Nyesom Wike is a unique sort of orator. He does not command a bravura class of diction, or the magnificence of phrasing, the sweet bass, the rich sibilant or tenor. But his voice scratches its way to the people’s heart.
He has become both speaker and singer, a stagecraft he tops with dancing. His walking stick is a character in the ensemble. To say he is a speaker discredits his dance. To say he dances undermines his throaty songs. To applaud his singing will draw a lash from his walking stick.
His is a whole package onstage. No one compares with him today. Not even close. His is the emblem of the folksy performer as politician. Which may not be fair since Wike does not even perform in the sense of the actor. He is just who he is. A natural. A thespian art without the thespian act.
When he appeared on stage last Saturday, his performance rang across to another stage in the Niger Delta. His stage was in Port Harcourt but he reverberated in Warri. An earthquake with a tremor on the other side.
It was a piece of revelation. He had said it a day earlier, but he especially said it on live television. He said his series of projects he had been inaugurating, including 12 flyovers and cancer centre, came from the munificence of President Muhammadu Buhari. Buhari had released great tranches of billions, he confessed, that the federal government had been owing Niger Delta States since 1999.
Back in Warri, former Edo State governor Adams Oshiomhole echoed Wike’s words. He localised it to Delta State, and said Buhari returned N250 billion to Governor Okowa. After that, he unleashed N60 billion, before two other tranches of N10 billion each. We have not seen onstage theatre talk to theatre onstage. Real-life theatre has upstaged performance theatre. It is only in Nigeria. We have seen plays talk to plays, or works of art talk to works of art. For fiction, it is called intertextuality. We have seen plays talk to fiction, like Shakespeare’s play, Antony and Cleopatra, talking to Roman writer Plutarch’s work on the lovesick pair. Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi descended from Brecht’s Three Penny Opera that hailed from the ancestor of the tale, John Gay’s hilarious Beggar’s Opera. The stories of these operas, originally based on Prime Minister Robert Walpole, ring true to the skeins of extravagance, political whoring and corruption of Nigeria today. Wike’s revelation was no mean challenge in an age of financial haemorrhage of mythic proportion.
We would have expected that one governor, especially Okowa, would come out and say, no it didn’t happen. Or he would use the familiar pidgin phrase of the day, if it didn’t dey, it didn’t dey. Obviously, Wike didn’t lie.
