In
this fourth chapter of Epistle To
Maduabebe, Nengi
Josef Ilagha’s tour de
force on corruption in high places, the poet practically pushes former
OPEC
President, Dr Edmund Maduabebe Daukoru,
off the Mingi stool with a commendable
knack for
tell-tale truism, and seizes the throne by force.
The Collapse of a Kingdom
In a time of universal deceit,
telling
the truth is a revolutionary act.
-
George Orwell
By His Majesty Nengi
Josef Ilagha
Mingi XII, Amanyanabo
of Nembe
Bayelsa State, Nigeria
|
D |
EAR MINGI MADUABEBE, if I have summoned the
courage
to address you as such, don’t blame me too much. Your younger sister
insists
that your title could be no better. She is truly upset with you on
account of
the spite she has suffered at your hands over the years. I have a furry
feeling
that you are on your own. If I were to tell you the kind of things
people say
about you in beer parlours, in offices, in
taxis and
in many homes I visit, you will promptly step aside from that sacred
throne in the
best tradition of Ibrahim Babangida, honourably speaking, when he came face to face
with the
truth.
And the truth is that your kingdom has
collapsed.
You rule only over the body you see every time you stand naked before
the
mirror. You have nowhere to hide, save behind bars. Quote me even in
your
bedroom. Tell your queens I said so. If I have ever been rude to you
before,
allow me to get even ruder than Evinrude.
I will
presently give you reason as to just why this is so.
In the first place, where did I go wrong if I
gave
some well-deserved publicity to the story of your own younger sister,
born of
the same womb as yourself? Until she turned up with her woe-begotten
story, I
had no idea where she erupted from. She was the one who volunteered
that she
knew me in the early seventies, just after the Nigeria-Biafra civil
war, when I
was but a school boy at Anglican Isoko
School, Apapa, Lagos.
I was known as
Teacher Pikin because my Father was a
classroom
teacher in that school.
This is how it happened. I came out of my
office on
the morning of February XII, 2009, having worked all night long like a
slave
working an endless shift, no leave, no transfer, more secure than all
the
security men put together, watching over the costly printing equipment
dumped
at the warehouse of the newspaper corporation by the Bayelsa
State Government for reasons best known to it. I stepped out to take a
breath
of fresh air, and there she was, seated right atop the slab of a
soak-away pit.
“God bless you,” said I to her in greeting.
She
raised her face from the copy of Chris Oyakhilome’s
Rhapsody of Realities she was reading,
and looked directly into my eyes. I could see great hunger and
dejection in
that face. I said to her: “Daughter, arise and walk away from that
place, for
the slab upon which you sit is cracked and could collapse even now, and
you
could drown inside the septic waste beneath you if that happens.”
She stood up promptly, and
said as follows.
“Noah, noah, noah.
Imiete.
Eri animi worio bo
na kige bo.
Eri amabo nto?
Eri Nembe bo nto?”
“Kesiye,” said I in reply.
“Eri Nembe
furo togu.”
“A ikiomo barambu ain wo paga te. Eri
tubo togu ne?
Toru kubu mi Ilagha
na
Alanyingi na owoma mein na
kige mi.”
“Iyorobo,
I koria nimi. Eri Alanyingi
na Ilagha na yai bodu.”
“Eri
ein gho tubo bai
ka nimigha?”
“Eri
bele da indi bei. Eri
Okparan bei bodu mi. Eri Gido
bei. Eri Iruka bei.
Eri Dajigegha bei. Eri Indukpurukpu bei.”
“Koko a koko. A gba
barambu paga te.
Ini ire mi
tei?”
“Eri Igbagara Nengi.
Eri Igbugburu Nengi. Eri Igbegumadudu
Nengi. Eri Kubor Nengi. Eri
Mingi Nengi, Oyi Main Findi.”
“A pa nimi
nimi gha, ei yo! Eri
iruo sou you Amanyanabo bei yo? Eri gbagba seiyo Mingi
Nengi bei wa?”
“Eri
abadi ogbo ngho kieri
kote indi bei. Eri Onana
Koko Owei bei.
