Senate, Melaye and the guts of suicide

FOLLY is the opposite of wisdom. And wisdom is the ultimate goodness, the very height of divine blessedness. We ride in a vehicle in which all that negate goodness take the front seat.  Even the foolish rates himself wise. Erasmus marvelled at how disingenuously folly is derided even by the greatest fools. You belong to the class of the wise when you do the right thing the right way. The Nigerian Senate lacks wisdom in doing the right thing the right way. Doing the right thing the wrong way is a mark of idiocy. Our Senate started by rallying in support of the ordinary Nigerian car owner whose rickety, only car was about to be wantonly seized by a Customs service wedded to impunity. The Senate soon rubbished its own good intentions ending up foregrounding uniform wearing by the Customs boss. And the wise swiftly snatched the initiative from the unwise, positioning itself as the friend of the people. How many car owners or even car dealers remember now that it was the Senate that wrenched them off the jaw of a Customs that lacks diligence at the nation’s borders? The only thing we remember about the Customs-Senate matter is the Hameed Ali-must-wear-uniform wailings. Any child that lacks wisdom cannot live. He will kill himself. Whenever I look at this 8th Senate, I see an institution with suicidal inclinations.

Senator Dino Melaye (Kogi, APC) got up to speak at the Senate confirmation hearing of the EFCC boss, Ibrahim Magu, two weeks ago. What he said was as important as how he said it. He wanted to introduce the adversarial report of the SSS to the inquisition of Magu. It was clear that that task was not cut out for the cowardly. Somehow, he felt what he wanted to do was a parliamentary version of taking the hemlock. And that was clearly foolhardy. To be foolhardy is to be suicidal. Melaye is an interesting person, bubbly, bold and self-indulging. He does his things with drama and great passion. He cares nothing if the whole world hates what and how he does his odd things. His name is interesting too. I once asked an elderly Okun man to unwrap the name “Melaye” for me. It means “I do not own the world.” No one does. Among the Yoruba, there is always an unbreakable link between a child and the name he bears. For Dino, that cryptic name may be his surname, but it speaks to the him the world sees in our public space. He does not own the world but he loves everything good in it – cars, money, power, attention and, should I add women? The one who does not own the world would not care about anything beyond living it to the full. Like the ancient Oyo’s Elesin Oba, “the juiciest fruit on every tree” belongs to Melaye and so does he take upon himself, the hardest and the nastiest task in the Senate. Life-loving Melaye got up in the Senate and said, “If you speak, you die. If you don’t, you die.” He lopped it off with a declaration that he was “ready to speak and die.” Then he released what obviously none of his colleagues could drop: the atomic report of the SSS. Death and dying are not ordinary words to define the consequences of an action. Anyone who faces death wide-eyed knows what he is up to. Dino was apparently not being literal in his definition of dying. He meant he was launching headlong into a battle with consequences. Class suicide, political suicide and economic suicide are all interconnected. Acting the bull in the marketplace may command attention, but it also has lashing consequences. Dino has, since that moment of speak-and-be-damned, been struggling with and against the principalities and spirits of immolation. He is, this moment, hemmed in by deadly tanks of war. But I won’t join the monkey of the mob to devastate his banana farm – at least, not until the full facts are out.

Suicide is self-murder, premeditated. Sometimes it is the last weapon of the defeated. Sometimes its synonym is honour. Cowards don’t commit suicide. It takes a lot of courage to take that route when all and everything is lost. We saw it in that young medical doctor, Allwell Orji who jumped to his death inside the Lagos lagoon days ago. Was it the same we saw in those two women who mimicked the doctor last week? Abigail Ogunyinka and Taiwo Momoh wanted death for themselves because they were in debt. They also tried jumping into the lagoon. What is it with the lagoon that has made it the latest attraction for life loathing souls? Were these women real or the attempts were what they were -mere attempts? Did anyone have to travel to the same area where a celebrated case was recorded a week earlier before jumping to death? The death-seeking women were indeed luckier than Doctor Orji. They are alive and well to tell their stories of failure. Their luck will be complete when and if they find someone who would buy back their debts. And like Dino, these women dominated the media space last week, becoming celebrities.

Suicide is supposed to be voluntary. If it is not, then unprefixed murder is it. But sometimes suicide is ordered, like court-ordered winding down of a failed entity. A country of hopelessness is a haven for suicidal thoughts and actions. It provides roadmaps for hapless ones to stab or shoot down their own existence. Throughout history, the powerful always induce the underdog to kill himself. Kings commanded out-of-favour subjects to voluntarily exit the world and they had to obey. Powerful chiefs advised kings to step down and step out of life. They had to do it too. The Japanese are quite fascinating in any discussion of suicide. They ritualize it, brewing it almost into some form of celebration. They have fashionable names for it – harakiri and seppuku, meaning self-disembowelment. Its purpose is dual: for honour and as punishment. Did I see it too in the past of the Yoruba? Among them, suicide knows no social class. It can be a stigma. Sometimes it is honourable – like the historical case in which the victim was named Kobomoje after the act. Death is a worthier option than suffering shame. That was why an Aare Onakakanfo must not come back home empty handed. You cannot lose and remain a Kabiyesi. The wicked king must leave the throne and leave the world in peace. Alaafin Sango ended his intrepid existence on a tree in Koso; his wife, Oya interred herself in the bowels of Ira in present day Kwara state. Soldiers in war would rather “do as men do” rather than be captured in battle. But it was an extreme option, the very last one even in those old, dark days of war and uncertainties.

So, what really is it that the trending word last week was suicide? There is too much frustration in the land. Too many snobbish leaders ruinously directing the affairs of the nation. Too many reasons for even the wise to want to end it all. Anyone to whom life is all pains cannot be said to be alive. He cannot value life. A doctor and two failed traders have shown a sad way out of life’s wickedness. There could be many more unnoticed and unreported cases. Many more could be cooking that idea, drawing inspiration from the lagoon experience and the attention it gave. Many more are killing themselves slowly, silently drenched in thoughts of the hardship of the moment. But dying is not the way. It is cheap; the easy, crude way out. Again, Erasmus: “What can be more dear and precious than life itself?”! Why would death become so suddenly attractive to a people who love life? Killing oneself is punished by every clan in Africa. You do not go that way because life is difficult. Doing it does not free you from the judgement of the unfair world. Doing it empowers that unfair and oppressive world to try and sentence even your corpse to indecent burial. The world is unfair. It is wicked. But the way to fight it is not to jump out of it and become food for its big and small fishes. The way to tackle the principalities is to fight through their columns and decimate them, whatever it takes.