| Urhobo Historical Society |
In
the face of the raging debate about the constitutional right of Dr Goodluck Ebele
Jonathan to stand
in for his boss as Acting President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria,
Nengi Josef Ilagha
throws a searchlight
into political affairs in Bayelsa, the
home state of
the Vice President. In this tenth chapter of Epistle to Maduabebe, the author fingers
some of the most notorious sponsors of corruption and graft whose
narrow-mindedness has kept the state retarded for the better part of
twelve
years.
Goodluck to Bayelsa
Some people stay so far in the
past that
the future is
gone before they get there.
- Anonymous
By His Majesty Nengi
Josef Ilagha
Mingi XII, Amanyanabo
of Nembe
Bayelsa State, Nigeria
|
T |
HE
POINT BEING made, sir, is that Nembe has
had quite a
long and illustrious line of kings, each one capable of giving a
sterling
account of his tenure in the vernacular. But no private secretary was
there to
take down notes on a daily basis, just so that nothing vital escaped
history.
Allow me, therefore, to bring to your notice that I am looking for a
job.
Specifically, I would like to be your private secretary, the way Odia Ofeimun was to
Chief Obafemi Awolowo.
Unlike Odia, however, I promise to publish
at least XII books on
you, if and only if you will be generous enough to grant me a special
scholarship to proceed to a writing school abroad, for a start.
But
let’s not forget the pleasantries. How is our governor, Pigatin?
Please tell him that it is time to move the state forward. We have
practically
been stuck on one spot for too long. Bayelsa
needs to
make progress, I tell you, and it is a great pity that we remain
planted in
1996. We are still in the twentieth century when in fact the world is
one full
decade into a brand new century and a brand new millennium. It baffles
me. How
did this happen?
Ani kule
mi miete wa
kebe seimokuma
o. Miete wa gbori
yo gho tie timi pigiri kuma
fa. Pigatin ebene wamini gboriyo
kieri kpomo te, Okpoama
pogu gho? Gbiriri yo ka fa.
Mi ka paga paga
ye!
I
don’t know about you, but I feel truly frustrated that a
writer-governor such
as my very good friend has no iota of respect for the printed word, to
put it
mildly. Which government makes a head-way without a vibrant local
press? Please
tell me. How many more times do you want to hear that the press has a
cardinal
duty to nurture truth in governance, and to
secure equity
and justice on behalf of the common man, such that full-fledged
democracy can
have a wider room for self expression? Is that too much to ask,
grammatically
speaking? Why bother to tell your neighbours
that you
have a radio station, a television station and a newspaper house
operating at
par, when in fact you fund the radio and television to the exclusion of
the
state newspaper, simply because the pope in charge of the newspaper
writes
epistles to the worldwideweb? Between you
and I, your majesty, if I ever get to meet Pigatin
face to face again, I am going to…
Never
mind.
This
is just between you and me, but if I ever get a chance to share
breakfast with
him on the first day of next year again, I shall compel him to approve
a
goodwill grant for Vineyard Press. Otherwise, you guys should just
announce ThankGod Igwe
as General Manager
of the Bayelsa State Newspaper
Corporation, and send
me on sabbatical to some far away land like Iowa or Rotterdam or Leeds,
where I
can spend time spelling my name to white people, instead of tormenting
you all
with epistles. Your majesty, please tell your nephew to send me abroad.
I feel
like sitting in a classroom. I feel very rusty. I feel like earning a
brand new
degree at yahoo dot com. I feel like spending the rest of my life
writing The Great Book Of
Life, chapter after chapter, volume after volume, until I become
something
of a book treasure at yahoo dot com.
In
my honest opinion, it is overdue for Governor Timipre
Sylva-Sam to seize the day and get the world trooping to Yenagoa,
and I don’t mean hosting his fellow governors alone to a post-amnesty
party. I
have in mind a world-class event hosted by
all the
governments of the world, with Yenagoa as
the New
Jerusalem, for which the tax payer in Bayelsa
will
not part with a dime. I mean something grand enough to generate
universal
goodwill, beyond standing on the Star of David.
