Melancholy as Praxis of Resistance. Part 2: The Bail Condition of Mr. Farotimi Calls for Melancholy
In the first installment of this post, I wrote about the importance of owning our critical resilience amid painful realities that are difficult to accept or align with rationality while also cultivating melancholy as resistance. Our laughter, banter, and cruise are essential in painful times; however, they must be tempered with melancholy. Melancholy calls us to pause, reflect, contemplate, critically question, and prod. It is a refusal to carry on as though nothing had happened. It is recalling and remembering, calling to accountability. If we are, to be honest, all we have seen in the last couple of days highlights the chasm between the theory and practice of democracy.
Related to this, every time I reflect on the many sites of the violence of colonialism, from the women’s war of 1929, where police fired into the harmless female protesters in three locations, to the Enugu Colliery massacre, where police opened fire on protesting workers to the violence on nature and non-human beings like dogs who were killed on the eve of the visit of the Queen aptly documented in Saheed Aderinto’s books on Gun and animality and other “scenes of subjection” (as per Saidiya Hartman) of colonial modernity, I ask myself how quickly we move on without marking our own “bloodstain gates” to borrow from Fedrick Douglas. From Kunle Adepoju, a student hit by a police stray bullet in 1971 at the University of Ibadan, to the recent Lekki Tollgates massacre are some of the many sites of subjection that are fresh in our memory.
Similarly, Dele Farotimi’s bail condition raises some questions. Why do rich people get lenient bail terms while poor people will need to sell their ‘blood’ to qualify? Imagine that children who, in all likelihood, may be out of school were asked for a bail term of 10 million. They said the scale and sword symbol of the court or Lady Justice indicates measure and weight, suggesting that punishment should be commensurate with the crime if it is at all in this case. Mr. Farotimi is asked for a bail bond of 50 million naira and other stringent conditions. Who has 50 million in Nigeria now needs to be on the most wealthy list. Is justice now tied to money and freedom to riches? Is this why many people are languishing in our jails? They can’t meet the bail term.
The judiciary was not incensed when someone mentioned using his influence on his wife, a former judge in Nigeria, to benefit some of his political associates, but it is now by Mr. Dele Farotimi's book. The conundrum, constraint, and crisis of confidence that the average Nigerian has about public institutions require sobriety from the leadership of this country and all of us.
Believe me, they are orchestrating another plan. They are relying on your amnesia. They will manufacture mud on him soon; I hope you will not fall for it.
Dear Nigerians, let us refuse to move on.
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