GUARDIAN
Friday, 19 November 1999
A woman called Tomorrow
By Reuben Abati
THERE is this woman called Tomorrow. Born in a timeless moment, by a father
whose name was Time, and a mother called Hope, Tomorrow has grown to become
the most famous, most beloved woman in history. She is a polyandrist: every
man is her husband. There is also something of a lesbian about her: every
woman loves Tomorrow. They think about her. They want her. They admire her
beauty, and everything she promises. Ms. Tomorrow - she uses Ms. to
underscore her neutrality and availability, is human to the extent that she
conditions human imagination and efforts, but still, she is not exactly like
us. She is more of a ghost standing between the past and the future, so
translucent you can see through, yet so intangible and evanescent, so
changeable, she confounds, mystifies, intrigues. At group and individual
levels, man has been locked in a permanent embrace with Tomorrow. She is so
generous, so available, if she were really physical, she would have been a
prostitute, servicing the hunger of a rampaging phallocentric,
pillow-centric humanity. Her feminity is indeed irresistible. To embrace
Tomorrow is to live. Mere thoughts of her keep the heart pumping, and the
blood flows in our veins. I am not exactly what you think but I confess from
the bottom of my heart that I love tomorrow. I should like to see tomorrow:
everything that surrounds me: should see tomorrow too.
Religious institutions tend to love tomorrow more than the rest of us. The
entire epistemology of religion is based on the conviction that without
tomorrow, humanity is lost, trapped in time. People go to church, the mosque
and the temple either because they want to know tomorrow, control tomorrow,
or influence tomorrow. Tomorrow is ambivalent though, it is the vortex of
good and evil and the logical home and end of all contradictions. Immediate.
Totalitarian. Tomorrow arrives and surrounds us, not in 24-hour terms, but
in moments of pain or pleasure, fleeting moments in which life acquires new
meaning from an ordinary touch, or a spoken word. Tomorrow is a witch. She
can summon the wind, a bullet, a letter, a car, an illness, or just about
anything to deliver her love or hate, message and impact. In loving tomorrow
then, our devotion is total, like votaries at the altar of a goddess, and we
have no option, because tomorrow is the vessel for all the energies in
nature, the very energies that supply the electricity of life, and mediate
the law of thermodynamics for positive ends. To hate tomorrow is to die.
Those who despise tomorrow instantly lose part of the spark of life: they
become like NEPA, our society's epileptic institution (which is why even the
inimitable Chief Bola Ige appears helpless) and in the end, they commit
suicide. In every human society that kind of suicide resulting from a wilful
failure to embrace tomorrow, is considered a crime. Such men are taken to
the evil forest, they are treated by forensic experts like a piece of
evidence of how not to be human in a humanising world in love with tomorrow.
Tomorrow, then, is what we live for. The hangman looks forward to tomorrow.
The man on the death row, like Ken Saro-Wiwa, still speaks of tomorrow with
certainty. On the way to prison, Chief Obafemi Awolowo spoke of tomorrow
like a man who knew tomorrow, and her secrets.
But tomorrow is the home of secrets. Who knows tomorrow? men are wont to
ask. "Nobody knows tomorrow," the same question is answered on the tail
board of Lagos mammy-wagons, the Molue, where philosophy is delivered and
distributed in the streets in innocent but poignant doses. If men were to
know tomorrow, they would never make mistakes. The Elizabethans (16th and
17th century England) invested much effort in knowing tomorrow, but their
most accomplished poet, William Shakespeare eventually wrote that "It is
human to err". Man errs because he is destined to die. He dies because he is
fallible, imperfect. Tomorrow is a wonder of creation - every woman is - and
those who doubt this should consider the mystery of pregnancy, the bigger
mystery of birth, and the larger mystery of growth. Medical scientists and
fortune tellers these days pretend to have answers to all problems: they can
foretell the sex of a child, or the coming of a hurricane, but science has
not answered all the questions about the future of a hurricane, or the tango
between a child and tomorrow. Fortune tellers have not fared better. Every
year, Olabayo, and Okunzua pretend to know tomorrow, very soon they will
mount the crystal ball again, but by mid-year, they have to remind you of
what they said about tomorrow, and they are free to say anything, because
really we are so trapped in personal battles with tomorrow, we hardly bother
about men who live off the uncontrollable destiny of man. Even Nostradamus,
the prince of all futurologists, did not know everything , because nobody
does.
