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A broken usurper and the wheel of fate

By Uthman Shodipe
09 June 2016   |   4:30 am
Somewhere in the palace of wealth where the radiance of decadent luxury glows in wondrous imaginings, where marbled opulence intrudes upon every stretch, where purloined acquisitions attempt a laundered...

Wheel

Somewhere in the palace of wealth where the radiance of decadent luxury glows in wondrous imaginings, where marbled opulence intrudes upon every stretch, where purloined acquisitions attempt a laundered majesty, where all the vast tinseled emblems insist on enforcing competitive luster, where power resides in charmed monarchical pretenses – there is a man who once sprung from debasing anonymity, whose ancestry is contrived,  whose beginnings are cloudy, woven in dubious lineal ambiguities.

This man, this vain, usurping symbol of our national hypocritical largeness, gives the impression of settled contentment and irreversible conquest.

To the unwary, this pretender in the courts of power appears enviable and lustrous, wrapped in exemplary graces. He seems like one whose journey is fulfilled, whose challenges have been nullified by the incredible ability to neutralise all obstacles with immense fortunes and shrewd political maneuverings.

His presence hovers everywhere in annoying ubiquity as he enlarges his territorial acquisitions, invading all vulnerable openings with aggressive resolve, heedless and certain of absolute triumph.

In this reckless obsession with blind, imperial pursuits, he looms like some unfeeling ogre consuming friends and foes without any stirring of honour, voiding the selfless service and the sacrifice of others without any restraining temptings of our common humanity.

He occupies a depraved, benumbing height where there is no moral caution to withdraw into a contemplative brightness, where there is no abiding principle to delineate the limits of ambition and the cordon of fate.

His fixity is total and unchanging. His gaze invalidates any collective predications. It is always about the self. It is always about the narrow provincialism of unitary conquest.

Without the tempering moral arbitration, without the contributory guidance of plural articulations, he graduates into a godhead, a monstrous self-appointed deity who sits in totemic majesty apportioning right and wrong, distributing the advantages of power in indifferent caprice to merit, deciding who is to be elevated in the new dawn and who is to be hurried into a banishing obscurity without reprieve.

With flurries of victories and seemingly perpetual ascendancy, he starts perceiving himself in distorted oracular exactitudes, believing that his mere notion is the law, that his judgment is cast in iron, that his truth is the universal wisdom, that his gestures and fulminations must excite gospel adherence.

As his imperial wanderings grew and his bravura widened in licentious determination, he becomes cold and detached, prompt in abandoning anyone or anything that clutters his passage.

In this crude unalterable fixity to assert an overwhelming relevance everywhere, he cobbles alliances with feverish greed, forfeiting the fealty of old without the faintest emotional concern, shrinking the bands of loyal courtiers who would have been discarded in the new arrangement, thus increasing the ranks of enmity in dizzying paces.

With enlarged territory and a growing sense of omniscience, he is without any restraining counsel, heedless of any intervening guidance, assuming an inflated paramountcy and absolute wisdom.

Without the tempering moral arbitration, without the contributory guidance of plural articulations, he graduates into a godhead, a monstrous self-appointed deity who sits in totemic majesty apportioning right and wrong, distributing the advantages of power in indifferent caprice to merit, deciding who is to be elevated in the new dawn and who is to be hurried into a banishing obscurity without reprieve.

With the hubris of command and control and the absolute grasp of his territorial beginning, he becomes contemptuous and resentful of the very accommodating spatial orbit that gave him a perch in the sun.

In his insatiable haste and hurry to gobble up more spoil, to acquire a greater platform of relevance, he has vaulted himself into an unthoughtful national height where the complex contentions are far beyond his comprehension, where the competing protagonists are much smarter and much more devious in the art of partisan maneuverings.

He has now collided against a force majeure, pitted against a sworn annihilating foe that brooks no competition, which condones no smug impertinence of a vain empire hustling interloper.

In his restless acquisitive greed to grab the stars and reach for the welkins, he has been halted in abrupt disgrace and martial severity where there is no tolerance for those who would flout the hierarchical discipline.

He has been put in his place. He has now reached a ceiling of his inordinate wanderings. In his desperate straying beyond civilised contentment he has been halted in a grim cul de sac; a confounded object of derision and flagellated symbol defrocked of eminence and arbitrating relevance. He is now stunned and bewildered by the sudden turn of the wheel of fate.

Now knowing full well that his glow in the sun is receding, that his cycle of fate is rounding up, that his vaunted relevance is being eclipsed by a dark shroud of inevitable finitude, he is now quietly grasping everywhere, seeking for a new opening , maneuvering in the shadows to avoid the lash of the subsisting power.

There is no settled felicity in this man again. Behold, there is no strutting assertiveness of the conqueror basking in the flourishing ardor and the celebratory cadence of unceasing victory.

He stares at present at the full wallop of personal and glaring ridicule. In this tamed vastness he feigns gestures of compliance and submission to the new order. While he whines and growls and curses in the shadows, he deceives himself in public contentment and salutary expansiveness, masking a roaring rebellion in the guise of splendid acquiescence.

But the shrewd martial arbiter at the acme of our unifying fortune is not to be deceived by the pathetic wheedling in the public space. He is not conciliated by the fraudulent acrobatic holler of trumpeted support.

He can perceive far beyond the shadows where the defeated man riots in rage and fury, where a broken and perplexed swindler laments the cruel turn of fate, bitterly reproaching himself for abetting the ascendancy of a stern, uncompromising arbiter who has now flung him into a scathing irrelevance and a grim abandonment.

Now the palace of wealth does not glitter anymore. The rush and thronging of endless favour seekers have ebbed and dried up. The incandescent glow of yore is long tarnished, now replaced by a drab, souring emptiness. The raucous cheer and the dazzle and the florid eminence of yesterday have vanished, now replaced by the hushed, cowering uncertainties.

Silence pervades everywhere. The vain swagger of oracular pronouncements, the sweeping inebriated certitudes, the contemptuous glare and the self-conceited magic of omniscience are now evaporated; unseen, unheard, swallowed in oblivion. His legion of court choristers and hallelujah scribblers are now hoarse, stripped of any thoughtful exposition, engulfed by their own resounding banalities.

There is now an irreversible intimation of the end. His finitude has come. His wheel of fate has turned. He will not be envied nor pitied in the chronicles of the righteous. He will not be accorded any benign mention in the narratives of the just and the conscionable. In the end he will be fittingly delineated as a chastening moral, a cautionary tale about the utter fruitlessness of enfeebled mortals who would strive with the gods for eminence.

3 Comments

  • Author’s gravatar

    Much as I like and admire the prose Shodipe has never been man enough to indicate names and surnames. This trait was very evident during the military regime of Sani Abacha. But even now he has not changed. It is as if he writes about imaginary figures. Is he writing fiction? Just thinking aloud.

  • Author’s gravatar

    He is just showing off his poetry ability. To be allowed all this space in the newspaper to make this jest is shameful. I supposed that the reader is to conjure up any suitable name an transfixed it as the person being refereed to in this column.This to me is cowardly Shodipe.

  • Author’s gravatar

    Guys if you don’t understand the imagery used by Shodipe, don’t be ashamed to ask him privately who he is referring to. This is a nice prose and we should applaud it. This is the type of intellectual piece that should be assembled by Shodipe and made available in schools – both secondary and tertiary institutions.