I
think it will be a thing of tremendous honour
for the
governor if one of his humble servants goes beyond our humble literary
ken to
pluck a few feathers, even from among the busy medical hens cackling in
their
laboratories about bird flu and ebola. As
a poet in
his own modest right, Sylva ought to know what I mean. The other day,
on the
very first day of January, 2009, he recited a poem he had composed,
spanning
all XII months of the year. In five minutes, he had finished reading
the body
of the masterpiece, secured a resounding applause from the faithful
congregation at King of Glory Chapel, Creek Haven, and gone back to his
seat. I
obliged him a few claps as well.
Anyway,
I return to these blank pages merely to fill them up as assigned to me
by God,
first in class all the time. I need not stress unduly that I have
learnt a few
more words in the English dictionary since listening to Sylva’s poem. I
will
demonstrate this to the best of my ability in the rest of this epistle
and any
other that may follow. That should come as a plus to all of Nembe
Kingdom. In fact, it should be headline news on Radio Bayelsa.
Pope Pen comes with fresh metaphors fit for a king. David, shepherd of
his
lines, plays yet another humble tune upon his lyre.
What
shall I say and what should I refrain from saying? I will not hold back
anymore. I am tired of being choked by words. Your majesty, you have
been very
unfair to me in all ramifications. You have behaved in the same precise
manner
that Thompson Okorotie behaved some years
ago when he
was my next door neighbour. He took his
share, and
then added my share to his own, so that his stomach and only his
stomach
expanded. That is exactly what you have done to me, and continue to do
to me.
Let me put you in the picture.
As
Group Managing Director of the NNPC, you worked on strategies to fund
the NLNG
project on an equity share basis. Between 1992 and 1993, you even
served on the
board of the multi-national company, and raked in your millions in
local and
foreign currencies. Yet, many years later, you found it convenient to
deny a
young poet under your domain from accessing a token of the selfsame
NLNG
largesse, using your prime role in establishing the company as a wicked
tool, simply
because the said poet had directed pertinent questions at you in the
largest
possible interest of the community you govern.
You
practically threw spanners into the works of the Literature Committee
to the
effect that, rather than give the 2009 Nigeria Prize for Literature to
Pope Pen
The First, every poet on the long shortlist should come last, and the
prize
money go to charity. Well, well, well. Welcome to court. I have come to
plead
my own case. It so happens that I am Jesus Christ, so help me God. I am
the
final judge. I am the last jury. I am tired of observing this world
from the
vantage point of my humble cornerstone. I am fed up with your attitude
problems. How petty can you get? You thought you could get away with
everything, as usual? No, you will not. I have had it up to here,
looking upon
injustice flourish in the world.
Enough
is enough.
Let’s
face it. Your resourceful tenure as Group Managing Director of the
Nigerian National
Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, witnessed the production of a
comprehensive report
on appropriate pricing of petroleum products. It has since gone down in
the
history books that your report gave birth to the defunct Petroleum
Trust Fund,
PTF. Yet Bayelsa, your home state, suffers
a great
deficit with regard to petroleum pricing matters. As if that was not
enough, you
opted to sack the Pen Pushers Talking Front, PPTF, an independent media
outfit
under the auspices of Pope Pen The First,
PPTF, an
agency which seeks desperately to correct the anomaly through a random
opinion
poll.
These
are dire allegations, your majesty, enough to bring on a life-long aggro. How do you plead? Guilty,
no
doubt. Before you answer the next set of XII questions, let’s
take a
cursory look at your extra-credentials. You are an Associate of the
Royal
School of Mines, London, and an Associate Member of the American
Association of
Petroleum Geologists. You are also listed as a Fellow of the Nigerian
Mining
and Geosciences Society, and a Fellow of the Nigeria Association of
Petroleum Explorationists, for that matter
a distinguished recipient
of the prestigious Feyide Award for
Technical
Excellence. And to top it all, like a welcome recharge card, you hold a
Doctor
of Technology degree from the Technical University of South Korea.
