Ifedayo Babalola

By Ifedayo Babalola

JERUSALEM: A group of tourists are on the last stage of an unusual ‘The Holy Land Tour’. They are drawn from diverse nations, nationalities and cultural entities. The two-week experience has been life-changing for most. There has been drama, revelations, teachings and deep spiritual connections with sites once thought to be celestial.

It is now time for the final all-involving act.

A Bible story is about to be re-enacted. It was perhaps the most knife-edge confrontation between Jesus of Nazareth and The Pharisees. A dramatic revelation, among other things, of human hypocrisy and godly mercy.

It has been carefully planned by the tour organizers. Without their knowing, the tourists will be dramatis personae in the drama about to unfold. After all, following two weeks of spiritual re-engineering, it’s only natural to test the extent to which participants have imbibed the teachings of Christ.

The tourists file into the hall and are encouraged to pick a stone each from a pile by the entrance. The The Master comes on stage, followed by the twelve. They are dressed up like it was back in the days, all in an attempt to give seeming legitimacy to the story. From the other side of the hall, a woman is dragged and pushed in by six men. Evidently harassed, cowered and scared, there’s blood streaming from one side of her face.

She is pushed right before The Master, kneeling, head bowed.

‘This woman has been caught in adultery. Caught in the very act!’ Accused the six.

There is muted grumbling all around the hall. The Master waits for it to subside. Then he stoops down. There is no dust floor to write upon, but he runs his forefinger on the hard-tiled stage floor all the same.

‘All right,’ He says, without looking up. ‘Let whoever never sinned among you cast the first stone!’

One after the other, the six men leave by the exit.
The Master looks up.
‘Where are thy accusers?’ He asks the woman.

And just before she answers, the first stone comes flying though. Then another, and another, until it becomes a hail. The Master and the twelve duck, shielding the woman between them.

‘Stop! Stop!’ Security men rush to a semi-dark corner of the hall where a group of ten tourists huddle together. They are dressed in green, white and green colours. Apparently, they had each picked more than one stone at the entrance.

But thankfully, the ‘stones’ are made of plastic. Plastic filled with hot, bubbled air…..

The mass hysteria by Nigerians at home and abroad over the recent Donald Trump victory in the US Presidential Elections beggars belief.

Dumb America! Stupid America! Ugly America! Racist America! These are only a few of the verbal and written boulders thrown the US way by my very upset countrymen.

‘God punish America!’ Cursed one.

‘RIP, American democracy!’ Someone weeps on the tombstone.

‘End of America!’ Corrected another. Didn’t he notice that America it(very)self just died?

This one really got me amused. ‘Never underestimate the power of dumb people in very large numbers.’

Nigerians are posting on social media that The US is populated by dumb people probably in excess of a hundred million? Amazing!

And we are not just talking of uneducated, rural-dwelling Nigerians here. The stone throwers include very educated cosmopolitan individuals, celebrities as well as closet commentators.

The stage was actually set before the election date. Bank customers, civil servants, and market women vied to join the Hillary army. One university student reported that discussions about The US elections took half of the class time, with everyone, lecturers inclusive, routing for Hillary Clinton. Churches raised prayer points and prophets prophesied in tune with vox populi.

By election day, Hillary had either become spiritually ordained or culturally adopted, with one message asking guys in The US if ‘Our Sister’ was winning. That was only two hours into voting by the way.

Such was the level of overconfidence in the Hillary-Nigerian camp that when the unexpected eventually happened, many went practically into fits and shocks. Otherwise reasonable people had failed to leave themselves any shock absorbent threshold in a matter over which they had little or no control.

One young man could not sleep due to the tension. Nevertheless, he had a dream in which something terrible loomed over America. Another one lamented that he had never witnessed such an upset in his entire life! When I reminded him his entire life isn’t really that long, it seemed to calm him down a bit.

And then, there are those who, four days later, still can’t believe it… But perhaps the most scary of all is a long lost friend I ran into who declared emphatically that Trump will not be President by the end of January 2017.

Some fellow Nigerians (cursed?) the country and the people who had given them refuge (for decades in some cases), and who sheltered them from some of the most despotic of African regimes. ‘Change’ preachers who would also castigate other nationals who exercise their own right to choose ‘Change’.

Others threatened to leave for Canada. They couldn’t recognize the America that admitted them and in which they prospered anymore. Time to move again, but not homewards. Like a spouse in a bad marriage would tell the cab driver, ‘Anywhere but home.’ Anywhere but the twelve-two-third country, land of annulled election where many questionable electoral victories are handed by courts. Anywhere but the home of mindless electoral violence.

