BY EKANPOU ENEWARIDIDEKE
The story of that poor helpless village boy in Delta state who suffered afflictions of coronavirus, for whom mama Moses Oromola Jemigbeyi (Eluko) the 137-year old woman of Okerenkoko town in Gbaramatu Kingdom prayed tenaciously for recovery alongside the committed coronavirus-survival moves of Tompolo, and in whose behalf Okowa intervened and cured the covid-19, can never be told without Governor Okowa because he will nobly leave Government House someday at the appointed time, leaving behind the legacy story of how Okowa devotedly waged the war against coronavirus exampled by the village boy who now happily lives a life free from the afflictions of the ravaging coronavirus. Is the Deputy Governor of Delta State, Otuaro, aware that Governor Okowa’s humanity-governed intervention saved that poor village boy from the deadly afflictions of that senseless ravaging covid-19?
That Governor Okowa did not allow that poor helpless covid-19-afflicted boy to die ignominiously is a legacy story that will be told forever from generation to generation until Jp Clark is born in Kiagbodo town again – I mean a new Jp Clark born carrying the poetic drunkenness, the poetic fluidity, the poetic versatility, the poetic sensibility, the poetic flexibility, the poetic elasticity, the poetic effortlessness, of that JP Clark who left a memorable last testament on the Kiagbodo River, and whose last testament was religiously accorded the demanded dignity and faithfulness the man Professor JP Clark poetically pleaded at his retirement from earth.
This world we always claim ours was once viciously ravaged by covid-19 though it is still being ravaged in varying degrees. It was at the peak of the destructive dance of coronavirus that that poor village boy in Delta State was afflicted. Like an endangered ship at sea the world flounders in anticipation of rescue operation led by dolphins.Like a forester who falls ‘pataru’ into a marshy ground that draws one inward beyond rescue except barricaded through human interventions, the world toils daily to escape the consuming abomasum of the sinking marshy ground offered by the deadly coronavirus.
The world flounders either towards death or existence because it is being venomed everyday by coronavirus that sailed all the way from Wuhan in China in 2019.Because the world flounders, some entrepreneurially gifted men of God can no longer resist the temptation to turn itinerant traders now vociferous and aggressive in the hawking of the highly demanded eschatological ware that the world is about to be brought to an end – as ominously signalled and communicated by the ravaging coronavirus in the world. Upon this eschatological ware aggressively hawked by men of God, the immediate responses become those of fear, panic, followed by daily meditative exercises carried out as a kind of medical regimen to propitiate and please God to decree a miraculous prorogation over his programmed destruction of the world now waiting by the corner in the looming image of coronavirus.
I was the only one among my peers who contracted the coronavirus in my ward though everybody knows I am not a globe-trotter whose contraction of such virus would find a justifiable basis. Venomed by the coronavirus, all my efforts were channelled towards curative mechanism. All around me were epidemiologists and virologists professionally equipped to cure it but they all deserted me. They wish the poor village boy were venomed to death by the coronavirus. While they deserted me, they devotedly attended to coronavirus patients from distant lands and cured them in a matter of days after giving the right medication.
People from distant lands full of apprehensions for coronavirus were immediately given the Ori Vaccine, but not the poor village boy who is down with coronavirus. I went to all the coronavirus testing centres but no one gave me attention. I became the orphaned coronavirus patient whose terminal point has been decreed because the helpless poor village boy and I have imaginatively merged into one indivisible entity in the narration of this story of coronavirus-affliction.
In my state of suffocation and torment in the hands of coronavirus, I could see gloating smiles, gloating laughter and gloating eyes quizzically cast at me. To many, I should be left to die ignobly, deprived of any possible touch of humanity. It meant nothing to them that I laboured devotedly for them in the political Garden of Eden. Unappetizingly, coronavirus paradoxically became the recompense for my devoted labours for them in anticipation of bumper harvest at harvest time. These are the vagaries of human nature – the vagaries of political involvement in the political space.
When hopeless and helpless, full of radiant visions of my death in the lethal claws of coronavirus, when the sun was on the sail to set, when the fluorescence was about to be quenched for another phased orbital exchange and shift, something marvellous happened – a marvel words were too marvelled to image and mouth to the world where many prayerfully wished the poor village boy be extinguished by coronavirus like a candle, or like an oil-lamp kept buoyant on the river while the net is cast down the river in a fishing session for glass catfish and Esoun fish.
With every new day that emerges, that poor village boy suffered the pains of the ravaging coronavirus. The negative well-wishers, the naysayers, the tenacious negative prayer warriors at work gloatingly concluded in a celebratory caper that it was the end of the coronavirus-struck poor village boy. The whole episode could be correctly likened to the mythological appropriation that both the living and the dead are respectively up to different plots. When they thought sombrely that the twilight had staged her swan-song, inexorably sinking into the irrietrivably total darkness, Governor Okowa marvellously appeared, accompanied by Otuaro and Tompolo, carrying that potent cure for that poor village boy ravaged by what some avant garde stylistic enthusiasts may metaphorically term the political coronavirus.
