THE MASQUERADE THAT FORGOT ITS OWN DANCE. By Chidi Ekeh

THE MASQUERADE THAT FORGOT ITS OWN DANCE

Sit down, my children. Sit down.

There is a proverb our people keep close to their chest like a farmer keeps his best seed — ugbu a ka oge di mma— now is when the time matters most. I did not leave my *obi* to come and whisper. I came to speak. And what I will say, I will say standing, because a man my age has already made his peace with the consequences of truth.

I want to talk to you about pride.

Not the pride your television set sells you every evening. Not the pride that arrives in a motorcade of fifty vehicles and expects a village to prostrate itself on the dust of the road while it passes. I want to talk about the real thing — the thing our fathers carried in their chests like a coal that never goes out — before we, in our haste to be governed, handed our dignity to men who do not know what dignity is.

—

First, Let Me Describe What I See

There is a man — and I will not say his name, because the elder who taught me said “when a masquerade misbehaves in the marketplace, you do not call it by its sacred name — you describe what it is doing, and every child present will know which masquerade you mean.”

There is a man sitting in the highest house in our land.

He is old. His hair has gone the colour of the harmattan sky. And because his hair is that colour, he has concluded — he has *announced*, through every instrument of state available to him — that he deserves reverence. That his age alone is his qualification. That to question him is to sin against the ancestors.

My children, I want to say something about this slowly, so that it enters properly.

Age is not wisdom. Age is merely survival. The tortoise is old. The iroko tree is old. But we do not gather in council to hear the iroko pronounce judgment on a land dispute. Survival and wisdom are cousins — they live in the same compound — but they are not the same person.

Our tradition honoured elders not because they had grown old, but because in growing old *faithfully* — in growing old with their word intact, their record honest, their hands clean of the community’s blood — they had accumulated something worth honouring. The white hair was a symbol. It pointed *beyond itself* to a life lived in a certain way.

When a man’s white hair points only to itself — when it says *”look at me, I have survived, therefore bow”* — it is not the crown of elderhood. It is a costume.

And our people know the difference between a true masquerade and a man who has merely found a mask.

—

*On the Matter of Words*

In the time before the confusion came — before we learned to clap for men who speak from both sides of their mouth simultaneously — a man’s spoken word in Igboland was a sacred instrument. Not metaphorically sacred. *Actually* sacred. You swore before Ala, the earth goddess beneath whose body we all sleep every night, and that oath became a living covenant.

Ala does not forget.

This is why our fathers approached the matter of public speech with the gravity of a surgeon approaching an open body. You did not make promises you could not keep. You did not announce what you had not yet done. You did not stand before ten million hungry faces and tell them that their hunger was, in fact, prosperity — and then instruct them to *”endure”* while you feasted in a house whose kitchen alone costs more than a hundred of their lifetimes.

Because to do that — to speak falsehood to people who are suffering, to dress failure in the borrowed clothes of vision, to call a wound a doorway — that is not merely a political failure.

In the reckoning of Odinani, that is an abomination.

Ala governs truth. She governs the spoken covenant between a leader and his people. When a man ascends to the highest seat in the land and swears — *swears* — before Chukwu and men and the watching universe that he will serve faithfully, he has made an oath that no press secretary can later reinterpret. No spokesman can issue a correction on his behalf to the earth beneath his feet.

The earth heard him.

—

The Arrogance That Wears the Mask of Pride

Now let me describe arrogance to you, because we have confused it long enough.

There is a particular species of arrogance that thrives in our political class. It is the arrogance that has studied pride from a distance — that has seen what confidence looks like in a genuine man — and has produced an imitation the way a village market produces imitation goods. It looks similar until you press it. Then it crumbles.

The truly proud man — the man our tradition celebrated — did not need to silence his critics. He absorbed their words, extracted what was useful, and discarded what was noise. Because a man who knows his own worth is not threatened by another man’s assessment of him. The mountain does not tremble when the housefly lands upon it and declares it insufficient.

But watch what happens when you criticize the masquerade I have described to you.

The instruments of state bend toward you like a forest in a storm. Men who carry guns on behalf of the public suddenly remember that their guns can be pointed at the public. Journalists find that their accreditation has expired. Judges discover jurisprudential reasons to become suddenly and conveniently slow. Voices on the internet — paid voices, voices without faces, voices manufactured in the rooms of those who have outsourced their conscience to their stomach — descend upon the critic like a swarm.

This, my children, is not pride defending itself.

This is fear.

Genuine pride — *ịma onwe ya*, knowing oneself — does not require an army of suppression to sustain it. It sustains itself. A man who truly knows his own worth sleeps peacefully even when his enemies speak against him, because he has already judged himself truthfully and found that the evidence supports his peace of mind.

It is only the man whose self-assessment is fraudulent — whose inner accounting does not balance — who must silence every auditor.

—

On the Spectacle of Demanded Respect

There is a thing happening in our country that makes the old men in my memory turn their faces away in sorrow.

We have a ruler who has confused the *performance* of respect with respect itself.

He has confused the long convoy with authority. He has confused the standing ovation — extracted from men whose livelihoods depend on their ability to stand and ovate — with genuine reverence. He has confused the title with the substance behind the title. He has confused the ceremony of elderhood with the character of elderhood.

And so the motorcades grow longer while the roads beneath them crumble.

And so the banquets multiply while the tables of ordinary families grow bare.

And so the speeches lengthen — full of thunder, full of imagery borrowed from men of genuine vision — while the distance between what is said at the podium and what is experienced in the market widens into a canyon.

