Violence has acquired a new meaning in this election season. The old menu is passing away: Ballot snatching, bullies, glitters of knives and machetes dripping blood, barehanded goons, gunmen on rampage, bone-mangled streets, subdued alleys, cars and homes in ruin, innocents on the run. From sanguinary to the sanguine.
Technology is upstaging all that theatre, if we do not reckon with IPOB’s daredevil daring. We now are enshrining the sort of violence that Festus Iyayi lamented in his novel. A violence without the blood. No thanks to Godwin Emefiele and the men who crest Nigeria’s hierarchy of oil.
It is our perversion of genius. We have always known how to reinvent our stories. Gunmen out. Conmen in. The con is happening in our body politic. This essayist wept over the new invisibilities of cash and fuel. They told us they have enough fuel for all. We cannot see it. But only those atop the hierarchy of oil can see it. We have become blind men walking. Emefiele says he has enough cash in circulation. We cannot see them. ATM machines cannot see them. The bank clerks and CEOs cannot see them. Only Emefiele and his men can see them. We are also blind. We are doubly blind.
That, it turns out, is only one level of a ghostly era, a ghastly error. Fuel is called motor spirit. We have fulfilled the name. It has become a spirit. As Jesus told his apostles, “A spirit has no blood, bone or flesh as you see me have.” In his play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare said, “In the spirit of men, there is no blood.” Fuel is the blood of the car engine. When it loses its blood, the car’s spirit vanishes. It is dead. The same is happening in the world of money. Without money, what can we do in a modern economy? The scriptures say money answers all things. Now money hampers all things.
That is not the only spirit of the age, our version of the word zeitgeist. Asiwaju Bola Tinubu drew our attention to another dimension of ghosts. There are two types of ghosts: corporeal or embodied ghosts and disembodied ghosts in this political reason. Ghosts are wholly spirits. When Tinubu said it, it ignited a pushback from some who thought he was clutching at straws. He said there were some people who did not want him to win the election, and last week this column was the first to make the point that some people did not win the APC primaries and their sponsored candidates were still wallowing in their shellacking. They wanted to be spanner in the works. I concluded with a Shakespeare quote that it is easier to play with a lion’s whelp than with an old lion. Not long after, Governor Nasir El-Rufai confirmed it. He made some revelations first with Okinbaloye at Channels and elaborated on it in his interview with TVC’s Journalists hangout. Journalists like us do not say everything we know. When Dele Giwa wrote this, I wondered, as a student, at his restraint. Not so now. El-Rufai, for his revelations, is still restrained. He did not mention names. He did not cite episodes. But he revealed that in the combustion of the primary run, some villa tenants encouraged northern governors to muddy the waters by buying forms.
These are the corporeal ghosts in Aso Rock. The ones that, as Shakespeare alluded to in Hamlet, “are doomed for a certain term to walk the night.” They are the night marauders of APC, the nightmares of democracy, the wizards and spoilers of presidential ambition. Tinubu added a new spectre to the plot. He alleged that they so hate his prospect to be president that they are contemplating the Samson option. They want to pull down this democracy and pave the way for an interim national government. They have wet dreams of a new Shonekan. In words of Poet Leopold Senghor, all their “dreams made dust.”
They are also making ghosts of Tinubu. Anywhere he goes, anything he says gives them the creeps. They failed to kill his ambition. They even wanted him to die of illness. But he is the most travelled presidential candidate, lapping up miles on road and in the air. They have made Tinubu into Banquo’s ghost haunting them like Banquo did Macbeth. They are screaming, “avaunt and quit my sight. Let the earth hide thee. Thy bone is marrowless and thy blood is cold.” They are appalled that Tinubu’s blood is still warm and he will not quit their sight. He whispers them awake in their sleep and pinches their buttocks at their seats. Hence, they want, in the language of the Bible, money to fail in the land.
Another man chasing ghosts is Atiku Abubakar. He said he was in talks to ally with NNPP and Labour Party. Obi said, no dice. Kwankwanso said, “na lie.” He was speaking with ghosts of both parties.
But he is in cahoots with the presidency and the CBN governor by his own Freudian confession last week. He said the CBN and presidency should remain steadfast and not postpone the deadline for the currency change. He describes what we are going through as “little inconvenience.” Why did he say “presidency” and not president. This confirms what El-Rufai has said. Some folks in the villa want Atiku as revenge for their disaster at the APC primary. The Kaduna State governor said these fellows have never even won a local government election.
Atiku has been wishy-washy on the currency crisis. He wanted it before he did not want it. After I poked fun at him last week for following Tinubu’s path, he exercised a pirouette. He now says we can ignore the people’s suffering. Did he see the naked woman at a bank, the fellow who slumped and died on a queue in Asaba, the fellows who cannot get money to buy fuel, who cannot feed. That is little inconvenience from his lofty tower in Dubai. He is seeing the wrong ghosts of the people. It was the same wishy-washy way he condemned the killing of a Sokoto girl before he regretted it. The same way he wanted to be a PDP member before he spat it out before he came back to his vomit. It is politics as whoredom.
The cash problem continues, and Emefiele – his friends call him Mefi – has shown he does not understand the full meaning of finance. He understands the mechanics of it. He needs to read economic anthropologists like Karl Polanyi and Abraham Rotstein to get the grip of the intercourse between economics and society. Finance is not for finance’s sake. This cash policy just exposed him. The Kaduna State governor said one local government in Kaduna State is as vast as Anambra State, and it has only one bank. Only two local governments have banks in Borno. Did he factor this in? I recall making this point when he introduced this policy in November, and warned that it could lead us to this treacherous pass. Here we are. Here is what this essayist wrote on November 7 in In Touch:
“Also, as markers of the conflict of economics and society, dislocations are coming from climate change and flood as well as the insecurity and fear of movement. With flood affecting 22 states of the federation, many people are out of the loop of the so-called modern economy with its financial institutions. How will those cooking Kosei in Jigawa or Ogbono soup in Bayelsa access banks wiped out of contention by the unthinking might of a flood? Or an ancient town like Lokoja. With the fear of bandits in the shadows of northern bushes, how are the men and women who own fifty thousand naira as life savings, or even less, going to trust the streets between their homes and their banks? How sure is the trader with N20 million in the Southeast that the local militias will not mark him out on his way to his bank?” It shows Mefi does not understand the geography of finance, let alone its cultural nuance. He needs a crash course for we are on a crash course.
I wrote further: “Mefi is trying to conjure a miracle without being a god. He is a prophet without the gift of prophecy.” We are witnessing his fate as a prophet. No one has faith in him. Riots have broken out.
The so-called money swap is aiming at politicians. What a pity. They forget that the upper crust can circumvent it. But the ordinary citizen lacks any facility for manoeuver. The upper class has oppressed the common folk as a routine. Now, Mefi and his cohorts have installed a new layer of class tyranny. They are the ones suffering it more. Hence, Atiku calls it little inconvenience. It’s like the Bible’s picture of an economic apocalypse:
“As with the people, so with the priest:
As with the servant, so with his master;
As with the maid, so with her mistress;
As with the buyer, so with the seller;
As with the lender, so with the borrower;
As with the creditor, so with the debtor.”
As cerebral Kayode Komolafe of ThisDay – alias KK- noted, it is not the constitutional job of the CBN to monitor election spending. Leave that to INEC and EFCC. He is playing electoral busybody. His own job he cannot do. He is doing another’s.
And Atiku says it is little inconvenience. Mefi’s ghost of cash and the oil hierarchy’s ghost of fuel are not holy. They are unwholesome ghosts. All we want is to make our nation whole again.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected Columnist with the Nation Newspaper.