These
are truly impressive credentials, sir, but they remain hollow for as
long as
they have no bearing on the lives of the ordinary people of Nembe,
to say nothing of the peace-loving people of Glory Land. In short, your
degrees
are many but you are poorly equipped to tackle simple examination
questions set
before you by toddlers. The tragedy of it all is that you couldn’t be
bothered.
You would rather lord it over one and all. So long as you can feed fat,
you
care not if your subjects grow lean by the day. So long as you can
grab, let
them gripe. That sounds like your daily credo, isn’t it?
Currently,
as you know, we have unsettled matters between us. On my part, I have
been
doing my utmost to get close to you but, for whatever reason, you bow,
shiver
and tremble whenever you happen to set eyes on me. Why is this so? Why
did you
go off your rockers, completely losing control of yourself, when you
saw me and
your nephew holding hands at Camp David in April 2007, when it was
clear he was
to step in as Governor of Bayelsa, taking
over from
Dr Goodluck Jonathan? Do you recall the
incident? No?
I will be only too glad to prod your memory, but I’m sure your nephew
can help
you out.
If
I have been plying you with questions tirelessly, it may well be
because I have
been watching Frank Edowo on national TV
in yet
another edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? I bet you couldn’t
be bothered to watch the programme. I bet
you are too
much of a millionaire to bother about such fiddle-diddle. You don’t
want to be
a millionaire, frankly speaking. You would rather be a billionaire, and
if
there is a higher category, I bet you will settle for that. As Jonathan
Obuebite, your royal clown would put it:
“Your royal majesty,
you are too much.” He can be counted upon to say that again and again,
feeling
really funky in the course of his assignment.
And,
as our fellow Nigerians would say, you are a bastard millionaire in
terms of
naira, kobo, and all the permutations of anda igbogi
that you have sold to the greedy
world from time immemorial. Even so, remember this. Aristotle Onassis,
one of
the richest men that the world has ever known, said at the end of his
life:
“Millions do not always add up to what a man needs out of life.” Do you
agree
with him?
Well,
if you do watch Frank Edowo in your spare
time, I bet
you answer every question ahead of the respondents. Before the options
following a question are reeled out, you know the answer already.
That’s quite
a brain you got under that stolen crown. I bet you simply go to sleep
in the
middle of all that brouhaha about placing long distance calls for
friends to
help out with dicey questions. Now, then, it’s your turn. What is the
difference
between 12 and XII? Feel free to place a call to any one of your
friends around
the mathematical world.
Come
to think of it, let the next question-and-silence session begin in
earnest.
There you are in the hot seat. Here I am facing you with a cool smile.
I remain
Pope Pen Prosperous To The Last Letter. Who are you? Let the bout begin
the
round. Let the round begin the bout. In the first place, your majesty,
how did
you get to be a millionaire? When did you get to be a millionaire? At
what
exact point in your life did you make your first million? How many
millions do
you have in naira? How many millions do you possess in dollars? And how
many in
pound sterling, to say nothing of yen in Yenagoa?
Don’t
take a break. How much in millions do you own of the Euro? Did you earn
all
these millions of soft and hard currency by hard labour,
or was there a soft little by-pass to it? I mean,
was
there an aggregation of kick-backs of various kinds that may have
transpired in
the cause of the countless transactions that enabled you to secure your
first
one million, and the many millions afterward at yahoo dot com? How many
side-kicks make one kick-back, and vice
versa? If you have a corner kick, would you rather set up a corner
shop
like the Pakistanis in London?
