Ancient Yoruba says, he who seeks to purchase only the fresh head and limbs of a tortoise will end up buying the whole creature — “Ẹni t’ó ńwá orí ahun láti rí; t’ó ńwá ẹsè ahun láti rà, onít’òhún á ra odidi ahun.” That ancestral wisdom, which carries the weight of Nostradamus’ predictions, captures the kernel of the tango between the 31-member Nigerian Progressive Governors Forum (PGF) and FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike last week.
The abrasive Wike arrived at the “Ìṣò L’ékụ-l’éja” — the herbalist’s stall of rats and fish, representing the 31 governors — and asked to buy only a tortoise’s head and limbs. In his guttural, impatient voice, Wike insists he wants no part of the full creature. But the Hope Uzodinma-led PGF is querying the logic of this impending transaction: If Wike’s Rainbow Coalition supports President Bola Tinubu’s return to office, it must go the whole hog and buy the tortoise whole. The PGF refuses to let an outside coalition weaken the ruling party or fragment grassroots loyalties ahead of 2027. Anyone who wanted its tortoise cannot be allowed to have its fragments.
That territorial war sparked immense political tension last week. PGF members filed out like wild cats — or enraged termites defending their mound. On Arise TV, APC chieftain Farouk Aliyu admitted Wike had caused massive distraction. When termites are confronted with external invaders of their territory, their fit of anger is synonymous with what you saw in the governors’ eyes last week. Wild cats’ fit is often very clear and unmistakable. Confronted with an interloper, their eyes narrow and dilate entirely. They look onto their target with a fixed, heavy-browed gaze, ready to pounce. Those days as kids, when we were playing in sand dunes and decision time beckoned, we sang: “The eyes of the leopard are red; the tail of the leopard is turgid!” – “Ojú ekùn ńpón, irù ekùn ńle!”
Yet, at their Abuja press conference, the PGF veiled its red eyes in diplomacy. Uzodinma was apparently afraid of the leopard and avoided naming it outright, even when Wike was the subject of the press conference. Who dares to peer a torch into the eyes of “Ògìdán, olóólà ijù” — the lone predator in the wild whose patterned spots is scarified by nature with tribal marks, and whose sharp claws mark its prey like an artist’s knife?
Still, Uzodinma found his footing: the PGF remains unequivocal that it will endorse no political alliance outside the official APC structure. It dismissed Wike’s Rainbow Coalition as a rude interloper. Aliyu reinforced this, insisting that APC will only sell the whole tortoise: the governors, not Wike, will run campaign structures in their respective states.
Wike would not hear of that. He promptly went deep down into the sewage, brought out chunky smelly faecal matter with his bare hands and pelted it on the PGF. Governors opposed to his Rainbow Coalition were “419-smart and politically lazy,” he said. If you didn’t hear it well, you’d think a motor-park tout was the protagonist. He singled out Kwara State governor, AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq and Uzodinma in an ad-hominem rain of abuses that signpost his garrulity and intolerance for the other person. Aliyu promptly called out his arrogance, urging him to watch his words and learn humility.
Beyond the insults, this friction highlights a deeper struggle for party control on the road to 2027. Stripped to its core, the exchange resembles the accusative howling between an adulterous woman and her liaison, something in the mould of a mistress and her partner washing their dirty linen in the public after a failed extra-marital fling. Rather than mere “shame,” the dynamics of traditional adultery aptly explain this drama. As Dadakuada bard, Odolaye Aremu, chanted: “Ìjà níí gb’ẹyìn àlè” — Fights are always the end of adulterous flings.
APC’s decision to bring a quarrelsome, voluptuous fling into its household in 2023 was bound to prove fatal. That liaison is akin to a man who takes a termagant — a woman always aggressively nagging, scolding and fighting to wangle her way through in her husband’s home (Pa-mí-nkú obìnrin tíí se orí bęnbę s’ókǫ) — as a consort. The end is predictable.
