There are too many mad people in this country. From top to bottom, we are all mad.
There is even the aspect that I call treasonable madness by some Nigerians.
One mad countryman was laughing so wildly and screaming these crazy words on a hot Lagos afternoon: “How can a man who has just imported a super-duper Escalade be talking of pursuing a Nigeria First policy/”
Another madman countered him thusly: “The only thing better than a democratically elected governor is an appointed military sole administrator!”
The madness has overwhelmed the ordinary folks on the streets as well – just like the whisky-gulping bozos in the higher echelons of power.
Just the other day, on Nnobi Street, Ikate, Surulere, Lagos, a young man wearing dreadlocks went stark naked and jumped on a table in the middle of the street, stating, in his words, “to prove that smoking Indian hemp does not make anybody mad!”
“Who says that weed-smoking drives somebody mad?” hollered the bloke, taking a long drag on his heavy reefer and blowing a cloud of smoke into the air, with his unmentionable dangling down below. “I am here smoking ganja and talking sense to you to prove that smoking grass can never make you go mental!”
As they say, shame only belongs to the relations of the madman. The guy has since been taken to Yaba-Left by his relatives.
This fellow’s case, of course, pales in comparison to the raving madness of our politicians, a typical example being the self-advertised godfather in my native Anambra State who in his heyday took a Bible-wielding hard man to the dreaded Okija shrine.
There are too many madmen and women parading themselves as politicians and democrats in this country, e.g., the SP that boasted that he would only settle the woman molestation charges on his head if the other politician settled the problems of his small party.
What is happening in Nigeria today reminds me of one of my favourite novels The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
Part of the blurb of that astounding novel reads:
“The devil makes a personal appearance in Moscow; his retinue includes two demons, a naked girl and a huge black cat which talks, walks upright, smokes cigars and is a dead shot with a Mauser automatic. Some of the devil’s pranks are sheer anarchic fun, more often they are chosen to bring out the worst in everybody. When he leaves, the asylums are full, the forces of law and order are in disarray and the population is haunted with feelings of guilt and shame…”
The world knows that Nigerian politics and politicians are stranger than fiction, whence the manufacturing of electoral results larger than the number on voters list.
The crazy stuff about Nigerian politics is that it is very much like American TV wrestling – it’s fixed!
An election technological machine bought for all of 117 billion America Dollars can be put out of work, as per computer glitches, in our embrace of total madness in election manipulation and manufacturing.
You see, what generally happens is that these politicians start out as meek normal human beings when asking for the votes of the people initially.
They only run mad completely once power gets on their lap, and they start forming mad ideas such as third-term and one-party magic.
If they said Germany’s Adolf Hitler was mad, the Nigerian politician today is madder and he readily has propagandists madder than Josef Goebbels.
Let’s crown the ace Nigerian politician with the coveted title of GOAT, that is, Greatest Of All Times in absolute madness and outright lunacy.
It takes unfathomable madness to dream of capturing the state and the entire country and all the people therein, and there happens to be the additional peck of sit-tight imperial hoodoo.
One of the maddest of them all who was caught on camera by all the televisions shoving bribe dollars into the vast pockets of his babaringa recently stated that one-party rule should be good for Nigeria because that’s how China developed.
He was promptly reminded that in China any corrupt person is promptly executed such that he ought to have been done away with long since.
According to the prolific American novelist Joyce Carol Oates in The Accused, “while madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader.”
Now that Doanald Trump is holding sway in the United States, I pray he does not hit me with the hot madness of tariffs for highlighting this quote.
The point of course is that the American politician no matter how gifted in lunacy can never trump the Nigerian politician in madness and total derangement.
I should press the stop-press button now that there is this new development of the mad Nigerian professors who always rig the mad Nigerian politicians into power finding it necessary to make a Professor of Psychiatry the new head of ASUU.
This is very crucial indeed because the professors and politicians need acute and chronic psychiatric attention.
But it does appear that madness is coming hard upon me in the shape and size of madman Azuka Jebose, the incurable apostle of madness spreading madness from the United States to Nigeria.
I’m off and running – madly!
Catch me on the mad multi-billion-dollar coastal highway to nowhere!