A season of demystifications

Chuks Oluigbo

On February 3, 1960, the then British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, having spent a month in Africa visiting a number of what were then British colonies, made the now famous historically-significant "Wind of Change" address to the South African Parliament in Cape Town. Some records say he had earlier made the same speech in Accra, Ghana, on January 10, though that didn’t catch much media attention.

In that speech, which signalled clearly that the Conservative-led British Government was no longer equivocating about the granting of independence to its African colonies, Macmillan said: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”

Subsequent events proved that the change the British PM was talking about was not a ruse as a total of 16 African countries gained independence between February 3 and the end of 1960, though they were not all British colonies. Senegal became independent on 4 April, 1960, followed by Togo (27 April), Mali (22 September), Madagascar (26 June), Congo Kinshasa (30 June), Somalia (1 July), Benin (1 August), Niger (3 August), Burkina Faso (5 August), Côte d'Ivoire (7 August), Chad (11 August), Central African Republic (13 August), Congo Brazzaville (15 August), Gabon (17 August), Nigeria (1 October), and Mauritania (28 November).

In the last one year or so in Nigeria, another wind of change has blown. And this is not just about the illusive, undefined change that was promised (of course, we know change can be positive or negative, and Nigerians can tell better the type they’ve felt and are still feeling since May 29, 2015). It is about a heavy wind that has ushered in this season of demystifications that we are in.

The last one year has seen the shattering of many myths woven around some individuals in today’s government. It’s a year that has exposed their inadequacies, their equivocations, half-truths and outright lies. It’s a year that has underscored the fact that they actually possess no magic wand, forget all that pre-election talk about a serious government fixing power in six months. We have seen through the smokescreen and now know better. We now know how easy it is to criticize a footballer from outside the pitch. We also know they are typical Nigerian politicians, never mind all the integrity and anti-corruption bullshit. All the excuses and blame-game don’t cut it.

As scales fall off eyes, hero worshippers are reviewing long-held beliefs as they behold their messiahs in all humanness, warts and all, and realise that there is only one messiah the world has ever known; that their so-called messiahs are after all mere mortals masquerading as gods. You know, it's like the unmasking, in the village arena – in the presence of non-initiates, including women – of that favourite masquerade of yours that you have held in high esteem for so long, that you actually believed was an ancestral spirit from the land of the dead.

Hero worshippers are realizing that so-called heroes are indeed media creations. But some of us have always known this. Just get a man, weave some myths of omnipotence and infallibility around him, give him sustained media coverage, hide his sins, exaggerate every little good he does, whitewash every dark spot in his life, get Beyonce's make-up artist to make him up and declare him 'flawless', paint him in the most generous epithets, apotheosize him and convince us that he would have come into the world as a god but the Creator changed his mind at the last minute, and boom! another hero is born.

You can also spin an integrity yarn around a candidate, remove his agbada and wear him a tight-fitting dark suit. Forget that he toppled a democratically-elected government or just find the 'right' argument to justify that unnecessary military incursion, 'kill' all reports that highlight the high-handed, draconian and dictatorial tendencies that hallmarked his first coming, including even the fact that the little good that regime is remembered for was actually carried out by a subordinate, baptise him and rename him a born-again democrat, in fact, elevate him to the status of gods, promote this new image of him by hook or crook, and bang!

But public offices have a way of making or marring their beneficiary. A public office can and has unravelled even those to whom we arrogated superpowers. Some erstwhile superheroes have found themselves overwhelmed in a new office, including even some men of God!

Our super-columnists have been demystified in this dispensation. Never mind that they had been churning out incisive Op-ed pieces that farted upon the gates of power since your kindergarten days, when the chips are down, they can lie to you repeatedly, unashamedly, that the president is not sick even when the man says he is going on a sick leave; they can also tell you that not everyone is complaining about the hardship in town (at least, they and their families are not complaining), and they can call you a wailing wailer when you raise genuine concerns about issues of mal-governance.

But in spite of all this, we are overcomers. Nigerians are. It’s well, as we say here. Indeed, this too shall pass.