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Urhobo Historical Society |
In the face of the raging debate about the constitutional right of Dr
Goodluck Ebele
Jonathan to stand in for his boss as Acting President of the Federal
Republic of Nigeria,
Nengi Josef
Ilagha throws a searchlight into political
affairs in Bayelsa, the home state of the
Vice President. In this tenth chapter of
Epistle to Maduabebe, the author fingers some of the most notorious sponsors of
corruption and graft whose narrow-mindedness has kept the state
retarded for the better part of twelve years.
Goodluck
to Bayelsa
Some people stay so far in the past that
the
future is gone before they get there.
- Anonymous
By His Majesty Nengi Josef
Ilagha
Mingi
XII, Amanyanabo of
Nembe
Bayelsa State, Nigeria
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T |
HE POINT BEING made, sir, is that
Nembe has had quite a long and illustrious
line of kings, each one capable of giving a sterling account of his
tenure in the vernacular. But no private secretary was there to take
down notes on a daily basis, just so that nothing vital escaped
history. Allow me, therefore, to bring to your notice that I am
looking for a job. Specifically, I would like to be your private
secretary, the way Odia
Ofeimun was to Chief
Obafemi
Awolowo. Unlike
Odia, however, I promise to publish at
least XII books on you, if and only if you will be generous enough to
grant me a special scholarship to proceed to a writing school abroad,
for a start.
But let�s not forget the pleasantries. How is our governor,
Pigatin? Please tell him that it is time
to move the state forward. We have practically been stuck on one spot
for too long. Bayelsa needs to make
progress, I tell you, and it is a great pity that we remain planted in
1996. We are still in the twentieth century when in fact the world is
one full decade into a brand new century and a brand new millennium.
It baffles me. How did this happen?
Ani
kule mi
miete wa
kebe
seimokuma o.
Miete wa
gbori yo
gho tie
timi pigiri
kuma fa.
Pigatin
ebene
wamini
gboriyo
kieri kpomo
te, Okpoama
pogu gho?
Gbiriri
yo ka
fa.
Mi ka paga
paga ye!
I don�t know about you, but I feel truly frustrated that a
writer-governor such as my very good friend has no iota of respect for
the printed word, to put it mildly. Which government makes a head-way
without a vibrant local press? Please tell me. How many more times do
you want to hear that the press has a cardinal duty to nurture truth
in governance, and to secure equity and
justice on behalf of the common man, such that full-fledged democracy
can have a wider room for self expression? Is that too much to ask,
grammatically speaking? Why bother to tell your
neighbours that you have a radio station,
a television station and a newspaper house operating at par, when in
fact you fund the radio and television to the exclusion of the state
newspaper, simply because the pope in charge of the newspaper writes
epistles to the worldwideweb? Between you
and I, your majesty, if I ever get to meet
Pigatin face to face again, I am going
to�
Never mind.
This is just between you and me, but if I ever get a chance to share
breakfast with him on the first day of next year again, I shall compel
him to approve a goodwill grant for Vineyard Press. Otherwise, you
guys should just announce ThankGod
Igwe as General Manager of the
Bayelsa State Newspaper Corporation, and
send me on sabbatical to some far away land like Iowa or Rotterdam or
Leeds, where I can spend time spelling my name to white people,
instead of tormenting you all with epistles. Your majesty, please tell
your nephew to send me abroad. I feel like sitting in a classroom. I
feel very rusty. I feel like earning a brand new degree at yahoo dot
com. I feel like spending the rest of my life writing
The Great Book Of Life,
chapter after chapter, volume after volume, until I become something
of a book treasure at yahoo dot com.
In my honest opinion, it is overdue for Governor
Timipre Sylva-Sam to seize the day and get
the world trooping to Yenagoa, and I don�t
mean hosting his fellow governors alone to a post-amnesty party. I
have in mind a world-class event hosted by
all the governments of the world, with
Yenagoa as the New Jerusalem, for which
the tax payer in Bayelsa will not part
with a dime. I mean something grand enough to generate universal
goodwill, beyond standing on the Star of David.
I think it will be a thing of tremendous
honour for the governor if one of his
humble servants goes beyond our humble literary ken to pluck a few
feathers, even from among the busy medical hens cackling in their
laboratories about bird flu and ebola. As
a poet in his own modest right, Sylva ought to know what I mean. The
other day, on the very first day of January, 2009, he recited a poem
he had composed, spanning all XII months of the year. In five minutes,
he had finished reading the body of the masterpiece, secured a
resounding applause from the faithful congregation at King of Glory
Chapel, Creek Haven, and gone back to his seat. I obliged him a few
claps as well.
Anyway, I return to these blank pages merely to fill them up as
assigned to me by God, first in class all the time. I need not stress
unduly that I have learnt a few more words in the English dictionary
since listening to Sylva�s poem. I will demonstrate this to the best
of my ability in the rest of this epistle and any other that may
follow. That should come as a plus to all of
Nembe Kingdom. In fact, it should be
headline news on Radio Bayelsa. Pope Pen
comes with fresh metaphors fit for a king. David, shepherd of his
lines, plays yet another humble tune upon his lyre.
