There is an old Nigerian joke about Noah and the Ark; author unknown. God warned Noah that a flood was coming and gave him six months to build an ark. But this Noah was a Nigerian. Before he could cut the first plank, Nigeria happened to him.
How did it start?
“And the Lord spoke to Noah and said: ‘I will give you six months to build Me an Ark. At the end of six months, I will send rain to cover the entire earth and destroy all bad people. However, I want to save a few good people, and the animals, two of every kind. So I am ordering you to build an Ark for Me,’” said the Lord.
And in a flash of lightning, He delivered the specifications for an Ark.
“No problem,” said Noah, trembling in fear and fumbling with the blueprints.
“Six months, and it starts to rain,” thundered the Lord. “You’d better have my Ark completed, or learn how to swim for a very long time.”
And six months passed. The skies began to cloud over and rain began to fall. The Lord saw that Noah was sitting in his front yard, weeping. And there was no Ark.
“Noah!” shouted the Lord. “Where is my Ark?”
A lightning bolt crashed into the ground next to Noah.
“Lord, please forgive me,” begged Noah. “I tried. Oh, I tried! You cannot imagine the trouble I have been through. They told me I needed a certificate of occupancy before I could build the Ark. I went to the Ministry of Lands so many times that I became exhausted. Then I realised that what they really wanted was money, so I gave them all the money I had. After that, the Ministry of Works came in with their own demands. I borrowed money and settled them. Then they mercifully told me to add extra windows for ‘cross ventilation’ and to separate the toilet from the bathroom so that if one person was using the toilet, another person could take a bath.
“Lord, I tell you, I am exhausted. Just the other day, a tax collector came and said I had not paid my tax and that they were going to arrest me. I told them I had paid my tax last year. They said I had to pay this year’s tax in advance. By then, I had spent all the money I had on settling officials.
“Anyway, I looked for more money and I paid an engineer to modify the plans for me. After I had finished with that, I went to the forest to get wood. The villagers told me I could not cut any wood without a permit from the Forestry Department. So I went to the forestry officials, and eventually they said I could cut the wood.
“When I got back to the village, however, the villagers refused to let me cut any wood. They said I had to give them their share because a wealthy man from the city had previously come there, cut down all their trees for export and paid them no compensation. What a country! And I had thought the government did not even allow us to export wood. Finally, when it looked as if they were going to fight me, I quickly settled the village chief, and they agreed to let me take the wood.
“Before I could transport the wood home, there was trouble at every point on the road. I settled the police, I settled the soldiers, I settled Customs, I settled Immigration, I settled the tax officials and I settled the local government officials. Then, when I finally reached home, the truck driver and his boys said that unless I settled them too, they would not help me unload the wood. I settled them.
“As soon as I started building the Ark, task-force officials arrived and marked an ‘X’ on it. They said I was not permitted to build the Ark there. They asked whether I did not know that the environmental sanitation law prohibited such a structure within the town.
“Anyway, I suspect it was my neighbour who reported me. The man is terribly jealous of me. What could I do?
“While I was building the Ark, NDLEA officials came and arrested me and took me to prison for questioning. They said they had received information that I intended to use the Ark to smuggle cocaine and Indian hemp to America. Later, they discovered that I was not the person they were looking for, so they released me. I had not even reached home when the SSS arrested me for further questioning. They said they had heard that I was a member of the opposition, an enemy of the government and a hater of the president, and that I planned to use the Ark to smuggle guns and bombs into the country to overthrow the Nigerian government. Eventually, I convinced them that I did not even know what opposition was. They released me but ordered me to report to their headquarters every day.
“When I started gathering the animals, FEPA sent me a letter saying I had not submitted an environmental impact assessment covering the animal waste and the flood You, God, intended to send. I told them that You, the Lord, were the one planning to send a flood to cover the whole world. They were not impressed at all. They told me that nobody, including You, the Almighty, could undertake that kind of project without their permission. Then their chief engineer demanded that I show him exactly where the flood would begin. I gave him a map of the world. He still was not satisfied, so I had to settle him too.
“Then I began gathering the animals, and I ran into another problem. The people who eat dogs (the 404 people) refused to let me take the dogs because they said dog meat was a delicacy. The bush meat sellers and poultry people would not cooperate either. Even the people who eat Isi Ewu (goat head) pepper soup became angry with me. They asked whether I did not know how expensive meat had become and why I wanted to take away the little meat that was still available. So, Lord, I must tell You now that I could not find dogs, chickens, goats or bush meat. In fact, I only just managed to get some cows. One Aboki, a Fulani herdsman, nearly stabbed me when I tried to take the cows.
“And the reason I am crying is that the trouble simply never ends. The chairman of the local government where I live accused me of being tribalistic. He said almost all the carpenters and labourers working for me came from my village. He said I had to employ some of the local boys. I told him to send them to me, but he refused. Instead, every day he sent ‘area boys’ to come and cause trouble. They threatened to destroy the little part of the Ark I had managed to build. They would not allow us to work. Every day they came, I had to give them money; otherwise, they threatened to scatter the Ark.
