Obinde injustice: How Dino Melaye’s god may be our God

A single thread links the duo of Dino Melaye, former Senator representing Kogi West in the federal parliament and Shakespearean tragic character, Cinna the Poet. It is their individual resort to metaphysics to explain their predicament and preoccupation.

While Cinna never lived to tell the story, Melaye severally dubbed an infantile-mind-trapped-in-an adult- body – apologies to Farooq Kperogi – may by now have gone into the studio to wax yet another of his sickening pediatric comic skits.

Rome had been enveloped in violent disorder and utter chaos in the thick of the mourning of the assassination of the mercurial Julius Caesar, the fallen Roman emperor. It was also a time in which nobody was safe.

It was this time that Cinna the Poet had chosen to pay his final obeisance to Caesar by attending his funeral. On his way to the venue of the obsequies, a riotous and vitriolic audience of Roman plebeians had accosted him, demanding to know what he was about and why he dared to go out at such a time of national emergency.

Last week, like Cinna the Poet, Melaye also chose to pay his own obeisance to the serial presidential contestant, Atiku Abubakar. Similar to Rome after the murder of Caesar, Melaye’s Nigeria has fallen into political disorder, uncertainty and utter chaos.

According to Melaye at a press conference last week, he and his God-knows who god, were entrapped in a rapturous telephone exchange on the presidential candidacy of Atiku Abubakar. Amidst banters between him and his god, he said, this god revealed to him that Abubakar would be Nigeria’s next president.

“I want to state unequivocally that many of us, when we call on God, God doesn’t give us missed calls. When we call Him, He picks up our call. And He called me and he said, ‘Dino,’ I said, yes my Lord. He called the second time again, I said, ‘yes my Lord.’ He called the third time, and he said: ‘Atiku would be the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria’,” said the exsenator known more for his fawning infantilism on social media than any serious mental rigour.

Like Melaye, upon being accosted by the blood-lusty crowd, Cinna fled into the incorroborate world of metaphysics to explain his current predicament. “I dreamt tonight that I did feast with Caesar, And things unluckily charge my fantasy. I have no will to wander forth of doors, Yet something leads me forth,” he had said.Then the angry plebeians asked him of his name and when he said Cinna, they killed him because he bore a similar name with Cinna, one of those who killed Caesar.

By the way, give it to him, Melaye’s reply to Ayo Fayose’s vacuous claim that by knowing the geography of amala joints in Nigeria, he is fit to be Nigeria’s president, is so very apt. How can a man be as empty as to reduce Nigeria’s leadership, the burdens of security and economy that assail the country, to the understanding of the contours of the stomach?

Conspiracy theories surrounding 2023 are becoming as luscious as the tree planted by the rivers of water. They are complex and complicated. When broken to their granular form, however, the theories suggest that Melaye’s god is a god who is supervising a clandestine machination, to wit, the collapsing of political party affiliations for a larger regional interest, all in the bid to affirm an Atiku Abubakar presidency.

A caveat, though: Conspiracy theories are allegations of conspiracy that may, or may not, be true. Today, what remains of Northern Nigeria is a mere shell, sucked off its oyster.

Yesterday, it was reported that the United Nations said that people now eat grass to survive in the Northeast. In a 2020 event marking the 60th birthday of Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai, former Emir of Kano, LamidoSanusi, said that nine states in the North were responsible for 50 percent of the entire malnutrition burden in Nigeria.

This is outside of the burdens of drug, Almajiri and Boko Haram that have become an albatross in the region. Eighty seven per cent of Nigeria’s total poverty index, said the former CBN governor, is in the North, while millions of northern children are out of school. The distressing statistics must have since skyrocketed.

Apart from building a billionaire cabal, members of which daily survive by sucking the nectar of national contracts and forex insider trading, with Godwin Emefiele providing a convenient abetment for them, Buhari’s presidency has rendered the north a hopelessly defoliated territory, deforested of any human habitational excitement.

Today, many of those northern big-men with flowing babanriga are totally empty and lean in associational joy as they cannot go to their home states or towns.

Indiscriminate violence, banditry and kidnapping have taken the shine off the once flourishing north, making it one of the most volatile regions of the world to inhabit. Kaduna, a once flourishing city, has lost its innocence as well.

Today, it is home to unconscionable bloodshed by terrorists. All these leave the Federal Capital City of Abuja, as well as its succulence and sweet juice as the only goldmine left for the north.

It is also the only geographical environment left where an average northerner can strut in, with a potentatelike, territorial airs of ownership. All these will however be threatened by a southern presidency, according to a conspiracy theory bandied by some Northern elements.

More importantly, the injustice and gross nepotism that MuhammaduBuhari has inflicted on Nigeria in his seven years of macabre rule is such that a North out of power post-2023 is one akin to a man with a suicide rope fastened to its neck. If Nigeria has a southern president, Abuja will now become an ngbatingbati or yanminrin enclave? Dan borouba! So where does the northerner lay claim to?

If you go to virtually all government offices in Abuja today, you would think you were in a Hausa Republic, or right inside a market in Tsafe, Zamfara State. Buhari has filled virtually all federal offices with northern Nigerians, so much that all other regions have become bystanders in their own country.

Bearing in mind the above equation, consenting to be out of power post-2023 will appear like self-immolation to the north.

