Once upon a time, a billionaire patriarch got starved to death. Starvation plagued him through dusk and dawn, writing his epitaph with his gasps and sighs for food bought with his money yet denied to his belly.
His wife, who became a billionaire running his business empire, dreaded him soiling the precious bedsheets that she bought with his money. Thus, she denied him food. She padlocked the fridge, pantry and kitchen cabinet. Then she instructed the maid and his caregiver never to buy him food from their own purse.
The only food he was allowed to eat was the cereal she rationed to him very early before she left for work every morning. A rare boardroom titan she was, who had time to inspect the clothesline to see if the helps washed and changed her husband’s bedsheets – to establish if they fed him in her absence. His anal incontinence made him soil the sheets every time he ate and for this, she starved and flogged him in creative ways that left no welt on his tender skin.
One Tuesday morning, around 10 a.m. to be precise, the billionaire’s sister came visiting and found her brother crying for food like a baby. Weeping profusely, she rushed to the kitchen and found the fridge and food shelves padlocked. Angrily, she broke the locks and made her brother food.
She vowed to beat up her brother’s wife but her elders promptly reminded her of the severe traditional penalties she would incur – which included buying a ram to appease the gods and a heartfelt apology to her sister-in-law. She also dreaded being hunted by the culprit’s friends in high places. Thus, the matter got swept under the carpet by a family divided within itself.
No thanks to the lure and devices of filthy lucre that got them split in disparate camps; one camp groveling before their patriarch’s affluent, power-drunk wife, while the other camp banded into a defiant but disunited collective ruing the precarious circumstance of their hitherto powerful patriarch.
This is hardly about their shenanigans but about the sad fate of their billionaire patriarch who personified opulence in his youth but was eventually battered to death by hunger pangs and associated ailments. This is about other billionaires, still alive, ignorant of what fate awaits them in their twilight.
Predictably, the death of Access Holdings Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Herbert Wigwe, with his wife and son, in a chopper crash, en route to the 2024 Super Bowl in Las Vegas, United States, has birthed a flurry of posthumous disclosures on his doings while alive.
While some are fawning and patronising, some are damning and malevolent. In the end, both pro-Wigwe and anti-Wigwe homilies ignite introspection about mortality and the transience of life within and outside billionaire circuits.
No matter how rich and powerful you become, your whole life and worth eventually reduces to a final moment and fate as a venerated billionaire, or a bedridden, starved, flogged, forsaken, vilified and embittered old man.
This is sadly the lot of several men in their twilight. It doesn’t matter if they were good to their dependents: wives and children, friends and employees may eventually desert you once they exhaust their love for you or if you outlive your usefulness.
No motivational theory or exaggerated psychobabble could dull this fact. A wealthy patriarch knows when relatives hang around and feign love for him in order to inherit his wealth.
While money offers no protection against the ravage of unforgiving karma, the beaming brightness of good that each man had done may, serve as his buffer or protective shield against the whims of a vindictive wife, ungrateful children, churlish relatives and pitiless karma. Even where you enjoy the spirited love and devotion of loved ones, your citizenship of humanity may excite gory recompense.
For instance, a public administrator or bank chief who is good to his family but monstrous to employees, the masses and others whose destinies entwine with his whim may suffer a gruesome end.
No matter how rich or affluent a man is, he can never determine his final fate. No magnitude of wealth could enable a man reclaim his youth and undo his past mistakes.
In “The Two April Mornings” and its companion poem, “The Fountain,” a 72-year-old schoolmaster recalls his youth as an energetic man, Wordsworth recalls. Virility is canonised only when lost.
It is documented as distant narrative removes, nostalgia within memory: the first poem ends with Wordsworth recalling the schoolmaster’s memories. Masculinity is contemplated through the bleared lens of age, notes Paglia.
In “The Last of the Flock,” we meet a full-grown, healthy man. But he is weeping in the road. Once rich, he has sold his fifty sheep to buy food for his children. Wordsworth turns the flock’s diminishing into a litany of dwindling manhood: fifty, ten, five, three, two, one, none.
The poet’s arithmetic charts the shrinking of patriarchal domain and masculinity’s supple patch. As his property shrivels to the borders of his body, the protagonist, like fabled Odysseus or Lear, diminishes to nobody.
Are we prepared for that dreaded epoch when we may become nobodies? Are we prepared for that period when our shiny glories in time of youth may command only a perfunctory nod or the crisp tribute of a grudging hand clap?
How does a man welcome that frightening reality, when the unforgiving measure of his deeds as a public officer or private citizen, determines the drift of his twilight?
The Wordsworthian male decline, like Sango’s domestication by Oya and Kleist’s male mastectomy in Penthesilea, is a surgical reduction of self that counsels reflection among Nigeria’s privileged folk.
William Wordsworth empathised with the virile male of “The Last of the Flock” over his suffering and fast diminishing masculinity. Yet for Wordsworth, a man may become greater as he becomes less.
As a man, do you attain greatness as you become less? Have you made any sacrifice worth canonisation by the cult of posterity and human nature? Would your name enliven high society and suburban poetry long after you return to dust?
What quality of manhood do you pose to your dependants, neighbourhood and the Nigerian state? What calibre of men steer the ship of the Nigerian state? What is our collective value beyond the elevated treatises, political, economic, and sociological theories hazarded to define us?
Who are we, stripped of the veneers of material wealth, randomly professed spirituality, feminism, chauvinism, masculinity, masochism, intellectualism, and every other ism and schism that serve and afflict us?
Alive, we seek our aspirations as rites of pagan worship in our bejeweled social and political space. In death, they resound like comical jaunts borne of a pedestrian taste of the splattering kind.
Any blockhead or egghead may enjoy wealth and power through crookedness or honest endeavour, until karma strikes.
Man’s karma travels with him, like his shadow. The universe’s agent of cause and effect, deterrence and retributive justice, can neither be owned nor placed on a leash.
It becomes our temenos or ritual precinct of reward and comeuppance. In this divine, marked-off terrain, the moral code of the universe operates at its darkest and most mechanical – there are no emotive shingles of pardon or persuasion, just causes and effects, actions and consequences.
•Written by Olatunji Ololade
