The theatre lurked in the news.
The setting, London. The characters, politicians. The air, intrigue. There was neither a climax nor denouement. It was like a Harold Pinter play where what is seen and what is said cloak what is done. The action took place beneath the prattle. If the faiths wear mystery as a robe, politics advertises it.
So, we had little to believe or chew from the lips of Nyesom Wike, a battering ram as bride of the political class. There was something showy about how he unveiled what happened with his fellow politicians in London. Of course, Wike is no Nnamdi Azikiwe. The latter knew how to huff and puff. He was a man of letters, colourful in attire and wordplay and the thespian art of the gesticulator. The Owelle of Onitsha craved the spotlight and the spotlight craved him.
But Wike is an original. We saw him step out of the aircraft. His eyes hidden behind moony spectacles, his scowl a comic spectacle. His stride, near slouch, near swagger, had the menace of a Mafia don. His voice of scratchy bass would have been good for a comedian, except that Wike is funny when he does not want to be.
But Wike and his peers were funny, if they did not mean to be funny, when they said the meeting was not partisan, and it was all about making Nigeria a better land for all. Now, what was it about London that whisked them away from home? Was it about the weather? No, it is an oven just now. Was it because it was a colonial metropolis? Hardly. Number 10 Downing Street has a tenant who is packing his bag while the prospective new one, maybe male or maybe female, is trying to pack enough votes to pay the rent.
Such meetings are inspired by two reasons. One, it is part vacation, a time to splurge and inhale moments of European luxury. Two, as a shelter against the eavesdropper, the tattle-tale.
But Wike must be having a time of his life. All want him. Is it because he has such a big haul of votes or because a big haul of cash? It is not for play that his party members once described the PDP as Wike Inc. He must love to be called the beautiful bride. Zik was the first to earn that accolade, when all the parties sought him. On its front-page picture, The Daily Times feminised the Owelle, giving him the look of a runaway success as a runway model. It was an aesthetic coup.
Wike, with his retreating paunch, with his gait, with his goggled mien, does not have the sort of model physique of the Owelle. A newspaper will risk its circulation and Wike might sue for abuse of form, or impersonation. So, he is a bride as battering ram, like the wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As a bride, Zik displayed pride, plume and peacock. Wike, with hoofs and horns, is charging at his suitors.
Wike met with Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and that made news. Not as much because they had met before, and this may have a momentum. It was a continuation, it seems. They met in France, now in London. Governor Masari boasted Wike will work for Tinubu.
But what gave the better buzz was when the old fox slinked into the tale. Obasanjo with Peter Obi and Wike in a meeting? What was it about? Obi had met with Wike before. Also with the Owu chief at Ota. So, what was the old fox looking for? Obj is not only an old fox but also a tortoise, as a creature who creeps into any Nigerian tale like the folk tales. As a tortoise, so as a fox, a dual incarnation. Like the tortoise, this fox is often to no good. After he met with the APC flagbearer, he probably thought he had conceded too much. He had crafted the indelible symbolism of southwest unity behind the Jagaban. He had to confuse the air, and travel with Obi to London. Obi might need Wike more than Wike needs him. For all his open bluff, Obi thirsts for the traditional structure, not the amorphous hope on the unknown mass as structure. Obi has not had a big-name politician behind him. Not even a local government chairman. Is he trying to go back to his vomit, the PDP, by courting Wike or ride on Wike’s back? Is he eyeing his pot of cash? Obi is not capable of the adventure of abandoning his crowd like Zik did in the nationalist era.
So, what we had was the old fox, the tortoise and the battering ram as bride.
At the bottom of all these was the meeting with Atiku. They both had broken the ice? But has the ice melted between them, or merely broken? I think both still bear glaciers in their hearts. The glaciers have frosted further with Atiku’s utterances like his assertion that Wike could not deliver. Wike fired an iceberg in his theatre with his song, “As e dey pain dem, e dey sweet us.” Both cannot step over the chasms of hate and bile, and embrace. It will be a bearhug full of spikes. Or what the novelist Ousmane Sembene called “the perfidy of words and the hypocrisy of rivals” in his short story, Her Three days.
So, what we might have had in the meetings was a stalemate, dialogues as ellipsis. This essayist does not see any good coming out of the meeting between Wike and Obi, in spite of the hectoring negotiator in the Owu chief. In his new book, Leadership, the 99-year-old Henry Kissinger espoused what he called “strategic humility” as a means of achieving political goals. He cited German post-war leader Conrad Adenauer, who eased Germany back into the mainstream of world powers. It’s what Oliver Goldsmith wove in his play, She Stoops to conquer. Bashorun Gaa practised it in the intrigues of the Oyo Empire. I don’t see humility in either Atiku or Wike. In the same book, Kissinger identified two types of dysfunctional negotiations, the psychiatric and the theocratic. The first sees negotiation as an end in itself. It is all talk, and no substance. The second sees the other party as infidels. No way out in that as well. From Wike’s statement beside his side kick Ortom, the meeting with Obi and Obj was the former, and the one with Atiku the latter. It was all a huffing and puffing without puff-puff.
Meanwhile, Wike will continue to bask in his bridal status, like the character in Oyono Mbia’s play, Three Suitors, One Husband. The Wike meetings had the false air of a party, atmospherics but no specifics. It’s like Pinter’s play, The Birthday Party, where the event had all the rituals of party, a festivity without felicity.
So, rather than have a husband, the suitors surrounded the so-called bride, like Penelope until Odysseus the husband arrived. But we have to wait for Wike’s day of wedlock. Until then, we have to take the mood of Oyono Mbia’s other play: Until further notice.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with The Nation Newspaper.
