If you are a reader who follows football through and through, that is, thoroughly, and you enjoy it as you enjoy any food that elevates your taste buds to the desire of your tongue and inspired mouth, you cannot but be un-churlishly inspired and demand very good, very delicious, football. And you will always be excited any time you behold a chef of delicious football.

Who is the chef of delicious football? The coach? The manager? Or the president of the outfit, the club, that is, that owns the players, the stars or super-stars, that are endowed with qualities to stir up our emotions – especially those that give noble pleasure to our taste buds.

In the hierarchy that I have mentioned we have the chefs, and chefs. But there is only one chef, the super chef, who is the head coach sometimes referred to as the manager – which in truth is not a fair and fitting nom-de-guerre, if I employ the term here, to re-describe the super chef – whose football dishes speak delicious talk to our tongues.

How do we praise the super chef (and his assistants) when his delicious impulse of victory stirs the minds of those who praise him? And those who praise him – his praiser and praiser – always want him to remain unchanged. But things do not always happen this way.

A change must come when it must come – forced or not forced. This is an immutable aspect of our existential existence we must surrender ourselves to if we want to always cope here fittingly.

A super chef in the grand football restaurant of the super fabulous football club called Real Madrid of Spain ended his second spell in the Spanish capital this past Saturday, 25 May. One of his spicy onions also ended his many years of muse-inspired time there at the same time of 55:30 PM or thereabouts that same Saturday. The gleaner, this gleaner, is speaking about Carlo Ancelotti and Luka Modric who respectively are Italy- and Croatia-born. Their muse-conjured delicacies have been magnetically transmitted from Spain and outside of Spain to rhapsodise our tongues and palates anywhere we are.

But what they did, what they cooked in their Madrid restaurant and transported to us up to the aforesaid Saturday will soon become a distant echo resounding in the memory of each of our tongues of praise – or of the proper meeds of praise and its rhetoric. Change came for them. Let me quote Luka Modric, the sumptuous mid-fielder of the super chef: “The time has come that I never wanted to come.” No one can keep time still and steady. This is not original with me or with Luka Modric or with Carlo Ancelotti.

The rhetoric of time is the rhetoric of change. And change can be charming and delicious and perfect when it enriches our humanity. Change that enriches our humanity is the change that enables us, that compels us, to embark on revisions that give value to the society, to our space and landscape. Its rhetoric is the rhetoric of timeless time that is ever on the move on the ground, on/in the sea and in the sky and in the air. It moves in a manner that is timefully and timelessly timely – succulently and deliciously so.

We give the moves, the movements, of time the reverence they deserve. A bad experience with time that we revere can always change, will always change, turn, into music and harmony of splendorous splendour. We must study intimately when to eat or devour what we need to eat or devour from it.

But time, we must note, is ambiguous. It is the master and owner at the same time of ambiguity. Nobody knows or understands it intoto. It is unpredictable, profoundly unpredictable – and herein perhaps lies the real passion and power of the rhetoric of change whose rhythm we must study closely if we must gracefully change our dance-steps in accordance with the beat of its drum. As Chinua Achebe famously said: “When the drum-beat changes, the dance must also change.”

Many things have changed – and are changing – in your country, this country, my country. Let us focus a little attention on our House of Representatives. Recent reports in the papers, mainstream and online, have indicated that a law will soon be in place in accordance with the dubious wish of the Reps to commit to prison, or so, anyone who does not vote in future elections of any colour or magnitude – if what I heard or read about the subject was not out of tune/tone with my understanding of it. What an unforeseen change!

We expect regular sumptuous dishes from our National Assembly, but the super chefs (and other chefs there) often cook bad meals for us. Their latest absolutely unpatriotic desire to wrench from each of us our right and wish to exercise our discretion to have or not to have barbarous fellows in the National Assembly or anywhere they want to invade through elections (that are not going to be elections) is an unwelcome change. No elections of barbarians should be accepted or tolerated any longer in the polity.

We need this change now. How many compatriots will they not imprison for refusing to accept the impending inglorious change they want to force on us? The coming immoral change is a change that we do not want and we will never want. But it has a significant value. It may force some of us to leave a career in letters for politics. Doing so will help to enrich our morality and beautify our polity.

Now the time has seemingly come, has seemingly arrived, indeed, for anyone who, for instance, has a career in letters to enter politics where his purely mental activity will be infused with positively unrestrained supernal inspiration to be employed on behalf of the people. In his thoughts all notions or principles of survival of the fittest will perish and die.

What sumptuous dishes, that are sumptuous dishes – will he not serve the people? He will be blessed with the vital spirit of change to serve the people as they ideally should be served because they are worthy of being so worthily served. 

You may call the column today a symbol, or an allegory of change. You may be right or very right or too right (or not even right). But to what end is the allegory? The year 2027 is hurrying near. It will soon appear for us to embrace it. All the events and their players with their characteristics in masculine and feminine numbers the gleaner shall treat very amply farther on – as the Supreme Masters of Merit (SMM) shall direct his ink and nib. Then, this column shall make more than its spiritual mark prophecy-wise.

Its spiritual legacies to the gleaner’s country shall be recognized for its mutably and immutably sumptuous laws of social and political art rooted and ingrained in instructive, non-injurious spiritual/metaphysical/mystical prose-poetry of healthy, valuable pictures of our circumstances. The errors of our times must be rectified by vigorous hands and bounteous minds, and injurious prejudices opposed by commanding voices.

We shall invoke William Shakespeare, John Milton, Dante Alighieri, Jonathan Swift, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Romanus Egudu, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Olu Obafemi and the other Masters – dead or living, ancient or modern, international or national or local – of valuable change.

And before I forget, what of Primate Theophilus Olabayo and Sehaji Jacob Oshodi? Their voices shall enter the column any time they are needed to enter the column. These number among the voices to guide us in the turbulent days ahead.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.