‘I won’t be everywhere’ as chichidodo, maggots-loving bird

THE ancient wisdom of our forefathers we grew up to meet is that, no one delegates the very personal task of emptying one’s bowel to their closest acquaintance. Not even your child. «A kì í fi iṣé ìgbònsè rán ọmọ ẹni” was the ancient Yoruba wisdom in this regard. But that was when life was straightforward and hadn’t been taken over by hypocrisy. It was unimaginable for anyone, no matter how close they were to you, to qualify for a delegation of the task of forcing out your excrement to. It is a wisdom which, for centuries, curbed trickery. It is also a metaphor for setting boundaries of specificity. However, today, strange occurrences have taken over this world. The world is standing on its head, upside down.

When I heard Nigeria’s president speak at the State House Banquet Hall, Abuja, last Wednesday, that poo-poo feeling came over me. The president spoke shortly after inaugurating the APC Presidential Campaign Council. He would not be everywhere campaigning for Nigerians’ votes, he said boldly without batting an eyelid. 

The president wants to delegate the task of emptying his bowel to his vice, APC Chairman, Nentawe Yilwatda; the man with the arrogantly irritating gruff, Nyesom Wike and the 31 governors already held captive in its penitentiary. To equally help Mr President force out the smelly poo-poo trapped inside the narrow pipe of his buttocks is the dancing fellow in Osun State, as well as the grovelling man who sold his brother for a mess of political pottage living in Awka. Individually and collectively, that is their task. 

 “You have warned me and asked me not to allow the rigour of the campaign to distract me from governance. I hear you. I am in full agreement with your decision. Nigeria needs more attention now than ever before. The responsibility of this office does not pause… So, you will excuse me from going everywhere with you,” he said to a Nigerian world which was unfazed by this quixotic declaration.

 Watching how feeble the president gets by the day, Nigerians predicted this day, more than two years ago, that their president would be quarantined at home during the presidential campaigns. As he belched out what was obviously a huge lie, I wish I was at the event to see whether, at that moment, Mr President had blood encrusting his lips. He would be a nice guinea pig for testing the efficacy of Yoruba’s literal perception of lie-telling. The people take the lie-telling act as equal to “killing a lie” (pa iró) but believe that you cannot find blood on the lips of liars. 

This morning, I am listening to Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey’s classic Jùjú medley track entitled, “A ńjáde L’ónìí, Elédùmarè”. It is an early morning supplication to the Owner of the universe for spiritual fortification from the arrows of this world. It asks for protection against crossing paths with misfortune (àgbákò). For decades, this song was an early morning invocation in many Yoruba homes. In their spirituality and cosmology, Yoruba do not joke with early mornings.

Sung in 1982, after that prayer to the gods of our forefathers, Obey and his Inter-Reformers Band then made a detour. «Àbòsí ti d›áyé, ònà ti jìn…” Obey sang. It is a philosophical reflection on human nature. The world is polluted by widespread evil, dishonesty and malice. That pollution by sons and daughters of perdition makes life’s journey long and arduous. The song further warns that the world is a lie, occupied by wiles in high and low places. Leaders are becoming more and more deceitful and the led, extremely treacherous. For humanity to sail through this mesh and navigate life safely, it needs extra care and divine protection, Obey’s classic track said in a serenade.

As I listened to this man of power waddle through a cloud of obvious lies, I pitied him. In all this, you will see the almightiness of God. How does a man spend all his adult life pursuing an elephantine warthog (Ìmàdò) only to develop toothache at meal table when the animal had been killed and barbecued for dinner?

 I am reminded of Odolaye Aremu’s famous musical line: “Ohun t’óo l’óó dà l’o dà yí o!” – “This is what you have pursued all your life…” In that line, the Ilorin bard was addressing an unnamed man of power who perhaps thought that wearing a beautiful cap was the be-it-all of manly elegance. Knowing how to wear a cap, our elders say, is the littlest of the trip of the fancy of elegance. For the cap to fit the wearer is an architecture of elegance that can only be bestowed by the Creator. Taking this life’s vanity philosophy from where Odolaye left it, Yusuff Olatunji continued. He sang of those who called for war and when this same war came, they ran away – “Ẹyin l’ẹ p’ogun tí ẹ sá f’ógun, ẹyin l’ẹ p’òtè t’ée fi s’éyìn”.

How does a man who had always wanted to be Nigeria’s president now resort to delegating one of the most fanciful apparatuses of being a president – the political campaign? Allahu Akbar!

As the 2027 elections draw near, norms collapse, rules die and the bolts that tighten us to the rest of humanity loosen. The truth is, there is a huge pall of mystery surrounding Nigerian government and politics.  

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Most times, when you tell a lie, you will need hundreds of other tissues of lies to panel-beat your lying thesis. To me, this is the summation of the Nigerian presidency’s almost 4-year attempt to hide behind a single leprous finger. Last week, Pope Leo XIV underwent a successful thoracic surgery at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital. For about 90 minutes, he was under the scalpel to remove a cancerous growth on his right lung. The world was even told the identity of the doctor who undertook the operation. He is Professor Stefano Margaritora. Leo, leader of approximately 1.38 to 1.41 billion people worldwide, the world was told, is expected to remain hospitalized for about a week. He came clean with the world on his own share of life’s burden that humanity carries. The world is still on its knees praying for Leo. As our people say, if you do not hide the Ifa corpus from me, I have no reason to hide the Ọpẹlẹ, the sacred divination chain, from you as well.