What shall I say and what should I refrain from saying? I will not
hold back anymore. I am tired of being choked by words. Your majesty,
you have been very unfair to me in all ramifications. You have behaved
in the same precise manner that Thompson
Okorotie behaved some years ago when he
was my next door neighbour. He took his
share, and then added my share to his own, so that his stomach and
only his stomach expanded. That is exactly what you have done to me,
and continue to do to me. Let me put you in the picture.
As Group Managing Director of the NNPC, you worked on strategies to
fund the NLNG project on an equity share basis. Between 1992 and 1993,
you even served on the board of the multi-national company, and raked
in your millions in local and foreign currencies. Yet, many years
later, you found it convenient to deny a young poet under your domain
from accessing a token of the selfsame NLNG largesse, using your prime
role in establishing the company as a wicked tool, simply because the
said poet had directed pertinent questions at you in the largest
possible interest of the community you govern.
You practically threw spanners into the works of the Literature
Committee to the effect that, rather than give the 2009 Nigeria Prize
for Literature to Pope Pen The First, every poet on the long shortlist
should come last, and the prize money go to charity. Well, well, well.
Welcome to court. I have come to plead my own case. It so happens that
I am Jesus Christ, so help me God. I am the final judge. I am the last
jury. I am tired of observing this world from the vantage point of my
humble cornerstone. I am fed up with your attitude problems. How petty
can you get? You thought you could get away with everything, as usual?
No, you will not. I have had it up to here, looking upon injustice
flourish in the world.
Enough is enough.
Let�s face it. Your resourceful tenure as Group Managing Director of
the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, witnessed the
production of a comprehensive report on appropriate pricing of
petroleum products. It has since gone down in the history books that
your report gave birth to the defunct Petroleum Trust Fund, PTF. Yet
Bayelsa, your home state, suffers a great
deficit with regard to petroleum pricing matters. As if that was not
enough, you opted to sack the Pen Pushers Talking Front, PPTF, an
independent media outfit under the auspices of Pope Pen
The First, PPTF, an agency which seeks
desperately to correct the anomaly through a random opinion poll.
These are dire allegations, your majesty, enough to bring on a
life-long aggro. How do you plead?
Guilty, no doubt. Before you answer the
next set of XII questions, let�s take a cursory look at your
extra-credentials. You are an Associate of the Royal School of Mines,
London, and an Associate Member of the American Association of
Petroleum Geologists. You are also listed as a Fellow of the Nigerian
Mining and Geosciences Society, and a Fellow of the Nigeria
Association of Petroleum Explorationists,
for that matter a distinguished recipient of the prestigious
Feyide Award for Technical Excellence. And
to top it all, like a welcome recharge card, you hold a Doctor of
Technology degree from the Technical University of South Korea.
These are truly impressive credentials, sir, but they remain hollow
for as long as they have no bearing on the lives of the ordinary
people of Nembe, to say nothing of the
peace-loving people of Glory Land. In short, your degrees are many but
you are poorly equipped to tackle simple examination questions set
before you by toddlers. The tragedy of it all is that you couldn�t be
bothered. You would rather lord it over one and all. So long as you
can feed fat, you care not if your subjects grow lean by the day. So
long as you can grab, let them gripe. That sounds like your daily
credo, isn�t it?
Currently, as you know, we have unsettled matters between us. On my
part, I have been doing my utmost to get close to you but, for
whatever reason, you bow, shiver and tremble whenever you happen to
set eyes on me. Why is this so? Why did you go off your rockers,
completely losing control of yourself, when you saw me and your nephew
holding hands at Camp David in April 2007, when it was clear he was to
step in as Governor of Bayelsa, taking
over from Dr Goodluck Jonathan? Do you
recall the incident? No? I will be only too glad to prod your memory,
but I�m sure your nephew can help you out.
If I have been plying you with questions tirelessly, it may well be
because I have been watching Frank
Edowo on national TV in yet another
edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? I bet you couldn�t be
bothered to watch the programme. I bet you
are too much of a millionaire to bother about such fiddle-diddle. You
don�t want to be a millionaire, frankly speaking. You would rather be
a billionaire, and if there is a higher category, I bet you will
settle for that. As Jonathan Obuebite,
your royal clown would put it: �Your royal majesty, you are too much.�
He can be counted upon to say that again and again, feeling really
funky in the course of his assignment.
And, as our fellow Nigerians would say, you are a bastard millionaire
in terms of naira, kobo, and all the permutations of
anda igbogi that you have
sold to the greedy world from time immemorial. Even so, remember this.
Aristotle Onassis, one of the richest men that the world has ever
known, said at the end of his life: �Millions do not always add up to
what a man needs out of life.� Do you agree with him?
Well, if you do watch Frank Edowo in your
spare time, I bet you answer every question ahead of the respondents.
Before the options following a question are reeled out, you know the
answer already. That�s quite a brain you got under that stolen crown.
I bet you simply go to sleep in the middle of all that brouhaha about
placing long distance calls for friends to help out with dicey
questions. Now, then, it�s your turn. What is the difference between
12 and XII? Feel free to place a call to any one of your friends
around the mathematical world.
