Kábíyèsi Olókùnkùn Birimù Birimù. Whoever coined that mouthful title deserves a GCFR in seditious satire. Political nicknames, whether in London, Paris, or Ibadan, are never innocent. They are instruments of attack in the hardtackle game of politics. Politics everywhere has its theatre, and in that theatre titles are bestowed to honour and to hurt. Nigeria’s restless political marketplace is filled with such wares of barbed sarcasm, wicked wit and withering satire which, sometimes, dress themselves in the robe of royalty.
You cannot prevent the Ifa (palm nut) from showing its palm kernel behavior (Kò sì bí a ò ti ṣe Ifá tí kò ní hù’wà ekuro). It is in the nature of politics and politicians to fly or shoot down ambitions. Adebayo Adelabu seeks to feature in next year’s governorship election in Oyo State. Sometimes one pursues a title and gets a completely different one. Shehu Shagari wanted to be senator, he became president; Ahmadu Bello wanted to be Sultan of Sokoto, he became the premier of the whole of northern Nigeria. Adelabu’s impatient ‘lovers’ in his Ibadan have made him king. They dressed him up in a regalia of scorn and crowned him Kábíyèsi Olókùnkùn of Okunkun—His Royal Majesty, the King of Darkness. They say he is in charge of national grid collapse and unending darkness. Their reasoning is simple and brutal: Ibadan, the minister’s hometown, is lit up in months of unremitting darkness under his watch. So, if the city, and indeed, the entire country sits in pitch darkness, the minister of power must be its monarch.
But the logic of power does not quite support their satire. In governance, ministers are not sovereigns; they are agents. The sovereign authority belongs to the principal who appoints them. In presidential systems, that principal is the president. In administrative theory, responsibility flows upward. Authority is at the very top. The minister executes policy; the president embodies and orders it. If Nigeria must coronate a monarch for darkness, political logic suggests that the throne cannot be occupied by the minister; it belongs to the president. He is the one holding the faulty switch of light. His head this crown of darkness fits.
In quarrelsome politics, songs easily become proverbs, and proverbs songs. To crown Adelabu the “King of Darkness” while sparing his appointor is to blame the drum for a rhythm composed by the drummer. A bad workman, the proverb says, always blames his tools. Ministers are tools; the hand that wields them writes the music.
The minister is styled Olókùnkùn Birimù Birimù I. The regnal ordinal “I” (The First), suggests that before him, history has produced no predecessor worthy of such investiture. Olókùnkùn The First, stands, therefore, as a founding ancestor to future failure, progenitor of a dynasty of darkness. But if a minister presides over a mere kingdom of darkness, the president reigns over an empire and should not be denied his own befitting imperial crown.
In Nigeria’s political theatre, presidents have rarely escaped the sting of nicknames. Goodluck Jonathan was branded “the Clueless One” by the opposition All Progressives Congress, a label meant to portray his government as drifting without direction. His successor, Muhammadu Buhari, came and acquired the mocking sobriquet “Baba Go Slow,” a jab at the perceived sluggish pace of his administration. Today, Bola Ahmed Tinubu is derided in Obidient circles as “Bulaba”, one of his many campaign gaffes.
The case of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua was different and complicated. He was slow and absent. His presidency was defined by circumstance, his prolonged illness and absence from public life, leaving history to remember him less by a mocking title than by the quiet fragility of his tenure.
Now we have a minister garbed in the golden apparel of dank darkness.
Elisabeth Staab’s ‘King of Darkness’ might well look on with envy at the appropriation of its sunless title by Nigerian politics. The same reaction may be expected from ‘Kings in Darkness’, a 1962 sword-and-sorcery short story by the English writer Michael Moorcock. In that story that reads like Nigeria, two distressed adventurers who barely escape with their lives from a city of beggars, stumble into a cursed forest. The title feels oddly apt for Nigeria of today.
Back to Nigeria’s power crisis and the anger in the streets: are we condemned to spend this century groping through darkness?
We have a peacock government that prances and preens as though it were the best that will ever be. But if the unwell is left to roam the streets as he pleases, he will soon turn the neighbourhood into a warehouse of filth. We should be talking and acting. Is the mockery of the minister part of that talking? I don’t know.
I suspect the government will calm the angry by telling them that there is nothing new or unseemly in the unfurled darkness over the Nigerian skies. The price of petrol competes in space with war missiles in the Middle East. Electricity tariff here does not do that. The cost of power does not rise every day and night like the third leg of the lecherous. That should be a plus for this government, and for which it should be praised.
