ADWIN CLARK, OLD AGE AND THE SOUR, DOUR DIALECTICS OF THE GRAVEYARD BY WOLE OYENUSI
Old age is a piquant paradox and deriving from this indisputable fact of life, it vervously ventilates both positive and negative ambiguity in its facets depending of course on which side of the intellectual divide that circumscribes its momentary preeminence over the other at any point in time. It exhibits a latent capacity for the auspiciously sublime, indeed the implicitly and idealistically noble, as well as the inelegantly injurious inclination to the vindictively ignoble, to Mephistophelean devilry all in one breath. It spouts both penned and colloquial sophisticated sagacity, and erupts in equal measure, like a volcanic pyroscriptive geoform, an assiduously assinine idiosyncratic jejunery as well. The hoary head is both a winsome attraction as well as a demise denoting ultimaatising stigma.
As a related development, Pa Edwin Kiagbodo Clark, a.k.a EK Clark, the Ijaw Nation’s patriarch, to all who have known him, and indeed even those who haven’t but have heard of him, is a political and anthropocentric phenomenon that one cannot forget in a hurry, or dismiss with a mere and cursory wave of the hand. A political icon, bureaucrat, communal opinion-moulder, vibrant commentator and statesman of no mean provenance, proclivity and pedigree, Clark obulliently bestrides the Nigerian national threshold, self-appointed iconoclastic enigma that wouldn’t suffer our exotic and executed oil multinationals gladly as regards their oft arcanely orchestrated and executed oil-derivative humongous heists all along the Niger Delta panoramic shoreline.
However, like all good things surely doomed to enervating transience, the old warhorse is succumbing to a touch of the moribund and neuroscriptive greyness inevitably, trudging wearily more than ever towards slow but relentless aging. Although having contributed immensely towards the amicable resolutions of our nation’s hot headedly debated and articulated burning issues, particularly the infrastructural redemption of the national goose that lays the golden egg: The circumstantially restive Niger Delta, in relation to the welfare of her equally restive sabre-rattlers and storm petrels, the elder statesman once again stirred the hornets nest two days ago in his usual rambunctiously opinionated, abrasively candid and idiosyncratic style, complacently campaigning for the brusque and unceremonial excision of the Iroika of Abia, Imo and Ondo states from the Niger Delta chimaeric corporate geo-economic configuration. In that sandpaperishly prickly and acerbic graphic tendentiousnesss, Pa Edwin Clark tenaciously templated four main dialectics and an evaluative presupposition that I would like to examine dispassionately, if for nothing other
than their innate egregious ill-logicality, red herring proclivity and now that we are on the subject, their primordial pertinacious pristinity.
For a candently controversial start, the former Commissioner of Information smugly submits that the three states being corralled do not intrinsically lie within the ambit of the Niger Delta proper, as being believed, but only vestigially contiguous to it. The pertinent questions that leap bull-at-a-gate to mind here are legion, some of which are; who says? And on what subjective authority? To start with, the spatial coordinates, the longitude and the latitude, of the largely littoral geographical expression called the Niger Delta, a tropical temperate agglomeration of low-lying creeks and rivers, and some land, can cursorily be palpated and plotted easily from even a primary school atlas worth the paper it is printed on, so we won’t need a grandstanding or browbeating Clark, or anyone for that matter, to adjudicate over this purely geographical issue, and if we would at all, it would be specialists of geography, geophysics and geology that would be needed to lay the clamour and bickering to rest, certainly not Pa Edwin Clark, and as such, that is going by the delineating features of this stretch of geocentric terrain, it would be a total and distinct geographical and geological impossibility for some parts of Ilajeland not to be so subsumed and Ilajeland is inassaibly and inevitably in Ondo State.
Another Clarkian dubious disclaimer of deltahood, as far as the three eastern and western states to be duly and dourly dismembered are concerned, is the quantity of oil produced per annum, a sort of senility-informed pseudo-argument that blithely self-styles itself as a sort of contra-syllogism, sounding in every way like; if a particular quantity of salt mined from an ocean doesn’t arrogate itself up to a particular measure the ocean isn’t a bona- fide ocean. In this particular Clarkian dialetic there nestles in the bedrock a glaring glitch between he underpinning premise and the ultimate conclusion drawn, thus invalidating his pert and pet argument. In philosophical rubrics and rhetorics, a yawning chasm between a premise and its interpretive, evaluative conclusion robes itself out as a non-sequittor which lies in amicable apposition to dialectical invalidation.
Another intrinsically egregious mal-apprehension of the Niger Deltan maverick statesman is the sly and snide superimposition of the parochial interests of the so-called majority states over the equally so-called minority, a certainly nefarious, invidious nomenclature that strives valiantly to polarize prodigiously this geopolitical and indeed geofiscal grouping. In a caustically primordial and pristine posturing Clark valorisingly
justifies the dominantly preeminent leadership plum jobs like chairman and the managing director etc, looking on such as the exclusive privilege of, especially the Ijaw states, even when regular rotation has been enshrined in the enabling law books. If indeed the minority segments aren’t to have a say in the interventionist imperative of this agency of state, why did the elder statesman and his kinsmen and women aggressively fight the northern oligarchy and majority for power shift to the south and particularly dusted up their son Goodluck Jonathan to vie for the presidency? What moral justification does Clark now have to criticize the Hausa/Fulani hegemonistic “born to rule” syndrome, if the Ijaw states especially, should be the exclusive dictators of the NDDC? So it is self-evident that the patriarch’s thought patterns must have been rendered to a large extent fuzzy and pallid by some mental cobwebs, deriving from primordial and ethnocentric sociopsychological fanaticism and xenophobia.
Another spurious dialectic that seems, in that bad bloodedly acrimonious and bickersome noxious graffiti, is that of incompatibility of vested interests, immanent in the wholistic synchronization of oil-producing states infrastructural development initiative. So boorishly condescending of the non-Ijaw states, Clark seems to be fractiously peeved and grieved at their benefitting at all, so much that he mordantly advised them to jump ship and make themselves scarce from the Niger Delta development corporation, which he seems to regard to as the Ijaw Nation’s private and exclusive chattel. This unassailably cloying, ultra- materialistic grab imperium is certainly and clearly at loggerheads with ethnic tolerance and civilized developmental econometrics, in more ways than one, and sets our nation smack back into the primeval and Hobbesian state of nature when life was known to be “brutish, nasty and short” and by that fact diametrically irreconcililable with the quotidian and hebdomadal scientific stark realities of the postmodern world.
What edifying prospect for national cohesion and unity does this vituperatively specious, supercilious demagoguery proffer for our nation, tottering tenuously on the brink of self-implosion and componental disintegration? What jejunely “jaggabanned” dandification of carelessly-spouted provincial balderdash inexorably importuning sardonic dismissal, scorn and derision from a presumably prodigious personality. It certainly is the now brimming blight of old age. With its appurtenant malaise: senility of thought.
Wole Oyenusi
