Gorilla, snake allegory

Belief systems and practices define the culture of a people and their very essence. Countries where superstition and all manners of attachment to weird beliefs and the mundane constitute predominant ways of viewing life, rank low within the development matrix.

So it is with Nigeria. Our attachment to superstition, occultism and all manner of belief systems has become somehow, a thing of immense concern. We are regularly regaled with news of killings and reprisal attacks by students of our higher educational institutions in the name of cultism. The carnage arising from such killings has become as embarrassing as they appear to have defied solutions.

But behind all this, is the notion that those involved in such cult activities derive some supernatural powers from it. Little wonder the army of our youths that are increasingly lured to them. Opinions will continue to be divided regarding the benefits that accrue from such weird engagements.

But the same malady has also permeated the lower rungs of the educational ladder and the larger society. The increasing subscription to such weird belief systems raises questions as to how far-reaching our claims to religiosity and modernity have been. Even with increasing level of education and the quantum of exposure and rationality that go with it, the reality is that many of our people are still embarrassingly attached to these inexplicable and bizarre belief systems. The signs are easily perceptible in our daily lives; in our dealings with others and the ease to rationalize our failings on some unseen forces.

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That is why a staff of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board JAMB in Makurdi, Benue State, Philomena Chieshe had the comfort of mind to come up with the claim that a huge snake swallowed a whooping N36 million kept in the vault of that agency. The JAMB sales clerk had told the JAMB registrar and his team on investigations that a sum of N36 million generated from the sale of recharge cards some time ago was swallowed by a huge snake.

When prodded further, she claimed her housemaid connived with another JAMB staff to ‘spiritually’ through a snake steal the money from the vault in the accounts office. She was arraigned by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, just last May after about one year and three months she made the stunning claim.

But as the EFCC is still battling to unravel the mystery surrounding the rogue snake, another curious story evolved from Kano. This time, it is the narrative of a rogue gorilla. Reports quoting officials of the Kano zoological gardens went viral last week with the startling account of a gorilla that allegedly swallowed N6.8 million belonging to that zoo. According to reports, one huge gorilla sneaked into the office, carried away the money and swallowed it.

Apparently worried by the uncommon narrative, Governor Abdullahi Gunduje ordered a probe into the claims. But the police suspect theft and have arrested 10 staff including the accounting officer. The position of the police seems amplified by the managing director of the zoo who disclosed though belatedly, that the zoo does not have a gorilla within it. So the story goes. If this later account is true, it is either the gorilla came from somewhere else or those who told the story could not differentiate between that animal species and humans.

In the days ahead, we expect the police to conclude their findings and possibly have some of the suspects arraigned. But we may not get the full gist of events until the legal process runs its full course. Then and only then shall we get to know whether the stories of the gorilla and the snake were real or figments of the imagination of some rogue officials. Then also shall we begin to construct a positive correlation between our attachments to the normative as opposed to the empirical.

The fact that such stories are easily peddled presupposes that their purveyors do so in the hope they could be believed. Those who told the story believe in the possibility of snakes and gorillas invading the vaults and swallowing the monies possibly as food. They believed in the persuasive powers of such stories and that it made sense to go that way. This angle was given added fillip by Philomena who claimed her housemaid connived with another JAMB staff to spiritually steal the money through a snake.

For her, this is quite possible. And she would want us to believe her story. Why not? After all, we are regularly treated with all manner of such stories from sundry predators in the garb of religious, occultist and traditional seers. Last December, the Federal Road Safety Commission, FRSC, had to mount sensitization seminars to disabuse the minds of drivers and road users that there are blood- sucking demons causing accidents on the roads. In a clime replete with all manner of miracle workers laying claims to converting impossibility to possibility; a clime the supernatural is constantly held responsible even for acts of omission and commission of ours, it is not surprising that such fables will continue to trend.

And as long as you can find those who believe such stories (they are many), so long will they continue to find sympathizers. That is the level at which our society still finds itself. It is telling of our level of attachment to superstition, ignorance and nature and how far removed we are from the path of modernity.

But we risk glossing over the real import of the narratives on the snake and gorilla if we seek to reason them out in a rational sense. My reading of the matter is that the purveyors of such stories were not talking of the real gorilla and snake. They were merely deploying hyperboles to give effect to the disappearance of the monies. Philomena spoke of the spiritual snake. She said her maid connived with another JAMB staff to spiritually steal the money through a snake. Her maid and the unnamed JAMB staff are mere metaphors for the snake.

It would appear we all erred in taking her statement in its literal sense. So also was the case of the gorilla that swallowed N6.9 million kept in the vault of the Kano zoological garden. If the allegory of the snake is difficult to appreciate, that of the gorilla should easily strike the right chord. They spoke of a huge gorilla. Incidentally, gorillas look like human beings except for their exceptional ugliness that will be difficult to decipher during the night the animal struck. Because the gorilla has the shape of humans, it is possible the narrator mistook a human being for a gorilla. The only snag there is that gorillas do not feed on pieces of paper and are not also capable of converting the money to buy their choice food.

So it is not the physical gorilla. It was the human gorilla that was possibly misread as a real gorilla. The gorilla denotes a metaphor for the thief. This characterization was given more credence by the zoo management when they said they do not have any gorilla in that zoo. So we are inexorably left with the human gorilla. That is why perhaps, the police has made arrests of some prime suspects. That also accounted for the setting up of an investigative panel by the Kano State government to unravel who the thief gorillas are. It is hoped they will unmask the characters behind the snake and the gorilla allegory.

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More fundamentally, these stories have wider repercussions for us as a country. They demonstrate very unmistakably, the very dangerous dimension corruption has taken on these shores. The two fables have to do with the stealing of monies belonging to the government or its agencies. We need to get at the root of the relative ease with which unscrupulous officials dip their hands into governments till.

We need to get at the root of the ease with which such infractions are rationalized on some weird and supernatural forces. President Buhari’s government has the fight against corruption as one of its cardinal programmes. It must figure out why the same individual that finds no wrong in looting government money meticulously preserves monies entrusted to his care by his ethnic unions or village meetings.

The level of progress in this regard will make the difference. But one thing that stands out is that manifestations of corruption are both complex and complicated. Beaming the searchlight just on political enemies will be of little value in the overall success of the fight. We must work to re-direct the psyche of our people against such malfeasance to get a more enduring result.