Take Gen. Sani Abacha. He used state resources to employ marabouts who told
him he was the greatest thing since the invention of toothpaste. Abacha
wanted to know tomorrow. He loved tomorrow. The marabouts told him he had
found favour with tomorrow. But he died, neither knowing nor meeting
tomorrow. If he had known that when and if tomorrow comes, his family and
friends will be subjected to humiliation, disgrace and contempt, maybe he
would have struggled to be a better man. If Abiola had known tomorrow too,
he probably would have stayed away from politics, and maybe he would have
gone into politics, and then not insist on the mandate he won on June 12.
Who would have thought that Obasanjo will return from prison to become
President? And Bamaiyi who was once said to be a man of power and means in
the Nigerian Army - today, the courts and lawyers are helping him to enjoy
some respite before the sins of his past catch up with him, and his tomorrow
receives a judgment from the past. If Bamaiyi had known, maybe he would have
behaved differently. Who could have predicted two weeks ago that Enwerem
will lose his seat as Senate President? And that Chuba Okadibgo and his band
of Igbo coupists will remove their own kinsman, something Tell magazine
could not really do?
I am afraid of tomorrow. Tomorrow, being a prostitute, is unreliable. Good
men do not always see tomorrow. Nature is ambiguous in its judgments. Until
we are able to know why good follows bad, and evil is rewarded with good, we
will never know tomorrow. So, what will tomorrow bring? Candidly, I repeat:
I do not know. The country today is precisely at such a moment that evokes
anxieties about tomorrow. The country is laden with contradictions. We have
a president who means well, but he is surrounded by cripples who are slowing
down the process with their omissions and shortcomings. We have a president
who left alone says the right things but whose speech and letter writers are
often absent-minded as evident in that thoroughly absent-minded letter to
the governor of Bayelsa State, that governor with a sentence of a name -
knowing that I require two tongues to pronounce that Governor's name, I
don't even bother to write it. (Sorry.) We have a democratic government in
power, but it looks like the politicians are distracted, while the area boys
are in charge. The Amphibious Brigade of the Egbesu Army and the Spiritually
Fortified Brigade of the Oduduwa People's Congress are far more influential
than either the Nigerian Army or police. When Lagos residents need help
these days for example, they don't bother to consult the police, they invite
the neighbourhood branch of the OPC. And yet, democracy is supposed to
guarantee our happiness, and not place us at the mercy of semi-illiterates.
Tomorrow is strange: she produces all sorts. Ganiyu Adams is today the
spokesman of the Yoruba. At least, he is the only one who can make every
other ethnic group in Nigeria listen to the Yoruba, and yet Yoruba advertise
themselves as the most civilised group in the country.
We are at such a moment in our lives as a nation when everything is
happening, and anything is possible. No nation, where the rule of law, is
entrenched, can afford such calamity. Our primary problem is in the area of
law and order. Some bearded mullahs in Zamfara State are misbehaving, and we
are all busy saying that is democracy. That is not democracy, it is
stupidity, because it is foolish to allow fifth-columnists exploit democracy
to cause havoc and not do something about them. We have impregnated tomorrow
in this land. We have abandoned the women of the land, and impregnated the
alternative from the coven of witchcraft. If tomorrow gives birth to a
hermaphrodite, that will be sorry indeed, considering the efforts we have
made, the bridges we crossed, the trees we planted. If and when tomorrow
comes, we shall see.
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