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In this fourth chapter of
Epistle To
Maduabebe, Nengi Josef
Ilagha�s tour de force on corruption in
high places, the poet practically pushes former OPEC President, Dr
Edmund Maduabebe
Daukoru, off the
Mingi stool with a commendable knack for
tell-tale truism, and seizes the throne by force.
The Collapse of a Kingdom
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary
act.
- George Orwell
By His Majesty Nengi Josef
Ilagha
Mingi
XII, Amanyanabo of
Nembe
Bayelsa State, Nigeria
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EAR MINGI MADUABEBE, if I have summoned the courage to address you as
such, don�t blame me too much. Your younger sister insists that your
title could be no better. She is truly upset with you on account of
the spite she has suffered at your hands over the years. I have a
furry feeling that you are on your own. If I were to tell you the kind
of things people say about you in beer
parlours, in offices, in taxis and in many
homes I visit, you will promptly step aside from that sacred throne in
the best tradition of Ibrahim Babangida,
honourably speaking, when he came face to
face with the truth.
And the truth is that your kingdom has collapsed. You rule only over
the body you see every time you stand naked before the mirror. You
have nowhere to hide, save behind bars. Quote me even in your bedroom.
Tell your queens I said so. If I have ever been rude to you before,
allow me to get even ruder than Evinrude.
I will presently give you reason as to just why this is so.
In the first place, where did I go wrong if I gave some well-deserved
publicity to the story of your own younger sister, born of the same
womb as yourself? Until she turned up with her woe-begotten story, I
had no idea where she erupted from. She was the one who volunteered
that she knew me in the early seventies, just after the Nigeria-Biafra
civil war, when I was but a school boy at Anglican
Isoko School,
Apapa, Lagos. I
was known as Teacher Pikin because my
Father was a classroom teacher in that school.
This is how it happened. I came out of my office on the morning of
February XII, 2009, having worked all night long like a slave working
an endless shift, no leave, no transfer, more secure than all the
security men put together, watching over the costly printing equipment
dumped at the warehouse of the newspaper corporation by the
Bayelsa State Government for reasons best
known to it. I stepped out to take a breath of fresh air, and there
she was, seated right atop the slab of a soak-away pit.
�God bless you,� said I to her in greeting. She raised her face from
the copy of Chris Oyakhilome�s
Rhapsody of Realities she was reading, and looked
directly into my eyes. I could see great hunger and dejection in that
face. I said to her: �Daughter, arise and walk away from that place,
for the slab upon which you sit is cracked and could collapse even
now, and you could drown inside the septic waste beneath you if that
happens.�
She stood up promptly, and said as follows.
�Noah, noah, noah.
Imiete. Eri
animi worio
bo
na kige
bo.
Eri
amabo
nto?
Eri Nembe
bo
nto?�
�Kesiye,�
said I in reply.
�Eri
Nembe
furo
togu.�
�A ikiomo
barambu ain
wo
paga te.
Eri
tubo
togu ne?
Toru kubu mi
Ilagha
na
Alanyingi
na owoma
mein na
kige mi.�
�Iyorobo, I
koria
nimi.
Eri
Alanyingi
na Ilagha
na yai
bodu.�
�Eri ein
gho tubo
bai ka
nimigha?�
�Eri
bele da
indi
bei.
Eri
Okparan
bei
bodu mi.
Eri Gido
bei.
Eri
Iruka
bei.
Eri
Dajigegha
bei.
Eri
Indukpurukpu
bei.�
�Koko a koko.
A gba
barambu
paga
te. Ini
ire mi tei?�
�Eri
Igbagara
Nengi. Eri
Igbugburu
Nengi. Eri
Igbegumadudu
Nengi. Eri
Kubor Nengi.
Eri Mingi
Nengi,
Oyi Main
Findi.�
�A pa nimi
nimi gha,
ei
yo!
Eri
iruo
sou you
Amanyanabo
bei
yo?
Eri gbagba
seiyo Mingi
Nengi bei
wa?�
�Eri
abadi
ogbo ngho
kieri
kote indi
bei.
Eri
Onana Koko
Owei
bei.
