Mocking the Nigerian Poor– Onyemaechi Ogbunwezeh

I just heard with one ear, that Godswill Akpabio, Nigeria’s senate president, was caught on camera, infamously mocking the Nigerian poor on the floor of the senate.

I also read that Pat Utomi rushed to Twitter, to chastise Akpabio.

Utomi became Simon Peter, who with a sword of indignation, rushed to save the man, who said blessed are the poor in spirit.

But like everyone, who has ever tried to defend those, capable of defending themselves, Utomi like Peter, ended up timidly harvesting a lobe of ear, insteading of cutting off the assailant’s neck.

We heard Utomi. The poor remained insulted. Akpabio’s head still sits on his neck. And business goes on as usual.

With a righteous indignation akin to that of Jesus the Galilean storming the temple of First-Century AD Jerusalem, to accost the cheating money-changers, Utomi wielded a verbal whip. But his whip did not chase the robbers off our temples. Akpabio is still wielding the gavel in our senate.

Pat Utomi is an intelligent man. He is a living personification of patriotism. But he made a mistake. In rushing to defend the poor, Utomi made the greatest mistake, that righteousness makes, when confronting an evil pregnant with greed.

He reprimanded Akpabio’s garrulity, with religion. He reacted as if religion has ever charmed greed off its perch. Zaccheus may have given back what he stole hundredfold. But Akpabio and other Nigerian thieves, are neither Zaccheus nor have they ever met Jesus.

He warned Akpabio that “he who mocks the poor, mocks God.” That is the naivety of righteousness. The belief that your concept of God is a universal.

Utomi’s mistake is to think that he is talking to men, who believed in his God or in any other God. He forgot he was dealing with moral imbeciles. The men he was talking to, fear neither God nor respect man. In fact God fears those men.

Akpabio, who is from the old calabar province and men like him consider God, an ojuju-calabar, deployed to frighten little children, and naive adults.

I wouldn’t fault Utomi’s desire to defend the poor. It comes from a place of goodwill. And like Immanuel Kant said, the only thing that is unqualifiedly good, is a goodwill. However, Utomi’s appeal to religion, undermined the poor’s ability to exact vengeance on the criminal garrulity of the Akpabios of our realm.

It serenaded the poor with the balm that since God was insulted, that God will rise to do battle. Forgetting as Sophocles articulated that the heavens will never help those who will never act. Utomi, like medieval clergy always did, unwittingly persuaded the poor not to do jack, but to wait on God. They may well be waiting for Godot. Utomi forgot what Napoleon realized. He forgot that religion is the only thing preventing the poor from eating the rich crooks of our land and clime.

On the other hand, I don‘t blame Akpabio. There is no justification for me chastising Godswill ibn Akpabio.

Why should I in good conscience, blame the shrew for stinking? It is in the nature of the shrew to stink. In fact, a shrew stinks pursuant to its genetic endowments. A shrew is condemned to stink. You don’t condemn a being for its essence. The essence of power is corruption. Power corrupts.

I blame the Nigerian poor.

They are the architects of the insults served them by monsters like Akpabio. They are the ones that built a latrine on their heads, and invited crooks like Akpabio and Tinubu to defecate on their heads. If not, Akpabio’s head would have long been detached from his neck. That is what poverty-insulted, does with its fury.

History gave us an example.

It was a calm day on that fateful 1789 morning in Paris. The insult allegedly addressed to the French poor, by her pompous majesty, Queen Marie Antoinette, have just reached the brutalized and oppressed ears of the French peasants.

These poor have for ages, been enslaved to the apron-strings of feudalism. They have paid more than their fair share of sacrifices, in hopes of a better life and better society.

Every estate of the realm contributed chains to their slavery. The King wielded the sword, the nobles applied the whips and the clergy got the people hooked on the opium of the masses. They sold them that narcotics of an extra-territorial Kingdom, flowing with milk and honey, when they must have died of drudgery.

Each step of the way, the poor were pushed deeper into poverty and destitution, by the avarice of the estates of the realm; peopled at each point, by men and women, who were nothing but eminent scoundrels, and armed buccaneers.

But these nobles and estates of the realm, have forever underestimated the resolve and intelligence of the poor. They have always believed that poverty is the equivalent of stupidity.

Why wouldn’t they? They live in the rarified world of unearned luxury and consequent debauchery. They believe that they became nobles by divine right. Unmerited privilege is that obscene in its self-overestimation.

But as history has forever shown, these hewers of wood and drawers of water, were poor, powerless, but not stupid.

They knew all along, what David Hume came to put in words, that power is just an opinion.

They knew that someone is powerful as long as public opinion holds that to be the case.

This is why governments have information ministries. Don’t forget that these were formerly named propaganda ministries.

That is why governments spend trillions annually, to influence public opinion.

That is why Intelligence agencies like the CIA, plan and execute operations like Operation Mockingbird, to influence public opinion.

That is why the media is the most powerful organ that there is today.

That is why Malcolm X told us that “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing”.

He laid emphasis on it by telling us that:

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses. The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s a the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing”.

All governments, according to I.F Stone, lie consequent on that realization that their power subsists as long as public opinion holds it to be so. They know that they are powerful because the public believes that shit. And that the day the public stops believing that, that their power ceases.

Since power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, power-holders are eternally afraid of the public rising to return power to where power belongs; namely, to the people.

That is why they do everything in their power to keep the public busy and distracted, just like Imperial Rome did with bread and circuses. Or keep them divided into tribes and ideological camps, so that the unity of purpose required to overthrow a rotten status quo, becomes impossible.

Power-holders know that the people united, is forever a threat to every government or institution of power. So they do everything in their power, to prevent that unity from happening.

But on this dreary French morning, poverty insulted, rose like Poseidon, from the seas of silence, to roar.

By midday, the head of the King and his avaricious nobles, have been eaten by the Guillotine. And the reverberations were heard all over Europe. That revolutions sent out ripples, which overthrew monarchies, wiped out royalties, and placed us on a path to democracy.

People like Akpabio will stop mocking the Nigerian poor, the day the poor will realize that those heads are not different from that of 1789 French nobles.

Once that happens, no one will ever rise to mock or insult our poor ever again.

Appeal to religion will not cut it.

Utomi can appeal to religion all he wants. It will not move power mongers like Akpabio.

Men of power have always known that religion is a tool of social control. They know that there is no sky-god anywhere that is going to sit in any judgement against them. They knew that it was man that said that God said.

What cuts it, is the Guillotine.

It is practical. It is quick. It cuts clean. The thieving and obnoxious heads, heading the infernal convoy driving Nigeria to hell deserve no less.

If the poor wants to end such insults, they know what to do. They have done it in history. Nigeria is pregnant. But historical illiterates like Akpabio still humour their idiocy that all is well on the Western front.

Akpabio has become one other fool, who has shown Nigerian revolutionaries another head that deserves to be eaten by a guillotine.

Gwazia ndi yard unu!!!

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