Only last week, one of Akpabio’s allies, Onyekachi Nwebonyi, senator representing Ebonyi North, canvassed the demolition of houses contiguous to the Abuja airport. He claimed they were unsightly for the FCT status, would scare off investors, and, whenever he was in the air and saw the slums, he probably felt like puking in a lavatory.
The senator’s call is a total clone of the theme of Aminata Sow Fall’s The Beggars’ Strike. Set in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, the elite called for action against what they termed ‘human detritus’ noticeable all over Dakar. This was a term for beggars who must be got rid of for driving away tourists. While Mour Ndiaye and his assistant, Keba Dabo, succeed in carting the beggars away, when Ndiaye desires to become vice president of Senegal and needs to give alms to beggars for spiritual advantage as prescribed by the Marabout, he finds the beggars unavailable for his bid.
Forget Tinubu and his cohorts’ misleading doublespeak; the prospect of a de facto one-party state is possible. This is so especially when you realise that funny legislative characters like Akpabio are Tinubu’s consorts. While Akpabio won’t have any qualms about licking the president’s spittle and stamping APC as Nigeria’s constitutionally recognised sole party and Tinubu, sole candidate, in exchange for a life tenancy in the senate, Nigerians will make this impossible.
A de jure one-party state is, however, possible. Its prospect is ripe in an APC where all Nigerian forces and absolute powers are fusing inside one party under Tinubu’s “sweep them clean” triumphalism. In a de jure one-party state, other parties would exist, but the APC and the president will certainly be so lawlessly authoritarian that they would criminalized public smile.
Yes, as Tinubu said, “freedom of movement and association is not a criminally punishable, (sic).” However, with this gale of defection sweeping all and sundry inside his party’s pouch, it may be a recipe for tyranny of the majority. By either hook or crook, the president has killed the sacred deer. His audacity in choosing to spread the deer skin for all to see may eventually court the disaffection of the Old One, the Nigerian people.
Now our own Ndiaye in Fall’s satiric novel, when Tinubu needs Nigerians, the beggars he treats with such conceit, he may not find them. Again, like the urchin who cursed the Iroko tree and persistently looked backwards in fear of immediate repercussion, does the president think the Oluwere ghormid resident inside the bowel of the Iroko strikes with immediacy?
