The power in the hands of the voter is almost equal to the power of the African witch. In Africa, witchraftery is a powerful occult that gives its initiates the power of life and death. In Yoruba epistemology which promotes the witch to an almost imperial realm, the witch is attributed with the power to munch the limb through the narrow passage of the head; devour the heart through the route of the kidneys and the bile-duct from the buttocks. As powerful as the witch is projected to be, virtually every belief woven round it is in the realm of fantasy. It cannot be subjected to hypothesis or empirical verification. Still in the belief of the Yoruba, it is a cult whose members kill and look not for the vulture to devour the carcass. They do themselves.
Egba, Ogun State-born indigenous African Sakara music exponent, Sanusi Aka, popularly known as S. Aka Baba Waidi, in two of his vinyl, illustrates my drift. This he did in two albums recorded in 1959 and 1974 respectively. While the former was highly political, which he entitled Ibo fedira, (Federal election) the other was entitled Awon Orisha. The Awon Orisha track is a fabulous narrative of how some renowned deities in Yorubaland, in an ego clash and desirous of sorting out their supremacy battle, met with and had a conversation with God. Some of the deities were Ifa and Osanyin, as well as Islamic/Christian clerics, and the Witch. Each demanded of Him a pronouncement that they were the most powerful and supreme among earthly deities. God then asked them to gather at an appointed date for a test of their individual prowess.
Inside a house with different rooms, God kept in each a cow, black dog and white ram, with no one but His angels in the know of it. One after the other, God asked these divinities the identity of what He kept inside the rooms. Aka rendered this request by God musically, in his very sonorous, Egba dialect-laced voice, salted with his insignia traditional flute, as ohun to wa ni’yara kokan, ko wi fun wa, ka gbo s’eti. As they took their turns, beginning with Ifa, expectedly, the deities were apt in their divination of the objects kept in the rooms and for this, God gave them, beginning with Ifa, kudos – Olohun ni sadankata e, Ifa. When it was the turn of the Witch to be called to demonstrate her prowess, she boasted that, as against the other divinities who could merely see through the fog of the unseen, she was capable of transpolinating destinies – won ni awon le yi kadara eda pada sibikibi t’awon ba fe. So she used her witchcraft to swap those objects that God kept inside the rooms, to the chagrin of all gathered. And as such, the Witch emerged the most supreme of all deities, so said Aka.
The voter, the world over, is that African Witch. S/he is imbued with remarkable power to transpose and transpolinate destinies of ordinary aspirants and candidates into political offices. Remember that Honolulu, Hawaii-born gangling Senator of Kenyan descent, Barack Obama who, upon being elected the American president, took the world by storm?
As powerful as the voter is, in the Third World especially, he is at the same time as light as the feather. He is impressionable, pliant and seems to be easily mollified by the frills of their oppressors. The elector is not deep, no matter his education; they are flimsy and very easily suaded. When confronted with electoral choices, even if he is a professor, the elector throws away his thinking cap and begins to reason with infantile mindset. What triggers their excitement at moments of electioneering are flimsy and unenduring fancies. Persuaded of this penchant not to be thorough, the Nigerian politician also treats the prospective electors in this mould.
From the elector who would thoroughly interrogate issues in the First and Second Republics, we have landed at the feet of electors who are so peremptory, unsound, and easily excited by nothing. The politician too then has morphed from ones who, in the 1960s, confronted the electors with cogent, persuasive, and convincing offering as reasons to be voted.
In a famous 1970s vinyl, Volume 17 to be precise, Olatunji, apparently in a riposte to an earlier vituperative sarcasm from his lifelong musical rival, S. Aka, the man known by the famous sobriquet “Baba L’Egba”, singed the flesh of Aka by lamenting that he had luxuriated in infamy, from a decidedly lamentable state – Omo Eran – Son of a Goat – to a worse one – Omo Eshin and finally, to the most precarious state – Omo Garawa, which he rendered in the song thus: A npe won l’omo Eran, won hu’wa omo Eshin/A npe won l’omo Eshin, won hu’wa Omo garawa/Awon Eniyan yepere, ko to si’ruwa lati se Gada f’eniyan yepere. Translated, it reads thus, I initially called you Son of a Goat, but in manner, utterances and demeanour, you have since earned promotion to be referred to as Son of a Goat. I had not sat down to this classification of your person before you tumbled down into something worse, the Son of a Horse and then subsequently, you transcended further into earning the sobriquet of Omo Garawa. This is due to your roguish and rascally behavior which makes you deserving of my resentment and complete avoidance.
While politicians have gone deep down in their lack of thoroughness and excitement with vaporizing issues as campaign objects, the Nigerian voter has gone down the abyss with them. Only recently, we were sold the dummy of Muhammadu Buhari. Virtually every component of that dummy has fallen. Not only was Buhari the presidential candidate shielded from being grilled by Nigerians in presidential debates, as a political gambit, his mental depth was completely shrouded from view. Voters even rationalized that his opaque academic certification was unnecessary and that even if he presented a NEPA bill, he was fine. The result has been almost eight years of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Today, those who packaged that fraud as pearl are being rewarded with yet another brand of self-obfuscation and complete representation of dross as gold to us. Rather than critically rejecting this misrepresentation, we yell in childlike excitement and fantasy.
Last Monday, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), ex-Governor Bola Tinubu, honoured the well advertised appearance at the Chatham House in the United Kingdom. Apart from addressing many issues that agitated the minds of the people, though in a scripted speech, whether believable or not, issues like his place of birth, certificates, corruption and sundry other issues got his explanation. It was a good place to begin. It showed that Nigerians eventually got him to speak to them directly about his opaque past.
However, after his opening remarks, when asked to answer, and adlib, specific and critical issues about his projected governance of Nigeria, Tinubu outsourced his answers. He prefaced this queer leadership model with a rationalization thus: “Let me demonstrate here one of those philosophies and doctrines that I believe firmly in; it is team-ship, unbreakable team. To demonstrate that, I’ll assign it to my team”.
This was a man whose extempore speeches since he began the presidential campaign have been pockmarked by embarrassing glitches that spoke to mental mis-coordination or one bereft of intellectual capacity. He had been invited to media interviews which he shunned. Rationalizing this at Chatham, Tinubu said he refrained from such one-on-one interviews with Nigerians because “I see myself as a marketable individual. They want to use me to make money and I said no.” So what is wrong with that?
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