Animal kingdom

Denizens of our animal kingdom are of diverse kinds. There are those who suckle in the main on patronage pleasures of powers that be, and now they are thoroughly disconcerted over the fluidity of things. The lion king has been away for some while and it is up in the air when he would be back. And prolonged absence has a way of weakening allegiance in the quicksand of opportunism – didn’t ancient wisdom teach that out of sight was out of mind? Thus they have faltered in the rites of passage at the power Rock. Now they cast anxious glances on the horizon for portents of a vengeful roar by the lion king, who was recently touted to contemplate a lashback from his long hibernation.

You could see through some other denizens in the palace courts groping for which altar is secure to worship at: the altar of defiant loyalty to the absent lion king and outright insouciance to proxy authority, or the altar of concessional allegiance to surrogate power – even if only for this intermission that the lion king is away on hibernation. After all, the lioness lately growled a blatant warning that jackals and hyenas in the kingdom should prepare to be sent packing when the lion king shortly returns. She was construed to be alluding to freebooters angling for vantage foothold in the flurry of intrigues surrounding the throne, amidst lingering uncertainty occasioned by the long absence of the lion king.

But there also denizens far removed from the palace courts, who are simply but thoroughly distressed by the persisting pendency relentlessly imploding our coerced commonwealth at its feeble joints. This pendency, by the day, increasingly attenuates the obliged mutual toleration by co-habitants of the kingdom, which now is erupting into freewheeling hate discourse threatening our collective wellbeing.

The metaphors adapted here were lately served up from the palace courts as the new parlance of our national conversation. We had thought the hotheaded separatist obsessively pursuing the once lost cause of Biafra secession (Nnamdi Kanu) badly fouled up the air when he labelled Nigeria a cannibal zoo. We felt his imagery was way too toxic, and in league with the horrific experience of 1994 Rwandan genocide where majority Hutus were incited to a last push against minority Tutsis who were at the time labelled ‘cockroaches.’ Now we may just as well eat the humble pie and admit our indignation at Kanu was presumptuous. Because in the last few days, we have had the ‘distinguished’ imprimatur of a senator of the Federal Republic to see rabid jackals and hyenas inhabiting this domain of the lion king. And for good measure, we have had the royal seal of the irrepressible lioness of the kingdom to ratchet up threats against those hyenas and jackals in anticipation of touted imminent return of the lion king. Welcome to our animal kingdom!

This is one kingdom where hate speech thrives even in the hallowed corridors of power, never mind that there is a subsisting national advocacy to rein it in for the safety of our commonwealth. And it is moot that the nihilistic streak involved is a universal tendency. Forget now their United States of today under the Donald Trump presidency, there was a time in that country when it seemed that graceful speech in the face of hate speech was one of the lofty attributes of civilised conduct of power. Recall, for instance, that amidst the diatribes which attended the country’s 2016 presidential electioneering, former First Lady Michelle Obama, while on the hustings for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, famously canvassed the ethic: ‘When they go low, we go high.’ You could well say the unstated ethic of national conversation in our own kingdom is: ‘When they go low, we plunge to the nadir!’

To be sure, ours is an animal kingdom, not even an ‘animal farm’ as in the republican allegory of events leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution and the despotism that followed, which you would find in the all-time classic, Animal Farm, authored by English novelist and critic, George Orwell. Unlike in Orwell’s animal farm where there was a semblance of communal sovereignty, at least until the hegemony of Napoleon crystalised, what we have with us is a kingdom. And like in any typical kingdom, it is the lion king and his power clan of strongmen who hold utter sway over effectively powerless subjects.

Of course, you may have thought, like some of us who have our noses up in the clouds, that this is an electoral democracy, and hence that sovereignty flows from the people who elect the power clan to office to serve them. And you were right, but apparently only theoretically so, going by the recent metaphoric admonitions of the senator and the lioness of the kingdom. The effect of those metaphors is to nudge us to the reality of where sovereignty in the animal kingdom truly lies.

Let’s here call off this sardonic game of stretching the animal kingdom metaphor and cut to the cheese: hate speech abounds in the Nigerian polity – but more distressingly so in recent weeks, even at the highest stratum of power. That development made paltry the plague among ordinary citizens over which there has been an outcry hitherto. 

Senator Shehu Sani (Kaduna Central) obviously exercised his literary gifts and right to free speech when he made the July 6 post on his Facebook page about the absent lion king and the scheming by hyenas and jackals in the kingdom owing to that absence. And so did First Lady Aisha Buhari in her rejoinder post on July 10 where she said the hyenas and the jackals would shortly be sent out of the kingdom, as God answered the prayers of the weaker animals. But it should be obvious as well that both personages trafficked in hate speech to the extreme. The imageries used explicitly wedged Nigerians into hostile camps; and the message by First Lady Aisha, in particular, injected more venom rather than relieve the tone of national conversation that had been heavily weighted with negativity in recent weeks. And by the way, was it coincidence or consequence that Acting President Yemi Osinbajo scurried off for an unscheduled visit to President Muhammadu Buhari in London on the heels of the First Lady’s post?

It is trite that, ideally, the privilege of power must come with the consciousness of responsibility for role modeling. Our leaders need to bear this in mind in every conversation.