I was in the United States, in California, when news came to me of the murder of my friend and brother, Bola Ige. Let’s say that he was murdered last night. I received the news in the morning. Most of that day, I sat in my study, unable to do anything creative or productive. All I achieved that day was to telephone here and there, take calls, make myself available for telephone calls, leave my email open as I waited for further news about an event that I could not yet fully absorb. It was right in the midst of this existence in limbo, that one message popped up on my laptop let us say, about ten hours after I first received the news of his death, that is, less than eighteen hours after his actual murder. This message had been sent, allegedly, by Bola Ige’s widow, Justice Atinuke Ige. And what did that message from the distraught widow have to say? Surely, you have guessed by now. Tinuke was informing me that her late husband, Bola, while he was alive, and in his capacity as Attorney-General of the nation, had stashed away a staggering sum of some two hundred and seventy million dollars, property of the Nigerian people, and that she was looking for a partner through whom this money could be laundered abroad. This indiscriminately diseminated formula was familiar, boring and obscene in every detail, one of at least a hundred thousand faxes and email messages that fished around for gullible and greedy partners in the disposal of corrupt acquisition. All that was demanded from me was a letter with my letter-head, giving my bank account etc. etc., and a guaranteed thirty percent of this loot was mine. Yes, this was the content of the letter that came to me, allegedly from the head of the Ige family, a High Court judge and a newly created widow who was nothing less than my own sister. Someone in this very nation could not even wait for a season of grieving to have subsided, had not the scantiest respect either for the reputation of the dead man, not long before his death appointed a member of the Judicial Reform Commission of the United Nations Organisation, nor of his surviving widow, whose reputation as an officer of the law was being tarnished, brazenly among thousands of recipients of such letter. I cannot tell, till today, which event was more lacerating to me personally, on so many levels this indecent assault on the very being of these two people, their families, colleagues and profession, or the death of my friend, Bola Ige.That exaction, that brutalisation of my inner psyche, is not something that anyone can quantify, and it is not a price that I am prepared to pay for any spurious theology of reparations. Many people simply do not understand, have never taken the trouble of an imaginative projection of the ramifications of the Advance Fee Fraud. Until you have taken the trouble to do so, considered its effect on the lives of innocents, kindly keep your theology to yourself. Some of us are not pacifists and our response at such moments may be to take our own need for reparations instantly into our own hands. --Wole Soyinka: The Protean Dimensions (2006)
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 19:15:38 +0000
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