Village things and village people are performing theatrical exhibitions in the presidential and gubernatorial palaces of the powerful. They are replicating village behaviours. They are fighting over communal property, access, and laying down the path to dictatorship.
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Villages are the home place of parables. It is best to share these tales through that time-tested tradition. Self-inflicted home trouble assails the many palaces of our land.
Various genres of theatre continue to play out in the high areas of our country to the disappointment of citizens. It would have been funny if it were not so sad. Unfortunately, citizens joined in the performances either for comic relief or in the manner of if you cannot beat them you join them.
Command performances with different characters have held in the nation’s premier palace. There was a skit about a wedding. The hilarity on the street was loud and unrestrained. While it lasted, persons to stop it with the armour of fact and truth played safe. They spoke after-the-fact!
Maybe it was just as well and in the best traditions of Machiavellianism. The Italian strategist is on record as advising leaders to create diversions that would occupy citizens. There would seem to be no better time to do so as when proposals and threats undermining the pockets and wellbeing of those citizens are flying forth from MDAs. The skit occupied both the chattering and thinking classes from the evidence on media platforms. Everyone had a wild time playing guest and mimicking our wedding traditions.
The vaudeville continued to play out in the Big Palace with the release of candid-camera videos and interviews on foreign media. The cousin-in-law sought to establish a claim to part of the palace in traditional homestead behaviour. The reverberations are still abroad. It fetched a gift of an unconstitutional office with no fewer than six additional aides for the Spouse of the nation.
Much more dramatic events of a sad genre continued to play out in the states. Many of the monarchs in the palaces of the semi-sovereigns displayed a readiness to copy the disdain for the rule of law and atavism. They replicated the statement of the French king that “the state is mine.”
In God’s own state, a young man fearful for his life deployed the tools of the modern age to capture the vile threats of a close aide to the monarch. The aide threatened to make him disappear if he as much as says one more word askance against the power holder. The threat came at a time when the smell of the principal city of the state was threatening to cloud all the activities of the lead actor. It was the outcome of village fervour gone overboard in dealing with city matters.
In the nearby land of Canaan, the lead actor took matters into his hands. He would not stomach any criticism of any kind and thus involved a willing security apparatus in imprisoning a professional storyteller even before the pronouncement of the court. Now saying a negative word amounts to treason in Nigeria, 35 years after the King of the Hill made such a faux-pas the law of the land.
The tragic drama continued in the palace a heartbeat away from the Main Theatre. The tragedy here involves two cooperative arms of government. Even after a court-ordered enquiry returned a verdict of not guilty, the minions in the Assembly ignored law and convention to push a deputy out on the streets. Now they stand accused of shooting the deputy!
In the exercise of puny power and urge to satisfy the new Emperor of no clothes, they willingly created a case study and template of impunity. Who can hold me accountable is the arrogant disposition of the ruler of this kingdom. He is the new Ozymandias. Like Ozymandias, all of them seem to be saying, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” speaks to the futility of power and human efforts to immortalise the powerful. Ozymandias is the title of the Egyptian king Rameses who tried to memorialise himself with a statue. The ruins of the figure in just a few years intrigue the poet as well as the narrator telling him the story.
Ozymandias is a fitting point of emphasis for this parable. History bears out the futility of all attempts to play the divine by holders of temporary power. Nepotism at the seat of power almost always breeds contempt for proper conduct, then shame and despair. Nepotism, vaudeville, disrespect for law and order, bad examples and inappropriate behaviour are standard features of the many palaces of our land. It is not fitting.
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CHIDO NWAKANMA
