The Book of Nigerius

Serializing my book, Gathering the Words - continued from previous articles,

"The scariest moment is always just before you start."

-Stephen King

I was in Dakar when the battles to oust Gaddafi began in Libya. Dakar is a small city on the western coast of West Africa and the capital of Senegal. I was at that time there for a couple of weeks, as a working guest of the UNDP. I remember this detail about Libya because the city of Dakar made a memorable impression on my mind. It was a clean city with very friendly and contented people who had no airs about what they had or did not have. Whether you had a Rolls Royce or all you could afford was a bicycle nobody thought much of that. The only time I was ever made to feel advantaged was by this young lady who lusted so much after my?Blackberry phone,?that I was quite tempted to give it away, only I spoke no French, which was the downside of my delightful experience in this place.??

Driving is not one of my best interests, but I found the roads so smooth, without gullies and potholes, that I thought driving would be a delight. Food was cheap except at the Point E axis where my hotel, as well as several diplomatic offices, were situated. My hotel accommodation was an inexpensive suite of an unreasonably large size where you could successfully stand at least five hundred adults.?I learned at the time, Senegal was one of the safest places to live in Africa and also had the most stable democracy in the continent.?

As I watched the fracas of Libya on my television, I learned that Libya was also a delightful place to live until the shelling began and the roads and mansions were reduced to rubble. In contrast, the military governments and the succeeding dodgy kind of democracy in my own country, had for long benumbed the people to the possibility of another kind of life, other than the morass of greed and corruption around which they merely glean a bare existence.

When Gaddafi became the leader of Libya, I was merely 11 years old, I had just cut a brand-new secondary school uniform and was still busy dodging four-foot-tall giant bullies in a school where the British type fagging tradition had no respect for the time of the day.?I didn’t know who Gaddafi was until later in university, thanks to the very generously informative Students Union who gave us the pleasant choice between picketing against world politics every week, getting drunk every day and graduating at all. Forty-two years later he remained the leader, and his people, more than half of them probably hadn’t been born when he became the leader of the country and thoroughly fed up, wanted him to go. I confess I am not at all familiar with the political intrigues within Libya, or the extent of the hatred which the?West had for the man Gaddafi; therefore, I apologize to any whose battles he genuinely fought. However, my concern is about curse of lifetime rulers, which Africa seems especially afflicted with.?

? We surely did adore Gaddafi in those days as students. He was that young man bold enough to stand against the oppressive world system. He was the raging African fire-god, a bastion for the oppressed teenager, our very own Guevara and Castro rolled into one and the terror of our tormentors. Even adults cursed their enemies in his name. Where then had he gone wrong? The common error of most African leaders like him is that they never know when to say goodbye, countrymen. Consequently, they end up destroying all they had built up through plain conceit.?

Why do leaders seek to permanently foist themselves upon their country? Is it because they think that those their “children” will never grow to know what is good for them and what they want from their own lives? Is it because they think that nobody else in the world can do a better job than them? Is it because they think that people love them so much that they will be so sad to see them go, because as you know love is a perennial thing?

? But there is an optimum period for the pursuit of a love affair between persons not related either by blood or marriage ties. It rarely is cordial for more than a few years and if something new is not continuously infused into the environment of the relationship hatred soon sets in and possibly violence. The same is true about leadership. Sadly, most leaders miss this – and they thus eventually metamorphose into monarchs, “comrades”, military presidents and despots and megalomaniacs of every similar description; unkind and unfeeling.

? The Book of Nigerius was a child of frustration. I was never one to care about politics or how my country was run. As long as I was not in need, I was okay. But the change in attitude came when it seemed certain that another one-time, military coup leader was about to again become a civilian president. I remembered the first time the fellow had together with a group of military bandits stolen the country and led by force. I remembered it as a period of the worst economic and administrative decisions any nation could have known. So calamitous was the situation that many of the prized professionals no more able to find employment, fled abroad never again to return. The rest had to contend with being rendered professional panhandlers, chasing pedestrians and alimentary achievements.

It was certainly the panic that sent me in a frenzy of writing in protest against the ambition of this man. It was too late though, and he eventually won the election.?I persisted with the watch nevertheless and so robust were my public comments about the once again disastrous direction of his government that I received daily warnings and threatening calls to desist - from known and unknown persons. Nevertheless, the economy and social conditions plummeted as I had predicted, and in addition to the constant half-literate drivel that came to me from every imaginable source from agents of the government, I found myself under watch by security agent. Switching my protest to a language only intelligent people could appreciate was an idea that soon came to me. The Book of Nigerius was a narration to confuse the regular heckler for whom thinking would normally be too much hard work.

The year that the story begins from is 2015 or is it 15 AD? The place is Rome but maybe it is another clime. It is a period of great political fervor and Manius Scribonius Africanus, a slave who's also known as Nigerius resolves to keep a periodical record of the occurrences around him. His record begins with the crowning of the new Emperor Tiberius Buarius Ravilla after the deposition of the previous Emperor Pompilius Jonatus Vespasianus.?He thereafter records and enumerates the important events which followed.?

Nigerius started as an experimental project of Facebook page essays. It is a political satire and as the discerning reader would soon notice, Nigerius is just the contrived singular of the name Nigeria. The nickname of this slave stands for a typical Nigerian common citizen. Similarly, Pompilius Jonatus Vespasianus and Tiberius Buarius Ravilla are Latinised names for Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammad Buhari, both of them respectively previous and current presidents in the timeline of the story. All other place and person names in the story have been similarly transformed to merge with the theme.