Eri
Egbegwabo
bei.
Eri mesele
kiri bio
ngho
ingbese
tinmi eki
opinda gho
pura
bo
bei.
Eri
tundu
ogono
ngho
ein kori
eki
sikomo
tinmi
kasi mo
numo pere
bei.
I Dau re I
kori
tiemo
worio.�
And suddenly, upon your sister�s face came the light of epiphany,
such as was beamed on a recalcitrant Saul along the road to Damascus,
and she was transformed in a Pauline way. She was promptly led to the
Upper Room, Vineyard Press, Glory Land, where she gladly told her
story in the presence of Jesus Christ, all ears and eyes open right
behind her, and right before her. So did Augusta
Idibiye
Ombu open
up. So did
Walanyo, your selfsame younger sister who
stayed with you for five years of your life in Lagos, practically
washing your dirty briefs while you drilled as much money as you could
into your pocket, so did she tell her story. And, O, what a pitiful
story Walanyo had to tell.
In the end, I expressed my sympathy and volunteered an admonition, a
short verbal epistle, if there was any. Arise and shine, said I, for
the light of the world has come, like a thief in the night. To cut a
long story short, since the said ordeal of your sister was published
in Coastline News Network, our local
CNN, her light has continued to shine. To
God be the glory. So this is the reason I
address you the way I do, which is no sin really, since
Maduabebe is the name your father gave
you, knowing your destiny well enough. As for
Mingi Madu,
the title and the name, it was your sister who called you that. I
merely transcribed it in the course of the interview which, as you can
see, I have done well to transform into a standard profile that may be
read on CNN, BBC, SkyNews and all the
cable satellite channels around the
worldwideweb.
Next thing I knew, you had sent hoodlums
to raid my house and steal three of my desktop computers. May the
Nigerian police locate the whereabouts of
Ngotari
Agai and
Tekenah
Calmday. Next, you sent the same bandits to break
the glass door to the production room of my worldwide news magazine,
WWW. After that, you sent the leader of your band of juju priests,
Joseph Douye
Otuogha, to strike at the spinal cord of
the Corporation. Next thing we knew, the Chief Operator of the
seven-chamber King Colour 2000 rotary
press, Mr
Diepreye
Kwokwo, was dead.
And now, you dare to come after my daughter. How dare you? How dare
you attempt, even conceive, the thought of abducting Pentecost? How
dare you aspire to shoot God in the face? Who dares come after the
children of Jesus Christ? All the saints of Heaven condemn you this
day in the chosen year of manifestation, 2009. Even the EFCC
outrightly condemns you to prison. Let
your conscience torment you henceforth, if you have any. Let every
single detail of every sinful act you have ever committed show up like
sudden ghosts before your six senses, stretching through the mirrors
of time into the very crack of doom.
If you dare touch any one of my own, you shall fast and never be fed.
You shall shed tears that shall swell like turbulent waters until you
drown in them. Your sorrows shall overwhelm you, even as Marie Corelli
prophesied in her book,
The Sorrows Of
Seiton. You shall wail endlessly in the cauldrons of Hell, and no one shall
hear your voice. If you dare harm one hair upon my head, you shall be
lost to night and day, lost to history, lost to politics, lost to
geology, lost to your family, lost to the world, lost to yourself.
You shall behold your sins in the full glare of your mind, and never
stop shuddering at the wicked spirit that inhabits your body. You are
mean, your majesty. You gather, and continue to gather vanity into
your secret folds, even as your bank accounts break out in a rash. In
short, Seiton, you are in trouble for all
the terrible sins you have occasioned upon the face of the Earth since
time began. You are in trouble for all the tattoos you have caused to
be designed on the bodies of Adam and Eve. You are far more terrible
than Osama Bin Laden, the bearded terrorist. You are far more horrible
than George Walker Bush, the Anti-Christ.
You are by no means terrific.
Let me put your mind at ease for the rest of this humble epistle by
introducing myself in simple terms. My name is Conscience, in case you
do not know. I reside within you. I shall be very calm upon what is
left of this page, speaking only in a still small voice that you must
have become very familiar with by now. Verily, verily, I enjoin you to
do the same. Peace, be still. It is I. Indeed, I promise not to use
any more big words, no wayward metaphors,
no side kicks. I shall be as plain and as
friendly as possible in the few paragraphs to come.
