By Uthman Shodipe-Dosunmu
He once rioted in untidy hubris of power, puffing and huffing, daring a trampled people to engage him, frightening in that great repose of seemingly infallible authority.
He was a cruel and crude partisan, who stood in judgement of others, arbitrating in a cause where he stood to gain, pronouncing judgement in primitive fervor when he ought to be collared and packed in the dock.
Godwin Emefiele hurried in unconscionable power, indifferent to the sufferings he inflicted on everyone, wrapped in some twisted arrogance and idiocy as Nigerians confronted an unforgiving nightmare, where hunger, tears, despair and hopelessness roamed the land.
But this man, who frothed in odious self elevation, was increasingly pumped with inexplicable malice against the Nigerian state, even as the most desperate and the most vulnerable were thrashed by a deliberately conjured venom of a man who knows no God.
Emefiele was largely a pretender to power, who forgot the ephemeral nature of all things. He somehow deluded himself with some infinite relevance, thinking that the purchased and purloined gains of the moment gave him a sense of invincible rampart; defiant, grim, a permanent scourge at the totem of power, wielding his truncheon with sadistic glee, flogging us all with omnipotent condemnation.
But now it’s over. All beginnings must have an end. Emefiele has fallen. He is now caught up in the transient dictates of heaven. He is stripped and subdued, brought down by the great leveler none can challenge.
In that solitary repose, where he now habituates, he will be kindled by the vanity of all riches, the falsehood of unearned authority, the fickleness of fortune seekers masking as friends, the dissipated celebratory hour, when men trembled before him, the grandeur and charm he once wore.
Now all gone, eviscerated by a new power.
The fate of Emefiele should be a moral to all men, who perceive themselves in some unbroken latitude of power, roused in false transcendental allure.
But the mortal man hardly learns from the fallen patches of yesterday’s men. Each believing “it will never happen to me.” To the unknowing, the greedy and the self absorbed, history always repeats itself.
Beyond today, another Emefiele will soon come, bestirred in the same hubris before the inevitable fall and thus the sad circuitry of history rotates itself in endless dirge. Surely, no tears for Emefiele here.
•Shodipe-Dosunmu, the Olóríẹkùn of Olòwògbowò, is the Director-General, DG, of The Patriots Roundtable.
