Death does not kill alone
Nor does he fight singly
He goes to war with plenty of warriors…
He sends Disease first
He sends Paralysis next
He sends Loss
He sends Curses…
Death finally comes to kill the hunter’s father
Who drinks now of heavenly water
The lines above are from Prof. Bade Ajuwon’s, Ogun’s Iremoje: A philosophy of Living and Dying, taken from Sandra Barnes’ Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New. It is a chant (Ìrèmòje) by one Lamidi in Akeetan, Oyo, Oyo State in 1976 for Ogundele, a deceased hunter.
Ìrèmòje is Yorùbá poetic dirge sung at funerals of hunters. The bards, in total submission, acknowledge that no armour is strong enough to shield fate. They employ the imagery of the hunter’s pouch, the English man calls it the quiver, the Yoruba hunter calls it the apó. Mourning bards lament that Death kills the hunter like one without the apó. Death kills a sick Babalawo like one whose vestry isn’t full of curative barks and roots. To reinforce this, Yoruba again say that what will be the death of the hunter lurks right there inside his apó. A strong Yorubaman from the hinterland that he is, President Bola Tinubu must have listened to countless lines of Ìrèmòje like the above. Since Wednesday when the African Democratic Congress (ADC) was launched, expropriating the wisdom in those hunters’ dirges, the Nigerian president must have realised that the firm ground upon which the giant, (òmìnrań) stands could suddenly become slippery, leading to his fatal fall.
The bard in the Ogundele chant above would seem to have compared the ADC warriors warring against President Tinubu to Death’s strike. In Yorùbá mythology, death is perceived as a warrior, too. When he goes to war, it is with the full complement of a battalion of malevolent supernatural warlords called the Ajogun. The launch of ADC last Wednesday may be the first battalion that death, those who want to unseat the president, sent to warn him.
Almost like an oxymoron, a great man can fall to his own folly and vanity. Irish poet, Oscar Wilde, once brought out this oxymoron in his The Picture of Dorian Gray when he said: ‘A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures’. This Wilde saying may be the purport behind a folktale told to children in pre, colonial and even immediate post-colony of Yorubaland. It was the story of a mythical valiant warrior who, either out of excessive power or inability to realise the fault lines of his prowess, transformed into a crocodile. Powerful and dreaded, the warrior, who had magical ability to transform into an animal, one day decided to repeat this magical wizardry. He asked that a traditional mat be brought out. As he laid on it, with a white cloth spread over him, by the time the cloth was unwrapped, he had transformed into a huge crocodile. Since, in the words of same Oscar Wilde, no man can be too careful in the choice of his enemies, the warrior’s friends immediately turned against him. Having found out that the only taboo against that animal transformation wizardry was raindrops, the warrior’s friends ganged up and decided to invoke a torrent of rain.
The Delesolu compound in Oje, Ibadan North East Local Government of Oyo State, parades this same mythical narration of their ancestry. History has it that the great grandfather of the Delesolus did almost like the warrior in the above crocodile mythology. He, too, transformed into a crocodile. Then rain began to fall on the huge animal. Unable to return to his human form as a result of the raindrops, the distressed crocodile walked helplessly into the bush and into the nearest river. He never returned. Till today, anytime a child is born into the Delesolu family, a live crocodile is placed beside the baby. In 1944, a giant crocodile was brought into the compound as a totem, a reminder to the crocodile progeny that wisdom can kill the wise. Delesolus know that the man who transformed into a crocodile was their great grandfather. Till today, they are forbidden from eating a crocodile.
But those who have followed the Nigerian president’s political trajectory compare him to the Onikoyi, a renowned war general in the Oyo empire who lived around the 16th to 17th centuries. So many epithets have been used to describe President Tinubu, one of which is that he is a ‘Master strategist’. Onikoyi too was. President Tinubu is so politically fearsome, so they say, that he possesses a mind of his own. Describing him further, they say he is a man who, in the words of award-winning Nigerian author, Chigozie Obioma, in his The Fisherman (2015), is ‘not the kind of man who would dip his foot in another shoe because his own was damp; he would rather trek the earth on bare foot’.
