THE “UNDERDOG” BARKS BACK AT THE “ATTACK DOG”. In a wrestling contest featuring Chibuike Amaechi and Doyin Okupe, the winner is probably easily predictable. But, hush, don’t predict just yet because appearances can be deceptive. Just because Yoko Zuna, who was a human behemoth, was larger and meatier than Johnny Kwango, who was a dry bone by comparison, didn’t mean that the skeletal English professional wrestler was a walk in the park for the humungous Samoan elephant. Intelligence and tactics, which an underdog may have in abundance, could have triumphed over piles of kilograms, which any attack dog packs in weight and appearance. And because all wrestling bouts come with a prize, this one is no different, only that the prize is neither a belt nor a silver cup but Goodluck Jonathan. Whether that is a trophy worth all the acrobatic gyrations and arm locks and pin falls and flying dives will be decided by the voting audience, maybe in 2015. But, for today, picture this: I am sitting in a long room the size of a stadium somewhere in the middle of nowhere interviewing Amaechi and Okupe, each staring at the other with the hunger a lion has for a gazelle. I am reclined in a squeaking chair in the middle of it all flinging questions this way and that. A pre-condition for this interview was that each interviewee would sit against a parallel wall, in order to avoid physical touch. Reluctantly, I agreed. My first question went to Okupe. I said, “You have so much hatred for that guy over there and he doesn’t seem to love you either. Men normally don’t fight each other unless there is a girlfriend tearing them apart. Is this different or is it not?”. Okupe said, “When you disrespect Goodluck Jonathan, you have me to contend with. I am not going to sit around and watch small fries like him square up to him and think I am going to turn the other cheek. Or why else do you think I won’t stop talking?”. I said, “I do not mean to speak for him, but he does say that it was your guy who started the fight by starting a fire in his living room and ordering the fire brigade to stand aloof and watch his house burn down. That was mean, wasn’t it?”. Okupe retorted. He said, “I hate to call Chibuike Amaechi by name and I am not going to do so even now, but what won’t he say to make Jonathan look like the devil you shouldn’t share a meal with? The other day he said his life was in danger because Mbu Joseph Mbu was ganging up with us to bury him in his untimely grave. As we speak, he is imagining himself terrorized by us, when all we are doing is mind our own business. Who else would do a thing like that but a man seeking to be pitied when he should be spited by people who should see through his elaborate façade?”. I turned to Amaechi, whose fuming breath had turned the expansive room oven-hot. I asked him, “Is that a fair comment?”. Amaechi said, “Joseph Goebbels always lied for Adolf Hitler. It didn’t just start with the body mass sitting over there. What is presidential spokesman-ship without the fantastic embellishments he is notorious for? So, when it comes to presidential big mouths, lying is in the blood. It is engraved into the DNA, transferred to them by their mother. But one thing I am sure of is this: no matter the tons of falsehoods he feeds into the public domain, the truth will always set me free.”. “What is the ‘truth’”? Amaechi said, “The other day, the one who calls herself my mother but never even met my father said I was the troublemaker because I was just trying to put my own house in order. She said I was rendering her people homeless by wrecking-balling their shacks and consigning them to bushes around oil wells. Nothing could be further from the truth. What is her business in my domestic affairs, to begin with? Then, her husband said I should have come in a motorcade carrying a large entourage to pay him obeisance.”. I interjected. I said, “Why didn’t you do that? That would have quenched all these fires, even before they started. The Bible says ‘honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee’. But by your own inadvertent admission, you disobeyed that clear-cut admonition. Now, look at the mess we have. Why won’t a guide dog be mad as hell, when you are sticking your finger into his man’s eyes?”. Amaechi raved with sarcasm. He barked directly back at Okupe, who was swelling profusely in his enormous chair. He said, pointing and wagging a finger, “With a guide dog like him, you could still be run over by a keke NAPEP. So the blind man should open his eyes.”. Amused by these two Sumo wrestlers, I was murmuring to myself. I said, “Underdogs, guide dogs and attacks dogs are all canines. They all bark with desire at the sight of a bone.”.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 19:29:47 +0000
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