At any rate, allow me to congratulate you on your first anniversary
in office. I couldn�t help but hear the din and
clangour of it all upon the clouds of
Glory Land. While you were having a field day misappropriating
valuable funds for the festival, I was whiling away valuable time,
having quite a field day with this page, to say nothing of a field
night. I have a feeling that you are already warming up to the second
edition of the celebration. I dare repeat that you shall not last one
more day upon the coveted throne. You shall witness the Son of Man sit
in your place, even as he sits at the right hand of God, scribbling
this very precipitate epistle to you at yahoo dot com.
Sit tight. Don�t move until you are told to move. You are under
arrest. You had no idea, did you, that God
arrested you on Saturday February 23, 2008 when you took what does not
belong to you, plotting your civil coups with a number of money-bag
transactions across the creek, from
Igopiri through
Anyama Polo to
Owusegi-Polotiri. Sit tight, I say. Don�t
you see the pair of swords crossed in front of you? Your judgment has
been pronounced from Heaven, and I have taken the trouble to
transcribe it for the eyes of the world to behold and see, both of
which amount to the same thing.
Beyond a cursory interest, you may have noticed that the national
papers gave scant regard to the epistle directed at you in January,
2009. You did your wealthy best to parry all XII questions by shedding
serpentine tears over the phone to the pitiful hearing of your
houseboys and palace guards. You equally did your jolly good plenty to
overwhelm the said national press with your royal tears over Queen
Gladys. Howbeit, you cannot take in every publisher in the
worldwideweb, can you? Clearly, you
cannot, and this copy of the unbelievable scroll in your hands is
capital proof that you may have won the last age and the one before
that, but you cannot win the Jesus Millennium.
Mene
mene tekel
peres
upharsin�
Allow me to remind you that your so-called coronation was marked by
an incident of grave historical and symbolic import. It will be nice
to hear you deny that you saw two posters, one wailing amidst a dire
storm in the night, as follows:
Armageddon Has Come! The other, bearing a rare,
refractive first-hand image of the battered body of
Jisos
Kraist on the cross, proclaiming clearly
that Messiah, King of Kings, Lord of Lords
& Prince of Peace, has come�like a thief in the
night. If you claim not to have seen those proclamations, and nobody
brought them to your attention, ask all over town. None of it may have
made any sense to you then as now, because it is the portion of the
wicked to forget their wickedness. But not so the long-term sufferer,
not so the owner of the body knackered to bleeding stripes in Pilate�s
court. Not so the nostrils of the Lamb of God who inhaled so much of
the smell of his own blood, determined to have it shed, if only to
redeem Adam from sin.
What is more, it is a pity indeed that, up to now, you still think it
beneath you to ask me just how I marked the first year of my
anniversary. Or, have you forgotten so soon that I was proclaimed
Mingi
Nengi XII on the front page of the WWW
edition dated Sunday February 24, 2008? In other words, Heaven
registered my face as the recognized
Mingi and substantive
Amanyanabo of
Nembe twenty-four hours before you
appeared in the papers. How do you like that? And your face when it
finally showed up, unlike mine, was far from the front page.
Now that we are talking strictly about home matters, you may wish to
share a few sentiments with me.
Why did Mary Queen and Otimibara go
about town half naked, sweeping the streets of
Nembe with brooms and dumping the debris
in invisible bins?
Vooooooh! Has it ever crossed your mind that their act was
a rite of purification for Nembe, given
the fact that they had seen beyond their noses to the day when the
Mingi stool would be seized by
Maduabebe�s unholy army? Think again.
Think hard.
Since your foul coronation, I have had time to interact with quite a
few eminent sons of Eden and feel duly gratified that a book by the
title of
Epistles
To The
Small Brave City-State
� the result of painstaking concern over the future of our land � is
in press to serve as an accompanying volume to this book. The spirit
of courage it evinces will serve the memory of our
honourable forebears, and inspire the
patriot in every Eden son of the present and future generations.