First, adultery is an affair kept secret until a messy spat exposes its squalid details. It is only when a messy fight ensues between the offeror and offeree — apologies to lawyers — that, in moments of exchanges of howling, its messy details unfurl. Outside of Aso Rock and Wike, no one knows the terms of agreement struck in 2023 between the philandering Villa and the PDP fling who is today in charge of the FCT. Second, a habit of illicit escapades as the APC has had in three years-plus with all manner of whores cannot but eventually lead him to an asínwín (madwoman); an àjẹ (a witch), or an òbùn (a filthy woman). In courting Wike, the APC’s hired farmhand (alágbàro) must have strangely acquired a field crawling with venomous snakes.
But the streetwalker the APC picked in 2023, with whom it has been in bed, has got her rewards. In the television interview, Aliyu said this much: “If you want to say that Wike has helped us, we accept that. But he has also been adequately compensated. The position of FCT minister is good and huge compensation in a political setting of this country.” Aliyu then concluded: “We don’t want either Wike or any other person from any other party to insult our leaders just because you have helped us.”
Adultery is abhorrent to political morality. In any sane polity, a figure who served as local government chairman, governor, and minister under an opposition political party and turning around to become a major-domo in the ruling party, is a bizarre arrangement. When you eagerly pick up a chattel discarded by another, you must ask why the original owner let it go. Did APC assume that the PDP which allowed Wike slid in the last months of 2023 was stupid? It is like finding a motionless buffalo stuck in a marsh (àbàtà) and excitedly pulling out a knife to skew its flesh, ignoring that its heavy filth might have caused its collapse.
If APC thought it found a humongous buffalo of Nyesom Wike’s monstrous size trapped in a puddle and picked it up, it apparently didn’t reckon that its overweight of dirt could have led to its fall. Couldn’t the Wike buffalo have been trapped by its own hubris? Now that the house is in commotion, no one should pity the APC for shouting “Eureka!” over a trapped buffalo find. If Wike was not poisonous to a peaceful PDP, would the original PDP have discarded its chattel?
Yoruba proverbs note that a half-cured lunatic has cyclic manifestations. In 2023, the APC was enchanted by Wike’s allure; now, it realizes it carries a faggot infested with stinging bees on its head. From the way this pretty woman sitting comfy in its living room laughs when there is no joke, (apologies to Bob Marley) the huge problem that lay ahead is finally here.
The APC governors complain bitterly today about Wike’s gutter rhetoric. Another proverb exposes their ignorance of power dynamics. It says, if one’s mother’s lover is greater than one’s father, one must address him as ‘father’” (Bí àlè ìyá ẹni bá ju bàbá ẹni lọ, bàbá là á pè é”).
The lover in this regard, who is spitting in the APC’s face, and who sees himself as greater than their father in Aso Rock, is Wike. They should either shut their mouths or allow him call their bluffs for free. Furthermore, don’t they know that a woman who destroys her previous home will not hesitate to turn her new home into a house of commotion? If Wike glibly destroyed his PDP for the peace of APC, would he hesitate to destroy an alien home? It reminds me of the tortoise who lifts up a morsel of food and his child opens her mouth to be fed with it. In reply, the tortoise asked her if he wasn’t miserly, how would the world name him ahun, the miserly?
For APC, Odolaye Aremu’s song captures its current travails: He sang, apparently sarcastically — The monstrous desire you craved is what you have now! — “Ohun t’óo l’óó dà, l’o dà yìí o!” Traditional folklore tells us that baby vipers eat their way out of their mother’s stomach: “Ọmọ inú ọká níí ṣe ikú pa ọká.” A party that covets unchecked bigness inevitably creates its own internal opposition and possibly, death. That is the bigness APC craved.
All said and done, he who brings the cripple to the shindig must take him back home. Aliyu and some other APC stalwarts have asked their Baba to quickly come back home. When he comes back from his photo-ops with French’s Emmanuel Macron, he must take his cripple back home.
For the APC, that saying by the Yoruba — though extremely sexist and one of the weapons used by traditional Africa to under-price the woman — that a household where a bad-mannered woman gives binding instructions is a house on the verge of disintegration is trite. Wild trees will grow over it (Ilé tí obìnrin bá ti ńké atótó arére, títú ni ńtú, igi arère níí hù níbè kéhìn). How can a strange fling give instructions to children of a home? How can a strange house guest be allowed to run the home?
NOTE: Views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Theliberationnews
