Nigeria’s dinner with ‘Mugabe’

Have you ever read Heidi Holland’s Dinner With Mugabe? It was published in 2012 by a Zimbabwean journalist and columnist who worked with Illustrated Life Rhodesia magazine. The book is a very penetrating portraiture of Robert Mugabe. It is a psychobiography of a freedom fighter, liberal lawyer and revolutionary who later became, first Prime Minister and later, President of Zimbabwe. The book’s title was a product of a 1975 sudden call from a Holland friend. He wanted her to arrange dinner and meeting with a friend she had no idea who he was, in her home in Salisbury, now Harare, then capital of white Rhodesia. “It wasn’t until we stood under the veranda light and looked up as we greeted each other that I recognised him. It was Robert Mugabe,” she wrote in the Preface to the book. “He swaggered awkwardly as he does still. His shoulders were stooped a bit and he looked lean and agile, as if ready to sprint.”

Mugabe had a train to catch that night and intermittently looked at his wrist-watch. He had just come out of an eleven years prison and was about to escape through the border into Mozambique to begin war against white rule. Holland, who later became a leading authority on the enigmatic mind of Robert Mugabe, drove Bob that night to the railway station.

For over 30 years, Holland observed Bob morph from a guerrilla-leader-in-waiting into a sadistic and grotesque dictator. Page by page, the psychobiography uncovers how tyranny took hold of Mugabe and the roots of his ruthlessness. It gradually unfolds the horrific consequences of his presidency of Zimbabwe. She interviewed many people to be able to construct the total picture the world has of Mugabe. This included an obscure younger brother of his, a Catholic priest who took his confession and then, a lengthy interview she later had with Mugabe as president. In all this, Holland reveals that Mugabe had a more complicated persona than his fearsome image the world had. She concluded that the tragedy he later became, especially his anglophobia and despotism, came out of his tortured relationship with Britain; that his hurt anger was that of a spurned friend. Mugabe was notorious for venting his fury on white farmers and Zimbabweans at large. He called the farmers “Britain’s children” and his cold-hearted governance was perhaps reflective of the poverty of his upbringing in a Shona family in Kutama, Southern Rhodesia.

Heidi’s psychobiography unwittingly shows that emergence of leaders is through two routes. First are the ones whose portraits are known, pre-power, ab-initio and without psychoanalysis. Such leaders the Yoruba call the e-ti- m’oko-l’óko-ikún-kí-e-tó-gbin-èpà-si type. Ikun, the land squirrel, is a rodent smaller than the widely known species called ọ̀kẹ́rẹ́. It lives on the ground as against trees that ọ̀kẹ́rẹ́ is known by. This rodent is renowned for its obsession with devouring nuts in a groundnut plantation. If a farmer knew that the plantation he was about to cultivate was in a squirrel-infested field, and, yet sowed his seeds in it, when he whimpers at its devastation by squirrels, Yoruba blame him for his stupidity. He should have known that a fatal failure awaited him; what the Yoruba, again, call “ofo l’ehin oja.”

The second kind of leadership is Mugabe’s, as profiled by Heidi. At the outset, they wear the garb of innocence. Suddenly, these leaders transmute into wearing the visage of Dracula. They then pounce on the people with their ferocious teeth.

When life is as sour as 2024 Nigeria, the Yoruba compare existence to the taste from licking the sour seed of Iyeye. Iyeye is however Janus. As sour as its seeds are, its generational benefits are legends of folklores. Botanically named spondias mombin, in English, Iyeye is the hog plum. In Igbo, it is Ijikara while Hausa call it Tsardar masar. Its seeds are sour-sweet but the medicinal barks and leaves are used for inducing labour in women. In those days in Iwo, old Oyo State, I picked two songs that still ring in my head till today. As pupils of Ajangbala D.C. Primary School, we sang, while marching from the “Assembly” to our classes, “Odíderé eye Ìwó, Àlùkò eye Òsà, Lékelèké eye Òsun, ìwà re wù mí, màá bá e lo…” (Parrot, the bird totem of Iwo people; Woodcock, bird of the Sea and Cattle egret, bird of the Osun River goddess, your characters fascinate me and I will go with you, wherever you go…).