Onikoyi held command over 1469 men who were famous for fighting to death. They never turned their backs to the enemy. Onikoyi’s war prowess was such that nobody could defeat him. Not only was he a foremost warrior, his descendants became rulers of the town of Ikoyi. A praise poem composed for him speaks volumes of his bravery and capacity to mow down his enemies. Translated by Ulli Beier in his Yoruba Poetry, (1970) it runs thus:
Onikoyi, the warrior who never received an arrow in his back
Child of the water lily, child of the squirrel
The bird’s foot shall never touch the water
The river shall never be at rest
Onikoyi, the warrior who frightens death himself
Child of the vulture perching on the baobab tree…
When the vulture flaps down
He will eat the intestines of a brave warrior…
He will eat the liver of a brave warrior…
He will eat the eyes of a brave warrior
Onikoyi loves nothing but war
When others drink wine, he drinks blood
When others plant yams, he is planting heads
When others reap fruit, he is reaping dead warriors
As whirlwind gathers dirt into its concentric circle, erstwhile Tinubu friends gathered at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre last Wednesday. Virtually all of them were once friends and associates of the Onikoyi. From Atiku Abubakar, Nasir El-Rufai, Rauf Aregbesola, Rotimi Amaechi etc, the list is endless. It includes David Mark, a man who, as military general, derisively told Nigerians that they were banished forever to a life of impoverishment. And Judas Iscariot Aregbesola. We are told that when we see the list of expected decampees that ADC would receive soon, many of whom still dine with Tinubu, we would be shocked. Onikoyi, too, was betrayed by one of his friends whom he favoured severally.
Envious of his valour, other warriors attempted to cut Onikoyi to size, to no avail. They then courted this friend who they paid handsomely to trigger a fight between Onikoyi and a best friend of his. In the battle, Onikoyi killed his friend and the warrior turned into a bush rat, thereafter making the forest his home. The middle friend who betrayed him had a huge tree fall over him, killing him instantly. For this prowess, a poem is sung in remembrance of the fatal fight which goes thus: ‘Onikoyi beheaded his friend at the Foursquare/It is because the friend chopped off the head of a little squirrel’. Till today, the people of Ikoyi hold the bush rat as a totem and never eat it. It is why one of the praise songs of the Ikoyi is:
Give him Ologini (cat), he will eat
Give him Alapandede (swallow bird), he will devour
Give him Awọnrinwọn, (monitor lizard) he will munch
Only the squirrel as venison is his taboo
Since Wednesday when the ADC unfolded, it will appear that the President and the All Progressives Congress (APC) have been losing the messaging war. From far away beautiful Caribbean island Sea of Saint Lucia where he and his principal are ensconced, the message of Death seemed to have hit the presidential team badly. So, Bayo Onanuga sought to remind us that the ADC is an assembly of grousers. While lifting the veil off its leaders one by one and their political sins, he even predicted their waterloo.
Onanuga needed to rewind the clip of his words to hear his own grumpy voice. Nigerians are aware already that right there in the ADC assemblage are political sinners; but, is the APC any better? If he says ADC lacks ideology, what is APC’s ideology? A minister was clearly accused of corruption, of filching billions of the people’s money in collusion with some star boys in the federal executive council. The president sacked her. Till date, she has not been tried. Corruption is said to sit in its imperial glory, just as maggots do on a decomposing meat, in Aso Rock as we speak. A cavalierly looting of Nigerian patrimony, perhaps unprecedented in Nigerian history, is the credo.
So, is political party about sainthood? If sainthood was the qualification for assembling to form a party, the crew that came into federal power in 2015 would not be there.
Muhammadu Buhari was a despot who had his hands bespattered with the blood of Bartholomew Owoh, Bernard Ogedengbe and Lawal Ojuolape. The trio was killed extra-judicially by firing squad in Lagos on April 10, 1985. Nigerians also knew Buhari as an Islamic bigot, thoroughly incompetent and one who sent Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson to prison under his maniacal Decree 4. Nigerians forgave and voted for him, only for him to unleash the most incompetent government on the people at his second coming.
