By Ekanpou Enewaridideke

IT is dark. No one denies that it is dark, neither does anyone pretend that the Heavenly bodies decree the darkness. Yet, it must be dark and darkened so the labourers would be known and crowned deservedly. There would be no coronation without darkness; darkness reinforces hopes of coronation. Therefore it must be dark, very dark, for all buzzing showy creatures to get the crown and find their roost.

Great writers have distinguishing marks. Great writers are a rarity anywhere in the world but in Nigeria great writers can be spotted in any part of the road, engaged in selective analysis. Hon. Rotimi Amaechi’s vindictive moves towards the cancellation of the Nigeria Maritime University, Okerenkoko, the incarceration of Nnamdi Kanu without bail, the violent 2015 Bayelsa State governorship election, the serial violation of court orders by the Federal government, the resurgence of Niger Delta restiveness, dwindling crude oil prices and the missing 2015 National budgets are national issues which merit the objective analytical commentary of great writers/columnists. Intellectually engaging these issues, asserting purposive prescriptions, would guide the government towards the formulation of a clear policy direction to the comfort of the wailing Nigerians. It scalds like a steaming kettle of water that the great writers, so ideologically obsessed with the pulverization of the Jonathans, Dasuikus, OKonjo-Iwealas and the Tompolos, they have metamorphosed into Tuomo Iguanas blind and dead to the consuming craters, blazes in the national discourses on good governance. Therefore, on daily basis, we have become slaves to the pseudo-intellectual distractions of buzzing showy creatures whose motivations and HOLY GRAIL centre on qualification as the megaphone of the anti-corruption government, and may be for the occasional temporary aggrandizement tantalizingly standing as the windfall. To be so honoured and entrusted with this patriotic national task, towering far above toddling intellectuals and writers like Gulliver’s Travel’s Broddinaggs, we have to applaud their achievements everyday and sincerely pray for inspiration for them so that no hiatus would invade their task and endanger the entire country.

Obsessively, most clearly situated among the great writers is Tabia Princewill whose cream of commendable inspiration shows all elements of immersion in, and subservience to John Dryden’s ‘Mac Flecknoe’. Both intellectually and historically she strikes a chord when she hysterically cast Tompolo as the cause of the impoverishment of the Niger Delta who was economically empowered by former President Goodluck Jonathan without any corresponding extension of same empowerment to the ordinary Niger Deltans. In a logically disconnected article dominated by feeble, limping sentences in the Vanguard of 27 January 2016 entitled ‘Can Nigeria teachers still teach?’ she coughed disgustingly like a hunter poised to fire an antelope at close range in the forest that: ‘The likes of Tompolo etc. according to recent allegations were enriched by the past government, with no benefits to the common man of the Niger Delta. So when will said common man in the creeks, living from hand to mouth, stop hiding and defending the people who are the cause of the region’s poverty?’

It is pointless and vague to say that Tompolo was enriched by the past government without evidential base provided. Does any known law or tradition prohibit human capital empowerment? Or if it had just become intellectual obsession for Princewill to discourse on people enriched by past governments, why didn’t the non-Niger Deltans who have been made STINKINGLY rich with oil blocks by past governments feature in her tendentious article of famished sentences. When super-rich oil magnates are deleted from an article supposedly partly devoted to the analytical categorisation and minimisation of personalities enriched by past governments, then we must listen to the tutoring voice of Wole Soyinka’s in The Interpreters as this would expose the true undisguised motivations of Princewill: ‘When a club yields right of way to an antelope, first look and see if Father Leopard is not a few trees behind’.

The pernicious ideological obsession of Princewill perpetually dances to hysterical filete steps. In her second article of disjointed communication, she admitted the existence of ethnic sentiments in the UK. It was also part of her admission that Nicola sturgeon who was the leader of Scottish National Party was known for his advocacy for projection of an undiluted Scottish voice in parliament. Perhaps, the commendable advocacy role of Nicola Sturgeon parallels the emancipation advocacy role of Tompolo, who inspired by the fosilled words of Soyinka in The Man Died that ‘The man dies in all who keeps silent in the face of tyranny’, has sacrificially laboured to bring developmental illumination to the Niger Delta, though armlessly.

Reading the article logically one would have expected Princewill to foreground the parallel between sturgeon and Tompolo and analytically justify the emancipatory sacrifices of Tompolo and the Niger Delta State struggle but rather illogically, she coughed intermittently and ululated that Tompolo, Asari and Jonathan were the agents of underdevelopment in Nigeria and the Niger Delta in particular, and that this domineering triumvirate had perfected the art of barricading talented Niger Deltans from the South-South who could LONDONISE Nigeria and the Niger Delta. In an article in which no part is devoted to a discourse on talents and personalities from the South-South geopolical zone, this signals the peak of compositional illogicality, intellectual casuistry, intellectual self-aggrandisement, hubris, analytical prejudice, analytical incapability, intellectual self-confusion, analytical cul-de-sac, etc. it is Princewill’s article published in the Vanguard of 13 May 2015 entitled ‘UK general election: Regional and popular interest in Nigeria and UK Politics’ which embodies this vindictive analysis: ‘Indeed, ethnic, or regional sentiments exist, even in the UK. Scottish National party leader Nicola Sturgeon has been advocating for a clear Scottish voice in parliament. Talents from the South-South who could have brought real development to ordinary people in the Niger Delta were sidelined by the Asari Dokubos and Tompolos of this world, who besides loud often comical pronouncements, have not, like their Principal, lifted their home towns, their people or Nigerians at large, out of poverty’.

