By Mohammed Adamu
If a fool at 40 is one forever, it is preposterous then to ask: what is he at 50?! Because the word ‘forever’ has already taken care of that, remember? So at 50, he is simply ‘on course!’ –fated in his ‘forever!’

But what if at 50 a fool begins to manifest transitory tendencies? As in ‘mutating’ from ‘tomfoolery’ to what I may coin ‘excitable lunacy’? –partying right at the foot of his wasted patrimony! Meaning a fool at 40 may not necessarily be a fool forever!

Because at 50 he may well choose to be a madcap -instead of staying the course of foolishness! In a previous piece, ‘Kaddafi: Mad Man Or Visionary’, I cited the racially tinged quip of a late Guianese Stand-up comic, Roy, when he said to a group of racially prejudicial, mostly gum-chewing female white audience “when I see a white man chewing gum and a cow chewing its cud, I can tell where the intelligence lies –in the cow of course!”

And when the allegorical character, Benjamin, The Donkey, in George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, was asked why he never laughed, his simple and rational answer that –in a state of beastly drudgery- he never saw anything worth laughing over, sounded to me more ‘golden’ than at ‘golden 50’ we have the arrant want of shame to pop the bottle instead of bottling ‘in’ and quietly searching ‘where did we go wrong?’

If ‘speech’, as they say, is ‘silver-n’ and ‘silence’, predictably golden, shouldn’t the 50th of a loafing, un-achieving do-nothing nation be made golden Where then was the quality of its ‘silence’ that for once we should not tarry a while to listen to the beat of the nation’s ‘heart’?

Yet the irony of it all is that where true Nigerians see a golden opportunity to quietly ruminate over the project called Nigeria, politicians in government see a nesting goose laying the golden egg!

Thus only a whiff of what monies would be retired by Government officials in the name of this justified golden profligacy across all tiers of government should get you in tears if you truly love Nigeria. So now you can see why on our ‘golden jubilee’ it was inevitable that we ‘jubilated!’

And that we even chose to invite the world to celebrate with us our ‘failures’ was only symptomatic of the irretrievable strain of our own kind of mental psychosis!

It was said of the Obasanjo regime that ‘if its members said to you good morning, you better look out the window and be sure it was dawn!”

But concerning Jonathan’s new dawn, if you get to ever hear the full complement of ‘good morning’ from them, and have not scampered for safety before the last syllable is pronounced, you may have been done-in already!

Or what do you do if you are greeted ‘happy Sunday’ when you know for sure it’s still a full day away even from Sabbath? Do you call for the Julian or Gregorian calendar to check it up? Or do you proceed to attend Sunday Service so to be doubly sure?

The dilemma is: if you say back to them ‘good morning’ or simply reply ‘same to you’, you are either a part of the deception or you are a proof of its efficacy! So if you don’t get the chance to run before the Jonathans say good morning, maybe you should politely answer: ‘Oh, is it morning yet?’ Or if you do have the courage, may be rudely retort: ‘Shame to You!’

Because if you ever thought that his fault was only that he is a man of his most recent words, -a euphemism for unreliability- you truly underestimate Jonathan’s inconstancy.

In fact your case will be made all the more hopeless because even as you depart his ambiance you cannot be sure his word to you was his most recent! What will Jonathan not promise?

Nothing! Don’t ask ‘how?’; just believe Joe will do it: he will count your every ballot paper to prove you can have a free and fair election, he will smile all the robbers that bother you to death, he’ll turn kidnappers to trustworthy baby sitters…

But if you think that at issue are only his flippantly gratuitous un kept promises, again you underestimate the quality and diversity of his ananiasm! Unkept  promises as ‘lies’ will differ in texture and in hue from say banning Super Eagles in the pretence of patriotic disgust for its dismal World Cup performance when truth was a good outing in South Africa should be omen enough for Jonathan to campaign his claim to divine ‘good luck!’

And maybe you worry there is one too many Jonathan un-kept promises; well, not to worry; because Jonathan himself worries about your worry! Why else do you think, at his declaration, he decided not to mar his finest hour by piling more and more un-actualisables onto the debris of his un-fulfillables?

He had resolved to come off ‘promises’; albeit by ‘promising’ now to “promise” less but….with yet another ‘promise’ -to “do more” that is! Ingenious! But if his fault stops only at making promises he never remembers, or never fulfils or yet which are practically unfulfillable either in space, time or in wherewithals, that’ll still not be too bad -politically-speaking!

Rather Jonathan’s knack for ‘making-ups’, his signature in ‘faking ups’, his desperation in ‘cooking-ups’, his penchant for telling honest lies, and righteous falsehood appears to me to be more worrisome than all his inconstancies concerning his ‘promisories’!

Graham Greene, English Novelist and Playwright, in one of his many conscientising storytelling novels, said of a character “His smile explained everything; he always carried with him as a leper carried his bell; it was a perpetual warning that he was not to be trusted.”

Bush senior’s “Read my lips” was just a political ‘will not tell’; Clinton’s “I told the truth, I only withheld information” was mere ‘defensive legalese’; Jonathan’s everyday crooked smile-lit face of ‘I do, I do’ are adding up to proving far more ‘high-wire’ than Nixon’s heinous tapings!