Today is my friend and brother, Honourable Patrick Osahon Obahiagbon’s natal day. He clocks 62 and there is a compelling necessity to roll out the drum in festivity in honour of a master bombast of this stint; someone who has cut a niche for himself as a grandiloquent speaker of the English language, always lacing his speeches with cornucopian Latin or Latinate dictions that he has largely deployed in contouring and defining the magnitude of his interventions which are always couched in what has generally become his characteristic Obahiagbonese.
How did our paths cross in 2008? I was tending to the Senate for THISDAY newspapers; and, on a particular day, in company with a journalist friend, Joses Sede, then of the Observer newspaper, I had gone to visit some news sources. Joses sighted him and wanted to exchange pleasantries with him. Joses felt strongly that I should be introduced to him and had taken it up himself to do so. Hardly had Joses mentioned my name, when he embraced me warmly and declared how voraciously he had been reading my reports and analyses; and, how in his summation of my journalistic efforts, I had been “intervening and contravening in the politics of Edo State from Abuja.”
The friendship has endured. So, also, is the brotherliness. Add to the offerings, brotherhood. He gave expression to these in a writ large fashion by storming Owo, nine years after, precisely in December 2017, on the occasion of the 85th birthday of my mother where he played the role of chairman. Indeed, Obahiagbon defined his epochal eon from 2007 to 2011 in the House of Representatives where he represented Oredo Federal Constituency of Edo State. In all that he did while in the House, he put his nose to the grindstone. He lent his stentorian voice to issues of common good.
Obahiagbonese (his peculiar coinages) attests to Obahiagbon’s legerdemain in the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of the intercourse between English and Latin, sometimes, with spices of the local Bini dialect. His loss of his party primary election had upended his continued representation of his people in the House. His opponents had expected him to despair by their rejoicing but he had the right reaction for them such that the entire political environment was nuanced with episodic comic reliefs for the utilitarian benefit of the winner and the loser.
His reaction to the rejoicing in the camp of his opponents who defeated him was: “This has made me suffused with emotional narcolepsy that the homo-sapiens in the metro-political geographical enclave of Edo have opted for owambe-ing over legislative quo modo dicis. Such a reckless display of narcissistic and flamboyant hedonism is capable of encumbering our nascent democracy with insidious, repercussive and cataclysmic exigencies.”
Obahiagbon also deployed the instrumentality of his sartorial elegance and/or swanky outfits in defining his peculiar style and traditional heritage. And the justification for that found anchorage in the sobriquet-“son of Igodomigodo,” which he adopted in 1999, when he was elected into the Edo State House of Assembly. This is the way he put it in my first interview with him in 2009: “I have deployed the nomenclature of Igodomigodo as a political sobriquet for ten years now, particularly as a vehicular nexus with my culturico-spiritual fons et origo and this emanated from an advertent primus mobilus to cosmopolitanise my genealogical matrix since it was not by accident that I originated from the land of Igodomigodo.
“Igodomigodo was the original, first ever, and pristine name of the Binis. From Igodomigodo, we were known as Ile-Ubini before the transmogrification into modern day Bini or Benin. So, you can now see that when I togarise my identity with the Igodomigodo aura, I am only invoking the visible and invisible gods of my progenitors and at the same time luxuriating in an ancestral aqua of pristine Risorgimento.”
To rationalize his fecund and forceful submissions on the floor, he had posited in another interview: “…You cannot succeed as a parliamentarian if you are not cosmopolitan. You must be prepared to immerse yourself in societal dialectics for you to be able to contribute efficaciously in utilitarian modus. So, if you are a parliamentarian and you don’t go through the ritual of even reading newspapers, you don’t bathe yourself in the aqua of the political cross currents, then you are going to be deuced, you are going to be paralytic in your contributions….”
Obahaigbon has never run short of big dictions or coinages that have defined his singularity. And when he “vibrates”, he does not laugh. He looks very serious as if he is possessed by some spirit. He has churned out in the process an avalanche of quotable quotes. Take for instance, when asked what legislators must do to make impact in the House, he said: “They must avoid regular big ‘stouting’, ‘suyaing’, and pepper-souping. Those are not the real issues. They must be prepared to immerse themselves in societal dialectics. They must put their nose to the grind stone. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Ikene philosopher, once said ‘the difference between my other colleagues and I, is that when my other colleagues are cavorting in the dark alleys, I am in my library working myself nineteen to the dozen.’ You cannot succeed in life if you are not disciplined. You must be puritanical in your predisposition; you must engage in an exercise of self-purification and mortification; you must engage in an exercise of self-abnegation; you must engage in an exercise of spiritual immolation. You must discipline the flesh. You must conquer the flesh. You must allow the spiritual aspect of you preponderate the material aspect, especially when you have been chosen to represent the people, so that at the end of the day, you can really say: vendi, vidi, vicki (I came; I saw; I conquered).”
His submission on the proposed Bill in the House of Representatives which sought to weaken godfathers’ influence in politics was also pointblank. Read him: “But we would be deluding ourselves if we believe that there would be a terminus earthquake to the philosophy of godfatherism. Godfatherism is an ecumenical concept; it’s an ecumenical fact, it’s a cosmopolitan reality, whether in America, whether in Great Britain, whether in France, you cannot totally rule out the concept of godfatherism. It only becomes deleterious to the salubrious disposition of society when you remove the father from the God and the God now assumes the letter of a small g; otherwise, there could be a dialectical interface between political godfathers and their protégés for the general and better enhancement of society….”
I had called him when I read his reaction to the news of Gani Fawehinmi’s death. He had laughed it off characteristically and claimed that I taught him the tricks. But he knew I never did. This is his inimitable tribute to Gani: “The grand initiation of Chief Gani Fawehinmi has since brought me emotional laceration and thrown me into utter catalepsy. This was a man who inured himself in the aqua of self-abnegation and immolation just to give justice to the down-trodden. Can there be another GANI in Nigeria’s legal firmament? I dare say I have my doubts. Chief Gani was simply inimitable, puritanically committed, inscrutably remonstrative, ideologically transcendental, quixotically cosmopolitan and ready conveyor-belt of legal tomahawks which he intrepidly deployed in his cascading fulminations against our Philistinistic military and political class. His transition is not only the fall of an Iroko but indeed the grand initiation of an iconic legal salamander. We only hope that we didactically learn here-from that it is not so much our sybaritic life class that matters more than the quality of service we render whilst we sojourn on this earth-plane.”
My friend and brother, Obahiagbon, has become a prodigious verbal contortionist. He has so many quotable quotes to his credit. A man, who is imbued with the capacity to titillate his audiences and followers consequentially deserves all the titillations and happiness he can get on his natal day. This is wishing him a happy birthday and many happy returns in good health and prosperity!
▪︎ Ojeifo contributed this tribute from Abuja via ojwonderngr@yahoo.com
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