By Sam Omatseye
Everyone knows we are not going to pluck our first female governor like a low-hanging plum. The story of Mama Taraba, with its breathtaking drama of a near miss, only gave a hint. But no one expected that the second time, it would look like a story of Jacob and Esau, or the narrative of Leah and Rachel. That is, the cheat of a switch.
In the first story, a woman. That was Mama Taraba. She was the broken heroine of her theatre. But she was not the arbiter. The role fell to the partisan imagination of her supporters chockful of feminists, APC members and many across the country partial to the novelty of her ambition. The imagination, as arbiter, was like Rebecca, who symbolized a dangerous imagination for the ages. Like Esau, Mama Taraba had no power to change the end result. Unlike Esau, she was not cheated. But some of her followers wanted to believe so.
She fought. She lost. She sulked and moved on. Rebecca cheated Esau for her beloved Jacob. Rebecca, according to Bible scholars, was a failure because that incident of a maternal trickster led to a dysfunctional family of feud, death and fear. So, she seemed to have won in the beginning. But, at last, her efforts yielded nothing savory. So, too, it seemed Mama Taraba, Aisha Alhassan, was on her way to victory in the gubernatorial poll in Taraba State. She fired the feminists into an expectant frenzy. It became an anti-climax. In mama Taraba’s case, we had two failures. One was the failure of a partisan imagination, and Mama Taraba herself who could not muster enough numbers at the polls.
In another tale, another man would cheat the same Jacob by disguising a bride on his wedding night. He had Leah instead of the winsome Rachel. He had to wait in lust and toil for another seven years. The father of the brides was an example in the nexus of capitalism and romance.
However, the cheat in the Leah story was like the cheat in the Adamawa tale. It was a man named Laban, the father of the two girls, who cheated. Jacob was a victim of what is called a switcheroo. Rachel the pretty had to wait another seven years for the man. Leah was the interim love. But unlike the resident electoral commissioner, there was no one to hold Laban to account for foisting an unwanted damsel on a thirsty suitor.
That role came to our own Hudu Ari. He committed his act and disappeared. That was not the case with Laban. He cherished the privilege of impunity. He remained on his farm. He looked Jacob in the face and asked him to work for another seven years for him if his lust and body still wanted to ravish his Rachel. He leered in impotence as his heartthrob pranced about. She also looked back in futile longing. Time was a big chasm between them and a happy doing.
Now, we cannot see Ari the REC. He has fled. Law enforcement agencies cannot see the man who was accompanied by law enforcement agents to announce that Benani, or Aishatu Ahmed, had won. He aborted a baby in mid-trimester. NBA, take note.
Ten local government areas were still voting. But people did not give him credit. He is a seer. He had seen the uncounted votes. He saw that his favorite Benani had won. With his cap and glasses, the man who is also a lawyer saw numbers all of us had no eyes for. There was no need for the virtue of patience. He saw the end from the beginning.
Who knows, maybe he has a numbers problem. Those accusing him of N2 billion bribe have no evidence as yet. They, too, may have a numbers problem. Maybe the man has illusion of numbers. He imagines figures. He privileges imagination over knowledge, just like the great genius of the 20th century Albert Einstein who said, “knowledge is limited…imagination is more important than knowledge.” If he imagined Benani’s vote figures, he could imagine her victory.
But the story Ari the REC composed was a nightmare. He probably was in the league of math geniuses who peddle imaginary numbers. Imaginary units are part of mathematical scholarship. Hence we speak of x and y. If he can imagine it, then he can say it. He is not alone then. He might see himself, though a lawyer, in the company of the geniuses who started saying that once you multiply any negative figure as square root, you must arrive at a positive number. So, Ari believes he is a positive man. He found the square root of the votes, and positive results for his favoured Benani. You cannot blame him. He is seeing figures we cannot see. After all, there was a case of an American who had the disease of not seeing figures two to nine. At least, he saw one.
Ari calculated the votes his own way. The novelist Dostoyevsky in his small classic, The Man from the Underground, said the problem with modern society is that we mathematicise life. We think one plus one will always give us two. It is such an obsession with mathematical precision that gave us the nuclear bomb and Hitler. Hence, he opined that one plus one is not two. It is no longer life but the beginning of death.
Charles Dickens skewers this cast of mind in his novel Hard Times. In his Bleak House, he mocks a female character whose tongue falls into a claptrap of numbers once she hears someone mention any thing that sounds like a number.
Maybe we have a genius in our hands. A genius of rigging. Except that the Ari man did not carry us with him. He did not show us that he is such a genius. He has made a mystery of his formula, turned electoral math into an arcane science. He is suffering from delusion of mathematical grandeur. Or he should have prepared us first by telling his employers how exceptional he was not only in law but also numbers. He should have told Muhammadu Buhari and the INEC boss what was to come.
But he has given us an anti-climax. Did the hero experience a self-doubt. If not, why is he on the run? Or is he working out the formula that gave him the incredible Benani victory. We know math involves subtraction, multiplication and addiction.
Maybe he is trying to work on multiplication. Was he going to give them new names, new fathers and mothers, new jobs, and affix INEC numbers to them that Mahmood Yakubu, INEC boss, is not aware of.
Then we have the chicken and egg scenario. Did she prepare the acceptance speech because she was in cahoots, or was it the hope that was in her, in spite of Ari the REC? Benani gave us a speech about the historic character of her win. It was the dream of all women. Every girl who goes to school knows she can be like Benani and the sky, as Shakespeare says, is her oyster. Any woman can be a Queen Amina, Yaa Ashantewa, Nefertiti or Cleopatra, or Hilary Clinton or Margaret Thatcher. They can soar away in the high places of the earth.
They don’t want deputy. They want to be boss. They want to ride the bus. That is the interior monologue of women. They have a right to dream.
So, too, if a mathematician can invoke imaginary units, why can’t our humble genius called Ari.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with the Nation Newspaper
