Kano would have ended Nigeria ( 2)

TODAY I was going to dwell on miscellanies. I was going to collect thoughts and subjects from diverse sources relating to different happenings before our very eyes in our land. The assorted collection was to be designed as a kind of Nigeria’s mise- enscene at a delicately delicate period of this country’s political drama.

Thoughts and peregrinations of scholars, professors, pen- pushers, journalists, readers and other operators in distant places and realms beyond what many, many and many folks do not know were as I planned going to be assembled here as a series to run for a pretty and beautiful period of time to jolt in the right direction the current framers of Nigeria.

Your humble columnist and allied minds would come out and peak as dopesters dwelling on your country my country our country’s peregrine falcons. Yet how what is near will be deemed to be far and faraway. I cannot but be misunderstood – which is fair enough. Only a tiny few see what they see or what they are expected to see and know.

Let me quote Martin Heidegger ( 1889- 1976), German existentialist philosopher: “All distances in time and space are shrinking.” Unfortunately, the runners of our affairs don’t know or see this. This is terrifying – despite what the Supreme Spiritual Masters of Merit have inspired our apex court’s justices to do about the thing they have done in Kano. Only a handful of deep fellows knew/ know the true nature of the nearness of the thing we avoided in Kano ( which may hop to

Plateau and elsewhere sooner or later than later unless we shrink it). Let me quote Martin Heidegger again and finally for now: “Nearness, it seems, cannot be encountered directly. We succeed in reaching it rather by attending to what is near.”

Another Kano and another Kano are coming. Let’s shrink the distance in time and space by everything that is equally fair and everything that is equally just.

Now let me quote verbatim three handsomely handsome Nigerians who responded, among others, to last Friday’s column. They are profoundly profound thinkers who know in- to- to the craft of thinking and how to stay genuinely on the path without going astray. They are ever unswervingly unswerving especially when it comes to subjects and matters such as the one at hand. Let us listen to Professors Olu Obafemi, Ibrahim Bello- Kano and Mr. Suyi Ayodele even as we examine them.

Professor Olu Obafemi

Thank you, as always, for this lucid and pungent narrative on the Kano situation and the apt intervention of the Supreme Court which overruled the explosive ruling of the Appeal Court, to our great local and national relief.

I was in Kano on the eve of the Supreme Court’s sitting. The atmosphere was pindropped silence and tenseness, with a certain foreboding eerie calm, the kind of clam before a mighty sweeping storm. I once talked, in my reaction to the eloquent analysis of radical intellectual, Ibrahim BelloKano, on the matter, that judgments and juridical actions, at moments like this, must mesh both the content of the law and its spirit to restore socio- political sanity to the restive environment. If the judgment had been otherwise, the match would have been supplied to light a powder magazine. It was a discretionary intervention in favour of logic, discretion and common sense.

The votes for NNPP at all levels - national and state - revealed, unequivocally, that the party was in control of the people's mind and mandate. Any judgment offered, as the Appeal Court delivered, can only end in mass uproar and dystopia. We must thank Goodness for the overturn by the Supreme Court. Thank you, our most eloquent poetpolemicist and public intellectual, for this refreshing offering.

Professor Ibrahim Bello Kano

Prof TA, I immensely enjoyed tremendously unfixed reading of myself reading my thoughts in your thoughts and your column and as re- presented by your semantic reframing of my ‘ frames’ under the guise of a prefaced precis of the pieced rendition of the Kano piece on the Friday it was rendered. Many a reader told me that you and I have become hyperbolic, rhetorically suave doppelgangers of hyperbolic grand fictionalisation of the Real.

In fact, there's a widespread suspicion, among educated readers of your column over the years, that you're the secret ghostly IBK of and in that Kano ‘ story’. Many a friend and colleague said that you, being a Smithonian Wordsmith and Wordsminter, like/ likes writing and quoting seductive prose and prosey deconstruction of tragic figures - eminent yet dead professors, trickster figures in mighty attires close to the Mighty Desk, Orwellian Labourited Dimunitives now in an Anambraised Quit House. Many people in Kano and around think that you're a hammer- wielding Derridean and Heideggerian Word Logger. However: your bravura Preface to my Baudrillardian story of the Post- SCJ Kano was well received.

A doctoral student said he would like to write like you. But I warned him with these words, "not yet, not yet". So the Doppelganger- Prof TA, I must thank you for putting me on the ‘ map’ of The Semanticised Rhetorical Syntax of the Seductive Prose World that works like the Sedative joy in winning a nice ‘ judgment’, a shot in the arm of the Truthful. Many thanks! TA'S Ibkised IBK.

Mr Suyi Ayodele ( Tribune Tuesday Flat out Columnist)

Salute to Professor IBK! Kano would have ended Nigeria! A million thanks to you, Sir, a very worthy mentor and teacher, our very own, for bringing your friend, our friend, the colourful Professor IBK to tell us the raw story of Kano! His piece would have made the front page lead were he to be a reporter. You have good friends, sir.

The columnist refrains from adding anything further to what these critical thinkers have said. And this is in obedience to the inspired words of the Supreme Spiritual Masters of Merit to yours very sincerely. They never fail. They never misfire. They never mishit. They never mistime. The rest is silence. And silence is the rest…