Nigeria and a Poet’s Crystal Ball

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Poetry has been referred to as “language of the gods”. It is said that the source of the art is in the void, the complex cosmos of consciousness, which is in the mysterious hands of the multi-Omni Divine. The rhymes and rhythms of the lines and stanzas of poetry, like the sounds of flowing river on the hillside, the soft strumming of nylon guitar strings in the quietude of remote villages, and songs of a thousand birds that blend in harmonious perfection with the pristine environment, take the reader on the wild whooshing wide wings of woven words to serene sceneries of climes that stir sublime ecstasy; climes beyond matter, only accessible by youthful fantasy. Undoubtedly, poetry is a heavenly art.

Poems tease the thirst for human adventure; they are music to the ear and lullaby to the restless. As balm on wounds left unattended for far too long, they calm nerves tensed by the daily hustle and bustle of human quest and bring succour to the soul. As a very important implement of the social critic, poems stealthily stab the ribcage of the villain and the conscience of a nation; yet they valorize the virtuous. Poems, if not promptly taken as gotten from the mysterious source, are forgotten, forever; and there lies its mystery.

Poets and poems are veritable vanguards of human society: the one, animate, and the other, though inanimate, sufficiently animates the animate into heroic actions that further the developmental endeavours and exploits of humanity. Armed with the pen and poised for poetry, the poet momentarily morphs into a veritable instrument of the Divine and reaches beyond self, beyond now. He reaches remote reaches that the rich can’t reach because, in their greed, they are in breach of the balance of human need.

Poets, as acclaimed wordsmiths, say so much in so little words. They have been likened to prophets; seeing into the future through the colored fluid that drops from their nib onto the papyrus, leaving behind inscriptions that wet the appetite of historians, analysts and other intellectuals of the future. Nostradamus wrote quatrains that saw trains before Richard Trevithick (1771–1833) was born; he also saw “metal birds” before Orville and Wilbur Wright were born, long before the historic and heroic flight at Kitty Hawk.

In a 1995 poem titled Niger Delta Donkey, the poet characterised Hausa/Fulani, Ibo and Yoruba tribes as “Herdsman”, “Oliver next door” and “Cocoa farmer”, respectively. Drawing from the map, economics and power-politics of Nigeria, the poet painted a pen portrait of the rest of Nigeria sitting on and riding the Niger Delta as a docile donkey. In the second stanza, the poem says thus: “See the herdsman/His Holy Book in han’/He’s jihading to thy sea/Always what and where he wants to be”. The third stanza goes thus: “The Oliver next door/Always wanting more/True and true Mr. Twist/He’s lord in the east”. The fourth stanza, which is the focus of this piece, says thus: “The cocoa farmer/Louder than the rest/He grips the system firmer/He reigns from the west”.

Fast forward to 2024, which is more than one quarter of a century after the poem, “The Cocoa Farmer is grip[ping] the [Nigerian] system firmer” by what has been adjudged “Yorubanisation of Nigeria”. Akalicious.net informs that the following key ministries are headed by Yorubas: Finance, Education, Trade & Industry, Petroleum, Marine & Blue Economy, Power, Justice, Communications, Interior and Solid Minerals. Other than the ministries, the commanding heights of the Nigerian system are squarely in the hands of the Yoruba such that an author sarcastically referred to the country as the Federal Yoruba Republic of Nigeria. In “Dark Side of Ministerial Positions “, Sylvia ThankGod-Amadi offers that “when ministerial positions are used for political control rather than public welfare, it undermines the democratic system and perpetuates a culture of self-interest, which has…damaging consequences for society “.

The above scenario justifies Pieter Botha’s villainous assertion thus: “give [Blacks] independence and democracy, they will use it to promote tribalism, ethnicity, bigotry, hatred”. Almost three decades after “Niger Delta Donkey”, the cocoa farmer has really gripped the Nigerian system firmer. The Holy Quran has been dipped into the Atlantic in fulfillment of Alhaji Ahmadu Bello’s charge to Nigerian Moslems thereby fulfilling the poetic prophecy of “jihading to thy sea” The Oliver next door is still “wanting more” while the Niger Delta Donkey is still gullible, docile and gleefully bearing the socioeconomic burden of a country that persistently and insistently remains adamant to progressive thoughts and global economic realities. In a related poem titled “Prodigiously Endowed yet Impecunious”, the author laments thus:

His wells are bleeding/Flames scorch his soil/Yet for a meal he’s pleading/Begging, cap-in-hand/From the custodians of his oil/Scavengers from distant land/With thorn-torn toes/And profusely running nose/He strives daily with a shovel/And crashes daily in a hovel/Stomach growling in emptiness/He resigns to his hopelessness

It is tragic that while other nations are consistently coalescing and collectively pushing boundaries of developmental endeavors to improve on the human condition, Nigeria is still propelled by centrifugal forces under myopic, inept and patently unpatriotic leaders who recklessly lavish public funds on themselves and their cronies like drunken sailors. The tragedy is that the captains’ inebriated judgment from intoxicated minds clouded by substance abuse, produce blurry vision bordering on blindness as the ship of the Nigerian state violently lurches towards imminent danger. And finally, a third poem says: “Like a bunch of Iguanas, deaf to advice/The captains of this sinking ship are lost in their vice”.

Osaí is professor of development studies at the Rivers State University, Port Harcourt. He can be reached on ozomagoosai@gmail.com.

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