There is sadness all over Nigeria today, and I don’t like it.
This simply shows that our politics is all wrong.
If the politics is right, people ought to be laughing from Lagos to Maiduguri and from Sokoto to Calabar.
Politics is a game of charismatic characters and jocular jokers.
Whether in the manner of speaking, or in carriage, the charming politicians stand out. During the time of Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe we were wont to hear expressions like “Zikism is no jingoism!”
A major character like Dr KO Mbadiwe would tell anyone who cared to listen: “I am no longer of the timber and calibre class because I am now a juggernaut!”
Chief Obafemi Awolowo reportedly said in the run-up to the 1979 presidential elections that he could debate the issue of education with Zik but not with Alhaji Shehu Shagari because the Sokoto man knows nothing on the subject!
Nigeria’s Second Republic boasted of a very hilarious character in then Kano State Governor, Barkin Zuwo, who when asked a question on the mineral resources to be found in his beloved Kano State, replied thusly: “There are many mineral resources in Kano like Fanta, Coke, Sprite, Mirinda, Pepsi, 7Up, Kunu, Fura di nunu, Danta Cola etc!”
A journalist who once asked Barkin Zuwo about his running mate got this answer: “My running mate is Abubakar Rimi who keeps running after my life! That Dan Iska called Rimi is always my running mate, chasing after me everywhere in Kano, never allowing me to rest, wicked running mate!”
As Oscar Wilde knows, “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
The joker in the park of recent Nigerian politics happens to be Dame Patience Jonathan, the erstwhile First Lady of Nigeria.”
What then President Goodluck Jonathan lacked in gregariousness and colour was more than made up for by his wife, Dame Patience, whose quotable quotes run thusly: “Na only you waka come? Diarris God o!”
Dame Patience thrilled the audiences across the country when campaigning for her husband by always stressing: “Vote for umblerra!”
She then upped the ante with the following quote: “We should have love for our fellow Nigerians irrespective of their nationality!”
Nobody can afford to ignore our Dame Patience and the many quotable lines attributed to her such as: “The bombers who born them? Wasn’t it not a woman? They were once children, now adult, now they are bombing women and children, making some children a widow.”
And talking of widows, there is this not-so-funny matter about a certain pastor in power who asked all the widows to go to a side of the warehouse church only to see one woman abandoning her living husband to join the widows. When the husband, a broke and koboless opposition politician in this dispensation protested, his wife replied him sharply: “Are you still alive, onye PDP, when you cannot buy me ordinary Nkwobi? Let me join my fellow widows to get their tradermoni jare!”
Politicians all over the world almost always have their foibles documented in the public space.
Former American President Gerald Ford had an entire book, The Gerry Ford Joke Book, written on his mishaps while in power.
Gerald Ford was once quoted as saying: “If Abraham Lincoln were still to be alive, he would turn in his grave!”
Talk of a man being alive and yet turning in his grave.
There is even the joke that Gerry Ford won an election in his constituency only because the people of his community were tired of seeing him around and thus sent him off to Washington DC by massively voting for him to leave town.
This regime must perforce bring laughter back on the Nigerian political front burner.
Let us get back to the time when Nigerians were universally declared as the happiest people on God’s earth.
The many lies issuing forth from ass-lickers of the powers-that-be are not funny at all.
Let the political jokes and jokers return like in the time of Barkin Zuwo who, when he was arrested after the 1983 coup for having millions of naira in the house, coolly told his military arresters that he did not see anything wrong in having “Government money in government house!”
Well, one of the change agents of the NextDevil, sorry, NextEvil, sorry again, NextLevel government has just informed me that after the nine-hour presidential judgment which declared that a school certificate can be obtained through an affidavit, the regime is working very hard to put laughter back on Nigerian faces by ensuring that in no distant future, say in 2023, or via a third term call, or a Sai Baba Revolution, or whatever, every patriotic Nigerian can earn a PhD – by affidavit!