The Seun Kuti overkill

I shall begin this piece with a folk story. It so happened, we are told, that a motley crowd of vengeful people had stormed Baba Ijebu’s homestead with his badly beaten and bloodied young son in tow. Alarmed, Baba Ijebu asked the noisome crowd: “K’omo de se o?” (And what did the child do?) and they replied: “So n jale.” (He stole). Alright, Baba  Ijebu said, “Ke wen de se?” (And what did you do?) and they replied that they had given him a hiding. Baba Ijebu was livid: “Omo jale, wen na, wen tun bo wale. Wen fe po?” (The child stole, you beat him, and yet you still followed him home. You want to kill him?”).

Seun Kuti, the Afrobeat singer currently in the eye of the storm, is rude and uncouth, and seems to be perpetually angry. Kuti says a policeman almost threw him and his family off the mainland bridge and into the sea, and so he flared up and slapped him.  Hogwash.  Flaring up is ok, but slapping him? Gross. But that does not excuse the demonic script that the Nigeria Police is currently acting, cheered on by social media mobs pontificating on Kuti’s desecration of a national symbol that the police themselves desecrated through decades of brutality. Kuti turned himself in at the Lagos State Police Headquarters, Ikeja, but he was then “arrested” and moved to the State Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in Panti. A Magistrate’s Court in Yaba granted him bail but the “police is your friend” advocates would not let him have it. They handcuffed and made a spectacle of a suspect who voluntarily handed himself over to them, showing that this is not about justice but ego, and losing the sympathy of right-thinking people.

The police have been fishing for evidence, intent on charging Kuti with multiple crimes. As they say, where there is the will to convict, there is evidence. Hear Benjamin Hundeyin, the Lagos State police spokesman: “In the course of our investigation, we stumbled on certain suspicious things that needed to be proven/disproved beyond reasonable doubt. We, therefore, applied for and duly got a search warrant from the court which we have executed. Investigation continues. No law restricts the police to investigating only the initial crime.”

Hundeyin knows this is cant, but he can’t help himself. In his many tweets, he sounds like he would have had Kuti quartered if it was up to him: he is accuser, judge and jailor, his voice dripping with venom. Does Mr. Hundeyin really think that Nigerians are actually playing “loving you” with his joint just because a singer erred? Bad as Kuti’s slapping of a policeman was, it is nothing to be compared with the brutality and outright wickedness that this joint has visited on Nigerians for ages. Hundeyin’s men murdered, and still murder, many in cold blood. In case Mr. Hundeyin does not know, the US police that he referenced while turning a simple plea by Singer Peter Okoye into pugilism are not a model by any standards; they kill black people for sport, and other colours at the slightest provocation. And most Americans have gun rights but Nigerians do not. So, get off your referential high horse. The Yoruba say if the wicked make a case, it is not the wicked that will judge it.

Regardless of the antics of social media noisemakers taking their own pound of flesh from Kuti, Nigerians will never love a force that takes great pleasure in mauling them. Like a late singer argued: “You are all guilty; it is the person that dawn chances upon that is barawo (thief).” Approaching Seun Kuti as if he is nomadic terrorist and Boko Haram rolled into one, the police have been shouting themselves hoarse about justice, yet the criminals who, during the 2023 election, brutalized non-Establishment voters, are attending inaugural balls. Fulani herders are still butchering people as we speak but no police SAN is battling them in the court of law. The police are going after Kuti like the proverbial one-eyed person hosting a party. Well, as the Yoruba say, “eni a le mu la n ledi mo.” (It is the underdog that we dwell unnecessarily on).  .

This recalls the folk story of igbin (tortoise) and his vengeful in-law. Igbin committed theft and his in-law tied him to a pole, and all the people passing by and heading to the market mocked him and justified his in-law. But the tune changed when, returning from the market in the evening, the people still found igbin tied to the same solitary spot. They descended on the in-law, reminding him that his daughter would have partaken in whatever the erring son-in-law had filched. This is exactly what the Seun Kuti/police case has turned into. The prosecutors, instead of charging the Afrobeat singer with his actual crime of assault, have launched into a crucifixion. They have lost the plot, mired in their own bile. They have sought ex-parte orders, invaded Kuti’s home, sidelined his lawyers, conducted media trials, seized his wife’s phone, and turned themselves into Vendetta FC. They have become the proverbial esuru which, because of its excesses, has lost any respect in the eyes of pounded yam makers. They exude meanness, a prime quality of nasty people.

Like a musician once surmised: “A pin got lost and they summoned Sango. Surely, what they lost was more than a pin.” Moderation is key, which is why the Yoruba say the stump of plantain does not call for the sharpening of cutlasses. In reacting to an overkill, the Yoruba ask: This matter or another? (Oro yi a b’oro mi in?). And I ask: Are we still on this case or is there another? Do you want to maim Seun like you did his father for ages? What business do you have with his wife and her phone? Turning the case into comedy, the persecutors claimed that the assaulted cop was already in a coma. If so, the thousands of Nigerians they slap on a daily basis are in the cemetery.

If the Kuti family is yet to get over the horrible treatment of Fela and his siblings, the hatred and bile by the men in boots, it really should now. As they say in Russia, when anger and revenge get married, their daughter is called cruelty. And in Spain: No revenge is more honorable than the one not taken.