Awo’s Statue: Nothing Do Am
Following the hullabaloo that has been going on about the recently unveiled Awolowo’s statue in Ikeja, I carried myself as a well-known busybody to see the statue and give my own comments to Nigerians. For those of you who do not know who Obafemi Awolowo was, well, no be me go
tell you. Someone paid my school fees and it is only him I owe this information. Well, as I approached the statue, I noticed that Awo was seated. That was my first issue. Why would Awo be sitting on such a busy traffic intersection? They should have made him stand so that all those traffic offenders will panic and be orderly. Well, apart from that, a careful scrutiny of the statue showed a perfect excursion into the delicate art of sculpture. A lot of these critics do not understand art. The artist has the creative liberty to depict his subject anyhow he wants. His work is his personal testimony to his subject, the way he sees him and the way he visualises him and what message and story he wants to send to his public. So, all this noise about the statue not looking like Awo is just irritating noise of people who do not understand the delicate construct that is art. If I were commissioned to make the statue, I would have sculpted an Awo on his knees and in tears with a very skinny and gaunt look depicting his tears for what we have turned into and how we have rubbished his legacy of selfless leadership. I would have shown him in tears crying at the destruction of his legacy of an egalitarian society hinged on free and qualitative education. I would have shown him on his knees pleading to this generation to reconsider our selfishness and corruption, I would have shown him naked with just a tiny loin cloth depicting how we have raped the resources of our land and increased poverty to the point where if Awo woke up today, he would literally die of shame as to what we have turned the society into. So my people nothing do the statue except the fact that the artist in his work did not let the statue tell a story and that is why he is being vilified this way. His work is bland and just sits there in its true beauty but vacuous essence and not reminding us of any of Awolowo’s legacies except the fact that he wore shoes with lace on agbada. Wait for my own statue, it would not only show Awolowo, but it will combine all our founding fathers in tears, naked with nothing but loin clothes covering their shame and bound in chains, weeping for the soul of this country. A country that has gone to the dogs making nonsense of the huge sacrifices they have made for our nationhood. I will do like six of the statues and look for places of high population density within the six geographical zones that make up what is beginning to look like a joke of a country and strategically place them there, so that when our children ask us what the artist is trying to say with such a sorrowful and sad work, we would with shame re-echo Wole Soyinka’s very apt declaration that this generation remains a wasted one. Kai.