The palace as leper’s colony

SOMETIME around 740 BC, Uzziah, King of Judah, bought himself leprosy with the currency of haughtiness. He wanted to transmute into a priest and burn incense. Here’s how 2 Chronicles 26 records his tragedy: “And they (priests) withstood Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the LORD, but to the priests the sons of Aaron, that are consecrated to burn incense: go out of the sanctuary; for thou hast trespassed; neither shall it be for thine honour from the LORD God. Then Uzziah was wroth, and had a censer in his hand to burn incense: and while he was wroth with the priests, the leprosy even rose up in his forehead before the priests in the house of the LORD, from beside the incense altar. And Azariah the chief priest, and all the priests, looked upon him, and, behold, he was leprous in his forehead, and they thrust him out from thence; yea, himself hasted also to go out, because the LORD had smitten him. And Uzziah the king was a leper unto the day of his death, and dwelt in a several house, being a leper.”

What happens when ruffians rule? They recreate society in their rotten image, desecrating the palace of gold, like Antiochus Epiphanes, the nonentity who obtained the Seleucid (Syrian) throne by flattery, plunged the palace into debt, and died a most debilitating death fighting needless wars. King Uzziah at least recognized his leprosy, and hasted into oblivion, unlike certain impostors in this land who look at themselves with a smile while the public cries bitter tears at their pitiable sight. Over to the gangam drum: “Inu igbo l’obo n gbe (2ce) /enikan i k’ole adete s’igboro/ Inu igbo l’obo n gbe.”  Gloss: It’s in the forest that a monkey dwells/No one builds a leper’s colony in town/ It’s in the forest that a monkey dwells.” Sadly, that is past like Shakespeare’s prologue: today, the palace is a leper’s colony, the place from where the town’s misery is minted. And so I ask again: what happens when lepers rule? A leper with a gun is far more dangerous than any unarmed soldier: if he doesn’t kill others, he will kill himself. Proverbs to the destroyers of inheritance, the arunguns and akotiletas in palaces; dark-goggled brutes, lieutenants of the owls that used to wake us seasons ago, the owls that Tanure Ojaide loathed with passion. Who sprung this tragedy upon us that only the basest of us should rule us, flaunting their illogic in our faces, telling us that red is black? A land where the man of books serves a heartless herder, and where the main opposition figure is a retired thief, has no future.

Hey, have you seen your neighbor in the house yonder? The dictator roams about, utterly confused. He is a Gbewudani, Omo Aijoberi, the alien to quality broth who splashes generous drops on his chest in his haste to wolf it down. You see, the robe they gave him isn’t his own, and he constantly desecrates it with saliva. He looks like a bag of beans, lost and utterly confused. Dandogo is not the kind of wear a child puts on. Its flow and embroidery place it quite beyond the casual. No one sews Dandogo at a whim, but it’s now been forced upon a mental child, and a fool to boot, and he’s totally drained of juice, lost like meat in a miser’s mouth. He himself is slime, fat like his forebears with a history of bribes and oppression. The dunce found a buffalo by the shore and immediately reached for opportunistic knives. Does he think it drank itself to death? His leprosy is legitimacy crisis, it is without cure, and he will cry rivers of tears. Hear the Abami Eda, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, reminding the nation that even animals wear suits (and I’ll add, with ties to match!) : “Animal dey wear agbada/animal dey put suits o.” The Tapa (Nupe) man can’t believe his luck: he has enough space (in another man’s land) to build his masquerade a house. He is Gongosu, King of Edidare, foolish to the extent of his wisdom, razing houses that took years of sweat and grime to build.

Strange things are happening in the land: the daughter carried a pregnancy but it was her mother who birthed the baby. It is a case, like the Ibadan people say, of misfits in conjugal union: the husband is an imbecile, the wife a nitwit: “Abunu meji n fera won o, Abunu meji n fera won o, oko dindinrin, aya o gbon, abunu meji n fera won.” There can be no hope when the land is ruled by a conclave of past, present and aspirant criminals, yesterday’s robbers ruling today with ferocity. I hear that every emperor’s son is an apprentice lunatic. Hmmm. Strangers now rule a captured land, rubbing their impunity in the people’s faces. For secretaries they go to distant lands, polluting the palace placed in their opportunistic care. I have said, and will not repent, that the problem of this land is madmen with pots of money. Christopher Okigbo, unmatched even in death: “If they share the meat let them remember thunder.”

The tenant goes about town demolishing homesteads. Don’t blame him because the throne he occupies is not his own. He sees no one in town qualified enough to be a town crier, and pray what will his gong tell an unwilling populace? Enter Niyi Osundare (My Lord, tell me where to keep your bribe): “Shall I haul it up the attic/Between the ceiling and your lofty roof/Or shall I conjure the walls to open up/And swallow this sudden bounty from your honest labour/Shall I give a billion to each of your paramours.” The wigged demons, consorts of the Sallah-suborned lawbreakers lately charged with an obsession with alien waists, are courtiers of our tenants on the throne, and they will not cease until they have plunged this land into hell along with themselves.

Over to the gangan drummers: “Gongosu, Edidare, b’o se gbon to na lo go to/Gongosu, Edidare.” Proverbs to rivers of ruin.

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