Nigerius was conceived at a time I had too many projects going on at the same time. It was also a time when political events were revolving at such dizzying speed that it would be a full-time job to regularly maintain such a journal. There was again for me the issue of obsolescence to worry about. Would the diary of Nigerius still remain relevant and interesting to the reader with the passing of time? Would it still make sense to a reader 20 years later when the principal characters were of no more relevance in the political circuits???

I enjoyed writing Nigerius. I am told the style of the story bears some semblance to the novels titled Imperium and Lustrum, both written by Robert Harris and both of which I have never read. Nigerius currently is an abandoned project. I hope one day to create a story from it, one which will not be killed by obsolescence. I am nevertheless sure it presently has some value as a work of art, but as not much as an enduring story. The political elements of the story should surely be obsolete in a few years, the personae retired away, and the stage set for a new set of scoundrels to exhibit a brand-new version of perfidy.

Excerpt from The Book of Nigerius:

The air is becoming heavy with weariness. The entire populace or at least the portions that may be safely considered sentient are asking themselves hard questions about the future of the country.

A scoundrel recently tried to sell me a miracle potion in a finely crafted jar. He tried to persuade me that it is a distilled effluent from the body of the Emperor Tiberius Buarius Ravilla . He insists that the preparation is so efficacious that it will solve any problem in the world, and also heal all diseases. He is of course a lunatic, but the country is lately suffering an epidemic of these desperate plaudits, persistently inferring that Emperor Tiberius Buarius Ravilla is a god able to make all things well by his mere presence. But behind the facade of hope, the discerning may easily see a fear that all is not as expected.

I think the Emperor is confused. Matters have not been like he had hoped they would be, or as he had deluded himself that they would be. He is used to giving strict orders which anyone in the land questioned at the risk of their head. This time though, he finds that he must have to answer to the Senate for whatever he does. I think this is awkward for him; he has no experience with dialogue.

Still he has not appointed any praetor nor censor. His supporters insist that this is because, he needs to appoint persons who will complement his promise to liberate the nation from brigands; and therefore, he is looking for men without spot or blemish. But alas where will these be found in a nation where the proclivity is to acquire and store away during the rains for days of drought. I do honestly think that he is less worried about the integrity of the persons he chooses than the more obvious fear that each one of them would surpass him in intelligence; which I sincerely believe is no more one of his strong points, at least not in this his old age.

The promises he has made to the electorate stand accusingly before him everyday, because they cannot be fulfilled. Every day, he digs up fresh excuses to explain why; but it is hopeless. His cohorts have sold him too hard as a superhuman god. Now he is left with the burden of proving them true. His ways are largely mysterious. He hides behind a wall of silence to give the impression that he is busy and hard at work - but when he eventually emerges to speak in public, he only seems to emit emptiness and controversy. He largely appears without an atom of clue about what steps to take next and in what direction. Where he is headed in any matter at all is anyone's guess. The rule presently is that when things go right in any matter his supporters claim that he was responsible for it; but whenever things are not going right they are quick to ascribe this to the neglect of the previous Emperor Pompilius Jonatus Vespasianus. But again the discerning can see that they are secretly worried. They express their worry by severely overreacting to any question about the Emperor’s competence. They organise into clandestine gangs and beat up opposing voices both in the street and wherever else they congregate. They are not doing him any good though; neither are they doing the country any good. They are blind labourers working to pave the highway to perdition.

His hopes are also being publicly dashed. Two men who have been constantly hailed as his most promising lieutenants have left his promise to liberate the nation from thieves in near disarray. One of them, Fulvius Amaexius Plancus has been linked with monstrous theft from the coffers of the district of Riversia where he was once governor - and it is all over known that much of the plunder was employed into the campaign to enthrone Emperor Tiberius Buarius Ravilla . How can he now possibly destroy the hands that lifted him up to the throne? Another one, the erstwhile much revered Governor of the district of Lagosium had been publicly upbraided for using money from public coffers to erect grandiose monument and to commission tomes to be written to his greatness - a task that has been conducted at obscene and prodigal expenses and without care for common sense. Emperor Tiberius Buarius Ravilla is running out of credible accomplices. He probably now realises the consequence of being helped to the throne by a band of thieves. Putting them in jail should also by default condemn himself to the same fate.?

Regardless however, his people, the rabble that cheered his ascendance remain everyday impatient. They desperately want to see hangings, they want to see the violent deaths of people they hate, they want public crucifixions, they want gruesome public beheadings, and they want to dip their feet into the blood of their enemies flowing in the street. They want to see the skies black with circling vultures coming to feed on the discarded flesh of their foes and the children of their foes. But they are fools. The ongoing events say it all.

Emperor Tiberius Buarius Ravilla is quite restraining himself from going back to his old ways of the maximum ruler who issues decrees. He has just recently promised to create tribunals to summarily judge and throw people into prison. How this will work I do not know. He might need the permission of the senate to accomplish this. Alas the senate is headed by Senator Appius Sarakium Sura, a trickster which Emperor Tiberius Buarius Ravilla , has I think, unwisely failed to befriend. I can almost feel sorry for him in his helplessness. He is not equipped to function in this way.

If I were in his shoes, I would stand up to face the populace and clearly declare all promises ascribed to me as untenable. But I think he is more fearful about losing face; because he fears to be consequently blackmailed into an ignoble retreat on all fronts. All he does instead is attempt to win sympathy for himself by attempting to rally the populace against the deposed Emperor Pompilius Jonatus Vespasianus.

I think though that this a despicable method for a ruler, and which will only result in ignominy.

Ave et Valete.

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