The old men of 2023

One thing that fascinates me about old age is that romantic walk down memory lane – how it must feel to have in your mind the passage of so much time and so many adventures, so many stories that are permanently lost to the past with absolutely no chance of a replay. I have very fond memories of the stories my late grandfather would tell us every morning as we huddled around him as little kids, free like the wind… everyone got a piece of Baba Maijaki.  

Baba Maijaki would get so animated narrating and also acting out stories from his very adventurous youth, traversing the length and breadth of places that are now distant countries but used to be a free wilderness connecting people and cultures that were so different and exotic you effortlessly concocted gizo-da-koki tales – cock and bull or fairy tales. 

We heard so many tales about his treks from Gwandu to Badun (Ibadan), and then onward to Ikko (Lagos) and to Auchi with their herds of cattle and sheep, and also the time he tamed a hyena and brought it back into town and then ended up almost being eaten by it. But the story that gets the prize in 2023 is how a military head of state bankrupted and pauperised him and how he knew what it felt to starve for the first time during the reign of a certain ja’i(sadist) – his words, not mine.  

You hear this line everywhere you go – that the old and wise had forewarned the young and the restless about the omen called Buhari. Personally, we got a free reign to sing the songs of Muhammadu Buhari inside our ancestral compound only after the death of Baba Maijaki in 2013. He carried his herdsman stick till the end and he would not have any qualms taking a swing at you with it for the crime of speaking for Muhammadu Buhari. 

My grandfather spoke fluent Yoruba and once, he took me with him to the market where he bought a plastic jug from a Yoruba lady, whom he apparently knew well and conversed with for a while in Yoruba. By the time school resumed, I was already telling my friends that I was Yoruba. And when my mother burst that bubble for me, I escalated to my grandmother and when she also wouldn’t confess that we were Yoruba, I went to the horse’s mouth. That night, my grandfather regaled us with the very long story of how they were caught in the heavy crossfires of a battle during the civil war near Asaba and they made it to safety in a group that included an old Yoruba man and a little girl. The old man was long dead, and the little girl, his niece now lived in Jega having followed my grandfather together with her own mother to Jega during the very difficult times of Major General Muhammadu Buhari. 

The interesting thing is that, the plot of that story could have been lifted directly from the events of the past few months in Nigeria, and what is even more interesting is that, the same name: Muhammadu Buhari is at the left, right and centre of these latter-day events too. I hear that el-Rufa’i has declared himself an elder since he has grandchildren. Now, because I also have the same war stories my grandfather had, I suppose that makes me an old man. Being alive today under the regime of the same Muhammadu Buhari that featured in my grandfather’s stories, I already feel as old as he was before his death in his 90s. We already all have the scars our grandfathers had and I guess that makes my generation old men in our 30s. 

The other day, this Muhammadu Buhari sent our governors back to us empty handed, with a request for seven days to fix the death march the past few days have been. He told them he knew how bad things were for us from television reports, yet saw no cause for emergency decisive action even though he is a commander-in-chief clothed in immense constitutional powers and able to solve our problems on the spot, literally just by the mere wave of a single hand. If that doesn’t make us old men, what will? 

So now, I may have to tell my own grandchildren, if I get that far, fables about the same Muhammadu Buhari my own grandfather referenced. What are the odds of that happening? That is two whole generations collapsing into a third and the same circumstances applied in all the three dimensions. There is a silver lining to every cloud – I will be able to embellish, romanticise and idealise my stories to my grandchildren far more than my own grandfather could ever have. Like how it is between grandparents and grandchildren, we had running jokes with old Maijaki where we accused him of embellishing his stories to make himself look as good as a conquering hero when the corroboration we hear from his friends was how fast and furious he ran being chased by a hyena, the most contemptible wild animal there is. 

The lines of silver in these dark clouds translate to being alive today. I believe it would be a very long time, and I mean centuries, assuming humanity lives according to the structure of contemporary postmodern civilisation, literally dozens of generation before society would be in the throes of such a tectonic rebalancing act because even nature does not have the stomach to withstand such convulsions regularly. 

By the time I get around to embellishing my own stories to my grandchildren, there will certainly not be a Muhammadu Buhari around. And if by some extraordinary happenstance he were to be around, he would be so withered by the decay of time that he would barely be a figment of the forgotten past. But who knows? It would be quite the story – having lived and survived through a time so surreal Salvadore Dali would be bewildered by its outlandish flair. In the time of Dali, such would have meant a world war or two, today we call them Tuesdays. 

I hope old Maijaki forgives all the jocular accusations. Now, I see the need for embellishments, why they are so necessary if you want to convey a full picture. With the success I foresee having one day entrancing my grandchildren, perhaps I will look back and spare one happy thought for the memory of Muhammadu Buhari, the man who made me old in 2023. 

RIP Baba Maijaki.