Rotimi Fasan
The report about a member of the House of Representatives assaulting a Bolt driver was one I had read earlier in the day the news broke. Even after I had seen a footage of the despicable encounter and the infantile utterances of the supposed legislator, I still didn’t think it was strong enough to displace the topic I wanted to write on this week.
It was attention-grabbing, yes, but there was nothing unusual about it. We have seen similar and, in fact, frequently more egregious versions of it (among the random big man or woman driving on the road; politicians and members of our military and paramilitary personnel and what-not, etc), that it has lost its capacity to shock.
Was it not a version of it that led a senator to slap a woman in an adult toy shop within a distance of where Alexander Ikwechegh allegedly assaulted this Bolt driver; a soldier driving against the flow of traffic in Lagos to mobilise his colleagues that beat a police officer on traffic duty to death a couple of weeks ago; a now-dismissed Police Inspector to murder a musician in Enugu State about the same time as the current incident in question? What’s new about these kinds of encounters other than to see them in all their tragic import as sources of comic relief, of how the wrong people have found their way into power? Things have reached that level of cynicism.
But as the day wore on and the story bodied out, developing to a point where one had a sense of who this latest honourable is, I came to the realisation that my earlier planned subject of discussion could wait a little more. Given the speed with which events overtake one another, our increasingly short attention span and tendency to spiral from one hot point of national discourse to another, one didn’t need to be told that by next week, the story of the Abia politician and Mr. Stephen Abuwatseya, the Bolt driver, would have been upstaged and supplanted by something more salacious. Yet, it was so important cynicism should not be the response to it. It deserves to be examined if not for anything else but that it speaks to the sense of disappointment that a generational shift in leadership from the old to the new evokes among Nigerians. The youth, our so-called leaders of tomorrow, are turning out more maggot-rotten and unfit for the role history has thrusted on them.
Let’s be clear, the report of Alexander Ikwechegh’s conduct, however, dishonourable it seems is still a matter of allegation. Even if we are here being called upon to disbelieve what would seem to be incontrovertible evidence before us, it is all still a question of allegation. This makes good sense, and in this age of artificially generated images, it is still wisdom to err on the side of discretion. So, we must see all that the legislator is alleged to have said, done and threatened to do as mere allegations. But should the ongoing investigation turn out to be true, then he is one more evidence of why our politicians should never be trusted or taken seriously until they have been put to test and found to have passed. Ikwechegh must have campaigned to the likes of the Bolt driver before he became a Reps member.
As is always the case when things like this happen, we know a lot more about this politician that represents Aba North and South Federal Constituency than we do about the alleged victim of his outsized ego that is now simply called a driver. If he had been made to disappear as the law-maker allegedly threatened to do in the footage in which he posed for the cameras like a model showcasing his attributes- in such less lucky circumstances, Stephen Abuwatseya would have become mere statistics in police record books. How many of the unclaimed corpses we see on our major roads had been victims of such sinister disappearance? But thank God, the man in that video did not bring his entire weight to bear on the driver he repeatedly called a stupid, foolish boy; a mere rat that dared to insult him in his own house.
His language and behaviour came straight from the deep south of America in the years of slavery, way back before Black men and women won the suffrage. How could this driver not know this big man whose very light complexion (he could easily pass for a white man, an oyinbo) contrasts very sharply to the very dark man that Abuwatseya’s complexion proclaims him to be? What seemed to incense Mr. Ikwechegh most was the fact that the Bolt driver did not know, could in fact not be bothered to know who he, the Right Honourable, was. He took his time to educate him about this obvious slight and in his righteous indignation, he could not resist the urge to steal another’s identity in order to raise his stock in the eye of this ordinary driver that would not be intimidated by somebody’s, even a legislator’s, borrowed plumage: he calls himself a senator, at least once! Coming to attention and bearing down on his victim as he recorded him, the good Honourable came to his full height, hands together behind him and introduced himself to the world. All for the cameras. What a way to enter the history books?!
For the 18 months he has been at the National Assembly, our “Distinguished” has not been known for sponsoring any major bill on behalf of his Abia constituents or other Nigerians at large. If he was not a replacement for the actual winner of the election that brough him into office, he probably would not be where he would be caught on camera bickering over a package of snails sent through the bold driver by a vendor, obviously a woman, who also became a victim of Ikwechegh’s outburst. He can be heard on phone reporting Abuwatseya’s disrespect, his refusal to hand him his order right inside his house or insistence on being paid.
For this, he received three facial slaps and had his shirt torn off his back. Thereafter, he was arrested and detained, not in Ikwechegh’s generator house, as he threatened, but at the Maitama Police Station, by an FCT Police unit whose spokesperson appeared more concerned about the legislator’s dismissive reference to the Inspector General’s office than the alleged violent behaviour of a supposed leader who started out as an LGA chair, reputedly the youngest in the country at the time. This is a distinction, for being the youngest this or that, that he shares with a certain White Lion currently fleeing from the law. How are Buhari’s lazy youths faring politically?
