By Sam Omatseye
Comedy is a cousin of tragedy. When comedy enacts a scene, it is like a traitor in the family. It makes us laugh, but it is often about something sad. I think this way about two characters in our politics today. They are from different geopolitics, although they belong, by coincidence, to the same party.
Both are the funniest duo in Nigeria today. In politics, that is. Outside politics, the gold card goes to Pastor Odumeje. From the Southwest, the honours go to Governor Ademola Adeleke of Osun State. From Rivers State, Governor Sim Fubara takes a bow. Two events last week puts both men in bold comedic relief.
In Rivers State, the Supreme Court came down with a hammer on the Rivers State local government polls, and it berates it as illegal.
It means all the ceremonies undertaken by the governor, the abuses, the voters register, the lineup of electors, the signing of results, and the jubilations of victory, all of these were what literary critics call burlesque. They were first up there, pumped up as balloons. Then the whole thing came down, burst and great was the sound of justice.
The top court also said the comedy of a three- or four-man legislature was a farce – my own words. But it affirms the 27-man law chamber. We cannot forget that Fubara underwrote a budget with a sprinkle of men. He set up an executive council with a few lonely men as lawmakers. He has been plodding along with a mockery of democracy.
As for Adeleke, it was about a local government and a demolition. He dissolved the local government, but the courts say he has no right to do so, that the terms of the incumbents have not expired. The court of appeal, that is. Then, with a sense of farce, he goes to a lower court to legitimize his action. The lower court, against all reasonable precedents, grants him order in defiance of the higher court. He goes ahead to conduct the poll, a sham of an election. His party, just like Fabara’s, sweeps the polls. And to avoid the clash of the winners as we saw in Rivers, Adeleke says the “winners” should not go to their offices. So, from winners take all, they become losers take none. They won but they lost. They are winners on paper. They are trustees of the mandate in waiting. It is a victory without spoils, a responsibility without power, a status without stature, a post of impotence.
So, both men, Adeleke and Fubara, are funny, but they are not fun. Fubara is still examining the judgment. His lawyers want to make a continual buffoon of their client. So, they are looking for lacuna to exploit. Some lawyers are denying the Supreme Court verdict of the lawmakers as to whether they have defected.
They are waiting for the top court to eat its own words and go back to its vomit. It reminds me of the words of Jesus, who poured woe on lawyers for taking away the “key of knowledge.” Money has held lawyers spellbound, so they turn the law with the facility of their crafty minds. Hence Shakespeare said, “the first thing we do, let’s kill the lawyers.”
The tragedy is that we need them. Some scholars are beginning to doubt the durability of the democratic idea because of the ability of men and lawyers to upend a popular system. We are seeing it in Europe, and the United States. It is a Hobbesian world we are walking into. It is a time for vigilance. In the sweep of human history, democracy has been a blip. We have had different forms of autocracy hold sway for most of human civilization, and we should not presume that it cannot die away. Democracies have voted in autocracies in Ancient Greece and in the 20th century. In the U.S., the poor voted in a plutocracy. Nothing is guaranteed.
With strong men with populist bravura and cunning, we may have a democracy by name, but the system would be essentially autocratic. We are witnessing that under Trump today. They are the models for Adeleke and Fubara. They are just not that clever yet. As the Russian novelist and philosopher Maxim Gorky wrote, the “only people who deserve freedom are those who fight for it every day.” Vigilance is the capacity for survival. Autocracy is beguiling; hence systems and masses tend to fall for them. It seduces hysteria. It is a charming brute.
Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, predicted that democracy will flourish as families break down to smaller units. His idea is that large patriarchies favour despots. That idea has been disgraced in public in the 20th century with the fascist seductions of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini in Europe and Pol Pot and Mao in Asia.
One of the problems of democracy is the impotence of the courts, that is righteous courts. A court does not have an army. So, it can issue a verdict. The executive branch that controls the armed forces clips the police and soldiers. Nothing happens. We are seeing this in Osun right now. Lawyers are coddling Fubara and quietly cajoling him to defy.
Hence, I say both men are comedians whose latest acts do not inspire laughter. They make us wince with fear for our system. They are different types of comedians. Fubara is not the laughing type, and makes us laugh just by his slapstick acts. We call such comedians dark. He does not intend to amuse, but he cannot help himself. What of a line like, “the jungle has matured.” Or his acts of lashing out at his predecessor when he is imitating his style of launching projects. Or when he says “I am not afraid of you.” His is what is called deadpan comedy, the sort that Soyinka gives in A Play of Giants. Or Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest.
Governor Adeleke combines fat and athletic to give us dances. His dance cannot win a formal prize but it entertains more than those formal dances because he is so unoriginal that it seems original because of who is dancing. It is like an agabya entertaining everyone and no one has to laugh at him. His rambunctious humour is like Baba Sala, or Jagua. The difference is that Adeleke is governor and some people need quite a few laughs in a time of desperate need. If he cannot give the people bread, as Roman Poet Juvenal prescribes, at least he can stage a circus, spontaneous, unscripted, rip-roaring circuses. The local government poll saga shows the thin line between comedy and tragedy. After all, Trump is a funny man, an entertainer who is blowing up the world. It is like Nobel laureate Gunter Grass who turns a comic style to script a Nazi feast.
Comedy and anomie are like beauty and beast.
The beauty, like Delilah, is like trouble. Hence Ayi Kwei Amah calls his novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a testament to beauty as impostor. It is not John Keats’ definition as truth. It is more like poet Rilke’s view that it is terror. Hence in her novel, The Death of Vivek Orji, Akwaeke Emezi’s protagonist treasures how Amah spells Beautyful in his novel by retaining the integrity of the noun. Adjectives undermine the souls of matters. That is the fear that our two top comedians may want to bring to our system.
Comedy is beauty, but not the sort we are getting from the top guns in Rivers and Osun.
