-By Abdul Mahmud
Death has always had impeccable timing in Nigerian politics. Campaign managers, pollsters and party apparatchiks are never consulted, although the political class somehow receives the message; before the condolences’ registers announce themselves at the entrances of the houses of mourning, convoys begin to gather with punctuality, funeral ceases to be a private moment and becomes constituencies.
The passing of the former Deputy Governor of Bayelsa State, together with the death of the police aide attached to Senator Seriake Dickson, brought forth a familiar national ceremony in which the departed were mourned, of course, but quickly found themselves sharing attention with a far more energetic spectacle, as the road leading to the senator’s residence became a political expressway and every arriving vehicle carried not only condolences but also calculations.
Television cameras understood the assignment, social media performed with customary enthusiasm, photographs multiplied by the hour, videos travelled across WhatsApp with astonishing speed, and a casual observer unfamiliar with the identities involved could easily have concluded that the visitors were the principal victims of the tragedy, while the deceased had quietly become supporting actors in the production mounted in their honour.
The renowned Nigerian writer, the late Chinua Achebe, once echoed the proverb that mourners should not cry more than the bereaved. Modern politics has revised the proverb. Contemporary Nigerian mourners have however taken his caution on board: they do not always cry; they pose for the cameras as soon as they arrive carrying faces carefully prepared for public consumption. The ritual begins outside the gate, temporarily stops with the departure of the television crews, and resumes in the media office where photographs are inspected before the familiar caption, “Standing with my brother in this difficult time,” is finally approved.
Grief has acquired a press secretary.
Nobody asks whether the family has eaten, while almost nobody notices the exhausted relatives who have repeated the same account of the death fifty times before lunch, because every important arrival demands receptions, handshakes and photographs that capture every audience. Silence, which once belonged to mourning, then struggles to secure an invitation.
Nigerian politics possesses the extraordinary elite gift for converting every human experience into attendances: weddings become declarations of loyalty, births attract congratulatory delegations, while funerals offer something even more valuable because nobody argues with mourners and nobody accuses a visitor of campaigning while standing beside a coffin. Death provides a temporary halt to the political, even if subtle. Every political camp understands the arithmetic. Expressions of sympathy seldom remain the expressions of sympathy for long. Public attention either drifts towards those who attended, who stayed away, or whose faces were captured by waiting cameras, until the funeral is discussed less as an occasion of grief than as evidence of political movement, with some political associates announcing that the gatherings demonstrate political strengths, although nobody stoops to ponder the uncomfortable reality that they demonstrate only the certainty that everyone eventually dies.
The pilgrimage has now shifted towards Rotimi Amaechi following the death of his mother, the route has changed, yet the script remains untouched. Convoys once again gather with solemn efficiency, with familiar faces who emerge wearing expressions perfected through years of public service and private ambition. Every arrival carries sympathy wrapped carefully around political significance; but nobody says so aloud because nobody needs to. Cameras click and roll. Photos and videos are posted on social media. Political commentators immediately begin searching the background of each image with forensic determination, discovering that some leaders smiled too warmly, and accidental seating arrangements suddenly become evidence of national realignments.
The deceased deserves remembrance.
Only the presumed chief mourner receives the larger audiences of mourners who turn funerals into annual general meetings in which they appear more as political shareholders in bright and variegated colours, and less as companions in grief than as officials of the Ministry of Condolence Affairs.
The Ministry could hardly function without a training school. There, public figures would receive instruction not in the difficult art of consoling the bereaved but in the more profitable discipline of public mourning, leaving with the practised understanding of where to stand, whom to embrace, how long to remain within the frame, and the precise moment at which sympathy should give way to publicity. The most accomplished officials would soon distinguish themselves in the field. A house of mourning would become their natural place of deployment, where success would depend neither upon familiarity with the deceased nor sympathy for the bereaved, but upon an instinctive knowledge of where the cameras had been placed and how best to remain within their gaze without appearing to seek it. Political parties would, in time, discover that funeral attendance provides a more reliable measure of commitment than the labour of reading a manifesto or defending a legislative record, with advancement increasingly reserved for those whose presence at high-profile bereavements has been faithfully documented, leaving the unfortunate politician who arrives after the television crews have departed to wonder whether the journey had served any political purpose at all.
Nigerians have become unwilling spectators in this performance because scarcely a day passes without the social media delivering fresh photographs of political visitors and preserving every embrace for public inspection, until the country begins to treat proof of attendance as a greater civic obligation than the quiet expression of sympathy from which such visits once derived their meaning. The long nights that descend after the visitors have departed seldom attract similar attention because cameras lose interest once the speeches have ended and the convoys have disappeared, leaving behind a family learning to accommodate an absence that no photograph can soften and no public procession can relieve.
The public life of every society demands gestures of compassion, and no reasonable person would question the duty of politicians to console associates in moments of bereavement, although a clear distinction remains between a visit undertaken to comfort the grieving and one calculated to communicate political relevance, because the former belongs to the ordinary decencies of human conduct while the latter gradually transforms private sorrow into another stage upon which ambition seeks public approval. The dead deserve better than becoming silent participants in political choreography, while the bereaved deserve the privacy that allows grief to unfold without constant interruption from visitors whose principal concern lies beyond the condolence they profess to offer.
Nigeria may never establish the Ministry of Condolence Affairs, although experience suggests that such an institution already exists in unofficial form, operating with remarkable efficiency and requiring neither legislation nor a budget because its work is carried on by those who instinctively recognise every prominent funeral as another engagement in the long campaign for political relevance, with its permanent archive preserved not in official records but in photographs and videos that survive long after the mourning itself has passed.
May the departed sleep well.