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At
a time when Nigerian politics, education, and social life are in great
travail, especially because of wrong decisions or even lack of
decisions on the part of those who play important roles in these
sectors, one is led in the search for ideas to “dying” indigenous modes
of articulating the problem of decision-making.

In the indigenous
Igbo world, one model of decision-making, which is perhaps considered
the most faulty as well as the most risky, is the Tumbom Tumbom.
Usually enacted with the recitation of “Tumbom tumbom nkwa nwa isi
eregede, nge!” the Tumbom Tumbom is a formula often applied in the
local Igbo setting whenever a person is confronted with the difficult
task of choosing from among several options that have little or nothing
to differentiate them.

The process is
simple: the finger of the chooser is made to travel from one option to
the other in the physical space, and wherever the song ends, or where
the word “nge” falls, that is considered the inevitable choice ordained
by Fate.

Related to the
tradition of casting lots, this approach to decision making is not
really determined by any supernatural intelligence. From a simple
understanding of kinesics and spatiality, the onset point, to a large
extent, determines the termination point, or just to say, the beginning
determines the end, or rather, the end is in the beginning.

The Tumbom Tumbom
model is risky, for it makes one’s decision subject to chance. But it
is not as risky as the Zero Option one encounters when one is
challenged to handle a dilemma, “Leta ira Mbajiaku na ikwu eriri, were
otu” (Choose between making love to Mbajiaku and committing suicide).
Mbajiaku was a mad woman with sores all over her body.

Her sad condition
made people avoid her completely, and so the question of a sane man
wanting to make love to her was considered inconceivable.

To be asked to
choose between making love to her and committing suicide is to be put
in a situation where it is impossible to make any choice, assuming that
the person asked to make the choice is still sane. Making love to
Mbajiaku is as horrible as killing oneself, at least in the
understanding of the local community in whose discourses the narrative
features sometimes.

The English would
call this dilemma “being between the devil and the deep blue sea”. For
the local Igbo community, the Mbajiaku script presents a situation they
can relate with as well as use in representing helplessness in the
selection of a suitable option. In a sense, it is a script used for
humiliating and subjugating an addressee.

Is one being unfair
to Mbajiaku? Is one merely exploiting her condition as a semiotic of
the reject, without a humanistic consideration about her right to
association, to company, and even to sex? Perhaps. And this means one
has to interrogate the assumptions in the cultural interpretation of
Mbajiaku, especially her representation as the outsider, as one
undeserving of what other human beings use in constructing and
maintaining their humanity. So, we must recognise the weaknesses in the
local Igbo use of the expression.

But in spite of
such weaknesses, one can still recognise the Mbajiaku script as an
important cultural statement on dilemmas in decision making, especially
in relation to crucial matters of societal and individual survival.

It is a great
misfortune for a society to find itself in a situation where, in
electing its leaders, it has to choose between making love to Mbajiaku
and committing suicide outright. One has to become like Mbajiaku in
order to be able to make love to her. She still has her teeth and could
bite. She still has her talons and could scratch. And she still has
some other “goods” she could “sell” to her crazy partner to help him to
kill himself sooner. Indeed, one has to become an Mbajiaku to be able
to approach an Mbajiaku for sexual favours. For if what the
psychoanalyst tells us about the relationship between the sex instinct
and the death instinct could be accepted, it is easy to kill oneself in
having sexual union with Mbajiaku at both the interpersonal and
societal levels.

I think that
Nigerian voters have for a long time been subjected to situations where
they have to apply the Tumbom Tumbom model of choice as well as perform
the Mbajiaku script. Sometimes they are asked to choose between two
retired military dictators who are known for their disrespect for human
freedom and human life. Sometimes they are asked to choose between an
Ivan the Terrible and a crook that loved money so much that he gave his
only begotten son in a money ritual.

It seems to me too
that when Nigerian voters are confronted with the Mbajiaku script, they
often find themselves applying the Tumbom Tumbom model, which produces
the predictable result of killing the self in the risky “either/or”
that the Mbajiaku script imposes.

With the 2011
federal elections getting closer, one is watching to see whether
Nigerians would prefer to perform an Mbajiaku script in the Tumbom
Tumbom mode, or choose to undermine and reject the electoral suicide
principle entirely.