Trump

Hillary Clinton

Much has been written and said about the US 2016 Presidential Elections, and much more will follow for decades. But let me address the question: Are Such traits as political incorrectness, tax dodging, racism, religious fanaticism, male chauvinism and press hate so alien to our political culture that we are deadly shocked Americans could vote for such a man as Trump? Don’t we campaign for, vote for and let such politicians rule over us all the time? Aren’t our loudest hell raisers best buddies with such local political ‘juggernauts’?

According to a Nigerian commentator, Trump was also ‘an employer who does not believe in paying workers for job done….. he told the party to either elect him as their candidate or he would break ranks and run as an Independent. As a candidate, he told the American people that he is either elected, or he would reject the outcome of the election because, according to him, “This is a rigged system”’

Ok. And such statements do not ring familiar very close to home? From what moral high ground are we displaying such dramatic righteous indignation? Is this not like the case of a man who goes to chase rats in a neighbour’s house while his is on fire? Hasn’t non payment of workers’ salaries become a national institution in Nigeria, promoted by jet-flying, affluent office holders to whom we bow and worship?

Oh yeah? Americans are racists for voting Trump? This charge coming from a country where tribe rules. In case our diaspora brethren have forgotten, if you are not an indigene of any state in Nigeria, you can hardly contest an election there. It doesn’t even matter if your grandparents were born there and you speak the language fluently. Go back home, you are told. In Nigeria, many children who have never been to their parents’ villages still have to contend with the ‘State of Origin’ question when seeking admissions or jobs.

Political entities in Nigeria have severally expelled ‘non-indigenes’ from civil service jobs or from the streets. Aren’t we a country of endless fatal communal clashes? And we are not even of different races. Which reminds me. We expelled Ghanaians for over-flooding our once opulent country, a gesture that was reciprocated by the victim at the appropriate time.

Political entities in Nigeria have severally expelled ‘non-indigenes’ from civil service jobs or from the streets. Aren’t we a country of endless fatal communal clashes? And we are not even of different races. Which reminds me. We expelled Ghanaians for over-flooding our once opulent country, a gesture that was reciprocated by the victim at the appropriate time.

The problem with even the best of us is that we still see The Caucasian as a super race, devoid of flesh and blood, no longer susceptible to human foibles. Even when we suspect that these human weaknesses exist at subterranean levels, we are confident the well developed institutional and social structures will prevent any eruptions regardless of how much pressure they come under.

That however is not entirely true. It dawned on me in 2012 during a looming tanker drivers’ strike in the UK. Like in Nigeria, there was panic buying and long queues at at petrol stations. The British are famed for their queue culture, but at that instance, fisticuffs were reported due to queue-jumping. Worst of all, able-bodied men snatched dispensing pumps from elderly women.

It is human nature whatever the skin colour. When people feel threatened, when there is not enough to go round, base instincts rise to the fore.

Must nationals of western communities be held perpetually captive to liberal sociology-political alchemy? Must they remain the world’s guinea pigs of increasingly coercive experiments in political correctness? Remember the Democrats’ push to impose same-sex marriage on Nigeria and the public reaction? So those too are not expected to react, albeit with their votes?

So how come we did not see Trump (and Brexit) coming? How come we did not anticipate the conservatives of America and other decent independents had for a while been hoping for a deliverer?

The problem with even the best of us is that we still see The Caucasian as a super race, devoid of flesh and blood, no longer susceptible to human foibles. Even when we suspect that these human weaknesses exist at subterranean levels, we are confident the well developed institutional and social structures will prevent any eruptions regardless of how much pressure they come under.

Nearly two decades ago, in New York City, a friend of mine was involved in a street march against a Third World authoritarian regime. After a couple of hours procession, a white man approached him and asked which country he hailed from.

‘Nigeria.’ My friend answered.

The white American looked at my friend and said in anger. ‘Look. I have been held in traffic for hours. But if you people had stayed back home to protest this regime, things wouldn’t be that bad over there and we wouldn’t have to suffer like this…’

It is the aggregate of such simmering anger that Donald Trump keyed into. We failed to notice over a long time. Maybe we should take stock now rather than throw bricks from our glass house. Otherwise, worse might meet us unprepared.

(Ifedayo Babalola, a writer and commentator lives in Ibadan).
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