Has this order finally carried out the annulment of the original annulment? Are we witnessing the righting of a historic wrong in a country with a chronic notoriety for repeated offences? Indeed, June 12 has many children, each of whom appears to be older, more intractable, than its parents.
June 12 possesses the baffling characteristics of Ajantala, that Mystery Child in Yoruba folklore: Birthed under extraordinary circumstances, reared in impossible conditions, catalytic in the most unimaginable ways, troubled and troubling, survivor of countless assassination attempts, waxing stronger and more defiant after each attempt, triumphant in the end to the utter consternation of its adversaries, bequeathing a confounding conundrum and profound moral lesson.
This past week the Buhari government shocked the nation by deciding to revisit the June 12 Phenomenon, a clear 25 years since General Ibrahim Babangida, then military president, committed one of the foulest crimes against Democracy when he annulled what has now come to be regarded as the “freest and fairest” election in Nigeria’s history. Understandably, the pronouncement of this historic presidential order has been trailed by a mélange of different opinions. Has this order finally carried out the annulment of the original annulment? Are we witnessing the righting of a historic wrong in a country with a chronic notoriety for repeated offences? Indeed, June 12 has many children, each of whom appears to be older, more intractable, than its parents. I am joining this fray by reproducing (with minor amendments) the poem below which made its first appearance 14 years ago.
JUNE 12 AND ITS CHILDREN
I
KUDIRAT (i)
They caught her mid-morning
Between the wet whisper
Of the roadside grass
And the shy intimations
Of a sun still preening
Behind the clouds
The market was just
Donning its wrapper of crowds
The hawker’s voice had
Not yet fully paid its debt
To the goddess of sleep. The day:
Too young for this crossroads
Of blight and blood,
The quarry too sinless,
The clay-pot too pure for this barbaric breaking
The date was four
The year was halfway
Through its turbulent journey
And the gunmen sprang from the crook
In the arm of the street, grabbed the road
By its neck, riddled a day so new
With a volley of fury and fright.
A startled country sought answers
In perforated metal and crystal showers
Of glass and gore. Sunset so sudden:
The nation lost its sight, then its right;
Murderers walked away, so conspicuous, so unseen…
KUDIRAT (ii)
Her beauty chastised the ugliness of the times
Her Truth the tyranny of their falsehood
There was a glowing grace in the egg
Of her eyes that un-
Hid what their night concealed;
An aura to her presence which dis-
Spelled the awe of monster clouds
Hopesongs dripped from her lips
Like magic gold from the honeypot.
A stubborn faith, a righteous resolve
A mothering mirth, immortal mettle
There was fire in her flower
Muscle in her music:
“The Mandate freely given the sun
By the unanimity of the day,
Let
Let it
Let it be
Let trees wave their leaves, freely,
At the urging of the wind
Let grassroots enfranchise the migration of ants
Let CHOICE triumph over chance
Let yearning hearts reap the bounty of the ballot
Let him rule who won the sanctity of our vote
Let death die
Let hunger flee the land
Let our tears depart and join the sea
Let houses link roofs beneath the sky
Let dwarfs reach out and touch the sun
Let let let …”
II
GOON-MAN (aka THE GOGGLED FIEND)
But Night Errants descended
Nooses in one hand,
In the other an arsenal of seething swords
They put the edge to Freedom’s throat
At the confluence of wailing waters
Hacked peace into pieces at the crossroads
Of broken pots.
And, saddle-crazy,
Indulged their pleasure on the people’s backs.
A goggled goon called the shots
From the hollow of an ancient rock,
Sprawled out on a throne of skulls
Bantam-brained, stone-hearted,
He swam each morning in a pool of blood
An infant nation between his teeth
Dull though he was and utterly dreadful,
Pundits ran his errands,
Licked his (bloody) boots
Schemed him into a “consensus candidate”:
“Rule us for ever!”, their chorus
Chilled a swindled nation
Their eyes on juicy cabinet designations
And the assorted stack of cash
Standing imperiously behind the palace door
Vulture-politicians who carrioned the state
And sent Hope on a lengthy exile
But Death caught the despot
Between the silky laps of imported whores
And the seething serpent of forbidden apples
III
THE TORTOISE’S SECOND COMING?
Flying turtles, midnight noons
Strange like a seven-headed penis…
People of our land,
Have you heard the news?
Remember the gap-toothed Prince of Tricks
Grand Annuller, Proscriber of Prophets
Make way for his second coming
He who dribbled the country into dross
Granted Graft a cabinet post
Make way for his second coming
Who killed our Hope
Abolished our Laughter
Make way for his second coming
His trumpet-blowers are filling the streets
His mouth-pieces are threatening like crocodile jaws
Make way for his second coming
His dispatch-riders are trampling our grass
His moneybags are rolling in the dust
Make way for his second coming
His flags are flailing
His anthem is supreme anathema
Make way for his second coming
His thunder is renting our sky
His storm is wracking our roofs
Make way for his second coming
He flayed us with whips the first time
He will skin us with scorpions the second time
Make way for his second coming
Tail-less we are, tribe of amnesic toads
Dry like a dinosaur’s scars, headless like crabs
Make way for his second coming
The rain which beat us many seasons ago
Will drench us to death in a second deluge
Make way for his second coming
He who killed the country in his first gallop
Is coming, horse-high, for the funereal finish
Make way for his second coming
All hail the gap-toothed Tortoise
Mess-iah Monarch in a jungle of fools
Make way for his second coming
IV
THE FORTUNATE INHERITOR
Widows wail, orphans lament
The people cry from their lowly roosts
Another Emperor swaggers in appropriated power
From inside the rock, the same old rock
Beneficiary of votes cast and votes un-cast
Fortunate inheritor whose legator’s name
Now burns his lips like a dreadful spell
(He says he was busy tending his farm
When they offered him the golden crown;
But unlike good old Cincinnatus, what kind
Of Re-public will this one bequeath?)