The other was mostly sung by our mothers in eulogy to the Iyeye. They sang, “Ewé ìyeyè, igba ni o, owó tí mo ní, kò ‘ì tó o, omo tí mo ní, kò ì tó o, ewé ìyeyè igba ni” (as the leaves sprouting out of the Iyeye are two hundred-fold, (may) my wealth and the children I will birth be similar in number; the ones I have are not enough). While the Iyeye song espouses and extols the multiplicity of children that a good tree begets, the two songs, taken together, speak to character and pedigree. The first extols the desirability and aesthetics of character of birds. Odidere, for instance, also called Ayékòótó, (the world scoffs at the truth) is a friend of man and the Iwo. It is domesticated and is said to understand and speak the language of man. It mirrors the purity of mind that its trustworthiness connotes. Such trust is reflected in the deep Yoruba saying that, Odidere should remember the tenets of the agreement it entered into with its master (Odíderé, t’ó bá j’oungbé, má j’oùngbé o!). The birds’ sterling character binds, like a twine, a whole people in friendship with the Parrot, Woodcock and Cattle egret birds.

Unlike Iwo, Sea and Osun River’s friendship with the above birds, our land has always been unlucky to be in besotting friendship with the Abyssinian hornbill bird. Yoruba call this bird Àkàlàmàgbò or Àkàlà. Àkàlà is a bird in whose veins, metaphorically, blood does not flow. It is audaciously bold in doing the unthinkable. It enjoys eating sumptuous sacrifices, food of the gods. These sacrifices are products of the innermost recess of pains suffered by those who offer them. Àkàlà also feasts on carrion, corpses of human and carcasses of non-human beings.

How did Nigerians get here? It is as a result of the fatal consequences they always suffer due to their uncritical profiling and friendship with their leader-tormentors. They once wanted a man who didn’t have shoes while growing up. They ended up with a man who scarcely knew his left hand from his right. Again, they desired a Spartan. They got one whose brain was as vacant as a Venetian graveyard. Lastly, they mis-read, mis-profiled and mistook Akala for the Odidere, the latter a bird whose sense of character imposes remembrance of agreement. Have they forgotten that the Vulture comes from a family of sacrifice and cadaver eaters (ìran Igún níí je’bo, ìran Àkàlà a j’òkú)? Why did they think they could make the corpse walk, apologies to James Hadley Chase, by reshaping the fatal consequences of their own hypocritical estimation? They deified a Capon whose heart is as cold as mutton as a potential Messiah. Now, they are wailing. Right by their bedside is their choice, the one they knew so much about, yet so little of the fatal damage that his pedigree they knew so well could do on their lives.

On Thursday, as fuel was being funnelled inside my car, I ‘prayed’ for everyone who brought this tragedy on Nigerians. To me, my blood was the petrol from the expensive nozzle majestically flowing into the car. It was N1,000 a liter! It is a very distressing time to be a Nigerian. I instantly remembered that, on October 10, 1998, almost 26 years ago, in Yaba, Lagos, with Nigeria locked in a similar chokehold of petrol scarcity, I asked today’s bird of carrion, who, pretending to be Odíderé, had just flown back to Iwo, what his impression of Nigeria was. In his usual cockney, he thundered: “Retrogression, rolling backwards, on reverse gear; that is my impression. Sad! That people are still queuing at the petrol stations, spend more productive hours at the petrol stations than in economic sector. It is a very sad story… You see poverty, glaringly on the faces of the people, in a nation that has so much resources to thrive on. It hurts.” I wrote this and more in my offering of December 10, 2023.

If poverty and suffering (glaring on the faces of the people) can be measured, I wonder which would be plentier – the ones now or the gnashing of teeth under the military in 1998? But, in unmistakable warnings, we foretold this tragedy. I did in a viral piece published on January 16, 2022. We were Heidi Holland and we literally had dinner with the harbingers of the present pains. Unlike Holland, whose portraiture of Mugabe was post-mortem, ours was ante-mortem. We were demonized as prophets of doom. Nigerians said they had discovered, right on their thumbnail, a great builder who could turn ruins to Ruby. His bio, they said, spoke volumes. Didn’t we know he built Òkun (the Sea) and Òsà (the Lagoon) from nothing and made both a glittering expanse of aquatic modern wonder?

