The ‘Prophet’ and the Grave Diggers
Two events played out on Monday, one in Kogi and the other in Abuja which, put together, tell a compelling story about our country and its future. In Kogi, shortly before the late gubernatorial candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Prince Abubakar Audu was buried, a ‘prophet’ appeared to embark on what turned out to be a futile effort. On the same day in Abuja, thousands of people flying the flags of Biafra were on rampage at the end of which some of them posted out statements, claiming “victory” for their cause.
While on the face value we may say the two events are unrelated, the subtext behind each is the politics of (ethno-religious) identity that defines our country and may be responsible for most of the challenges we grapple with today. In Kogi, the ‘prophet’ and the youth who broke the door for her to access where the remains of Audu was kept were desperate to resurrect the APC candidate because his death had thrown into the equations all sorts of imponderables that could alter the political calculus in the state. In Abuja, four and a half decades after the end of civil war, throngs of Nigerian youth mobilized around “Biafra” in a proxy fight against some of the dysfunctions in our nation.
Let us begin with Kogi. I can understand the decision by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conclude the gubernatorial election with the supplementary polls next week Saturday. The date, according to the commission, was chosen to allow the APC fill the vacancy created by Audu’s death. But the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is kicking against the decision and understandably too. Can a new candidate actually inherit votes that were cast for another candidate, now late?
Incidentally, the Kogi election has thrown up other hitherto unconsidered variables. For instance, the APC is claiming that INEC ought to have declared its candidate the outright winner of the election last Sunday. The total number of registered voters in the 91 polling units where the elections could not hold is 49,953 whereas the late Audu was leading with 41,353. The APC is, however, claiming that only about 25,000 are eligible to vote in those polling units because that is the number that collected their Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs).
While there is no proof to justify that claim, even if it were true, I believe that INEC was correct in its decision to order a supplementary polls since it would have been wrong to base such a critical judgement call on conjectures or mathematical permutations. What the Electoral Act recognises is the actual number of registered voters and not the number of prospective voters that collected PVCs.
What is particularly interesting is that at the APC primaries won by the late Audu, the candidates who came second, third and fourth are all Ebira people. So were the party to pick the runner-up, it would be left with an Ebira/Okun ticket, pushing the Igalas out of the power equation in a state they consider their own. It is therefore within that context that one should understand the desperation that brought in the ‘prophet’ who, according to a cartoonist, wanted to render Audu’s death “inconclusive”. It is also within that context that we can situate “the Biafra struggle”.
Whatever misgivings anybody may habour about the Biafran crusaders, the point here is that if the protests were the isolated reminiscences of a few individuals or small groups, it could easily have been waved off as the entitlement of citizens to remember an aspect of our national history. But what we are witnessing is an increasingly popular campaign where some young people attempt to seek salvation in a past experience that many of them only heard about from tales.
The Kogi debacle is only slightly different. The subtext is about the fate of the APC gubernatorial running mate, Hon. James Faleke, a second term (and sitting) member of the House of Representatives, representing Ikeja Federal Constituency of Lagos State. He is an Okun-Yoruba man in a state where it had become almost impossible for a non-Igala man to be Governor. Therefore, the inference one can draw is that the ‘prophet’ who was trying to revive Audu may have been doing so not out of love for the person of the deceased APC candidate but rather for what she believed the man represented. The same goes for Mr. Nnamdi Kanu, the incarcerated director of “Radio Biafra” and his silent supporters who may not even like the young man but have come to accept him as the symbol of a “struggle” for their people.
In the larger context, we can extrapolate the role of the ‘prophet’ and that of the grave diggers to situate some things about our country today. On grounds of an unproven claim, and with no known antecedent, the ‘prophet’ was allowed to go and violate the dead; and on account of that, rumours were spread that Audu had indeed resurrected. Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom in the adage that the grave diggers are more useful to the dead than the ‘wailing wailers’ proved to be true, at the end of the day.
Yet the tragedy of our society is that we put too much faith in the ‘prophets’, the charlatans who prey on the ignorance of the people to attract undue following while ignoring the ‘grave diggers’ who do the real job. That is perhaps the best way to describe the hysteria that Kanu’s “Biafra agenda” has become. All that the young man did was to print some flags, some “currency” that is not a legal tender anywhere, some “Biafran international passport” that he would dare not use at any airport etc. And he got thousands of youth to believe he has founded a new country.
The message here is simple: No nation develops with a preponderance of ‘prophets’ who merely rouse passion, promising what they cannot deliver and in the process contributing to the frustration of the people. On the other side are the ‘grave diggers’, who understand that they have a job to do and would refuse to be distracted by the antics of some overpampered ‘prophets’. They are the people who build enduring societies.