THE PRESIDENT, THE TORTOISE AND THE ANALYST -BY GANI KAYODE BALOGUN JNR.

A few days ago, one of my handsets blanked out with a near full charge. I battled to have it revived it for a couple of hours, but gave up afterward, having surrendered to the fact that I had no choice but take it for repairs.

Then my daughter, who is almost six year old, came back from school and picked up the phone. As I told her the phone was broken, she pressed a couple of buttons and voilà, the phone was on again! 

As I watched her play games on the device while munching cereals, she unmindful of the fact that she had just upstaged the smartest man that I know.

This reminds me of the old Ijapa (tortoise) fable, in which Oko yannibo decided to obtain all the wisdom in the world, put it in a gourd, hang it around his neck, and hide the gourd on top of the palm tree. After hours of trying but failing to climb the tree, an amused okere, who had watched ijapa's fruitless attempts with disinterested boredom, advised the tortoise to simply put the gourd on his back. Ijapa, now totally humiliated and realizing that he had not collected all the wisdom on earth, simply smashed the gourd.

When President Buhari said he belonged to nobody and to everybody, he must have patted himself on the back as a great wit. But when I heard him lamenting on how the members of Nigeria’s National Assembly (NASS), otherwise known as the Mafia, outfoxed him a few days  ago when  signing the 2018 Appropriation Bill into law, there was a clear absence of his wit, or the famous half of it, that was on display three years ago.

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It was a pathetic sight to see a man unperturbed that Dr. Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogbara defied the ruling party to emerge Senate President and Speaker of the House of Representatives respectively, under the mistaken notion that a northern Christian Speaker and a hybrid northern Fulani/Yoruba Senate President was the right combination to checkmate a smug sounding godfather before he became too powerful.

The irony now is that the dinosaurs created to checkmate a would-be Godzilla have turned out to be King Kongs. The NASS, despite having an APC majority in both chambers, is doing more political damage to this administration than a hundred Tinubus could have done.

This goes to show that preemptive solutions to  perceived problems tend to become bigger  problems in the long run. If in doubt, ask Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, Senator Dino Melaiye and the Yoruba federalists in Abuja.

As we say in Yoruba: “it is at the point your wisdom ends that another man’s begins.”

The president, just like the tortoise and me, had just been taught a lesson in humility.

He must learn from it.

-Gani Kayode Balogun Jnr, is a journalist and a social affairs commentator.