Buhari’s bigotry and nepotism having totally and successfully destroyed the fabrics of Nigeria’s pretence to federal character, no southern successor of his can ever administer Nigeria as a Nigerian president any longer. In the worst case, such a president would clean the Augean stable and return Nigeria to its tabular rasa state.

Head or tail, a Northern Nigeria that has become a frightening spectacle, a sturdy, gross underdevelopment, can never compete in a reset mode Nigeria. The north thus needs a northern Nigerian continuation in power to detoxify the toxins and pollutants Buhari fleeted into national space.

The conspiracy theory then continues. Who is the northerner who has some appeal to the southern electorate today, whose political charisma can confer legitimacy on the massive votes that the north would cast at the 2023 polls?

AtikuAbubakar fits the bill. His huge baggage and perception of corruption notwithstanding, Abubakar has a pan-Nigerian appeal and doesn’t look like one who would enfold Nigeria into the north as MuhammaduBuhari has done in seven years.

In the bid to perpetuate the north in power for another eight years, Buhari, with a robust pedigree of ethnic bigotry, would only be too glad to walk his renowned route.

His only allotted role in this drama is simple: frustrate worthy APC southern candidates from the political fray and emboss presidential imprimatur on a lackey, a simpleton as the party’s flag-bearer.

A Yemi Osinbajo or Bola Tinubu on the ballot will upset the northern apple carts, thereby dissembling a carefully knitted, seemingly foolproof northern political chicanery.

In Buhari’sAso Rock, the waters of bigotry run deeper than any allegiance or fidelity to gratitude. No one should need to tell Tinubu that Buhari’s bigotry train has taken the wind off his presidential ambition sail in the APC.

Already, there are rumours that the Landlord of Lagos is pitching his tent with the SDP, the old, abandoned warhorse. AdamuAbdullahi, a known northern irredentist of more incendiary bigotry than Buhari, was carefully recruited as a worthy undertaker for this northern cause, so says this conspiracy theory.

Iyorchia Ayu, PDP’s National Chairman, disdaining the temerity of NyesomWike to seek to be Nigerian president, will deliver a man to whom he is a dotting sidekick, AtikuAbubakar, as PDP’s flag-bearer without batting an eyelid.

With either of two renowned northern lickspittles, Godwin Emefiele and RotimiAmaechi who just declared for the presidency yesterday – both with arguable Igbo ancestry – on the ballot, the south would be too cross and indescribably riled at the Buhari insolence that its excessively miffed electorates would think they were shooting Buhari in the foot by casting their votes for Abubakar.

A deviation from this permutation, in the mould of a Buhari support for KayodeFayemi for instance, is about the only thesis that can perforate this conspiracy theory as Buhari’s north will know that Fayemi, with no baggage or national scandal, will surely engender a southern votes cluster.

When the Osinbajo group fools fellow travelers in their doomed presidential boat that Buhari had picked him as successor, they evoke a guffaw off pundits.

The only analogy that can defeat this robust lie is a houseboy who, for seven years, the master had denied opportunity of sleeping in the main house. Once when the master travelled and handed the home key to him, the master complained bitterly that he soiled his bedspread and since then, cast him further away from his vicinity.

Now, the master is leaving for another home and the houseboy grandstands that the master had promised to hand over the house key to him!

Osinbajo, perhaps the most brilliant person in the Buhari government and a natural successor to him in a clime where excellence is wired into the architecture and requirements of leadership, has been a stranger in the Buhari government.

He has also been uncannily profiled within the Villa by Buharists as possessing insatiable appetite. His dirt-embossed dossier is kept jealously in the cabal’s closet as an arsenal, even as the cabal withdrew from him the juice accruable to his presidential portfolio.

It is thus laughable when Osinbajo apologists spin the incorrigible yarn that a vindictive Buhari, with active connivance of his Fulani advisors, would willingly incense the god of power by handing over power to an Osinbajo who still nurses the aching sore emanating from Buhari’s stab.

In 2014, ex-Osun State governor, Olagunsoye Oyinlola, had propounded the Obinde injustice allegory. It runs thus: Mrs. Obinde’s husband had died suddenly and his family decided to pawn her, to be able to generate enough money for his burial. What ultimate marginalization and cheating could rival this!

What the South does not know is that, when it comes to power, the north coalesces its fractious contours in a twinkle of an eye and immediately, ancient internal recriminations and earlier political disaffections no longer matter. Religion is the only index it cannot compromise. The north did this in 2015 by massively queuing behind a Buhari it had hitherto serially rejected at the polls.

Apart from Obinde, another allegory which synchronizes with the fate of the south, according to that conspiracy theory, is the cheating of the African pied hornbill bird (atiala, atioro). In the words of a Yoruba aphorism which frowns at systemic cheating, it wonders why elders of a village would shave the head of the vulture (igun), shave that of theground horn bill bird which Yoruba call akalamagbo but when it comes to the turn of the atiala/ atioro to be shaved, now claim that the razor to weed off the bushy scalp had lost its sharpness. This is a cunning that the conspiracy theory alleges the north is weaving.

The theorists say that, by the time the south wakes up, it will be morning yet on creation day. By then, the only alternative left for the children of ObafemiAwolowo and NnamdiAzikiwe will be barren gripes against another northern iyanjeobinde. By then, the small god of Dino Melaye would have become our God.