Tunde Odesola
With feathers adapted for silent flight, eyes imbued with binocular vision, ears made for binaural hearing and talons designed to kill, the owl is the silent killer machine in the sky. The owl holds different meanings to different cultures of the world. In Africa, the owl is generally seen as an evil bird. Among the Kikuyu of Kenya, the owl is a messenger of death; the hoot of an owl is believed to bring bad luck, ill health, or death. Among the Yoruba, ‘eye aje’ (bird of the underworld) has the attributes of the owl – big eyes, big head, sharp talons and upright stance. The Ifa literary corpus pays tributes to evil birds (awon eleye) and their ruthlessness when dealing with mortals.
But in Asia, the owl is viewed as good omen. Myth has it that Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongolian Empire, was hiding from enemies in a forest clearing when an owl roosted in the tree above him, causing his pursuers to retreat in the thought that no one could be hiding in the area with the owl’s nest in sight. In today’s Japan, owls are regarded as harbingers of good luck and are carried in the form of charm or talisman. Generally, Europe ascribes owls with wisdom and vigilance. In Ancient Greece, for instance, Athens was noted for art and scholarship, and Athena, Athens’ goddess of wisdom, had an owl as a symbol.
I know onomatopoeia is at play when I hear animal names like snake, wolf, bee and cuckoo. I can tell that conciseness is at play when I hear animal group names like ‘a shrewdness of apes’, ‘an obstinacy of buffalos’, ‘a caravan of camels’, ‘a tower of giraffes’, ‘a thunder of hippopotamuses’, ‘a prickle of porcupines’, ‘a crash of rhinoceroses’ and ‘a scurry of squirrels’. It’s a misnomer to strictly describe vomiting during pregnancy as morning sickness; some pregnant women have nausea anytime of the day. I think it’s a misnomer and a disservice to the ageless friendship between man and dog to describe a group of dogs as ‘a cowardice of dogs’, considering the fact that numberless dogs have laid down their lives for man in countless instances.
Of all these collective names for animals, the one I found the most apt is ‘a parliament of owls’ because it speaks to the Nigerian situation. A parliament of owls is a synonym for a coven of witches and wizards. It is what the Yoruba call ‘apapo awon eleye’. And when bizarre birds congregate in a parliament, sinister, strange, scary and ghostly are few of the adjectives that come to mind.
Just two days ago, a Non-Governmental Organisation based in Berlin, Germany, Transparency International, conferred the title of the Most Corrupt Institutions in Nigeria on the legislature, the judiciary and the police. For lack of space, I’ll leave out the insane corruption in the judiciary and the police in this article. But I can’t agree less with TI’s assessment even though no NGO has conferred the title of Perpetrator of Impunity in Governance on the executive yet. It’s only in a parliament of owls that lawmakers can each receive N14.25m monthly as revealed by the gadfly from Kaduna when government is owing the masses 14-month arrears of the N18,000 minimum wage. Millions of Nigerian live on less than $1 per day. Ifa panegyrics for the birds of the underworld (apapo awon eleye) describe this weird specie as capable of eating the head of their victims through the limbs and also eating the innards through the liver. Merciless carnivores they are! Nigeria’s parliament of owls include three categories of eerie birds; one lives in a large red chamber, the other lives in a green chamber while the third category lives in a lower altitude called state chamber.
I watched three video clips last week. They were about the self-styled Ambassador of Christ, Elisha Ishaku Abbo, the Peoples Democratic Party senator representing Adamawa-North senatorial district. Months before being inaugurated as a senator, Abbo visited a sex toy shop in Abuja, probably to win converts but ended up beating up a nursing mother and returned to fortress of his home thereafter. The senator left the nursing mother with a facelift that include swollen lips, runny nose, bloodshot eyes, stinging cheeks, aching jaws and echoing ears. Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, the senator never looked back – having served hot justice to the Daughter of Nobody, who had reportedly rebuked one of the ladies Abbo brought into the sex toy shop, for vomiting inside the shop. Though the Daughter of Nobody knows nobody, she took her case to social media, where the CCTV video of the slapping senator was uploaded. Within hours of the video hitting the internet, the tough-talking 41-year-old Abbo became softer than ‘akamu’, wiping tears before the camera and apologizing for beating up the harmless woman – during a news conference organized to portray Abbo as remorseful.
I also watched the video clip of the senator when he appeared in court to explain why he rained (igbati oloyi) hot slaps on the Daughter of Nobody. Abbo had his two hands in the pockets of his starched purple dress, walked with a springy and vigorously shook hands with some people on the court premises. After he appeared briefly in court, Abbo was driven away in a glittering SUV that cocooned him in a cauldron of invincibility. An Abbo, who had ‘apologized to Nigerians and the international community’ (his words), entered a not guilty plea in court.
The third video captured the showdown. Appearing before a six-member panel raised by Senate President Ahmed Lawan to investigate why Abbo went wild in a sex toy shop, Abbo fiercely warned Senator Oluremi Tinubu, the wife of the National Leader of the All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, saying “I won’t sit down here and you threaten me with suspension. You’re a senator like me. I take exception to that…,” insisting that as the case is before a court, it would be sub judice if he appears before the senate panel to answer questions on his shameful conduct.
It is saddening that the Nigerian Senate is currently dissipating energy on a shameful scandal that broke out in a sex toy shop when poverty has become an abiding tenant in most Nigerian homes. A story published in The PUNCH last Friday with the headline, “Poor Nigerians rose from 86m to 98m in 10 years –UNDP,” said that the 2019 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index has indicated that ‘multi-dimensionally poor’ Nigerians increased from 86m to 98m between 2007 and 2017. The sobering story was sourced from a report released in New York by the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative.
If the Senate had, in the last 20 years, busied itself with its primary duty enacting proactive laws, it surely would have abrogated some obsolete laws that provide the thief an escape route. Last Thursday, the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related Offences Commission secured the conviction of a former Director-General of the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency, John Samonda, at a Federal High Court in Abuja. Samonda was found guilty of spending part of the N603m funds meant for federal projects on N2.8m Sallah welfare package for members of staff of the agency, spending N25.75m on a national stakeholders’ workshop and purchasing two Hiace buses for N49.1m without following due process.
In a shocking judgment, Samonda, who was convicted on five of 10 counts, was sentenced to one year imprisonment with an option of fine of N50,000 on each count, whose sentence is to run concurrently. No doubt, the judgment makes fraud an attractive alternative just as the Senate which should amend obsolete laws to strengthen the anti-corruption fight is busy finding a needle in a barn of hay.