In 2023, President Tinubu himself was one of the most unfit persons to be Nigeria’s president if a leader’s past was an index for voters’ consideration. I am not aware of any presidential candidate in the history of Nigeria’s electoral politics who heaved as hefty a baggage into the polls as the ex-Lagos State governor. He however got off into Aso Rock because many Nigerians believed he had the capacity to change their lives. Two years down the line, the reverse is the case. Nigerians crunch suffering as you eat crunchy nuts. All we hear are Marabout statistics of betterment whereas when we go to markets, we are faced with the tyranny of existence under a government in whose veins blood doesn’t seem to flow. So, reminding us of the past of the ADC coalition members is hogwash. It won’t wash.
But the Atiku ADC seems to be getting the messaging right. And Nigerians are listening to it. Though we know its members do not have any redemptive DNA and will also betray us if they ever get into government, their messaging resonates. Is life better for Nigerians now than it was in 2023? To imagine Aregbesola, whose government pauperized the poor Osun State civil servants as he paid them half salary while wasting billions of Naira on a needless airport project, now claiming that ADC is coming to ‘rescue the poor!’
Though he is one of the greatest dis-advertisements of the ADC coalition, notorious for his dunce-like dances (ijó dìndìnrìn) and maladministration, Aregbesola asked an apt question: ‘Is today better than yesterday, or yesterday was better than today’? Let suffering Nigerians answer that question. It is a question personal to them. Tinubu has spent two grim years that lacerate Nigerians. The next two years do not seem to offer any hope that life would be better. The people’s sorrow daily remarries them to God as they tend to be more religious these days. It is so bad that, in the words of Wilde, Nigerians, majority of whom are lords of language, lack words to describe their anguish and suffering.
Yet, still in the same words of Wilde, the President and his people ‘(fill their lives) to the very brim with a life of pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine’.
It reminds me of a line in Fuji music lord, Ayinde Marshal’s song. He sang that, same Nigerian life that is so difficult and painful to chew or swallow, is same world some Nigerians at the top eat crushingly like one eating hot yam (Ayé t’énìkan ńyó je, l’àwon kan ńje súà bí eni ńje isu) For almost one whole week, the presidency literally relocated and hibernated in Saint Lucia, with no decipherable outcome for Nigerian people.
Someday, the real fact of what took the presidency to this tiny island and the amount of the Nigerian wealth incinerated on the jamboree would be revealed. Was our wealth secretly tethered by the feet of Dionysus, Greek god of wine, pleasure and revelry, in Saint Lucia? From Saint Lucia, the presidency is junketing to Brazil for the 17th BRICS Summit. It would be its 18th country to visit in two years. It reminds me of the famous parody of S. L. Akintola against highly regarded anaesthetist, Nigerian Railways Chairman in the First Republic, Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani: Nigerians nru, (are getting leaner) the presidency nsanra (is growing rotund cheeks).
It is however too early in the day to come to a conclusion of what the coming days will be. Both the ADC and the APC are gathering missiles of war. While I agree with FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike that none of the coalition crew is competent to articulate the anger and hunger of the Nigerian people, there is no doubting the fact that the Tinubu government inflicts hunger on the people. In this case, both Tinubu and the coalition group are like the proverbial bedwetter who is incompetent to haggle the price of aró, used by local drycleaners to curtail urine smell. The Nigerian people are capable of articulating their anger. In 2027, it will be evil politicians against the people.
On the surface, President Tinubu’s famed wizardry would win him another four years in office. He is Onikoyi reincarnate, isn’t he? However, history tells us of an Onikoyi reincarnate who died on the battlefield where three trees met overhead. His corpse was not discovered until several days after. By this time, his decomposing corpse had been mercilessly half eaten, in the words of Beier, by vultures and ‘child of the eagle sitting on the silk cotton tree’ and ‘child of the hawk waiting on the camwood tree’.
The braggadocio of the APC group is getting muffled now. The voice of the fawning Senate President who said the President would win 99.5% in the 2027 votes is receding too, no thanks to the coalition. The APC, ADC and the Peoples Democratic Party will have to deal with Nigerians’ current reality of hopelessness in the midst of plenty. And tell us why we have to vote for them again. Or else, political Death will kill the Onikoyi like a hunter who lost his apó.
First published in Sunday Tribune, 6 July 2025