Your
majesty, when you snigger like that I get to appreciate your sense of humour more and more. I get truly glad when I
see you smile
the way you did just now. In itself, a smile is a wonderful kick. It’s
truly
like a rubber ball. Every smile has a way of bouncing back. And so,
your smile
brings us inevitably back to the worrisome questions that just would
not let me
sleep. May I crave your royal indulgence, therefore, to bring some
questions
from the closet into the open, in the hope that you might field them to
the
satisfaction of your conscience, to the relief of mankind, and
therefore to the
pleasure of God Almighty, first all the time in every class. In the
tradition
of Frank Edowo, therefore, please answer
the next
batch of XII questions to the best of your ability, as follows:
I.
In
your
considered opinion, what exactly did Chief Percy Diete
Spiff-Kien, acting on behalf of the Nembe Chiefs Council, mean by “your decades of
meritorious
and pacesetting contributions to the development of the hydrocarbon
resources
of our country…” as contained in a congratulatory letter to you dated
April 4,
2007, wherein he addressed you prematurely as Our Dear Mingi
XII?
II.
To
what extent
have your purported contributions to the said hydrocarbon resources of
our
country affected the lives of the ordinary people of Nembe,
to say nothing of the community as a whole?
III.
How
many sons and
daughters of Nembe Kingdom have you
encouraged to
take to your area of professional discipline, so that two or three
geological
disciples could add to your pioneering apostleship, in the overall
interest of
the Kingdom, and in view of the cardinal placement of the buoyant Nembe oil fields in the oil and gas calculus of
the modern
world?
IV.
As a
Board Member
of the Nigeria LNG Limited from 1992 to 1993, have you ever had cause
to lobby
the company, overtly or covertly, not to award the prize money of the
Nigeria
Prize for Literature to any winner in any given year to date, since the
inception of the award in 2004, simply to gratify your sense of
authority?
V.
Is it
possible
that you may have been tempted to do so recently, with particular
reference to
the 2009 edition of the poetry prize, on account of the fact that the
author of
Epistle To Maduabebe
stood a jolly good chance of winning the coveted prize money of 50,000
US
dollars?
VI.
What
end did you
expect this to justify and how much influence do you swing, anyway,
with the
committees that decide the Nobel Prize for Literature, to say nothing
of the Caine Prize, the Commonwealth
Prize, the Man Booker Prize,
the Orange Prize and the Griffin Prize, amongst others?
VII.
Since
your
emergence as king, how many trips have you made to Britain, and what
efforts
have you made, if any, to remind Her Majesty the Queen of the
historical verity
that, once upon a time, Britain succumbed to the superior military
might of The
Small Brave City-State?
VIII.
In
the light of the foregoing, have you ever thought
of cultivating the political mind of Britain to the possibility of
commemorating the economic ties established by Sir Taubman
Goldie under the Royal Niger Company, even if by way of reminding Her
Majesty
and Prime Minister Gordon Brown about repainting the White Man’s
Graveyard at Twon-Brass?
IX.
Dimeji Bankole, Honourable Speaker of the House of
Representatives,
recently declared at a public event that Sylva and other Niger Delta
governors
have been running their states on deficit budgets supported by loans
and
mortgages, in spite of staggering monthly allocations from the
Federation
Account over the years. What enduring projects have these huge
allocations and
loans funded in Bayelsa, and exactly how
much of misappropriated
funds have been remitted into your private coffers since Sylva came
into
office?
X.
Your
coronation
is believed to have been sponsored by the tax payer’s money. How much
was voted
for this purpose, and how much did you obtain at the personal level as
a
long-time benefactor and mentor to the gangling governor? What
percentage of
your take from the Halliburton bribe may have supported the event?
XI.
With
the benefit
of hindsight, what is your honest assessment of the governments of
Chief Diepreye Alamieyeseigha
and Dr Goodluck Jonathan? Did the latter
really bring good luck to
Bayelsa as was widely advertised by Jesus
Christ?
XII.
In
view of the
constitutional provision that the Vice President should step into the
shoes of
the President in the event that the latter becomes unfit to continue or
dies in
office, what is your reaction to the attempt by undiscerning Nigerians
to
impose the Senate President, or anyone for that matter, on the nation
over and
above Vice President Goodluck Ebele
Jonathan?