How do you pity a man who did not show pity when the world panted in pain? When women wailed on the streets and children squeaked, when bank halls crammed into stampedes. Murder, hunger, hospital emergencies, a whole economy choking on his back. His was policy as bloodletting. Nobody was immune. From plenty, even executives had to scramble for 200 Naira notes. And nothing was immune, not even bananas that rotted in the open sewer of markets because no one had cash to buy. Food everywhere but not a bite to buy. In the Bible expression, money failed in the land. He presided over the purgatory of a nation. First came flood. That came scarcity. It was like a fulfilling of a Bible prophesy.
He was begged, cajoled, and pampered to show mercy? The quality of his mercy was strained. This essayist pondered this as Godwin Emefiele featured in a short video clip in the hands of his captors, the DSS. He first looked like a northerner in his cap and kaftan, his puny frame ejected from a vehicle as he stepped into an executive jet.
Executive jet? It was a moment in paradox. That is what we associate with snob, the indolence of the plutocrat, the class of contempt, the brigandage of the luxe class. They usually did that when they wanted to attend parties, soar to a conference in Abuja or Lagos to preside over loots, or when they had butchered and shared the choice parts. Or when their families, wives and kids, bored by the Jejune routine of our lives, flew to Dubai or London or California for fresh air. So, the last image of the jet is one of captivity. That may not last, though.
But as one looks at him, we cannot but wonder what triggered Mefi’s errancy. Why did he do it? When Buhari came on board, a few thought he would be fired. He cringed and rolled over in flattery and supine pleas. He was going to be a good boy. He was going to yell yes when the law said no. He was going to fret for them, perfume their farts, kneel with files as they sat cross-legged, stoop to be conquered, nod to the economy as their fiefdoms, play serf to their feudal commands.
So, why was any surprised as the time came for him to fulfil their righteousness? He was a perfect example of how not to be a pawn. First, they conned him to run for president. He took the bait. His posters were everywhere. He teased us with a pyramid of nothing in Abuja, got a media house to evangelise him. We knew, like a eunuch, his rice could rise. This essayist blasted him on this page and he ran an advertorial to defend himself and attacked him with the flimsiest of logic. When he ran that advert, I knew he was gone. He did not want to resign. But he wanted to run for president. His ego bloated. He was a lord by the lords in Aso Rock. That is the Malvolio complex. He thought he had the master’s permit. The master never gave him nor defended him. He was on his own. He alone did not know it. He puffed on his own fantasy. He was ready for the fight. He had jets, we are told. He had vehicles lined up. He had a media outfit. He had the cabal. And, of course, he had cash. His case reminds one of the IBB years, when the gap-toothed fellow conned some top bureaucrats to run for president. They believed the saint. They went to hell. One of them, colourful Abel Ubeku of Guinness, did not survive it having withered all his wherewithal in that disaster of an ambition.
Who will save him now? Not Buhari, who stood firmly by him when he went full-throttle with his scheme. He knew it was not an economic policy. It was a gang-up against one man. He thought he was the ultimate beneficiary. He is not guiltless without Buhari, who defended him to the end.
Who will save him? Not the cabal. President Bola Tinubu, as a candidate, said it was Buhari’s men. He said they did not know the way to victory. In what I call his Lisabi speech, he mocked that Mefi and his masters poured ink into the money in the name of currency redesign. Stormy Petrel Malam El Rufai corroborated this. The men who did not want Tinubu to win the party nomination – and who lost – also did not want him to win the presidency, and they lost again. They had been losing since they won the second term and took the party structure from him by ousting Adams Oshiomhole. They owned the structure but did not win the party’s soul. Tinubu did. Mefi lusted and Mefi lost.
Who will save him now? Not the media house he fueled and funneled with his generosity. They knew, too, that it was all a cynical game. He would lose. He would pay them to lose. But he alone would pay for it when time put paid to his ambition. They flattered, made him swell like the rice pyramid, and he too enjoyed the run. They gave him the disease of all megalomaniacs – the delusion of grandeur. They did not believe in him. But he believed them and in them, so much so that he believed in himself. Faith without charisma, faith without resume, faith without structure, faith in a cabal that looked elsewhere. The faith was dead.
Who will save him? Not his kinsmen. Reports tell me that he went on a nepotist spree of job offers. He comes from the Ika part of Delta State, and he binged on giving them jobs at the CBN. The jobs ran close to a thousand, and he deployed them to branches like Delta, Bayelsa, Kaduna, Kano etc. This sort of practice ought to stop in this country. I attended an awards night by NIMASA a few years back, and it turned out that the awardees reflected the years that their kinsmen were the director general. This is not how to run a federation. From Mefi’s record, he had done the same thing. His kinsmen can only watch in impotence as their patriarch falls from grace.
Who will help him? Not the cash of the CBN. Not the new money no one can see. Not the billions he spent to do the policy. Not the accounts of the jets, or cars, or party funds. Above all, not the public he tormented. He is alone, the sort of tragic island of humans that populate Kafka’s writings, like Gregor Samsa, who turns into a giant insect. No contact with humans anymore. A character in Henry James’ novel, The Ambassadors, captures the life of Mefi in the following words: “I have lived a life for other people.”
But Mefi is a story of the pawn game. He was in the centre of all the plot to throw one man. All of the others, his fellow travelers, are happy in their ornate mansions, smiling to kids, tending their cattle, swaddling their kids, ogling their loot, hugging their wives. He is hugging a jail wall. He recalls a familiar figure in history, this time a cleric, a banker of souls. He served king Henry the Eight of England, who exercised his licence of the flesh to defy Rome and become a Christian nationalist. Cardinal Wilson served him with pharisaic mischief. When he fell, the cleric wept: “If I had served my God the way I had served my king, he would not have forsaken me in my old age.” Mefi is our cardinal of finance who fell, and who must contemplate the vanity of money and status as a hard reckoning opens up in the court. It is a lesson in power for those with an eye on posterity. Mefi followed a cabal like a herd, and now he must realise, as Joseph Conrad says, that “we live as we dream – alone.”
