Aso Rock
Nigerian writer, Ken Ugbechie, has reacted to highly publicized story of rodents invading the Aso Rock presidential villa.
Dateline, March 2005: President Bingu Wa Mutharika
of Malawi was on the run. He took off from Lilongwe (capital of Malawi)
to Mtunthama, a sprawling town in a tobacco-growing community 60 miles
away. A septuagenarian, he must have puffed and panted as he ran for
dear life. So, what got a powerful president scooting to safety? Rodents
of course! Yes, President Mutharika, (he died of cardiac arrest in
Lilongwe while in office on 5 April 2012, at age 78), a man who loved
the good life, was chased out of his luxurious, 300-room mansion by some
disrespectful rodents.
The President was never the original owner of the palatial mansion
but long throat will not let an old man behave like a true elder. The
expansive house was built for parliamentarians but the President had
other ideas of how to make better use of an edifice where laws were to
be made for the good governance of an impoverished Malawi.
The mansion was built by Malawi’s founding President Hastings
Kamuzu Banda, who ruled the country for 28 years from 1966. Reports say
it took 20 years at a cost of $100 million to build. The jaw-dropping
edifice is set on 555 hectares. Mr Banda, the builder, lived there for
only 90 days. His successor, Makili Muluzi, who came to power in 1994
through the country’s first multi-party elections refused to use the
house, calling it a show of “obscene opulence’’.
But Mutharika upon becoming president appropriated the house and
moved in. As he moved in, so did some weird, spooky rodents; as
devastating as the Tasmanian devil, another dangerous but almost extinct
animal now confined to the precincts of Australia, precisely in
Tasmania Island.
As it turned out, President Mutharika, having taken sleep away from
Malawi parliamentarians could not himself sleep. He said he felt
ghostly rodents crawling all over his body when the lights were turned
out in his haunted 300-room home. Aside from the rodents, he also said
he heard footsteps and strange noises in the presidential suite at
night. Strange! It gets stranger because neither his security men nor
his wife, First Lady Ethel, noticed any supernatural presence in the
same house.
And for all the while he occupied the house, Malawi Parliament was
not able to meet because of lack of an appropriate venue. They resorted
to using rented offices. The committees had to conduct their business in
hotels. They even mulled using a stadium for their debates. But none of
these would worry the dictator. What bothered him was that rodents
would not let him sleep. So, he packed out. But he loved his mansion and
was determined to use it as his home. A solution must be found
immediately. Then they came up with an ingenious idea. Get the exorcist!
They got clerics from Catholic, Lutheran, Calvary and Faith of God
churches to offer prayers for the building. Reverend Malani Ntonga, the
presidential aide on Christian affairs, told journalists that neither
rodents nor ghosts would be allowed to harm their dear President. In
clumsy Pentecostal fervour, he declared: “No strategy designed from the
pits of hell will prosper against the President because we have asked
for divine intervention to cast the blood of Jesus against any evil
plots against the President.’’ The rest, as they say, is history. But
the story illustrates how powerful some rodents can be.
Fast forward: August 2017, Abuja, Nigeria. Some devilish rodents
have shipped themselves into Aso Rock, Nigeria’s seat of power. Unlike
in the case of Malawi where the rodents were said to be spooky and
surreal, the Aso Rock rodents were not presented as supernatural, except
that they were just stubbornly devilish. At least, one man was able to
identify them as the architects of the devastation caused in the
hallowed office of President Muhammadu Buhari. Buhari’s media aide,
Garba Shehu, did not have to hazard a guess as to what and who turned
the President’s office into one huge mess. He was emphatic that some
devious rodents ran riot in the office, destroyed the furniture and
anything in the office that caught their fancy.
I can tell that in the President’s office there are many things
that will appeal to rodents. Taking a cue from Edward Page Mitchel’s
1878 Crypto-fiction classic ‘The Devilish Rat’, it is easy to conjecture
that the rodents in Aso Rock were simply devilish. Some rodents can
really be deadly; capable of causing national catastrophe of the
magnitude of an earthquake. Mitchel’s work mirrors the life of some
flesh-eating rodents, so weird they can cause serious mayhem in a
community.
As omnivores, rodents can descend on the leather furniture in Aso
Rock, the mound of papers, the mountain of files, they can even excavate
cables and shred them or better still set up their own offices in the
inner chambers of air-conditioning units. A good 103 days is enough for
these devilish rodents to create a scene inside the once serene
Presidential office such as would make our President, a retired General,
to cringe and fret in horror.
I have always argued that not all rodents are ordinary animals.
Some rodents are eerie and mysterious. The rodents that pursued Malawian
President out of his home are not mere mammals that you find in your
homes. They are ghostly and uncanny. They do not bow to rat poison. They
are not ensnared in traps made by man. They are spiritual and can only
be tamed by a stronger spiritual power. In the case of Mutharika, it
took a combined battery of priests, reverends and fire-spitting pastors
to retrieve a sprawling Presidential mansion from the hands of some
daring devious rodents.
Make no mistake about it, all rats are rodents but not all rodents
are rats. Mallam Shehu did not say rats ravaged the President’s office;
he mentioned rodents; meaning they could be rats, mouse, woodchuck,
beaver, jerboa, muskrat, or any of the sharp incisor animals from the
order of animals called Rodentia. The special thing about rodents is
that they have very sharp incisor teeth which grow all the days of their
lives. Again, they are so numerous and ubiquitous, constituting a good
third of all the mammals. This is why they can be devastating enough to
pursue a President out of his 300-room home and upturn the office of
another President so much so that he cannot even dare work from that
office for a season.
The issue goes beyond the trail of criticisms that erupted after
the rodent theory. The Presidency must not allow such invasion of
rodents from hell on the sanctum sanctorum of Aso Rock. The President’s
office, the equivalent of the Oval Office of the White House, is not a
place for the festering of a community of strange creatures least of all
rodents. Using such as excuse to justify why Mr. Buhari or any other
President would not use such office after a long absence makes us a
laughing stock in the comity of nations. Next time a President, any
President, is away let’s do the needful: regularly fumigate and clean
the office under the strict supervision of Aso Rock security. And if the
rodents prove stubborn, call in the exorcists: the marabouts, priests
or even native doctors according to the persuasion and faith of the
occupant of the exalted office. That way we do not need to spin a fib or
scratch our heads for the most disingenuous of reasons that crudely
portray us as a nation of unreasonable people. Nigerians are smarter
than that; we are a people of high intelligence quotient, capable of
sound logic and ever ready to engage any audience brilliantly and
intelligently. Perhaps, this explains why the rodent narrative drew
giggles and nuanced grimaces because Nigerians read between the lines
and dismissed it as another presidential histrionic in a long season of
hysteria. But what is it with African leaders and rodents? Somebody help
me!
***
Written by Ken Ugbechie
0 comments:
Post a Comment