By Sam Omatseye
This is not a time for the brothers El-Rufai to wash the family kaftan in public. For a good reason. Their father is behind bars partly because of his footloose tongue. Are they trying to tell us that running their mouth runs in the family?
Their father is seething in ICPC detention. The sons are at each other’s throat. This essayist will not descend to the abyss to reprint the bile that younger brother Bashir has spewed online.
Rather than sober up, the boys are fighting. Bashir may be angry that Bello is on the ticket of the ADC. Bashir is not contesting. Is that the source of the rage? They should sober up because their father went belly up at the ADC primaries. Of all the 26 nominees, Bello was the only winner. They now have a one-man family structure in the ADC. Maybe Bashir is mourning in public and taking it out on his elder brother.
Nothing new about brotherly feuds. “There is no worse enemy or better friend than a brother,” wrote Joseph Conrad. We have seen it in our politics. Power is a divider. We have seen it, not only here, but all over history where it is either brother against brother or sister against brother. The quest for power or relevance dissolves any love ties in their bloodstream. We have also seen when brothers work together. Ambition stirs brotherly love, and the spoils sweeten their bonds like childhood when they drooled over mother’s afternoon broth.
We only have to remember the Sarakis. It was not just brother Bukola against sister Gbemi. It involved father Olusola Saraki who was governor. Just like Malam Nasir El-Rufai is the source of all troubles in the house, Olusola Saraki did not unite Bukola and Gbemisola. Yet, before his children came of age to duel in the maelstrom of politics and ambition, the Saraki Paterfamilias had to handle another family feud. This was between Adamu Atta and Ado Ibrahim. Both wanted to be governor of Kwara State. Atta was a wealthy business man. When he paid a visit to the Concord newspaper editorial board, Dele Giwa’s prose haunted his Sunday column with the encounter. Never one to miss a detail, Giwa recalled Atta’s Rolex wristwatch headlining his wrist. He also recalled Atta referring to his brother as “that boy.” Ado Ibrahim was no mean man. He was a traditional ruler. Saraki chose Atta over Ibrahim. That tension followed both men forever.
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Olusola Saraki succeeded again to have his son Bukola as governor, and he thought his song as kingmaker would waft along. Until Bukola brayed at him. His sister Gbemi would not succeed him, in spite of father’s insistence. Bukola prevailed. So too has the fight between brother and sister prevailed up till today. Son overthrew father. Sister skewers brother. Father impotent to reconcile.
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We saw the tension between George W. Bush and his father George H. Bush over principles. It was not a feud. The son just did not agree with father and former president, especially as regards the war on Iraq. They handled their tiff with dignity and kept away the public eye. Those sorts of feuds promise juices but do not deliver. They teased us and we pined in vain.
We have seen quite a few of such boring spats. The Uba family and brothers in Anambra State bore us with their civilities. But Chris more than makes up for that with his theatrics with other people. We cannot forget Okija Shrine drama with Governor Chris Ngige. More of that drama with yet unreported detail will be contained in my upcoming book. Andy excited as the shadow man in OBJ government. He too had a taste of governor until it turned sour. None as scurrilous and base as the one between Bashir and Bello.
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Both Kaduna brothers are giving us drama when their father cannot also intervene because he is out of circulation. He probably would have stewed the plate with his colourful quotes. Olusola Saraki was not under lock and key, but he was under his son’s lock and key. A brother and sister feud goes back to ancient Egypt between the feme fatale Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy. With beauty and cunning, sister Cleopatra thrusts brother into the wilderness. Shakespeare makes a juice of this in his play, Antony and Cleopatra. Wordplay reifies the battle of the royals.
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Yet we know that brotherly feud can also be a metaphor for a broken society. Jacob and Esau become eponymous ancestors of a world divided by greed and quest for power. The real villain may not be the two sons but mother Rebekah, who sets the deceit in motion. If the Bible tale nails mother as the abuser, the Kaduna boys must point fingers at a father and how he raised them.
We must also see beyond the fight of the brothers. What is going on between Bello and Bashir is also happening in this season of electioneering. Bashir’s spat is no different from Atiku Abubakar’s unceasing flow of imprecations, abuse and banalisation of political rhetoric. Because he is turning 80, he must make himself a younger man to his political vanquisher by clocking his age exactly ten years older. He must lie that the borders should be opened. He must deprive students of their subsidy-inspired NELFUND bounties. He must deprive governors of their big FAAC harvests. He must forget that he sold over 140 government properties and companies for pittance. This kind of banalisation is what Philosopher Herbert Marcuse lamented about capitalist societies that have not only banalised products because of profit but also for vanity. It has spilled over into our rhetoric and even our sense of worship.
We are seeing the banal in both brothers and in Bashir’s unabashed scurrility. This sort of trope came from the play titled: Audience by Czeck playwright and president Vaclav Havel in which a brewer cannot defend his employee before the communist state because, somehow, both of them are one in complicity. It boils down to who should write a letter and whose letter is authentic. Havel is probably haunted by the ideas of German philosopher Martins Heidegger who grappled with the idea of authenticity. Heidegger was a married lover of Hannah Arendt, a jew, who would realise later that her world-renowned lover was a Nazi.
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But blood feuds of brothers never get better or worse than the one of two Greek royals and sons of Oedipus. They are Eteocles and Polynices. Both are responsible for their father’s blindness when he realises that they are fruits of incest. Both sons fight to the death, and their dynamics power two great classics, Antigone by Sophocles and Seven against Thebes by Aeschylus. The long and short is that both die, and that is the tragedy.
If they die, it teaches us one thing about power. It blinds. Their father dies literally blind. They die literarily blind. That is what the brothers El-Rufai should learn from the drama unfolding in their families. They may not see that what is happening between them is manifold. They include hate, deceit, fear, ambition, intrigue, loss of childhood bond, oedipal disdain, family opprobrium. They cannot see it because power has made them blind. That may be what is happening to Atiku, too, who has forgotten that it is better to be a good human being than a terrible politician.
Bello and Bashir’s situation may be unique in the way families are not the same when they are unhappy, apologies to Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But the oedipal part of the story is heavy. Those who have read Doestoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude will know that fathers and mothers pass on their inanities to their children in unique ways as the classics have told us. We can only ask father Malam Nasir El-Rufai to learn, not from himself but from his children. They may be the best mirror he can access of himself and see the dark spots on his nose.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with the Nation.