In their excitement, they even foretold life in abundance and plenty under the incoming builder. So they excitedly sang “L’áyé Olúgbọ́n…”, a historical song sung in the old Oyo Empire during the reign of Aláàfin Abíọ́dún. The song was to buttress their anger at what they called our  prophecy of doom. Indeed, during the reign of King Abiodun of Ọ̀yọ́-Ilé in the Empire, his government typified the height of an empathetic and benevolent administration. It prioritized the people’s welfare. There was plenty. There was peace, economic growth, prosperity and development. People praised and sang the goodness and huge financial stability that Oyo witnessed under him. So, women were renowned for singing this hate-laced, scurrilous attack song against the opposition to Abiodun: “During the reign of King Olugbon, we had such plenty that we bought and sewed seven exotic scarves; during the reign of King Aresa, we bought and sewed six scarves; during the reign of Abiodun, we bought and sewed velvet, silks and other pricey clothing materials…” (L’áyé Olúgbọ́n, mo dá’borùn méje, e ó maa ko yìi l’órin, l’áyé Arèsà, mo dá’borùn méfà, e ó maa kò yí l’órin, l’áyé Abíódún, mo ra kókò, mo rà’rán baba aso, e ó maa kò yí l’órin…” They ended their mockery-laced song by calling us lazy drones who only foretold hunger and pain. They asked us to carry our baggage and seek comfort in another land: “Àf’òle l’ó le pé ilè yìí ò dùn; eni bá pé ilè yìí ò dùn, k’ó yára k’érù s’ókò, k’ò gb’oko lo.”

We didn’t relent in telling them how wrong they were. We told the people that no one can build, nor renew any skyscraper of hope on a cracked pedigree. The “Oba Abiodun” they were bringing to sit on the Rock was actually Alaafin Aole. You can check who the original was. He would steal, plunder and despoil farmlands plus their future. He was a lover of the good things of life and would go on a saturnalia with your patrimony, we warned. The modern builder they trumpeted to high heavens, we warned, was a nondescript Amukun. The Amukun is the knock-kneed whose ways are foretold by his own structural calamity. We warned, they scoffed at us and called us names. But, now is our time to scorn them! We would have done this gladly, drinking drums of palmwine as we laugh at a people’s foolishness. However, as Bob Marley sang, when the rain comes, it doesn’t fall only on the nice man’s house. So does hunger and devastation. We are drenched in this downpour of pain, hunger and rulership calamity. We are the Babalawo who divined famine who is also buying famine for N1000 per morsel – just like those who scoffed his divination. Our fates are conjoined.

Today, the land tastes like a sour Iyeye fruit (Ìlú kan gógó). As our elders say when there is famine and maladministration, our birds chirp in awkward manner; our rats squeak in ways they had never done hitherto. Our situation is almost synonymous with the biblical Samaria where parents entered into consensus to eat their children. Hope is the scarcest on the horizon. The people suffer needlessly. They queue in serpentine, snake-like kilometers-length to buy fuel that oozes out of their own soil. Nothing seems to work. Yet, the people in power live recklessly the proverbial fàmíl’étèntu’tó life. They fly glittering jirigin sama, a $100m-worth ACJ330-200, VP-CAC (MSN 1053), while their people wallow in abject squalor and poverty. Those who daily eat eggs forget easily that the cock that lays the eggs suffer anal pains. Like Mugabe’s, ours is Zimbabwe where, unto the Leviathan, the legislature and judiciary bow. In our face, they flaunt the latest Cadillac Escalade and tell us to go jump inside the lagoon. A country where the groaning of the people does not grate the ears of their leaders is gasping for breath. Being a Nigerian at this time is like wearing a thorn-filled crown and carrying the heavy biblical Jesus’ cross.

To worsen matters, subterfuge and a coterie of lies are official responses to our anger. When you are seen as one who heaves a tall ladder (àbà) to the furrows in order to climb a heap (ebè) you are an Alágàbàngebè – a serial liar – so say the Yoruba. A person or government which lives a life of decet; one who daily tells scores of lies, is labeled Ajíp’ogúnn’ró. We must be bothered about the moral imperatives and implications of government’s deliberate falsehoods. We seem to live now in a post-truth, post-fact era Nigeria. Truth and fact are casualties of a government whose widely known alias is Ajíp’ogúnn’ró. For those who know what reputational harm can do to a government trapped timeless times spinning falsehoods, this is really scary.

Jamaican reggae music sensation, Peter Tosh, was at the emotional crossroads we are today as Nigerians. A very religious Rastafarian, Tosh preached redemption through his songs for decades, yet none came. He was often brutalized by the police. So, in frustration, he asked a rhetorical question in the track, Jah Se No,“Must Rastas bear this cross alone and all the heathens go free?” No. There is redemption. History tells us so. To ram home the fact that no evil goes unpunished, the Yoruba say nemesis is next door for every enemy of the people, Ìtàdógún kù sí dèdè, ojó elésìín k’òla.