What’s my name? Which one is my name?

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He was named Calvin Cordozar Broadus at his christening. His father goes by the same name. Therefore, he is Calvin Cordozar Broadus Junior. Nobody knows his father. Put differently, his fans do not care who his father was. Yet they love him. Most of the millions of people who love Calvin Broadus Junior cannot tell anything about who his father is. As. As some of them contend, his father is none of their business, because he is not the one who has made himself known to them through his art. They just love him and swing to his numerous vibes no matter how awkward, how unbecoming, how lurid, how vile and how violent. That is about the major reason his songs hardly make it to airtime on the radio. And he has about 35 million of his body of work out there in different homes in the United States of America (USA) and other parts of the world. What this means is that if each of the 35 million of his albums had eight songs, there are about 280 million ways they have heard him say the things he says and preaches through his message.

Calvin Cordozar Broadus Junior is Snoop Doggy Dogg. He is far better known as Snoop Dogg than any other of the many names he had adopted along the journey of his spawning career. He had briefly gone by Snoop Lion, Dogg Father, and Big Snoop Dogg. He is also known in some circles as Snoop Rock, Snoopa Fella, Snoopzilla, and so on. His identity depends on where you find yourself with him. Indeed, a man adopts whatever name he wishes while outside his native community (Orúkotí ó báwunilàájéleyinodi). That is the case with many positively or negatively creative people. But even that still does not erase the man’s real identity. A man cannot hide his real identity from his people — just like saying a person’s underwear cannot fail to see the details of that person.

A fake identity, like lies, can only be covered by other layers of lies. Such beautiful but false aliases and borrowed cognomens can deceive, but only the wary and upright stand firm against such. Macbeth could not. Macbeth was dressed in borrowed robes by one of his men. He knew it was a deceit when the words of Ross hit him and covered him in beautiful verbal apparel. Macbeth did not hesitate to tell Ross so. Ross hailed Macbeth as “Thane of Cawdor” when he met him. Macbeth asked in response, “Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?” Macbeth knew that the owner of that identity, that accolade was the Thane of Cawdor who was still alive. So, he wondered why he was being dressed in the robes supposed to be reserved only for Thane. He called the hailing “borrowed robes” and initially rejected them. The end of Macbeth, according to that Shakespearean classic, had everything to do with those borrowed robes.

Snoop Doggy Dogg, born on October 20, 1971, was first marked as a promise when he featured in Dr Dre’s ‘Deep Cover’ in 1992. In 1993, Snoop Dogg came out big with his first solo album ‘Doggystyle’ produced by the same Dr Dre. He came out big because he debuted at Number One on Billboard 200 and Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip Hop Albums charts. The biggest hit in that album is the track: “Who am I (What’s My Name?”) Snoop Dogg has always had a different version of the same song and the same question: ‘What’s my name?’ in some, if not all, of his albums.

Interestingly, it is easy to trace the background of Snoop Dogg because even his father, Vernell Varnado, is a film actor who has an active social media presence. Vernell Varnado was born in December 1949 to Williams Varnado and Minnie Felder. See? Regardless of Vernell’s acclaimed absence as a father, Snoop talks so much about him. Snoop relishes his father’s influence on his music career, especially as it flowed from their mutual love for music. “Nobody comes from nowhere, stop saying ‘he just came from nowhere’” was a submission by comedian Destalker.

How did the name Calvin Cordozar Broadus Junior come about if his father is Vernell Varnado? Well, I am just snooping around like Atiku Abubakar.

Snoop, by one dictionary’s entry, is said to be “a person who furtively tries to find out information about someone’s private affairs.” The same dictionary further explains the word as “a furtive investigation.” Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the last general election went snooping in the USA for the name and academic records of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. However, I think Atiku Abubakar’s snooping in the United States was not furtive because he was in open court and had to notify the man he was snooping on.

Abubakar said he is convinced that Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not who Bola Ahmed Tinubu said he is and that the relevant people should help him throw light on this enigma. He is in court with his torch and while going about it, some other people who also believe that they can snoop made a discovery of their own. They said they found that the man who was searching (or is it snooping now?) for his father’s debtors had encountered his father’s creditors. The Bola Snoopers are delirious that the names of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar have changed over time from Kajoli to Sadiq to Abubakar. This, they think, removes any bully pulpit for the man on the matter. The issue has now become as rough as the limbs of the tortoise. Some busybodies have even done their snooping business beyond Atiku Abubakar. They have thrown their light also on Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the same election in which Obi and Atiku are in court to prove its lack of veracity. The issue has pitted supporters of the three big wigs against one another and its ugly, deafening noise is disturbing Nigeria and the international community.

The snoopers on Peter Obi said he carries a certificate which does not bear the name for which he is known. While standing close by, he got splashed with the mud Atiku and Tinubu are dragging themselves through. Now, Nigerians are back in their places as The Victims as exemplified by Isidore Okpewho in his brilliant book of that title. We the commoners are the victims of these heinous political power brokers!

For us ordinary Nigerians, leadership failure and inconsistencies have been perpetually presented like the silent cries as sung by Dionne Warwick in her 1964 classic ‘Walk on By’. She says “…You don’t see the tears, just let me breathe.” For instance, Tinubu and the other people at the top of the political and leadership ladder do not see the tears at the airports when the passport is Nigeria’s green. They should just let us breathe. They do not see the tears when people work months without salary and they have children to feed.

What brought us to all this snooping around? What triggered the torchlighting? I think they now call it gas-lighting. It is simply Tinubu’s opaque, difficult identity. I do not know how clean Nigeria would emerge from all of this messy name-calling and identity bludgeoning. It is shameful that simple things are so complicated in Nigeria. Who am I…? What’s my name? The answer, to which Snoop Dogg rapped smoothly and his band sang melodiously and made name and fortune, has turned out to be like rocket science in Nigeria.

Meanwhile, where is the presidential spokesman, Chief Ajuri Ngelale? President Bola Tinubu told us he would continue with the legacies of his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari. His lifting of the foreign exchange ban on 43 import items, including the celebrated toothpick of 2015, needs an explanation vis a vis his promise. We need to hear the president through Ajuri Ngelale. Or, could it be that the child has encountered the head of an elephant…?

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