral and saw the sore-riven body concluded without evidence that the man had been a victim of poisoning. A seeming confirmation of this rumour immediately came when, at cremation, the poor soul’s body would not succumb to the torment of a burning fire. Manipulating this wide-spreading rumour, Gracchus dressed for weeks in mourning robes. He told whoever cared to listen that enemies of his land reforms had poisoned his client and, if he wasn’t careful, he could be poisoned as well. This widespread rumour helped Gracchus manipulate popular opinion in his support for the reform, thus helping the poor Roman people access to land.

A very notorious rumour was spread on Obasa like the Gracchus client poison rumour. As he fell from grace on January 13 in the hands of his own Julius Caesar’s Brutus colleagues of the Lagos parliament, Obasa was said to have flown into Abuja from America where he was during the parliamentary coup. Said the rumour, he had gone to consult with his benefactor, the Nigerian president. Continued the rumour, Obasa reportedly told him that eedi was responsible for his fall.

On September 16, 2018, I did a piece entitled Tinubu the Ap’ejal’odo and his strange fish friend. It was borne out of then ex-Governor Bola Tinubu’s leash-less powers in Lagos State politics. I was not aware of anyone in contemporary history who possessed such totalitarian powers. He had the powers to conjure a Lagos dead to rise. That 2018 piece was illustrated with an anecdote of a fisherman and his wife. An ancient anecdote in pre- and post-colonial Yoruba society, it famously helped tame the greed of, as well as, any tendency within the society to play God.

Let’s keep the above Ap’ejal’odo anecdote in a bank. We will make use of it presently. Since the rumour broke out that Obasa said his predicament was an affliction, linguistic and syntactic surgeries have been done on the alleged Obasa word. Was eedi or asasi responsible for the coup against him? Or that he met his waterloo in the process of proxy-fighting the battle of the president? Both, metaphysical afflictions, are very strong Yoruba words that some users of the language, unable to find its appropriate synonym or a fitting cultural or spiritual etymology, concocted the Gaeco-Latin word ‘hubris’ for. Whatever you may settle for as the appropriate force that hit Obasa at the apogee of power, eedi and asasi are both words for external afflictions or calamities. However, while eedi is a spiritual affliction that makes the victim to act totally out of sync with their ordinary self, asasi, a stronger force, is programmed to ensure that it runs its full course on the victim until they meet their final denouement. Example of eedi, Yoruba believe, is a boy who rapes his mother while asasi, an invocation, consists of the invocator ordering the victim, in a distinct voice that could be heard only by them, to, for instance, go jump to death inside the well.

In Yoruba mythology, supported by an anecdote, Eedi was reputed to be a ghommid, a one-eyed part-human, part-otherworldly creature who deafens its victim to other voices except the victim’s. When men are led by the hubris of presuming themselves to be God as Obasa was, which leads them to commit fatal errors that subsume them, they are said to have succumbed to the fatal affliction of eedi. When Eedi is in operation, its victims don’t listen to wise counsel.

What afflicted Obasa during his imperial reign as Lagos Speaker could not have been either eedi or asasi. While it has a tinge of both, it is in a class of its own: the ex-Speaker invoked the power calamity upon himself. Like the Ap’ejal’odo, Obasa was inebriated by the alcohol of power and accomplishment. When I began to hear stories of his audacity and imperial attitude in power, I thought the spirit of youth jumped on him. It is only youthful exuberance that allows unthinking suicidal jump into vanity. In his advocacy for being the Emilokan (It is my turn) to climb the stool of Lagos governorship, Obasa failed to adhere to a famous counsel of late 19th century Irish poet, Oscar Wilde. Wilde had said, the commonest thing is delightful if one hides it. He acted like the anecdotal Ap’ejal’odo who unthinkingly, in spite of his earthly favour by his fish friend, wanted to be God.

Obasa could not be blind nor deaf to the trending news that Seyi, son of the Senior Ap’ejal’odo, the Capon of Lagos and Nigeria, is interested in that same stool of Lagos governorship. Didn’t he know, at the risk of citing Wilde again, that behind every exquisite thing that existed, lies something tragic?

While the hubris demonstrated by Obasa yesterday through his “triumphant” entry into Lagos will seem curiouser and curiouser, not only wasn’t it not novel, it was taken directly from the surreal playbook of Lagos politics. At a time when the whole Nigerian power calculus was against his presidential ambition, aspirant Bola Tinubu bit the bullet in Abeokuta on June 3, 2022 when he proclaimed that it was his turn to be Nigeria’s president. Someday, if he dares to write his memoir, that ex-aspirant will need to tell the world whether that statement was spilled out of valour, boldness or was some metaphysical recitation.

Obasa’s bold comeback yesterday can only be one of two things: That he is poised to bite the bullet like Tinubu did in Abeokuta in 2022. Or that he is a proxy battle axe of the president himself. What is clear is that, his wasp that is dancing on the river has a drummer weaving the rhythm underneath the waters. Rumour had it that Obasa’s removal didn’t get the president’s approval. He was thus miffed at those who carried out the MKO Abiola wise-saying on him by shaving his head in his absence. Methinks, if the soup you cooked loses its savour, why cast the blame on the plate with which it was served? An Ap’ejal’odo will no doubt have a totalitarian tendency. Earlier,  the rumour was that the Senior Ap’ejal’odo had cut the wind from his sail by de-linking him from access to Aso Rock. Another rumour is that, being an Ap’ejal’odo who is not satisfied with how his fish god friend had made him president in spite of his myriad earthly foibles, Tinubu, being the Imam, still wants to be the Sarki. In other words, the whole of Nigeria being under his suzerainty, the president is irritated by the Lagos Sun’s audacity to shine and now wants to use Obasa to teach his Lagos mentees the lesson of the omnipotence of imperial power.

Obasa’s poise to fight his mentor’s mentees, either proxy or personal, may be a re-hash of Ap’ejal’odo heading for the river bank to meet his fish god friend to complain about the temerity of the Sun. Perhaps some political adversaries of the Master Ap’ejal’odo of Lagos and Nigeria, bent on sending the greedy fisherman who wanted to be God back to his old state, are chanting, “as the early morning mist on the leaf cannot last till evening, so will they scatter” (ìmòtú, ìmòjo, ìmò eni kìì d’ojó alé) against the imperial power of Lagos and its surrogates.

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