When I was in Primary 6, I had an encounter one day that I still remember clearly almost 20 years later. My class teacher was a pleasant woman called Mrs Amelia Dafeta, and she was what you could call a “yummy mummy” at the time. She was generous and always full of smiles, so as you would expect of 11 year-olds, we wanted as much as she could give. That day, she walked into the classroom with a bottle of soda and she placed it on the table. Every single one of us instantly knew that we wanted some of the contents of that bottle, and her knowing smile said that she was aware of the effect it was having on us.
The trouble was that no one would ever actually dare to speak up and ask her if they could please have her bottle of [redacted soft drink brand] sitting on the table there. For some of us, it was our “home training” kicking in and stopping us from asking an outsider for food. The outsider would have to offer it to us first before we would accept it. For others, it was a desire to somehow “earn” a mouthful by doing something to impress her, so that they would get it without asking for it. For others, it was a simple aversion to voicing out their wants, and so we all just sat and stared at the bright orange bottle, silently salivating while pretending not to look at it.
Out of nowhere, a boy at the back of the class raised his hand to get Mrs. Dafeta’s attention. The kid in question was (perhaps unfairly) considered to be the social and academic runt of the classroom, and he was by no means a teacher’s favourite for a number of reasons. As we had all sat pondering how to get our hands on the bottle of orange fizzy pop, it had not occurred to any of us that he was a competitor. Who would possibly give it to him? Apparently, he didn’t get the memo because confidently and without missing a beat, he asked her, “Ma, may I please have some of your drink?” We looked around in shock at his audacity, wondering where he got the temerity from, and what punishment was surely coming his way. What happened next came as an even greater shock.
“Ask and You Shall Receive”
To our utter amazement, Mrs. Dafeta smiled and handed over the entire bottle of cold orange liquid to this kid and told the rest of us gawking at him “Ask and you shall receive.” The point she illustrated with that simple gesture still remains in my mind 2 whole decades later, so clearly it was very powerful. In one short sentence, she had given us one of life’s most important lessons – being straightforward will often get you to where you want to be quicker than whatever convoluted strategy and scheme that could substitute for it. While we had plotted in our 11 year-old wisdom to wipe the whiteboard clean, pick up the litter, keep quiet, and do everything else that could bias her into giving us a sip, all it really took was just being honest with her.
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The secondary lesson that came with it was that while we had subconsciously ranked ourselves in order of who was most likely to curry favour with the teacher, the winner ended up being the least probable person – simply because he had the moral fortitude to ask. In other words, life often favours those who defy unspoken conventions to state their intentions clearly and unambiguously. Gimmicks, PR strategies and carefully crafted narratives will often fall flat when they come up against the simple force of simple determination and unhidden ambition.
Going through life as I got older, his became one of my guiding principles. Wherever possible, I would be as open and unpretentious as possible about my intentions and motivations. I would own those things with my whole chest and embrace whatever came with them. Career, relationships, marriage, hobbies, you name it – everything has come to be defined through the lens of Mrs. Dafeta’s metaphorical 50CL bottle of orange soda. And this brings us to an important conversation about a man in Kaduna.
“Don’t Go Through The Corners!”
Most people reading this column will be aware that in all but name, Nasir El-Rufai’s presidential, no vice-presidential campaign has kicked off in earnest. You can always tell these things in Nigeria by looking at the calendar and keeping an eye on certain international media platforms. With the 2023 elections now only 17 odd months away, The Economist last week ran one of the most absurd hagiographies ever written about The Accidental Public Servant, comparing him to the Chinese premier responsible for China’s post-1979 boom, Deng Xiaoping.
Almost as surely as day follows night, you can be sure that similarly weird comparisons will appear in the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy and possibly, the New York Times or the Washington Post. Maybe both. Some will compare him to the legendary Singaporean dictator Lee Kuan Yew, in an attempt to contextualise his vicious oppression of political opponents and ethnoreligious minorities in Kaduna State as some sort of necessary evil. The early skirmishes on social media have already begun. One of El-Rufai’s myriad beneficiaries has already tried to play off the inconvenient tendency of entire villages and towns in Southern Kaduna turning up dead enmasse while fighting off El-Rufai’s attempts to impose an Islamic Emir on them, as “little genocides.” (Sorry make that “pockets of genocide,” this galaxy megabrained chap helpfully clarified.)
Dear Nasir, if you are reading this, allow me to say on behalf of all of about 12 Nigerians in existence who don’t already know that you want to get into Aso Rock in 2023 – can you please not put us through this insufferable rigmarole yet again? You know you want it. We know you want it. You know that we know you want it. Can you please spare us the inevitable Twitter debates led by Mark Essien and Iyin Aboyeji on topics like “Do little genocides help boost development?” Can we please not have to read the inevitable Andrew Campbell thinkpiece on why Nigeria needs a “reformer” like you? Can we just not?
How about you just treat your ambition like Mrs. Dafeta’s bottle of orange fizzy drink, and you just come out and tell us what we already know? How about that? I mean don’t get me wrong, it won’t change many minds about you, for good or otherwise. Being straightforward and eschewing the proverbial “corners” will not necessarily win you any new supporters.
But at least, it will spare us 17 months of tortuously pointless “conversations” and vast amounts of well-conjugated English verbage to try to sell us yet another abomination as president, no, vice-president. And hey, if history is a guide, adopting the “I-killed-your-mother-and-you’ll-vote-for-me-anyway” style of Charles Taylor just might work in a part of the world whose psyche has never really recovered from the slave trade.
Worked for Emperor Muhammadu of Daura, didn’t it?
