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And Laurent Gbagbo
fell. I saw the photos — the strongman stripped of his swagger — and
struggled to reconcile the images of the two Gbagbos.

I remembered Samuel
Doe. Compared to Doe, Gbagbo is a lucky man. He’s alive. He won’t be
pulled apart, limb by limb. I also remembered Saddam Hussein, who, like
Gbagbo, was smoked out of a hole.

Events like these cause me to go all existential (to use that term very loosely), and wonder about power and its meaning(s).

Gbagbo is not the
only one who has had to, in the last few days, come to terms with a
drastic change in personal circumstances. Far away from Abidjan’s Golf
Hotel are Nigeria’s ‘polling units’: scenes, on Saturday, of some
rather dramatic reversals in fate and fortune.

It’s an impressive
roll-call: Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello, Dimeji Bankole, Iyiola Omisore, Kamoru
Adedibu. For a moment, we thought Bukola Saraki and David Mark would
also be on that list. When Saraki (or an aide, perhaps?) tweeted, on
Saturday night, that “all indications show that PDP has won all the
seats it contested in Kwara State…”, I was one of those who
challenged him.

The word before
that moment was that the ACN candidate had defeated Saraki. When,
moments later, the Saraki tweet was deleted, I wondered aloud if it
wasn’t in the first place a case of the governor succumbing to a moment
of delusion. By Sunday morning, it turned out I was the deluded one:
Saraki, unlike his colleague, Gbenga Daniel (senatorial ambition cut
short even before the elections), or ex-colleagues Olagunsoye Oyinlola,
Orji Uzor Kalu and Segun Agagu, had escaped a great fall.

There’s something
about ‘falling’ — as action, and metaphor — that the human imagination
finds fascinating. This might explain why a good number of the
best-known nursery rhymes seem preoccupied with it.

“Jack and Jill went
up the hill / To fetch a pail of water / Jack fell down and broke his
crown / And Jill came tumbling after.”

“Ring-a-ring o’ roses / A pocket full of posies / A-tishoo, A-tishoo / We all fall down.”

In “Jack and the
Beanstalk”, the ogre comes a-falling when Jack takes a cutlass to the
beanstalk. In “Ten Green Bottles”, we witness the tragic, sequential
toppling of all the bottles, until there is none left sitting on the
wall. And in arguably the most famous nursery rhyme of all, Humpty
Dumpty, sitting pretty on the wall, suddenly has “a great fall.” (You
have to wonder if there’s any link between the green bottles and
Humpty’s fall.)

Coming closer to
home, there are the stories from the outsize biography of my childhood
friend, Ijapa, (the most famous tortoise in the world) and his wife,
Yannibo (spelling varies). Ijapa was always falling, whether from
heaven or from tall trees. That explains, we are told, why he has a
broken shell.

Politicians too are
always falling. The Obasanjo years were marked by the most remarkable
‘fallings’ amidst the leadership of the National Assembly — Salisu
Buhari, Evan(s) Enwerem, Chuba Okadigbo, Umar Ghali Naaba, Patricia
Etteh. Some of them are now dead. Others, while still alive, continue
to struggle to regain the lost ‘glory’.

As the latest batch
of fallen politicians come to terms with their new reality (the list is
bound to grow in coming weeks, as the remaining elections take place),
I’d like to raise a series of questions that have always been on my
mind — questions to do with the longevity of political careers in
Nigeria.

How long, on
average, do politicians’ stars shine in Nigeria? Do they, at birth,
come stamped with an expiration date? Do all fallen tortoises get their
backs broken? Who or what decides which Humpty Dumptys, after their
great falls, shatter irredeemably, and which ones the king’s horses and
the king’s men will be able to put together again?

It is a given that
some politicians will recover from their failures. After losing the
1960 presidential elections to Kennedy, (incumbent) US vice president,
Richard Nixon, retired to California to lick his wounds. In 1962, he
made a bid for the governor’s office in California. He lost. He is
quoted as saying, on the night after the election: “You won’t have
Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press
conference.”

It turned out he
was wrong. Six years later, Richard Nixon was president of the United
States, a comeback that would, sadly, end in disgrace in August 1974.

It will be
interesting to see which of the current crop of ‘outgoing’ Nigerian
politicians will sink into oblivion. No doubt, some of the PDP
“chieftains” will remain relevant in the coming dispensation — if their
party wins on Saturday. Ambassador Gbenga Daniel, anyone? Or Dimeji
Bankole, Honourable Minister for ‘Yoot’ Development?

For others, alas,
this is the beginning of the end. “With gratitude to God for four (or
eight) budgets ‘well spent’, we regret to announce the untimely demise
of the political career of …”