Hope Eghagha
When the situation in any home, clan or country becomes extremely precarious or serious or tragic, we need men and women who have the innate or acquired capacity to make us laugh. Sometimes we laugh at ourselves or the situation or the object of scorn. In drama it is called ‘comic relief’. The atmosphere in our dear country right now is grave, very grave and uncertain. Loss of jobs, vanishing millions of naira and dollars, horrible pictures of slavery from Libya, carpet crossings, total number of voters exceeding the registered voters, eating of one’s words without shame, sudden deaths, suicides by jumping into the lagoon from the Third Mainland Bridge, ritual killings, fatal motor accidents, kidnappings, the cults boys significantly named Badoo of Ikorodu, and armed robberies all combine to create an atmosphere of sorrow in the land. It is a situation which Fela Anikulapo-Kuti once described as ‘Suffering and Smiling.’
People walk along the streets and mutter to themselves. Some hold conversations with imaginary friends. In the midst of these, we need to laugh and laugh real hard. Laughter is good medicine. It is cheap to get; cheap to give. It makes us happy and removes stress from our lives. Sometimes the cause for laughter comes from a man or woman who occupies a serious position in life.
You see, when a clown occupies a serious position, his actions could provoke laughter, sometimes at the expense of real progress. I have always loved Mr. Bean just the way we used to look forward to watching Charles Spenser in Some Mothers Do Have Them. Donald trump makes us laugh in the tradition of Dino Melaye, Barkin Zuwo, Sam Mbakwe, Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin Dada and the inimitable President George Bush of Bushisms Memory! In the pantheon of past leaders therefore, both local and international, we have so many distinguished clowns of different calibers.
Somewhere in the heartland of Igbo country, south east Nigeria, there is an officially tragic clown of great proportions whose actions and inactions have generated ripples of intense scorn and laughter across the country. Some of his antics have also been felt in post-apartheid South Africa where compatriots of that once-beautiful country have handed over their President to Clown IMO for safe keeping. This elected clown occupies Government House Owerri and claims to be a representative of the hopes and aspirations of the suffering people of the state. Indeed, with him in Government House, standup comedians have been out of job. But the tragedy is that he was not elected to entertain the people with filthily nauseous jokes conceived and executed with state funds. How and why did the people of that state deserve such a monstrous figure in Government House?
The ribald and the profane all come together in the arsenal of Clown IMO. First was his decision to build the statue of President Jacob Zuma in the state capital. This was at a time when President Zuma was insanely unpopular among his people. When he invited Zuma to visit, critics who were willing to give credit to vestige elements of sanity in Clown IMO thought he wanted to strike a deal with the President. As we know, there are thousands of Igbo business men (legal and illegal) doing things in South Africa. Quite a number had been caught in the past doing drugs or Yahoo Yahoo. Some innocent Igbo men and women have been victims of xenophobia. Some lost their lives in waves of vicious attacks in the last one year. A roundtable in Imo State with the visiting President would have meant helping to secure the lives of the innocent business men of Igbo extraction in Johannesburg or Cape Town. But alas what transpired was a gaudy display of small-mindedness through statues in open scorn of the hunger that ravages the state.
While we were reeling from the smell of the infamy that was the erected statue, then came an announcement that Clown IMO had appointed his sister.