Eri Egbegwabo bei. Eri mesele kiri
bio ngho ingbese
tinmi eki opinda
gho pura bo bei. Eri tundu ogono
ngho
ein kori eki sikomo tinmi
kasi mo numo pere bei. I Dau re I kori
tiemo worio.”
And
suddenly, upon your sister’s face came the light of epiphany, such as
was
beamed on a recalcitrant Saul along the road to Damascus, and she was
transformed in a Pauline way. She was promptly led to the Upper Room,
Vineyard
Press, Glory Land, where she gladly told her story in the presence of
Jesus
Christ, all ears and eyes open right behind her, and right before her.
So did
Augusta Idibiye Ombu
open up. So did Walanyo,
your selfsame
younger sister who stayed with you for five years of your life in
Lagos,
practically washing your dirty briefs while you drilled as much money
as you
could into your pocket, so did she tell her story. And, O, what a
pitiful story
Walanyo had to tell.
In
the end, I expressed my sympathy and volunteered an admonition, a short
verbal
epistle, if there was any. Arise and shine, said I, for the light of
the world
has come, like a thief in the night. To cut a long story short, since
the said
ordeal of your sister was published in Coastline
News Network, our local CNN, her light
has
continued to shine. To God be the glory. So
this is
the reason I address you the way I do, which is no sin really, since Maduabebe is the name your father gave you,
knowing your
destiny well enough. As for Mingi Madu,
the title and the name, it was your sister who called you that. I
merely
transcribed it in the course of the interview which, as you can see, I
have
done well to transform into a standard profile that may be read on CNN,
BBC, SkyNews and all the cable satellite
channels around the worldwideweb.
Next
thing I knew, you had sent hoodlums to raid
my house
and steal three of my desktop computers. May the Nigerian police locate
the
whereabouts of Ngotari Agai
and Tekenah Calmday. Next,
you sent the same bandits to break the glass door to
the production room of my worldwide news magazine, WWW. After that, you
sent
the leader of your band of juju priests, Joseph Douye
Otuogha, to strike at the spinal cord of
the
Corporation. Next thing we knew, the Chief Operator of the
seven-chamber King Colour 2000 rotary
press, Mr Diepreye
Kwokwo, was dead.
And
now, you dare to come after my daughter. How dare you? How dare you
attempt,
even conceive, the thought of abducting Pentecost? How dare you aspire
to shoot
God in the face? Who dares come after the children of Jesus Christ? All
the
saints of Heaven condemn you this day in the chosen year of
manifestation,
2009. Even the EFCC outrightly condemns
you to
prison. Let your conscience torment you henceforth, if you have any.
Let every
single detail of every sinful act you have ever committed show up like
sudden
ghosts before your six senses, stretching through the mirrors of time
into the
very crack of doom.
If
you dare touch any one of my own, you shall fast and never be fed. You
shall
shed tears that shall swell like turbulent waters until you drown in
them. Your
sorrows shall overwhelm you, even as Marie Corelli prophesied in her
book, The Sorrows Of Seiton. You shall wail endlessly in the
cauldrons of
Hell, and no one shall hear your voice. If you dare harm one hair upon
my head,
you shall be lost to night and day, lost to history, lost to politics,
lost to
geology, lost to your family, lost to the world, lost to yourself.
You
shall behold your sins in the full glare of your mind, and never stop
shuddering at the wicked spirit that inhabits your body. You are mean,
your
majesty. You gather, and continue to gather vanity into your secret
folds, even
as your bank accounts break out in a rash. In short, Seiton,
you are in trouble for all the terrible sins you have occasioned upon
the face
of the Earth since time began. You are in trouble for all the tattoos
you have
caused to be designed on the bodies of Adam and Eve. You are far more
terrible
than Osama Bin Laden, the bearded terrorist. You are far more horrible
than
George Walker Bush, the Anti-Christ.
You
are by no means terrific.
Let
me put your mind at ease for the rest of this humble epistle by
introducing
myself in simple terms. My name is Conscience, in case you do not know.
I
reside within you. I shall be very calm upon what is left of this page,
speaking only in a still small voice that you must have become very
familiar
with by now. Verily, verily, I enjoin you to do the same. Peace, be
still. It
is I. Indeed, I promise not to use any more big words, no wayward
metaphors, no side kicks. I shall be as
plain and as friendly as
possible in the few paragraphs to come.
At
any rate, allow me to congratulate you on your first anniversary in
office. I
couldn’t help but hear the din and clangour
of it all
upon the clouds of Glory Land. While you were having a field day
misappropriating valuable funds for the festival, I was whiling away
valuable
time, having quite a field day with this page, to say nothing of a
field night.
I have a feeling that you are already warming up to the second edition
of the
celebration. I dare repeat that you shall not last one more day upon
the
coveted throne. You shall witness the Son of Man sit in your place,
even as he
sits at the right hand of God, scribbling this very precipitate epistle
to you
at yahoo dot com.
Sit
tight. Don’t move until you are told to move. You are under arrest. You
had no
idea, did you, that God arrested you on
Saturday
February 23, 2008 when you took what does not belong to you, plotting
your
civil coups with a number of money-bag transactions across the creek,
from Igopiri through Anyama
Polo to Owusegi-Polotiri. Sit tight, I
say. Don’t you see the pair
of swords crossed in front of you? Your judgment has been pronounced
from
Heaven, and I have taken the trouble to transcribe it for the eyes of
the world
to behold and see, both of which amount to
the same
thing.
Beyond a cursory interest, you may have
noticed that
the national papers gave scant regard to the epistle directed at you in
January, 2009. You did your wealthy best to parry all XII questions by
shedding
serpentine tears over the phone to the pitiful hearing of your
houseboys and
palace guards. You equally did your jolly good plenty to overwhelm the
said
national press with your royal tears over Queen Gladys. Howbeit, you
cannot
take in every publisher in the worldwideweb,
can you?
Clearly, you cannot, and this copy of the unbelievable scroll in your
hands is
capital proof that you may have won the last age and the one before
that, but
you cannot win the Jesus Millennium.
Mene mene
tekel peres
upharsin…
Allow
me to remind you that your so-called coronation was marked by an
incident of
grave historical and symbolic import. It will be nice to hear you deny
that you
saw two posters, one wailing amidst a dire storm in the night, as
follows: Armageddon Has Come! The other, bearing
a rare, refractive first-hand image of the battered body of Jisos
Kraist on the cross, proclaiming clearly
that
Messiah, King of Kings, Lord of Lords &
Prince of Peace, has come…like a thief in the night. If you claim not
to have
seen those proclamations, and nobody brought them to your attention,
ask all
over town. None of it may have made any sense to you then as now,
because it is
the portion of the wicked to forget their wickedness. But not so the
long-term
sufferer, not so the owner of the body knackered to bleeding stripes in
Pilate’s court. Not so the nostrils of the Lamb of God who inhaled so
much of
the smell of his own blood, determined to have it shed, if only to
redeem Adam
from sin.
What
is more, it is a pity indeed that, up to now, you still think it
beneath you to
ask me just how I marked the first year of my anniversary. Or, have you
forgotten so soon that I was proclaimed Mingi
Nengi XII on the front page of the WWW
edition dated Sunday
February 24, 2008? In other words, Heaven registered my face as the
recognized Mingi and substantive Amanyanabo
of Nembe twenty-four hours before you
appeared in the
papers. How do you like that? And your face when it finally showed up,
unlike
mine, was far from the front page.
Now
that we are talking strictly about home matters, you may wish to share
a few
sentiments with me. Why did Mary Queen
and Otimibara go about town half naked,
sweeping the
streets of Nembe with brooms and dumping
the debris
in invisible bins? Vooooooh! Has it ever crossed your mind that
their act was a rite of purification for Nembe,
given
the fact that they had seen beyond their noses to the day when the Mingi stool would be seized by Maduabebe’s
unholy army? Think again. Think hard.
Since
your foul coronation, I have had time to interact with quite a few
eminent sons
of Eden and feel duly gratified that a book by the title of Epistles
To The
Small Brave City-State – the result of painstaking concern over the
future
of our land – is in press to serve as an accompanying volume to this
book. The
spirit of courage it evinces will serve the memory of our honourable
forebears, and inspire the patriot in every Eden son of the present and
future
generations.
One
of the precipitate opinions expressed about your inordinate rise to
power is
strong enough to catch you napping. It goes to show that there are
thinkers
amongst us who are shy of speaking their minds for fear of reprisals
from the
contingent of army and police personnel you have stationed in Nembe to guard your interest. As a thoughtful
young Edenite put it, “The rise of Maduabebe
to the throne of Nembe marks the rise of Seiton over the affairs of the world. Maduabebe
represents the serpent. The serpent has a double tongue. Whether the
serpent
blows hot or cold air, in the end, the serpent spits venom. It goes
without
saying, therefore, that in spite of how nice Maduabebe
might pretend to be for now, his big fat ambition is to wrap as much
loot as he
can gather into the labyrinth of his selfish fold, to kill and to
destroy, to
bring the world to its knees.”
That
fits you perfectly. You are an extremely selfish man. Your neck may
look dry,
but your bank accounts are oversize. And
lest I forget, the unacknowledged Nembe
philosopher
of blessed memory, Ayebaegberi Teknikio,
appeared to me in a dream on the eve of your coronation. He asked me to
invite
you to a marathon debate, face to face, at King Koko Square,
both of us proclaiming
our manifesto for growth and development in Nembe,
after our individual fashion. On my
part, I cannot wait for the opportunity. The Kingdom stands in
dire need
of progressive ideas.
Have you considered reviving the memory of
the late
philosopher and collecting his works, besides transcribing his ideas
into a
meaningful whole? I put it past you. No doubt you can take the next
query in
your strides. It comes from him. As a geologist, he says, what is your
interpretation of the tradition that forbids the sale of periwinkle
flesh
within and outside Nembe, while allowing
the shell to
be sold in any market? That should put you in the mood to take the next
XII
questions at yahoo dot com.
I.
Is it
true that
you are good at putting on tape the wild and provocative movements of
female
dancers at every other night vigil you attend in Nembe,
as in iworoko,
for purposes of nursing your private fantasies
at horny time dot com?
II.
Is it
true that
you formed a bad habit of visiting strip-tease night clubs whenever you
traveled abroad, as a natural offshoot of being an iworoko habitué on vinyl, one in the
particular business of sticking folded dollars and pounds into waiting
pudenda,
while enjoying a great laugh?
III.
What
is the exact
nature of your sexual relationship with Susan, your white girl friend
in Zurich,
Switzerland, who is reported to have insisted that you continue to eat
of her
forbidden fruit at yahoo dot com before commencing the real thing? Are
you
guilty or not guilty of this grave sin of the soul with Susan alone, or
with
Monica, Margaret and Sybil as well?
IV.
When
last you
looked at a photograph of yourself as a boy, did you see a tyrant in
the
making?
V.
What,
by the way,
is the current population figure of Nembe
clan? How
many war-canoe houses make up Bassambiri,
and how
many periwinkle shells make up Ogbolomabiri?
VI.
What
purpose does
it really serve if you alone hijack every cause in Nembe,
and eliminate your own subjects whom you perceive to be your opponents
and
competitors in social and political circles?
VII.
Since
when did Nembe become a prefix limited to Ogbolomabiri
and Bassambiri, rather than the
all-encompassing
suffix it has always been for the entire clan?
VIII.
Why
did you find it necessary to post a kite to the
effect that Senator Nimi Barigha-Amange
and Chief Pedro Adukpo-Egi Ikata
may have connived to sponsor the last epistle to Maduabebe?
Were you looking for an excuse to molest somebody?
IX.
By
whose
authority do you occupy the throne of Eden, sitting as His Royal
Majesty Mingi XII, Amanyanabo
of Nembe?
X.
If
Jesus Christ demands
that you step aside from that throne right now in order that he may
occupy it
and pronounce judgment upon the world, wouldn’t you gladly do so? Or,
having
returned to earth, don’t you think Messiah deserves a befitting Kingdom
from
which to reach out to the sundry kings and princes of this world?
XI.
Are
you hard of
hearing? Don’t you recognize the signs of the times? What are you
waiting for?
How far do you think you can run, and in which bunker do you mean to
hide?
XII.
Where
were you
when I needed you?