Are Tom and Jerry best friends?
Tom and Jerry are best friends. But Tom has to pretend to hate Jerry in order to protect Jerry so Tom’s owner doesn’t replace Tom with a cat that actually wants to kill Jerry.
The biblical story of Pharaoh and Moses is freshly insightful and relevant to the current situation in Nigeria and albeit Northern Nigeria. To understand my take in this essay and my digression, the story of Pharaoh and Moses, and its theological, ethical, and political implications needs understanding and perspectives; also I read it as a compelling story of a religious intellectual who is forced by a set of shocking experiences to re-read familiar religious texts in a wholly new way.
Kindly follow me in this brief, you will understand how I am redeploying the story of Pharaoh and Moses and meticulously sets out my views on the contemporary applicability of its lessons to Nigeria.
A detailed account and understanding of Pharaoh’s government, shows an archetypal dictatorial regime. However before some state operatives come looking for me, I will leave room for innuendos and allusions, leaving just enough room for deniability while at the same time allowing the reader to grasp the intended meaning.
I have and intentionally not mentioned names, I will not discuss how Pharaoh transgressed the boundaries of ethics, morality and natural law through his rampant violations of human rights, I will not talk about how Pharaoh’s larger than life images and statues were put up all over the country while the images and statues of previous rulers were removed and their images denigrated; how Pharaoh relied on a propaganda empire to keep power and to defame his detractors.
Our Pharaohs scattered all over are using intricate means of co-option, propaganda and coercion to stay in power and, sadly they continue as they discuss 2023 because interestingly, most of the responsibility for the existence of pharaonic dictatorships lay at the feet of the subjects. Pharaohs become what they are primarily because their subjects let them. Every time the people let a dictatorial move go unpunished, the dictator’s behavior is reinforced and the dictatorship only gets stronger and harsher. The situation in North of Nigeria and many parts of Nigeria is that dictatorships are joint ventures between Pharaohs and their subjects, and the people whose responsibility it is to stop rewarding bad behavior are caged by a pseudo cultural construct enmeshed in shared religious docility. The power that is originally theirs have been stripped of them by intentional impoverishment.
In the original story of Pharaoh, a certain Moses becomes a figure who realizes this problem and takes the first steps to start a struggle to take back the people’s power.
Pharaohs are of the past, considering the values that are the common acquisition of humanity. However, such tyrants have kept their seats in places like Nigeria, which has a history of 61 years post independence. And in our case, many Moses equally metamorphosed to Pharaoh.
I offer my condolences to us as Nigerians because years from now, we will receive recompense for the blood that we are shedding needlessly today, for the millions of Almajirin children littered all over. Our women that are raped daily, the trauma meted out to our kids whom all they asked for; was an education.
The Pharaoh and pharaohs in leadership positions will bear the brunt somehow, but most certainly the quiet youth of today, the youths that have kept quiet in the face of tyranny and not pushed to ask for something to be done while the land is desecrated will pay dearly.
There’s a combustion as Pharaoh will not hear, his heart is hardened. In corners, bandits have killed lawmakers, gunmen have kidnapped monarchs, burnt travelers in the caliphate, razed houses down and shot sporadically killing scores on market days.
Yet Pharaohs littered across the leadership landscape plan ahead of 2023, refusing to show empathy to Nigerians, we see a gross and continuous display of insensitivity to people’s plight.
The #NorthIsBleeding says who—the North is actually sliding into anarchy, the South does not want to be left behind, imagine the cannibalism of police men in Imo, the Mkupiri Miri drug wahala, the yahoo yahoo palavar.
Scores of school children kidnapped, and abducted since the year have been forgotten by Pharaoh. Killers everywhere and nobody is held liable. In a country where the Nigeria Police Force had on paraded 14 suspects, including a self-confessed fake police officer, a lawyer, an Islamic cleric, and a journalist for alleged involvement in the raid of the Maitama, Abuja residence of a Justice.
Police also confirmed that seven others, including soldiers, who took part in the raid were at large. One of the suspects insisted that he works for Nigeria’s Attorney General of the federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami. Yet this case like many ends Pharaohsque, but what is scary is the sidon look do little posture that’s seeing the North gradually become an Afghan republic with all sorts of collaboration and alliances amongst bandits and sings being waxed for vicious known bandits and terrorists. These terror lords are Pharaohs on their own.
The Pharaohs that name fellow pharaohs as terror financiers and sympathizers, as gunmen when not killing in Akwa, are killing in Kogi, while we are assured with vows that all will be well, but seemingly after every such vow, the pharaohs strike, the number of meetings amongst Northern governors and the presidency one has lost count. The nation is not at ease, life expectancy is zero, living in the nation is a skill set, an achievement, a nation that is under-secured yet almost 1000 security agents are killed in one year speaks volume.
Are Tom and Jerry best friends, as we fixate on an amended electoral bill, worry about our structure and the imperfections, discuss Atiku and Tinubu and the Igbo Presidency, Moses and Pharaoh, North and South Nigeria, Ibos and Fulanis, Sunday Igboho and Nnamdi Kalu, are we best friends, bandits and soldiers, police and thief, government and citizens, these are perspectives—only time will tell