Our ancestors had a word for this kind of man. They called him *ọkọ ụtọ* — the man who loves sweet things too much. Not merely sweet food, but sweet sensation. Sweet applause. Sweet deference. Sweet proximity to power for its own sake rather than for the sake of those the power is meant to serve.

Such a man, they said, will eventually eat the seed yam.

You know what the seed yam is? It is the yam you do not eat no matter how hungry you are, because it is the source of next year’s harvest. It belongs not to you but to the future. A man of genuine character protects it with his life.

A man of *ọkọ ụtọ* — of inordinate appetite — will cook it when the night is cold and his stomach speaks louder than his conscience.

And then he will stand before the community in the morning and explain, with great eloquence and visible emotion, why there will be no planting this season.

—

What the Young Man Watching This Must Understand

I did not come here only to describe the masquerade. Any man with functioning eyes can describe a masquerade. I came to leave something behind — the way a father, knowing his time grows short, begins to say the things he has withheld.

The young man watching this spectacle — the young Nigerian grinding his teeth in the dark because the generator has gone off again and his phone has died and his business has collapsed under the weight of a currency that loses its dignity faster than it can be earned — that young man must understand something.

What you see modelled from the high places of power is not what power looks like when it is well-used.

What you see is what power looks like when it falls into the hands of a man who spent his whole life *seeking* it rather than *preparing* for it. There is a devastating difference. The man who prepares for power studies governance, studies sacrifice, studies the weight of a million faces that will look to him in their hour of need. The man who merely seeks power studies the path to the throne and nothing beyond it. He arrives and discovers he has no map for the territory.

And rather than confess this — which would require genuine pride, genuine *ịma onwe ya*, the courage to stand in one’s own truth — he manufactures explanations. He repaints failure as vision misunderstood. He reframes hunger as necessary medicine. He asks you to *”be patient“* — a request that, translated from political language into plain Igbo, means: *”continue to absorb the consequences of my insufficiency while I continue to enjoy the privileges of the office your suffering sustains.”*

Do not call this leadership. Do not even call it governance.

Call it what Ala calls it.

—

The Elder’s True Obligation

Here is where I must turn the mirror on myself and on every man of my generation.

The elder’s first obligation — before wisdom-sharing, before dispute-settling, before any of the ceremonies that come with age — is truth-telling. This is the oath beneath all other oaths. The elder who sees the community walking toward the cliff and says nothing — because the man leading them toward the cliff controls his pension, or because speaking would create discomfort at the next gathering, or because at his age he simply prefers the peace of silence — that elder has committed a betrayal that Odinani regards with the same gravity as any other covenant-breaking.

We have too many elders in Nigeria today who have made their private peace with the masquerade. Who attend his ceremonies and eat his food and allow their white hair and their respected names to be arranged behind him in photographs like borrowed props in a stage production.

Every such elder is complicit.

Our tradition did not give age its honour so that the aged could lend their credibility to the deception of the young. It gave age its honour so that the accumulated hard-won wisdom of long living could stand between the community and its worst impulses — including the worst impulse of all, which is the impulse to follow a loud, confident, well-dressed man without first asking where he is going.

—

The Kola Nut He Has Not Earned

I want to close with this.

In our tradition, before anything of consequence begins — before the covenant is made, the dispute settled, the alliance sealed — the kola nut is broken and presented. And our people say: “Onye wetere oji, wetere ndu”— he who brings kola brings life.

The kola ceremony is a declaration of mutual worth. It says: I see you. You see me. We are both, in this moment, fully present as human beings of dignity, and what passes between us will honor that dignity.

A ruler who brings his people inflation without apology has not brought kola.

A ruler who brings his people darkness — literal darkness, the darkness of a nation that cannot reliably power a light bulb — and then travels abroad to be photographed in rooms blazing with light, has not brought kola.

A ruler who brings his people the removal of the only cushion that stood between the poor and destitution — and announces this removal with the language of reform, of courage, of necessary pain, as though he himself will experience a single hour of that pain — has not brought kola.

A ruler who, when the people cry out, sends words rather than remedies, sends spokesmen rather than solutions, sends the language of patience to people whose patience has already buried several of their children — has not brought kola.

He has brought an empty dish. Dressed it elaborately. Placed it at the center of the table with ceremony and expectation.

And demanded to be thanked for the presentation.

—

My Last Word — And I Choose It Carefully

The masquerade that forgets its own dance does not simply embarrass itself. In our tradition, a masquerade that malfunctions — that stumbles, that speaks out of turn, that removes its own mask in the marketplace — brings consequences not just upon itself but upon the community that sent it out.

This is the part that should keep every Nigerian awake.

We are not merely watching a man fail. We are watching the consequences of a system that confused noise for capacity, persistence for qualification, and the hunger for the seat with the ability to serve from it.

The masquerade must be returned to the bush.

Not with bitterness. Our tradition was never bitter. Bitterness is what happens when truth has been delayed so long it begins to rot.

With clarity. With the calm authority of a people who have finally remembered who they are, what their word is worth, and what they are owed by those who sought their mandate and received it.

A covenant was made.

Ala heard it.

The accounting will come — if not in the courts of men, which have grown creative in their hearing, then in the only court whose docket has never once been interfered with.

The earth beneath all of us is patient.

But the earth forgets nothing.

Nke a bụ okwu. Onye nwere nti ya nụọ.

This is the word. Let those with ears receive it.

Chidi Ekeh, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja!