Several years ago when Gen Sanni Abacha was military head of state, many Nigerians, maybe out of fear or servility, would wear a brooch with the picture of the dreaded General on it. General Abacha had earned the sobriquet ‘maximum ruler’ – he had just killed Ken Saro-Wiwa and the international community had designated Nigeria a ‘pariah’. Matters even got to the extent that if you were not dressed in a certain manner in Abuja, you were considered a semi-enemy of the state, and likely to be confined to oblivion. A lot of Nigerians seeking contracts and favours from government offices got the cue, and what we often refer to as ‘by force and by fire’, they would giddy up and be shod like Abacha or would simply don a brooch with his photo and generally got by.
That same culture eventually crept into and pervaded the corridors of supreme political power in Nigeria, and indeed around government circles as we became a democracy. People would dress like the man in power and arrogate to themselves ownership of Nigeria. Two of those epochs were the epochs of Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari. During the Jonathan Presidency, his kinsmen and indeed those from the South-South were seen as ‘owners’ of Nigeria because their ‘person’ or ‘son’ was in power. They were offered juicy contracts, granted extremely free access to the Aso Rock, and walked with the swag of a bourgeoisie. At that time, I had a friend from the North of Nigeria who basically was afraid to carry on normally when he was about me, reason being that ‘na your person dey power’. All the explanations that I made that I had never met Mr Jonathan, and therefore there was no way he is ‘my person’, could not assuage his nerves and feelings of being an outsider even in his own country.
Then suddenly the table turned. A Fulani man became president, and Nigeria automatically became a Fulani country. The Fulani overnight transformed from itinerant cow and goat herders to the owners of Abuja. They led their cows right through the city centre, formed a very vocal group, the Miyetti Allah, and threatened to drive the rest of us away from Nigeria if we did not behave. They decided policy and set the agenda for the rest of Nigeria. That friend of mine I had mentioned earlier is Fulani. Anytime I tried to see him in his office after Buhari became president, it was as if I was before the American or British Embassies seeking visas. General Buhari also began to operate as a clansman. He vigorously pursued the Fulani agenda to the extent that plans were on ground to take people’s lands and dash them to one obnoxious programme known as RUGA. In case nobody has noticed, that same group, the Miyetti Allah, has become as mute as a pole since after Buhari left office as president. Nobody knows today that they once held the rest us to ransom and threatened to drive us into the sea.
Prior to the change in leadership early 2023, Nigerians began to hear a chant or mantra associated with one of the candidates for election as president. His name is Bola Ahmed Tinubu, whose followers often sang the song, ‘On Your Mandate we shall stand’. They followed their leader’s cue by buttressing that song with the ‘emilokan’ dogma which they used to score some political mileage. That dogma which to my mind promoted a paternalistic and self-ululating philosophy verily transported me at that time to three epochs of political misdemeanour. One of those epochs was the epoch of Louis XIV who once declared, “L’État, c’est moi” (I am the State, and the State is me), before the French Parliament in 1655. Another epoch we were to hear this kind of odoriferous sentiment was during the epoch of Adolf Hitler, and which he encapsulated in his Mein Kampf, a document which Wikipedia says the brutal dictator used to establish the ideology for the Holocaust wherein he identified the Jews and “Bolsheviks” as racially and ideologically inferior, thereby establishing his own ‘Emilokan’. I am certain that a lot of our readers will remember that that sentiment that Bola Tinubu kept expressing at that time, the ‘emilokan’, may have reminded them of that epoch, just before IBB stepped aside. All manner of army generals at that time – David Mark, Bamaiyi and the Dongoyaros of Nigeria – all claimed that it was their turn after Abacha to be head of state, certainly establishing the huge conspiracy and scam underneath the veil of governance in Nigeria at that time.
It will be impossible not to have cringed when, therefore, some of us began to listen to the “emilokan” and “On Your Mandate” chants during the campaigns in 2022/2023. Most of us who expressed a foreboding, that Nigeria was going to be run on the emilokan philosophy, were again insulted and further lampooned by those naïve individuals with little or no inkling of Nigeria’s humhumhum. And yet, when on Wednesday, 29 November 2023, President Tinubu, at the Joint Session of the National Assembly, presented the 2024 Budget tagged ‘Renewed Hope’, all members of that esteemed body rose up to sing the “On Your Mandate” chant. I heard it reported but as I tried to listen to it on Youtube, my heart sank. I didn’t have the heart to go through that ordeal. Just after the French Revolution of 1789, Parisians often said that ‘bliss was it at that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven’. On the morning of that day that the National Assembly stood up, APC, PDP and LP, to attention to chorus Bola Tinubu’s On Your Mandate campaign mantra, Nigeria’s national anthem was flushed down the toilet, heralding the dawn of another epoch of clannish aspirations and tendencies.