It would be an intellectual stupidity to dismiss the fact that political appointment sails to its desired quay only after it has been politically innoculated against the politically motivated coronavirus in the politics of any country, particularly the political coronavirus type that mercilessly afflicted that poor village boy in Delta State. Appointment, the priceless lexical enigma every individual labours to master and claim however the underlying merit supposed to power and oxygenate it, lives comfortably as appointment subject to the interconnectedness of two factors free to fall into contextual biological categorisation as remote stimulants, remote carriers or vectors, enzymes, and immediate stimulants, immediate carriers or vectors, immediate enzymes.
In the individualised dance of defamiliarization staged literarily by the poor village boy, these two factors could be lexicalised as primary bulldozers and secondary bulldozers as this does not command any indignifying accusation of lexical madness or abnormality in grammatology.
In every step the positive prayer-warriors of the poor village boy inhale and exhale the long incubated thought that he be strategically placed in politics after the rigours of election and become the political Mecca of empowerment, the political Mecca for neutralization and transformation of negative vibrations from believers. They labour devotedly to send your name to the relevant places for appointive coronation. They feel ignored, degraded and affronted when you are denied appointive coronation as this daily strikes them as a psychological trauma threatening their designated leadership placement in politics. They feel much more traumatized than the coronavirus-struck village boy in whose interest the soothing antiphonies of Gbaramatu Kingdom, Otuaro and Tompolo are skillfully offered as the antidote against the man-made political coronavirus ravaging the poor village boy without any visible abatement.
With every passing day they keep their ears attuned to news of appointive coronation for their core believers.Sometimes the victim thinks the boss is up to some lethal pranks built around ‘stalled’ promise of political career-advancement for the believers.There are also others resident either in the village or city who do nothing for the poor village boy except their prayerful thoughts for his appointive coronation to take a concretized image away from deceptive appearances.
Both the pragmatic and prayerful well-wishers fall into the category of primary bulldozers because their thoughts bear resemblance to the force or action exerted on a forest by bulldozers let loose as the integral part of land preparation for either canalization or farming.
Known also are others who immediately mount pressure on the appropriate authorities for the birth of appointive coronation. They pragmatically extend and concretize the framework earlier built by the primary bulldozers as a continuum.They did not labour to build the appointive framework but only ensure that the framework is not subjected to annoying lacerations until its conceived physicalization is attained. They are the people grammatologically categorised as secondary bulldozers.
The secondary bulldozers cannot exist without the primary bulldozers because the appointive conceptualization owes its existence to the primary bulldozers. Those seen as the immediate activists of pressure mounted on the relevant authorities and the appointing authorities fall into the category of secondary bulldozers.
For the village boy whose political innoculation against the politically motivated coronavirus in the history of political appointment survived the lacerations of the killer coronavirus,unto the world of the primary bulldozers and the secondary bulldozers the heart of the village boy opens ‘Like the chaste leaf in the morning, when The sun first touches it’ (The Lion and the Jewel, page 6) because his world would have become worldless without their interconnected labour. It is for this reason the poor village boy ravaged by coronavirus that the antiphonies of Gbaramatu Kingdom, Otuaro and Tompolo are seen as bulldozers released for the political mechanization of the village boy’s political farm.
Because the primary bulldozers and the secondary bulldozers do not enjoy the luxury of appreciatory name-calling which has long become the defining quality of their allergy to exhibitionism, for fear of provoking their elemental anger, let all positive bulldozers be content with anonymous recognition where only the identifiable contours are traced and highlighted linguistically – rather than geographically – as either a conscious or unconscious challenge for only the discerning geniuses to know the region from which the lubricant or stimulant for the appointive coronation is provided for the village boy to sail even in the darkness of night like the protagonist, Tailor Gogi’s journey in the ‘narrow, long, still and dark creek’ (A Sail in the Dark, 1). But have I not already violated the code of no-name-calling in my ecstatic appreciatory journey here? Have I become the violator here?
The whole universe knows that coronavirus only glories in the emasculation and the non-appointment of labourers in the garden of politics. But who will still say the political omnibus has not been Okowa-otuaroed after the election when the protectively ‘Gbaramatued’ village boy, Gogi, has been miraculously cured of his coronavirus by Governor Okowa? Have Otuaro and Tompolo, the unobtrusive supportive pillars of the poor village boy, forgotten that Governor Okowa is the accredited political epidemiologist, the accredited political virologist, with the famed globally acknowledged cure for political coronavirus, particularly the coronavirus type that vindictively afflicts poor helpless village dwellers like Gogi of Akparemogbene in Burutu local Government Area of Delta State? Is Gogi the hitherto coronavirus-struck poor village boy not the Special Assistant to Governor Okowa on Political Matters now?
EKANPOU ENEWARIDIDEKE
Writes from Akparemogbene
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