The coronation of Princewill as a great writer, even more talented than Soyinka, Achebe and JP Clark, is fast approaching. The coronation Committee demands that whether or not she would be crowned depends on the number of trophies or laurels garnered; the number of laurels would be determined by the pulverization power and range of her obsessive pen and so to merit the crown, she has grown indiscriminate, destructive and insolent in the empowerment of her pulverization machine, deliberately moving away from analysis of developing issues, matters to infliction of bodily wounds, assaults on targeted personalities. Nowhere is this analytical deviousness or bifurcation more eloquent and purposive than this when verbal gamalin 20 was remorselessly poured on former President Jonathan in this article published in the Vanguard of 2 September 2015 entitled ‘The disservice of Jonathan’s men’: That he didn’t know of their activities is frightening: who then was in control? Many feel it is the untenable defense of a village boy who unexpectedly came to power and wanted to act as the ‘big boys’ did before him, “chop and clean mouth” but without the networks, or the devilish cunning and sophistication of a maradona to get away with it’.

A virus, not attenuated or emasculated, destroys indiscriminately beyond control. The Ebola virus once reigned but was killed by Jonathan government. Today, it is the Lassa fever that threatens though there are corresponding moves by President Muhammadu Buhari to curtail it. On the intellectual space, the articles of Princewill are viral proliferations, intellectual analytical abnormalities which demand attenuation and elimination.

Inaction and silence from readers who have the herbal cure for her analytical virus are the motivations for the virus because to Princewill, they are tacit acknowledgements of the rightness of her circuitous analytical path. I would have been too incapacitated to spot the Python in her cruel articles but for the strength garnered from His Royal Majesty Haile Selassie I, the Emperor of Ethiopia, who contends that: ‘Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better and the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most that has made it possible for evil to triumph.’

Jonathan, Tompolo and Asari do not deserve the acidic and abusive language deployed by Princewill in her serially illogical articles. Prominent people in leadership positions always attract critical commentary from different people, though some purely borne out of envy. Having gained prominence in different fields, it is inevitable that they would be praised and minimized differently by people as Michigan I awakens readers to, captured in my own book A Sail in the Dark: In every field of human endeavour, he that is first must perpetually live in the white light of publicity. Whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work. In art, in literature, in music, in industry, the reward and the punishment are always the same. The reward is widespread recognition; the punishment. Fierce denial and detraction…’ True as this sounds, criticism should be based on issues, not on the personality as the Princewills of this world, hysterically excited by the approaching coronation, are wont to do without remorse and intellectual decorum.

The articles of Princewill betray acidic mindset in the deployment of language, intolerance and bigotry. She has a pen illogically conditioned to minimize Jonathan and Tompolo. When a writer becomes intolerant, vindictive and bigoted as pointers of his/her directional principle, issues are obfuscated. With deliberate obfuscation which appears priceless to Princewill, readers are WEANED ON HALF-TRUTHS, and half-truths are agents of dislocation and retrogression in society. I bare my mind this way because I am always nauseated by Princewill’s obsession with intolerance and bigotry in her analyses. However much as I hate intolerance and bigotry in any guise, Soyinka is a better teacher to reawaken Princewill whose regression to a zealot is glaring. In his essay published in National Interest of 25 March 2000 entitled ‘Under the sign of an iconoclast’, Soyinka unequivocally declares thus: ‘I declare myself yet an implacable enemy of bigotry, intolerance and all agenda of mind-closure. A plague on the Taliban and their kind, on zealots of every colour and creed’.

The man called Tompolo currently verbally assaulted by Princewill and others is the latest news in town. Tompolo’s company accounts were frozen by the Federal government and promptly he took EFCC to court but no media hysteria greeted this. The media woke up when EFCC brought up a case of N13 billion against Tompolo in respect of the temporary site for the Nigeria Maritime University, Okerenkoko. Again he wrote and deflated the claim of EFCC in an advertorial using verifiable evidence. No media drama attended Tompolo’s rejoinder. Then again EFCC brought up a N35 billion naira case of money-laundering against Tompolo and others in a Federal High Court, Lagos. On the appointed day of the summons he did not turn up in Court. Promptly, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. The media went wild and hysterical in the presentation of this order to arrest Tompolo. It became a dance of buzzing showy creatures buzzing to claim the honeycomb.
Top on the buzzing creatures were Ayiri Emami and Michael Johnny who appeared captivated by their self-acclaimed patriotic assignment of newspaper persuasion and pressure on Tompolo to surrender, the two patriots carrying open minds unassailed by the words of Sir Francis Bacon that: ‘if a man begins with certainties, he will end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he will end in certainties’. With the bench warrant and the destruction of piplelines in the Niger Delta, the buzzing creatures began to finger Tompolo as the mastermind. Tompolo was also prompt and clear in his denial of the pipeline vandalism, thus asserting himself once again as the agent of peace, not destruction, despite the conspiratorial drama to incriminate him in any possible way.

