The Honourable (The Metaphysics of our Present Dialogue 115)

The Honourable (The Metaphysics of our Present Dialogue 115)

The honourable, in his double-breasted padded shoulders, looks gorgeously framed and luxuriantly structured as one that never seen sorrow nor ever sucked a mother’s breasts. His pomp exudes the aura of a god that cares little of men but more of his contests for survival in the weird order of the cosmos.

The honourable, given the time and energy invested in his appearance to build up official personality with flourished ego meant to arrest the eyes and minds of men and women, seems to have compromised the rectitude of a home-made man who grew up with the temperance to provide leadership, as earlier sharpened by life’s little ironies and family antecedents.

The honourable is well paid; he gets juicy contracts from MDAs, with lips-wetting hampers trickling in, in seasons. His fleet of cars makes his home the envy of his neighbourhood, giving inspiration to school children on career choices, as they grow.

The honourable, proud of his fortune, flaunts his wealth on wife and kids: buxomly dressed in epicurean lucre, to the shame and envy of peers, friends and opponents who fortune belittles for a while to the glory of the new sheriff –the honourable.

The honourable has his public image boosts by the magnanimous accolades of poor observers, which loom his pageantry to place him on the same pedestals with deities, and would ignore his humanity and claim a seat in the upper realms that a poor prophet would deceive the agrarian poor to believe, thereby enhancing a larger portrait of the honourable against the norms of governance.

The honourable, in his pomp and pageantry, inspires the growing kids into playing sycophancy. Some, he inspires to engage in night runs that leave homes and estates in sorrow and pain, in the efforts to measure up with the honourable with flourished ego. Others, he inspires into engaging in rituals that have the wife, son or daughter, or the entire household as sacrifice for enhancement of opportunity to also become honourable.

The honourable, in his Lucretius conceit, causes government’s business to suffer a fanfare pandemic that gives the impression of governance as a jamboree, with him looked upon as a dispenser of government’s largess in the face of excruciating poverty in the midst of plenty.

The honourable has his ego blown into balloon proportion by songs and accolades of the growing kids who, in their ignorance, are unaware they are creating yet another god to be enthroned amongst the gods whose interests are not in humanity but in their contests for survival in the weird order of the cosmos. The contests to survive in the weird order of the cosmos turn their oaths of offices into rituals of initiation into the realm of power-play that leave the society in chaos, because they must survive in the power-play or return to their humanity uncelebrated.

The honourable has infected his community with lust for power –the ephemeral spirit that rules human desires with the capacity to turn black to white or white to black. This spirit has strengthened the urge to be relevant against the use of reason: to be relevant you must belong to a particular sect of the shooting race. The honourable himself emerged from the shooting race; but having emerged, he becomes honourable by building up his appearance with the double-breasted padded shoulders that give him a gorgeous look with official personality flourished with ego. His new look and appearance exude the aura that spoofs the growing kids into using the honourable as a special brand or model; so, they paste his stickers on front doors or windscreen of their cars to announce their unblemished loyalties.

The honourable would not mind exhuming the influences of his clan’s deities through acquisition of chieftaincy titles to remain on board the generalissimo of politics, unlike in some other beautiful climes where it is difficult to identify honourable from the peasant folks, where their simple look and simplicity in temperaments demystify their offices in service to humanity, where they serve and are not served and cannot boast of a single car and are therefore living in low key serving the interests of the common good.

The honourable has his eye-brows fine-tuned in an attempt to relax his furrowed face to showcase a look of gentleman, suppressing the weakness that qualified him as member of the shooting race. With his fake gentlemanly disposition, he cuts for himself some pieces of our national cake, shares among his peers and party-men, and afterwards sits on a panel to interrogate others who cut their own pieces of the cake carelessly.

The honourable has reduced our country to a bye-word in the comity of nations, indulging in self-aggrandisement that leave the country impoverished of honour, dignity and wealth. The honourable is by far richer than everyone in his community combined, and the entire wealth of the nation is in the hands of the honourable men who loot our treasury to build for themselves private empires.

#Offong Okodio is a priest in The Temple of Justice where Truth is the presiding Judge