His own second term, too, and multiple terms
In his first coming he wielded an open sword
This time the sword hides under a flowing robe
Talking, never listening, hectoring hardly heeding,
All-knowing, all-mighty, an oracle beyond restraint
Like the tortoise in the tale, he will climb the palm tree
With the gourd of wisdom tied to his chest
Widows wail, orphans lament
The people cry from their lowly roosts
His is the era of want and worry
Of lean shadows and swindled dreams
Gari is untouchable in the market
A grain of rice costs a handsome fortune
Rent-gatherers fill the streets with homeless hordes
Hired killers hit at ten corpses for twenty kobo
The Naira melts
Like wax in a tropical furnace
Dark days, dark nights,
Roads spot potholes like thirsty craters
The land rots and reeks like a NEPA-less morgue
But it’s all power and perfume to the imperial nose
Chronically hard of seeing
The Emperor romps around in majestic indifference
His ward bursting with designer robes
His mocking foppery an affront to the people’s rags
Widows wail, orphans lament
The people cry from their lowly roosts
Trounce- trance-parency Incorporated
Deadly deeds dark as night
The land drowns in dire decay
The Emperor assays a placebo of platitudes
Clever Chichidodo, our Emperor hates shit & all its stench
He only feeds on the maggots from that forbidden mound
Co-, co-rupture, co-rupt, CO-RRUPTION
When the Emperor met that foe in the battlfield
He trembled, then executed a four-star retreat
Sacred cows have grazed the land into baldness:
Can a soiled finger really clean up its sullied mates?
The Caucus Leader is magician by day, marauder by night
He and Dirt call each other by the first name
Famous Factotum, he can fix a fart!
Ashes. Ashes. Grey intimations of foregone fires
Where are the hearths which endured their heat?
Behold these motley feathers
Where are the nests bereft by their plunder?
Widows wail, orphans lament
The people cry from their lowly roost
V
The Right Honourables
In the Capital city, their capital crimes
The Law Makers shock the land
With tales of venal horrors
Cesspool of intrigue and rancid rancour,
The Honourables think with their stomach
Their “sacred mission” is secreted
In bulging traffics of Ghana-Must-Go
Constituency allowances vanish into personal projects
Voter interests are pummeled under the gavel
The people, the people, who are the pee-pull?
We’ll tread on their shadows on the way to the toilet
Meanwhile, here we go on our usual “study tours”:
Legislative sight-seeing in Singapore
Kangaroo proceedings way down in Canberra
Management of the Maradona malaise in Argentina
Esther-code, Ngozi-code, Jumai/Jumoke-code:
Our rulers are bound for the skies
The only bills they pass are those the people pay
Emergency De-mock-rats, “new and improved”,
(Former) minions of the Trickster-General
Proud mess-engers of his goggled successor
And the present Emperor has a Dolphin in Sin-ate
Polluting all the waters with his stolen mandate
Mouth stuffed with cash, the House is honourably dumb
Behold how we drift, a race on a rickety raft
The sea so sad, the tempests so unsparing
The temples burst with prayers, the taverns with curses
Here, then, the vultures who thresh the sky like eagles
Ojelu, Orunlu, sworn enemies to our nation’s dreams;
We craved a cure, we got a curse
The gavel has become a gamble
The Mace is now a maze
Burn-again De-mock-rats have set our dreams ablaze
VI
CHILLS
Chills and Shadows
Whispers and Omens
The long-expected rain falls in shingles and showers
And a hen pecks clean its precious drops…
Is this, really, the long-awaited hour
Is it for this that men were maimed
Women wasted, babies prammed off to jail
In lieu of dissident parents
Is it really for this that corpses discoloured the streets?
I hear MKO asking
I hear Kudirat asking
I hear Rewane asking
I hear Kaltho asking
I hear the countless thousands
Who wrote our L-I-B-E-R-T-Y with their blood
Is it for this that corpses littered our streets?
VII
ROPE
They say Hope is not a long rope
Which dances round the neck of the nearly-lost
It is a long, long string by which the strong
Climb to the sun above the trees
Wasted several seasons,
Almost at our tether’s end
Some say we are on the thresholds
Of a long-awaited dusk
Others insist
Dawn cannot be far behind
Widows wail, orphans lament
The people cry from their lowly roosts
© June 5, 2004
Niyi Osundare is one of Africa’s foremost poets and a Distinguished Professor of the University of New Orleans (UNO), where he teaches in the English Department.