“Just when I told myself that I should hurry and finish the Ark, the carpenters helping me announced that they would not continue working unless I paid them more money.
“I was surprised when they told me they had heard that the Ark was a big government contract with plenty of money in it. To cut a long story short, I settled them too. Anyway, there are now plenty of people supposedly building the Ark, and apprentices are everywhere.
“To tell You the truth, Lord, I don’t think I can finish this Ark even if You give me another five years,” Noah wailed.
The sky began to clear. The sun began to shine. A rainbow arched across the sky. Noah looked up and smiled.
“Lord, you mean You are no longer going to send the flood to destroy the earth?” Noah asked hopefully.
“Wrong!” thundered the Lord. “But being Lord of the Universe has its advantages. I fully intend to smite the Earth, but with something far worse than a flood. Something man invented himself.”
“What is that?” Noah asked God.
There was a long pause, and then the Lord announced what He would now use to destroy the world. And what is that? “Government.”
Originally written in pidgin by an unknown author, the above story was found on the Internet by Emeritus Professor J. F. Ade Ajayi and sent to Chief Bola Ige in April/May 1998. The second republic governor of Oyo State found it apt for his era and published it as written (in pidgin) on May 3, 1998 in his Sunday Tribune’s Uncle Bola’s column. Here, I, with some modifications, have retold it in real English, as my teacher taught me.
Now, if the Nigeria of 1998 was choky for Ige and Ajayi, you and I know that, right now, it is agonisingly asphyxiating on an epidemic scale.
Religion says God used flood to destroy the first world. This one, how will it end? I consult Robert Frost and his 1920 poem, ‘Fire and Ice’: “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice / From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favour fire.” My generation was told in the days of our innocence that the next destruction would be by fire. That fire, I now know, is the government. Ill-digested policies, implemented irresponsibly, have proven more devastating than the flood of Noah’s time.
Government is a flood of fire. In Ebonyi State, the wildfire video of a senator is trending. The lawmaker went to ask a community for 2027 votes but could not physically reach the people because a river stood between him and them. Across that river, there is no bridge; the senator, his governor and his minister of works have not graciously granted those stranded people the privilege of one. What did the senator do? He stood on one bank, on dry land, the terra firma, and summoned the voters to stand on the other. Then, from across the water, he flung his campaign message at them. They dared not spurn his offering. They grabbed it.
Government people are magicians. The senator could not cross the river to reach the people, but his magic made their assurance of votes jump the river and land in his pouch. They will vote for him and his party of piety next year.
Between that big man and the people was a bridgeless river. And in that river without a bridge, the failure of government is made graphically visible. Aristotle defined justice partly as the duty of power “not to give too much to himself and too little to his neighbour”. On that riverbank, there was too much on one side and much too little on the other. And we think there will be peace between the Villa and the village. Machiavelli warned the Prince against becoming “hated and despised”. Nothing builds that hatred quite like the wretched watching power prosper comfortably from the other bank.
Back to the Nigerian Ark. In the biblical story, the flood overwhelmed the people and Noah built an ark. In the Nigerian story, government itself has become the flood; the obstacle citizens must cross to live meaningful lives.
Between President Bola Tinubu and former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, there is a renewed war over subsidy, petrol prices and the misery in the land. Atiku, with his nimble political fingers, is cashing out on Nigerians’ mass poverty and mass suffering, and Tinubu is responding to him, panting. Neither side will let us be, and they should let us be. They are òkúta ìsàlẹ̀ and òkúta òkè (the lower and upper grinding stones). Ask the kernel between them which one is its friend.
Policies without a human face destroy without a physical deluge. Their casualties are as uncountable as the sea of heads in IDP camps — or, more appropriately, as the grains of sand on the seashore. Check: the business that closes, the worker who loses his job, the child withdrawn from school, the pensioner who cannot afford his BP medicine, the family that cuts three meals to one. That is a deluge. You may not see the water rising; there may be no ark floating and no bodies washing ashore. If you care to look and see beyond your nose, you will see devastation dispersed across millions of homes but buried by the government in statistics.
I hear the government and its explainers. I hear Atiku’s sudden bursts of pro-welfare rhetoric. If I were not a coward, I would tell both sides to stop talking political statistics to a starving mass of skeletons. Economic policy should be judged by its measurable effects on human welfare, not by government claims or opposition rhetoric.
The government is busy pushing back against the poisoned arrows from Atiku, veteran of electoral intrigues. Should we or should we not listen to Abuja and its experts? How do we measure the truth here? Measure inflation against real wages; measure household hunger and business mortality; measure school enrolment and unemployment; measure maternal mortality, food insecurity, poverty and life expectancy. Measure life and death. My political economist says those measurements are the oracle that tells us whether government policy is medicine or poison.
Credit: Lasisi Olagunju