To the buzzing showy creatures, Tompolo is a fugitive, on the run from the law like biblical Jonah. Tompolo does not consider himself a fugitive but one who has just appropriated the age-long wisdom of tortoise who refused to visit Lion in his ill state because he (tortoise) could only trace the inward footprints of visitors to lion’s house without any visible outward footprints. The fugitive in Tompolo disappears when the outward footprints to the abode of Lion become visible and traceable.
For thousand years to come the memories of President Muhammadu Buhari’s last Presidential chat would live with Nigerians – a captivating Presidential chat resoundingly applauded by all patriots. In the Presidential chat the oracle of impunity was gaudily decorated and empowered to disobey valid Court orders as regards incarceration of personalities without bail. And today as revealed by Hon. Rotimi Amaechi (Minister for Transport) with empowered pride and impunity, there are ploys to cancel the statutorily established Nigeria maritime University, Okerenkoko, without valid reasons beyond political vindictiveness. The Nigeria Maritime University, Okerenkoko, was established to address the educational backwardness of the Niger Delta but now the existence of this University is being threatened by the APC-led government of President Muhammadu Buhari. Yet no buzzing showy creatures are seen or heard.

At this time the coronation-seeking exceptional writer Prinewill, labouring for the only available Nobel prize for literature in the hands of the APC-led government, blessed with the rare gift of ‘verbal fluidity’ and compositional illogicality, would not journey to Okerenkoko and verbally chastise the Federal Government for that waiting meaningless move in a country where the bulk of the oil comes from the developmentally impoverished Niger Delta. Not even Emami Ayiri and Michael Johnny, the great patriots, activists par excellence who laboriously prepared the Presidential seat for President Muhammadu Buhari in the 2015 general election and for which they have become the PINEAPPLES of President Muhammadu Buhari’s eye, would not flamboyantly hug the pages of national dailies and mouth their sincere concern or developmental passion for the Niger Delta; or must we now Pencil them down as selective, showy profiteering occasional commentators on Niger Delta issues?.That these perpetually theatrical buzzing creatures keep hermetically sealed lips on a matter that affects the destiny of Niger Deltans, they are indeed patriots who should not be denied the waiting coronation. For Princewill specifically, hers would be the APC NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE for selective verbal fluidity and unimpeded compositional illogicality.

We now know that selective flamboyant hugging of pages of newspapers and mouthing expletive, incongruities and unalloyed support for President Muhammadu Buhari pays handsomely no matter the disguised profiteering undercurrents, whenever a bench warrant is showered on Tompolo and whenever pipelines are INCRIMINATINGLY vandalized. It also pays to be consistently engaged in programmed arid analytical verbal fluidity and uninhibited compositional illogicality – an ideal strangely pursued with bizarre flamboyance which has consumed the entire writing career of Princewill Tabia.

Again, I feel obliged to add that because we love verbal illogicalities, because we passionately love verbal incongruities, because we love verbal hallucinations, let us address the buzzing creatures as patriots, activists and great writers so they would not be denied the waiting coronation they had laboured for over one thousand years. However, stuck in selective arid analytical verbal fluidity and compositional illogicality, it is intellectually debasing that Princewill serially leads a writing life untouched by the directional words of Napoleon Bonaparte captured in my own book The Road to Ken Saro-Wiwa that: ‘A journalist is a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.’
No matter the devotedness allocated to the verbal minimisation and pulverization of Tompolo, Nigerians know him very well: he does not lie. His positions on any matter are not disguised; he fearlessly claims responsibility for anything he does and believes in. For Tompolo to say he was not involved in the recent pipeline vandalization in the Niger Delta means he is not actually involved. A believer of EGBESU does not lie. And those who tell false stories to incriminate and entrap him, know that the ultimate truth paddles near-by.

Every where is dark. The darkness is not cosmically decreed. For those who engage this darkness with pure thoughts and dark thoughts respectively, a recompense waits. Even for those turned bees overnight because he is involved, the sting of bees has a duration. This is why the Princewills of this world should not daub and darken the darkness with intolerant, vindictive, bigoted articles dominated by illogical, famished and kwashiorkor-stricken sentences, all because of the prospect of the approaching coronation as the greatest writer ever born. As for Tompolo, one of the trophies Princewill requires to qualify her for the APC NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE , is a man who will never be persuaded to walk on the revolutionary path however the conspiracy; the Tompolo we know would rather seek out cosmically-decreed direction in the fosilled lines of Ella Wheeler Wilcox in his poem, ‘The law:’.
‘Your path may be clouded, uncertain your goal;
Move on, for the orbit is fixed for your soul,
And though it may lead into darkness of night,
The torch of the Builder shall give it new light.’

*Mr. Enewaridideke a public affairs analyst, wrote from Akparemogbene, Delta State.