For African leaders, chief among whom is the man who recently went AWOL for 30 days from Nigeria, hiding inside a hole in France, and who will yet be AWOL from his own campaign, It is high time to know that openness and accountability aren’t strictly about finance. Openness on health matters is an integral part of accountability in office. Those who framed the idea of democracy say it thrives on direct engagement between leaders and the citizens whose mandate they seek. Delegating direct interface with the people you govern, though may not be a constitutional infraction, is a symptom of deliberate retreat from direct democratic accountability. Put correctly, it is a presidential abdication of responsibility, a moral absenteeism which insulates the leader from the lived realities and grievances of the electorate. By asking surrogates to poo-poo for him, the president cleverly avoids direct scrutiny from citizens he was elected to govern, whose harrowing cries of rising living costs, security challenges and economic reforms have risen to the highest decibel.

No matter how fluid the voice of Nentawe Yilwatda could be on the campaign podium, it cannot substitute for the soothing, though coarse voice of the man the people voted into office. Nyesom Wike’s croaky voice and his bully can rally votes, but they cannot defend presidential policy failures, nor can they articulate personal vision or take direct public ownership of government outcomes.

Perhaps, the APC and the president assume that the campaign to the people of Nigeria is a political side-show. No, it isn’t. It is a crucial, hands-on auditing process where the leader directly faces the people who issued him an IOU in 2023. To dismissively tell this same people the bombastic lie that Tinubu would be absent on the hustings because «We have bills to pay» and because he wants to maintain focus on national development is a lie from the pit of hell. Whenever my people are face to face with a barefaced trickery as this, they draw a comparison between it and the loud swagger of an Òkóbó – the libido-challenged man – who, rather than inserting into an ancient hole, boastfully claims he could insert a thread inside the needle, even in the dark! The truth Aso Rock thinks over 200 million Nigerians do not know is that the president’s health cannot withstand the rigour of campaign. Simplicita!

 By detaching from directly addressing worsening security and economic hardship, Aso Rock covertly deepens public disillusionment, eventually risking rebellion.

During the 1983 Second Republic election, President Shehu Shagari pioneered this aloofness. In the build-up to the elections, he relied on powerful party barons whom the newspaper press of the time dubbed “NPN heavyweights» in the task of running regional campaigns. He remained trapped inside the belly of the State House in Lagos. He, however, succeeded in creating the image of a distanced presidency, alienated from growing public dissatisfaction. People also tend to see this strategy as an attempt to shelter weak candidates from press interrogation and unpredictable public scrutiny. By the time Shagari woke up to his reality, there had been loss of legitimacy, even though he was officially announced as having secured the 1983 electoral victory.

President Jimmy Carter of America suffered this same fate in 1980. Applying what later came to be known as the «Rose Garden strategy» during his re-election campaign, Carter remained inside the White House. He claimed to be focusing rather on what he called “presidential duties,” rather than actively traveling to have a one-on-one with American voters. Carter suspended foreign travel and regular political campaigning, choosing to manage the crisis directly from the Oval Office.

 Unfortunately, as these dragged on, Carter’s portrayal by the press as an isolated and ineffective leader trapped by circumstances went full throttle. The press dubbed him everything but a busy statesman. By the time Carter realized this strategy as a political waterloo and chose to eventually leave the White House on an aggressive political campaign, it was too late. He lost the 1980 election to Republican Ronald Reagan.

 As the Nigerian president told that naked lie of staying at home to tackle Nigeria’s development issue last Wednesday, Nigerians laughed themselves hoarse. A man who just returned from a 30-day junket, in violation of the constitution; who didn’t bother about the suffering of selfsame national development during his AWOL period, is now all of a sudden bothered. Now that he needs to be interrogated by the electorate, he has chosen to cherry-pick the 12 states he would attend. The other question in need of answer is, if indeed Mr President is AWOL from campaign in order to handle Nigeria’s development, how come all critical persons needed to help him bring about the elusive development are already on the list of presidential campaign? I remember a line from James Hadley Chase – a liar must have a very good memory.

The president’s decision to delegate his meeting with the people who elected him to unelected campaign surrogates reminds me again of Ayi Kwei Armah’s chichidodo bird. Chichidodo came into limelight in Armah’s famous The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Chichidodo is a mythical bird that fiercely hates filth and human excrement but whose favourite food is the maggots that grow inside that very filth.

This allegory of the chichidodo has become a critical lens through which political analysts and literary commentators evaluate statecraft, accountability, as well as how leaders distance themselves from systemic realities. Armah portrays the chichidodo as a hypothetical bird which was defined by a profound, paradoxical conflict. He wrote: “The chichidodo is a bird that hates excrement with all its soul, but feeds exclusively on maggots, which grow best inside filth.” While this strange bird is rankled by dirt and corruption, its life sustenance is attached to organisms sprung forth by decay. Chichidodo struggles to keep an image of moral purity through being aloof from mess, but is kept alive by the outcome of that mess.

 Like the chichidodo, Baba’s campaign strategy of delegating accountability to campaign surrogates is not only in sync with poo-poo’s thematic parallels, delegating the task of accounting for his administration’s austere achievements and shortcomings to political aides, party loyalists or campaign councils presents the president as creating a buffer. Our own chichidodo the bird cannot separate its appetite from the environment that creates its food. As the Armah bird is a symbol of a hypocritical attempt to enjoy the benefits of a situation, while pretending to be untainted by its uncomfortable realities, it explains the position our president found himself. 

 Overall, words fail me to express this misty mystery of a chichidodo Aso Rock. It beggars belief that those we give our more, in exchange, we receive less from them. They are interested in the warmth of the pool’s water but are afraid of jumping into it. By this, they ignore ancient wisdom which says, “Don’t jump in the water if you can’t swim”.