Olusegun Obasango, as PDP presidential candidate, walks through a cheering crowd during a rally in Minna, the capital of Niger state, on February 22, 1999. Photo: Corrine Dufka/Reuters
Hypocrisy: mouth one way, belly ‘nother way.
– Australian Aboriginal proverb
READERS of Adamu Adamu’s highly successful newspaper (and later magazine) column, “Definitions in Humour,” should kindly forgive me for changing the ‘H’ in his title with an ‘R’ for the caption of today’s column. My choice was due to the disturbing fact that there is queer correlation between humour and rumour, in the sense that one can lead to or even create the other. Remember the late Tai Solarin’s one-man match (at that time they didn’t conceive of million-man matches) to protest what he heard in an overloaded molue — that top government functionaries had swept the treasury clean? The story turned out to be a rumour and, instead of Nigerians to get angry with the radical old man, everybody laughed.
Nigerians are ever so humorous. And they love their humour as much as they relish rumours. They live on “Have you heard that… ?” In an overpopulated tower of Babel like Lagos, rumours are a dime a dozen. Lagosians seem to know everything about everything everywhere. They know what the First Family have for breakfast, where they sleep, what makes the First Lady happy or angry, the lucky guy the First Daughter falls in love with, how much the Head of State has in his savings account abroad or even the private things he tells Fati Lami Abubakar in the top-secret confines of his bedroom, etc., etc. No wonder the Lagos magazines are full of lurid tales about things they got from their “usually reliable sources.”
Last weekend’s rumour about the supposed death/assassination of President-elect Obasanjo was, however, an overkill. It must have grown, like many others, out of a drunken chat in a molue. ” has been killed along Iyana Ipaja/Ota road,” whispered the gossips with amazing incredulity. And there is something about a Nigerian rumour: it travels faster than any tabloid junk — or even faster than light. In Lagos, rumours burn through psyches like a wild fire. According to the Nigerian Tribune last Wednesday, “In Lagos, Ibadan and Abeokuta, there was palpable tension in the air around 6 p.m (on Monday) when the rumour spread like wild fire that General Obasanjo had indeed died.”
The result when the dam finally broke was a confused tumult reminiscent of the infamous June 12 troubles of 1993-94. People were killed, property were destroyed and socioeconomic activities were paralysed. All for the sake of a rumour. A bemused Chief Obasanjo had to appear on the network television refuting the false alarm. That doused the rumour’s flames. It sent many people, reportedly including Obasanjo himself, careening into a rib-tickling, bellyaching laughter. They saw the whole episode as just another side-attraction in our equally tantalising slide towards democratisation.
One can, however, give a deeper definition to the strange occurrence. In Abeokuta, the president-elect’s home town, motorists had moved around the town in convoys from 7 p.m., with their headlights on, shouting, “They have murdered Obasanjo!”
The question is: who are “they”? This writer’s presumption is that “they” means either the military and or the Northerners. Whoever started the rumour knew that if by any chance a Yoruba man elected as Nigeria’s president soon after the nation had come out of the June 12 debacle is dead before swearing-in, it would give the impression that he was assassinated by only Northerners opposed to power shift. Or he could have been eliminated by a faction of the military either opposed to democratisation or opposed to Obasanjo as a person — or both.
That ethnic banner must have been flown by the tribal jingoists behind the Great Rumour. Moreover, they must have relied on the ignorance of the rioters who couldn’t recall that Obasanjo’s main support base before and after his election is the North. And by the North here, I mean the whole Northern power structure, which includes the military. For anyone to think that Obasanjo was killed by “them,” they must have been expert in the art of sectional propaganda.
Northerners, rather than South-westerners, should have been the ones who rioted on hearing that the man they massively voted for was killed. For it was the North that stood by him when his own ethnic group rejected him at the polls. For, during his presidential campaigns and after, Obasanjo was called names by the South-western elite, described as just another military man, unfit to be a democrat, a Northern lackey and even likened to his erstwhile tormentor, Gen. Abacha. Many wished him dead. Some so-called Yoruba ‘prophets’ (the rabble-rousers brandishing questionable spiritual credentials) predicted that Obasanjo would die before 29 May. And the Lagos-Ibadan papers even gave them the lead headline continuously.
So why the fury when you heard that your enemy was dead? Why become violent?
Time magazine once said, “Violence is, essentially, a confession of ultimate inarticulateness.” This description is befitting of any arsonist, murderer and name caller who acted negatively on the Obasanjo rumour. South-westerners, by the fashion of their latest overreaction, have proved that they would continue to be violent under any circumstance. The pity is that such “inarticulateness” is committed in the name of promoting democratic ideals. Going haywire over the death of a man you opposed isn’t a way of showing your democratic ideals; it’s sheer hypocrisy.
Thank God the president-elect is hale and hearty, ready to be sworn in next Saturday as Nigeria’s second executive civilian president. Where I come from there is a saying that if someone wishes you ill as you’re setting out on a journey, it means that you are going to reach your destination safely and come back likewise. Obasanjo is carrying us on an exciting journey. We can’t wait.
* Published in my column, Melting Pot, in the New Nigerian Weekly today
