Red lines and our Villa of rodents

mondaylineTHE Oxford Dictionary of Superstitions has copious entries that suggest you must think twice before adopting the rat as the totem of your power. Folklore scholarship also has very many mentions of rat as a creature of omens and weirdness. To the ancient Romans and the Greeks, every animal act delivered a message. Rats destroying personal effects and household furnishing items were portentous of grave happenings. Indeed, Roman author and Navy Commander, Pliny, noted in his Natural History (published in A.D.77): “By gnawing the silver shields at Lanuvium, mice prognosticated the Marsian war; and the (exit) of our general, Carbo, at Clusium, by gnawing the latchets with which he fastened his shoes.” Here, the house rat is that small, audacious animal that eats in the presence of the house owner. Last week, rat crossed the red line into our governance structure and lexicon. There are now talks of Ratocracy or Rodentocracy, whatever that means. Presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu is a fine gentleman and a spin legend. He is an editor’s delight any day of the week and any time of the day. Since his Atiku days in the Villa, Shehu’s phones have always been ringing and he has always been picking his calls. His comrade in the Villa, Femi Adesina picks his calls too. If they missed your call, they would return it as a matter of duty. But when you speak for a government and you pick all calls and explain all actions, you must pay the price. Garba Shehu and the government he serves have not stopped paying that price since last week. He apparently picked one grave phone call and the storm has not stopped howling from land to land. The man spoke with a foreign media station on why his boss won’t be working in his office. He blamed rodents for literally eating the office of his principal.

It is true the president came back and resumed duty. He would be working from home. Did anyone need to explain these realities to the extent of blaming rats? And if the presidency must blame anything for a failure, should it be rat which poor, dumb kids blame at the end of a term of failure? Remember that weeping child in primary school cartoon who insisted he passed his exams but it was rat that ate his report card? (Mama I passed, it was rat that ate my card.) Every dumb school child that flunks his exams is expected to blame some poor, hungry animal at the end of the term. A child owes her parents that explanation. But does a government owe an explanation for which room the president chooses and uses in attending to state matters?

Government has not said the ratty story is a joke or a lie. Garba himself appears to enjoy the whirlwind it has birthed. So I am taking it literally with commiserations to the Lion King, the first from the cat family to be victim of miserable rodents. Rat, especially the one cosseted at home with kings and principalities, is a creature of purpose. The book of folklore credits rat with the sixth sense that makes it sniff danger and disaster ahead of time. It says rat is not like the pigeon which faces danger and stays and dies with its owner. Rat eats and escapes before calamity befalls its landlord. When rat abandons a ship at the port, sailors quickly read the situation and prepare for the worst. Those who believe in this would refer to a January 1889 story of a riverboat, Paris C. Brown that sailed between Ohio and Louisiana, United States. Shortly before an accident that sank it, the popular story is that rats that had shared the deck with the sailors disappeared. Three crew members who noticed this and heeded it as a warning were the saved. Superstitions. Beliefs. Rats visiting a sick person suggest he will be healed and well. What you get depends on what you believe and on who is telling the story. What is not denied anywhere, however, is that rats evoke the imagery of failure, of poverty, of destruction, of filth and of disease. So, why did Garba pick rat as a usurper of his Lion King’s powers?

Managing the media for a government has always been very tasking. It is more brain sapping in this age of the Internet and the limitless possibilities for evil. When your favourite phone won’t come on and you are getting worked up and frustrated, what you give it is the shock treatment. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. It may even further damage your device. In government business, if you must yarn, yarn big – very big. That, I suspect, was what Garba Shehu did. The challenge has been very enormous since the rat story broke. Even outsiders with their own homegrown, greater calamities like South Africans, joined in mocking us as a nation of rats. “Rats ate my office, says absent leader,” was the headline of a piece in a South African newspaper. It is not their fault and we are not blaming them for the insults. We blame the unknown disease that detained the Lion King in London for over 100 days and rendered the Villa vulnerable to all manner of little creatures and petty designs. If not for sickness, some miserable outsiders won’t be defecating in the bed chamber of the Lion.

What are we supposed to gain from this presidential rat story apart from the shame of global derision? If Garba Shehu’s rat claim was a lie (as widely believed) then, can we ask if men of power ever considered where lying to escape public scrutiny may lead? A popular children’s rat story should be enough: Dorothy Kilner’s Life and Perambulations of a Mouse, published in 1783 is a story of how not following the rules ruins otherwise good heads. It is the story of four rats whose foray into the wide, wild, world is with a warning from their mother on how to live well and live long: “Never be seen and never return to the same place twice.” They obey their mum for as long as she is around. But, her exit gives them the licence to enjoy life without the inhibitions of rules and mores.  “She was no sooner gone than the thought of being our own directors so charmed our little hearts that we presently forgot our grief at parting from our kind parent: and impatient to use our liberty we all set forward in search of some food, or rather, of some adventure.” They wantonly violated the two cardinal rules. “All of them, except one,” says Margret Blount, “come to bad, sad ends, caught by cruel humans, traps or cat.” Nigeria is a lying nation disrespectful of the truth and the law. What is it that all religions and cultures say will happen ultimately to lies and those who hawk them?

The president came back and addressed us. He didn’t mention common rats as the enemy at work while he was away. What he spoke about was that some E-rats used the social media to cross the red line in discussing the unity of the country. Red line is the “limit, past which safety can no longer be guaranteed.” The president was talking about Biafra and possibly the calls for the restructuring of the country. The president must have noticed that the tough talk has not done anything to stop further discussions on these topics. He must have noticed that the E-rats are everywhere dashing from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram and deep into the blogosphere to mock the powers and their red lines. He must be horrified that the E-rats are doing their thing unbothered by threats, and with voracious anger. The E-rats keep crossing the Lion’s red lines because the nation is dysfunctional. It is the dysfunctionality of the nation that gave common rats the audacity to attack the president’s office. Those talking and shouting and crossing red lines won’t stop because they feel that a nation where rats gnaw at lions is an unnatural, diseased enclave that must be fumigated. They feel that just as the president’s office is being restored after the rat invasion, the nation also urgently needs refining, retooling and restoration to its negotiated wellness. That is the way to go if the nation will be free of rats.