Come to think of it, let the next question-and-silence session begin
in earnest. There you are in the hot seat. Here I am facing you with a
cool smile. I remain Pope Pen Prosperous To The Last Letter. Who are
you? Let the bout begin the round. Let the round begin the bout. In
the first place, your majesty, how did you get to be a millionaire?
When did you get to be a millionaire? At what exact point in your life
did you make your first million? How many millions do you have in
naira? How many millions do you possess in dollars? And how many in
pound sterling, to say nothing of yen in
Yenagoa?
Don�t take a break. How much in millions do you own of the Euro? Did
you earn all these millions of soft and hard currency by hard
labour, or was there a soft little by-pass
to it? I mean, was there an aggregation of
kick-backs of various kinds that may have transpired in the cause of
the countless transactions that enabled you to secure your first one
million, and the many millions afterward at yahoo dot com? How many
side-kicks make one kick-back, and vice versa? If you
have a corner kick, would you rather set up a corner shop like the
Pakistanis in London?
Your majesty, when you snigger like that I get to appreciate your
sense of humour more and more. I get truly
glad when I see you smile the way you did just now. In itself, a smile
is a wonderful kick. It�s truly like a rubber ball. Every smile has a
way of bouncing back. And so, your smile brings us inevitably back to
the worrisome questions that just would not let me sleep. May I crave
your royal indulgence, therefore, to bring some questions from the
closet into the open, in the hope that you might field them to the
satisfaction of your conscience, to the relief of mankind, and
therefore to the pleasure of God Almighty, first all the time in every
class. In the tradition of Frank Edowo,
therefore, please answer the next batch of XII questions to the best
of your ability, as follows:
I.
In your considered opinion, what exactly did Chief Percy
Diete Spiff-Kien, acting on behalf of the Nembe Chiefs
Council, mean by �your decades of meritorious and pacesetting
contributions to the development of the hydrocarbon resources of our
country�� as contained in a congratulatory letter to you dated April
4, 2007, wherein he addressed you prematurely as Our Dear
Mingi XII?
II.
To what extent have your purported contributions to the said
hydrocarbon resources of our country affected the lives of the
ordinary people of Nembe, to say nothing
of the community as a whole?
III.
How many sons and daughters of
Nembe Kingdom have you encouraged to take
to your area of professional discipline, so that two or three
geological disciples could add to your pioneering apostleship, in the
overall interest of the Kingdom, and in view of the cardinal placement
of the buoyant Nembe oil fields in the oil
and gas calculus of the modern world?
IV.
As a Board Member of the Nigeria LNG Limited from 1992 to 1993, have
you ever had cause to lobby the company, overtly or covertly, not to
award the prize money of the Nigeria Prize for Literature to any
winner in any given year to date, since the inception of the award in
2004, simply to gratify your sense of authority?
V.
Is it possible that you may have been tempted to do so recently, with
particular reference to the 2009 edition of the poetry prize, on
account of the fact that the author of
Epistle To Maduabebe
stood a jolly good chance of winning the coveted prize money of 50,000
US dollars?
VI.
What end did you expect this to justify and how much influence do you
swing, anyway, with the committees that decide the Nobel Prize for
Literature, to say nothing of the
Caine Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, the
Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize and the Griffin Prize, amongst
others?
VII.
Since your emergence as king, how many trips have you made to
Britain, and what efforts have you made, if any, to remind Her Majesty
the Queen of the historical verity that, once upon a time, Britain
succumbed to the superior military might of The Small Brave
City-State?
VIII.
In the light of the foregoing, have you ever thought of cultivating
the political mind of Britain to the possibility of commemorating the
economic ties established by Sir
Taubman Goldie under the Royal Niger
Company, even if by way of reminding Her Majesty and Prime Minister
Gordon Brown about repainting the White Man�s Graveyard at
Twon-Brass?
IX.
Dimeji
Bankole,
Honourable Speaker of the House of
Representatives, recently declared at a public event that Sylva and
other Niger Delta governors have been running their states on deficit
budgets supported by loans and mortgages, in spite of staggering
monthly allocations from the Federation Account over the years. What
enduring projects have these huge allocations and loans funded in
Bayelsa, and exactly how much of
misappropriated funds have been remitted into your private coffers
since Sylva came into office?
X.
Your coronation is believed to have been sponsored by the tax payer�s
money. How much was voted for this purpose, and how much did you
obtain at the personal level as a long-time benefactor and mentor to
the gangling governor? What percentage of your take from the
Halliburton bribe may have supported the event?
XI.
With the benefit of hindsight, what is your honest assessment of the
governments of Chief Diepreye
Alamieyeseigha and Dr
Goodluck Jonathan? Did the latter really
bring good luck to Bayelsa as was widely
advertised by Jesus Christ?
XII.
In view of the constitutional provision that the Vice President
should step into the shoes of the President in the event that the
latter becomes unfit to continue or dies in office, what is your
reaction to the attempt by undiscerning Nigerians to impose the Senate
President, or anyone for that matter, on the nation over and above
Vice President Goodluck
Ebele Jonathan?