One of the precipitate opinions expressed about your inordinate rise
to power is strong enough to catch you napping. It goes to show that
there are thinkers amongst us who are shy of speaking their minds for
fear of reprisals from the contingent of army and police personnel you
have stationed in Nembe to guard your
interest. As a thoughtful young
Edenite put it, �The rise of
Maduabebe to the throne of
Nembe marks the rise of
Seiton over the affairs of the world.
Maduabebe represents the serpent. The
serpent has a double tongue. Whether the serpent blows hot or cold
air, in the end, the serpent spits venom. It goes without saying,
therefore, that in spite of how nice
Maduabebe might pretend to be for now, his
big fat ambition is to wrap as much loot as he can gather into the
labyrinth of his selfish fold, to kill and to destroy, to bring the
world to its knees.�
That fits you perfectly. You are an extremely selfish man. Your neck
may look dry, but your bank accounts are oversize.
And lest I forget, the unacknowledged
Nembe philosopher of blessed memory,
Ayebaegberi
Teknikio, appeared to me in a dream on
the eve of your coronation. He asked me to invite you to a
marathon debate, face to face, at King Koko Square, both of us
proclaiming our manifesto for growth and development in
Nembe, after our individual fashion.
On my part, I cannot wait for the opportunity. The Kingdom stands in dire need of progressive ideas.
Have you considered reviving the memory of the late philosopher and
collecting his works, besides transcribing his ideas into a meaningful
whole? I put it past you. No doubt you can take the next query in your
strides. It comes from him. As a geologist, he says, what is your
interpretation of the tradition that forbids the sale of periwinkle
flesh within and outside Nembe, while
allowing the shell to be sold in any market? That should put you in
the mood to take the next XII questions at yahoo dot com.
I.
Is it true that you are good at putting on tape the wild and
provocative movements of female dancers at every other night vigil you
attend in Nembe, as in
iworoko, for purposes of nursing your private fantasies at
horny time dot com?
II.
Is it true that you formed a bad habit of visiting strip-tease night
clubs whenever you traveled abroad, as a natural offshoot of being
an iworoko habitu� on
vinyl, one in the particular business of sticking folded dollars and
pounds into waiting pudenda, while enjoying a great laugh?
III.
What is the exact nature of your sexual relationship with Susan, your
white girl friend in Zurich, Switzerland, who is reported to have
insisted that you continue to eat of her forbidden fruit at yahoo dot
com before commencing the real thing? Are you guilty or not guilty of
this grave sin of the soul with Susan alone, or with Monica, Margaret
and Sybil as well?
IV.
When last you looked at a photograph of yourself as a boy, did you
see a tyrant in the making?
V.
What, by the way, is the current population figure of
Nembe clan? How many war-canoe houses make
up Bassambiri, and how many periwinkle
shells make up Ogbolomabiri?
VI.
What purpose does it really serve if you alone hijack every cause in
Nembe, and eliminate your own subjects
whom you perceive to be your opponents and competitors in social and
political circles?
VII.
Since when did Nembe become a prefix
limited to Ogbolomabiri and
Bassambiri, rather than the
all-encompassing suffix it has always been for the entire clan?
VIII.
Why did you find it necessary to post a kite to the effect that
Senator Nimi
Barigha-Amange and Chief Pedro
Adukpo-Egi
Ikata may have connived to sponsor the
last epistle to Maduabebe? Were you
looking for an excuse to molest somebody?
IX.
By whose authority do you occupy the throne of Eden, sitting as His
Royal Majesty Mingi XII,
Amanyanabo of
Nembe?
X.
If Jesus Christ demands that you step aside from that throne right
now in order that he may occupy it and pronounce judgment upon the
world, wouldn�t you gladly do so? Or, having returned to earth, don�t
you think Messiah deserves a befitting Kingdom from which to reach out
to the sundry kings and princes of this world?
XI.
Are you hard of hearing? Don�t you recognize the signs of the times?
What are you waiting for? How far do you think you can run, and in
which bunker do you mean to hide?
XII.
Where were you when I needed you?