American writer and poet, Carl Phillips, says that restlessness might not solve any problem, but it is a force which he would not refuse. In search of clues from history, I always turn to books and scholars. David E. Nye’s ‘When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America’ recounts how, during a major power failure in July 1977, New York City slipped into arson, looting and riots. So, as they do on earth, so they do in heaven! Hillard G. Huntington’s ‘The Historical “Roots” of U.S. Energy Price Shocks’ reminds us that energy disruptions have long shaken economies. Huntington traces “sustained energy price increases” as far back as the 1890s and shows how such shocks often precede economic decline. What my restless search found is that wrong policies (or the absence of policy altogether) have a way of switching off the light in people’s lives.
Indeed, as late as the 1970s, the United States (today’s emblem of industrial stability) was itself trapped in an energy crisis that rattled its politics and economy. Long queues at petrol stations suggested a sudden oil shock. Energy historian Robert D. Lifset, in ‘A New Understanding of the American Energy Crisis of the 1970s’, argues that the crisis ran deeper. He said what looked like an oil shortage was in fact the convergence of structural distortions across oil, natural gas and electricity—rising consumption, policy missteps and market imbalances that had accumulated for years until external shocks exposed them.
Nigeria’s present electricity emergency fits that pattern almost perfectly. The threat by gas suppliers to halt supply to power plants over mounting debts is not the disease but merely a symptom; it is the evidence of a distorted power market, a broken payment chain, and a dangerously centralised electricity system where a single financial blockage plunges an entire nation into darkness.
My point, therefore, is that Nigerians protesting blackouts are reacting to symptoms that manifest as outages. They should instead be seen, and heard, rebelling against a federal system designed to malfunction. Perhaps if we studied how the United States confronted and eventually resolved its energy crisis some fifty years ago, we might learn something useful. But such learning presumes a federation that works. Nigeria stopped working soon after independence. It stopped thinking right a long time ago. America’s response to its own crisis was anchored in a federal structure that allows its states and markets room to innovate and correct failure. Nigeria, by contrast, remains trapped in a dubious federal arrangement whose excessive centralisation breeds the very pests (and blood-sucking bedbugs) of crises it endlessly pretends to fight.
In any crisis, clarity of vision and sincerity in leadership matter. The president promised while asking for votes the last time: “Whichever way, by all means necessary, you will have electricity, and you will not pay for estimated bill anymore. A promise made will be a promise kept.
“If I don’t keep the promise and I come for a second time, don’t vote for me. Unless I give you adequate reasons why I couldn’t deliver.”
He launched his reelection campaign the very day he was sworn in. Has he given any reason why he failed to fulfill his electricity promise? None. The hungry man who once begged for èbà on credit has now married his creditor and is threatening to impregnate him with heavier debts.
A president who campaigned with the promise of light now rules with the torch of darkness. And everyone seems to have surrendered to him, even while sleeping and waking in utter hopelessness. It is tough for everyone; businesses are sweating blood under the weight of diesel and its cost which swells per minute like garri Ijebu. “Life here is tough. One has to be a devil to survive.” Donne, the principal character in Wilson Harris’s ‘Palace of the Peacock’, might well have been speaking of today’s Nigeria when he uttered that line.
“Olókùnkùn Birimù Birimù” has the cadence of poetic excellence. Political nicknames compress criticism into memorable phrases that travel faster than argument. Yet, satire also demands intellectual consistency. If Adebayo Adelabu is to be enthroned as Kábíyèsi over the kingdom of darkness, the crown cannot sit comfortably on his head. A chief cannot be king. The minister is not the head. In any system of delegated authority, the crown of responsibility climbs the ladder to the top.
So, enough of straw-stuffed dummies and effigies that are easily knocked down and destroyed. Throw the dart where the problem lies. If darkness reigns, the court must decide who truly wears the crown. After all, in the old, and even in contemporary Yoruba courts, no one addresses a courtier as king. Haughty Basorun Gaa was once greeted as “Kábíyèsi” by some frightened townspeople; he rebuked them: “K’áraóle là ń kí Ọsòrun.” (It is “be well” that we say to the Basorun.) The president professes this failure and must therefore receive the commensurate commendation for it. My muse gave me a proverb: “àṣẹ ọba ni ìlú fi ń ṣàye” (it is the king’s authority that sets the town in motion—or in demotion). The president, who has chosen politics as his only core course, is the true sovereign of this empire of darkness: I call him Ààrẹ Olókùnkùn.
Source: The Nigerian Tribune
