Some say they can’t vote for him because he is ill. But it’s because he makes them ill at ease. They tremble at the compass of his mind and the stature of his legacy. With affectionate defiance on Saturday night, he asked the Kano business community, “Do I look like someone who is sick to you?” He then pointed his finger to his skull, and quipped, “It’s because I am smarter than all of them.” He permitted himself a little swagger.
Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was still floating on the after-waves of ideas at the Arewa Consultative Forum. All who attended attested to his magisterial performance. Not the hegemonic effluvia of Atiku or the incantatory void of Obi. Asiwaju left the place with food for the Nigerian thought when he tackled the question of climate change.
The images of “church rat” and “poisoned holy communion” ruffled quite a few cassocks and their political hangers-on. They mistook it for a cannon against the canon. They claimed he had breached the holy of holies. He was turning the scriptures upside down. How could the holy communion be poisoned? It is holy, and so Tinubu had touched the unclean thing.
They were invoking Christ where he did not invite them. But Christ told them, “I never knew you.” They saw visions without eyes of understanding. The blind leading the blind.
For those who know the Bible, even the holy communion can kill. Hence Apostle Paul said, those who are not worthy should not take it or they will die. So, if we look at what the Catholics call the Eucharist, it is like poison to a defiled soul. The sinner who goes to the bowl with malice takes a poisoned chalice, ditto the adulterous appetite. They may swallow sweet poison. It is a holy death.
The communion then can also stand for purity, including the men of the altar. If prophets can lie and sully the word of God, so can they dispense a poisoned holy communion. It is all within us as humans, whether pastor or laity, to abide by the word. A pure holy communion is no guarantee. It depends on both laity and pastor. A compromised pulpit poisons the communion. A sinful laity courts damnation. Hence Jesus said, when the blind leads the blind, BOTH shall fall into the ditch. Jesus knew this, so he warned of the distinction between his bread and wine and the manna in the wilderness. Those who ate manna in the wilderness later died. His own will give eternal life. So, it is not about the holy communion but who poisoned it and who agreed to eat it. Tinubu says it is the west who added the killing vial. The church rat should not die for the sins of a wayward priest. The west is the priest.
Partisans who know little scripture aped the lead of these vain ecclesiastics. Beware of false prophets.
But what Tinubu was doing had nothing to do with holy matters. But he is asking if we are ready for the manna of the wilderness or the bread of life. He borrowed them as metaphors to show that we are stewards of God’s earth, but we are not subjects but sovereigns as Nigerians. The metaphor of poison is not new. We have the metaphor of poisoned chalice, poison mercury, poison oak, or Poison Ivy. Some are biological and they can, with imagination, become metaphors that picture human experience.
The poisoned holy communion here is the compromised climate or earth. We are the church rat, the innocents who would live but are confronted by the prospect of poison. But what shall we do? We are not compelled, according to Tinubu, to eat the white man’s poison. The world was pristine before the whites began pillaging it. But in doing so, they became rich.
Now, they are affecting climate remorse, and want the whole world, including us, to save the earth from the devastation of industrial man.
But in making their prosperity, they created an unequal world. They enjoy, we toil. Now, says Tinubu, we need to develop and go through the path they followed, so we too can enjoy. But they say no. The world is fragile. It faces apocalypse. No problem, says Tinubu, we can see it ourselves. We want to be rich, too. If they want us not to follow their path, if they don’t want us to burn fuel as they did, attack the ozone layer as they did, let flood wreck us and our rivers and ponds run dry as we are experiencing, let them pay us. If not, we shall, as church rats, do what we shall and allow the holy communion – the earth – to remain a poison. The earth is ours and we all can either perish together or save it together. Know that the church rat is there when the congregation is at home. On Sundays, the poisoned holy communion can kill the whole church with all of them dressed in fancy clothes and stuffed with billionaire offerings. All, both church rat and cassock man, will die. It’s like a terrorist that lobs in a bomb during mass.
Tinubu was exposing western hypocrisy. They have, in the words of poet Alexander Pope, raped the lock. It cannot easily be restored to its original beauty. This is not the first time Tinubu has mused this issue. It is a call to climate and environmental nationalism. What the west is doing is climate imperialism.
We all want good earth. But let us enjoy it equally. The west has been at odds with China over this. Premier Xi is saying what Tinubu is saying. Let us all be rich. They wasted our earth to make them rich. Tinubu knows the value of saving the earth. Before this era of flood fury, Lagos had it decades ago, and Tinubu, as Lagos State governor, confronted the Obj administration that splurged N4 billion a year to pour sands on the Bar Beach. It was a patchwork, not a solution. The thing was eating up Victoria Island like termites. Tinubu developed an idea to turn disaster into prosperity. Today, that swath of earth known as Eko Atlantic makes more money than many states put together. Even the United States is building its biggest embassy on the Eko Atlantic.
But the west must allow us to do it on our own terms. This is no colonial era. When the west started with the industrial revolution, they did not prioritise saving the planet. William Wordsworth, known as the high priest of nature, wrote: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
What Tinubu has done is to stake an idea for economic prosperity and diplomatic tour de force in one phrase. Shakespeare says, “brevity is the soul of wit.”
This is the third lie of the west. The first was what is known as the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. It was the genesis of international rule of law. The agreement was to recognize all nations as equal and no one should invade another without cause. It is still a fraught issue as Henry Kissinger tackles the subject in his book, World Order. Same Europe did not even recognize other continents, like African kingdoms, as sovereign. It led to the second lie: they invaded African kingdoms and raided for slaves to build the prosperity of the west. They couched us as savages and societies without civilization. It justified the invasion. Even the Church of England said we had no soul. Yet they sent us the Mary Slessors.
What they are doing now by asking us to abide by climate change is the same as they did when they started industrialism. It was then they knew slavery was inhuman. They stopped it for cynical reasons. To quote again my late teacher, Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin: “The abolition of the slave trade was an act of enlightened self-interest by the Europeans to give the Africans a new role in the international economic system.” Again, they decided to give us our nations, according to their lights. They jumbled peoples together without symmetry of culture and history. Yet, there was no concept of Europe until about the 5th century as the Roman Empire began its decline, and savage tribes invade each other like the Germanic tribes. The west is like the gang leader who becomes a priest because he needs quiet to enjoy his loot.
Climate change is their new apology. They can pay us if we insist, says Tinubu. In the US today, farmers are paid not to farm. The food will waste, so they get paid to do nothing beyond the nation’s capacity. They did not hurt the American farmer. But they hurt us for centuries and this may be Asiwaju’s way of asking for reparations while we heal the earth. As Shakespeare wrote in his play of international intrigue, Antony and Cleopatra, we can make “fancy outwork nature.”
That is Tinubu’s conundrum, a laconic riddle that we expect only from the lips of a genius. He is a financial expert but he has used language that turns professors of literature into their altar.
We can see why they fear Tinubu, and so hate him. He is the one asking the right questions.
