By Busuyi Mekusi

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Some of the oldies that got transposed into the new year were the issues surrounding the FCMB Managing Director, Adam Nuru, Moyo Thomas, and Tunde, the late husband of the latter, in relation to the paternity of their two kids, as well as the suspended Commissioner for Environment in Ogun State, who was alleged of ‘sexual ritual romance’ with 16-year old Melojuekun Monsuru. These two cases are a metaphor for the bestiality that characterises our humanity, as purported perpetrators and the mischievous hilarious spectators. Humans are intimately locked in artificial correctness, with the fidelity they parade often smeared by many limits. If it were possible, I would request those without ‘sins’ to cast the first stone.
The human race is reputed with trado-cultural and religious narratives of mono-source, such as those found in Yoruba creation story of Olódùmarѐ and the biblical centrality of Adam/Eve and Abraham, the latter whose ‘blessings are mine’ is appropriated at the expense of the corresponding liability of sacrifice. The various narratives of the origin of man, including the notorious Fred Hoyle’s ‘big bang’ theory, raise huge questions about the slippery attempts to make sense out of concepts like incest, infidelity, etc., with abominable act like rape underscoring the urgency for man’s egoistic mediation of libidinous propensities. Animals have been able to self-regulate and coordinate themselves in matters of sexuality and sex, with little contestations, until the prescriptive and disruptive impositions by human elements. Human beings have since been violating the sexual sanctity of animals, very irreparably.
‘Fidelity’ is more or less a hash-tag that is used by individuals and cooperate organisations to solicit for trust, and justify reliance, even when their actions are evidently antithetical to the import of such desired believability. To this end, fidelity gets burdened by the imperfection in truth, as there is no absolute truth, in that the ‘truth’ put forward at any instance is merely a part of a whole that exists somewhere. Different cultures and traditions come up with various orientations, standardisation, and sometimes use such to achieve baseless inscriptions of long-standing beliefs. Cultural differences do lead to complexities, due to the relative reception and interpretation of cultural nuances, as the use of a homegrown model would be misleadingly oppositional when used on a cultural trope outside to it. Infidelity in marriage in a cultural milieu would be redundant when viewed against the alleged controversial permissible entertaining value of the female body in Tiv society, reputed for the gifting of their wives to visitors. However, the fidelity of oral narratives attached to the foregoing is patently jaundiced, as that of most news peddled on the social media.
The pervasive infidelity in monogamous dispensations almost practically confers sanctity on polygamy. This is not to suggest that polygamy exclusively prevents the practitioners at both ends from going overboard. Both monogamy and polygamy are themselves limited by the greed of sex players. Sexual urges and activities are emotional and psychological, subject to dictates of biological compositions and medical alterations. Socio-religious restrictions become the ‘speed limiters’, which could become bad, or deliberately made inactive by an individual to achieve gratification. Little wonder that religious people get caught in the web of sexual contradictions.
The 21st century dispensations found fashionable the placement of trouser and skirt zips in the bottom region housing the ‘private parts’. This is an improvement on, and contrasts slightly with, traditional clothing and designs that required ‘lifting’ to access, as against zipping to exchange. The clothing of ‘private parts’, prescribed by some socio-cultural and religious institutions, is in itself an expression of intention, suggesting that there is something hidden behind the clothes, which produces the curiosity to want to uncover. Beyond this, nudity cannot be seen purely as a negative elixir, judging from its connection with the sanctimonious engineering of the female body, as found in the Reed Dance that is popular among the Zulus and Swazis, as well as the Ikare-Akoko Arìgìnyà fertility and virginity festivals. It is yet to be proven that any religious regalia or apparel has the inbuilt potency to stop one from the act of infidelity. So many putative and jocular exchanges support that certain religiously prescribed dressing codes help to perpetrate infidelity, without being suspected. Little wonder that traditionally defined educational, workplaces, religious, etc., spaces have been turned by some to sites of sexual escapades.
The recent Adam Nuru and Moyo Thomas story is an innuendo of the many real instances of the limits of our fidelity, nudging one towards the direction of infidelity, paternity and culpability. No doubt, paternity questions are linked to infidelity, but not limited to that as nature could give an individual two totally different DNA, due to the condition called Chimerism. A woman singer, Taylor Muhl, is said to be a Chimera. Paternity controversy can similarly be stirred by human act of deliberate swapping of babies at birth, particularly those delivered in busy public facilities. A former university teacher of ours, Hope Eghagha, in talking about Odéwálé in Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, once jocularly reminded us that we might not originally belong to the parents we lay claim to, because of past human deliberate or inadvertent behaviours. I later understood the import of his proposition, as so many of our ‘truths’ lack fidelity. The issue of abandoned babies, due largely to reckless sexual activities and unpreparedness to mother a child, as well as the adoption of same, have created new possibilities of how popular established socio-cultural orders could be altered, unknowingly, with babies finding their ways to where they could reconnect with their original sources, for instance through marriages, amidst infidelity and incest, thereby exposing the limits of our sanctimony.
We are all children of the earth, as paternity issues in Yoruba word-view could be resolved traditionally, even though opened to manipulations, with the position that a renegade is the only big ‘bastard’ that is around. Avowed fidelity is innately limited, but self discretion is more desirable. Semblance, which is also an act of physical conjectures, is generational, and subject to many external influences like climatic conditions, diseases, etc. Talking paternity, you may just belong where you are by accident, as the woman, in this case your mother, could choose to be a ‘multiple receiver’, leaving her with the role of a ‘dangerous umpire’ in deciding who owns the paternity. There have been insinuations about somebody who cannot father a child being celebrated as the father of children, after the wife sought and imported ‘help from outside’. While few spouses agree to such a deception, so many others are actors in a theater of the Absurd!
As things stand, so many domestic workers are altering the paternity sequence and landscapes in so many homes, as priests (of different religions) now convert their sacred but perverse spaces to uncover, zip down, and break virginity. Some fathers (stepfathers, in-laws, guardians, uncles, etc.,) are monsters preying on their helpless children, and fathering children with them. One would have desired that a protective mother would lace her daughter with Máàgùn (don’t climb or thunderbolt) to expose and shame such ‘beast of no nation’! The stories about the Ogun State Commissioner for Environment and the teenager that alleged him might not be negatively true, but are suggestive of the despicable ‘new normal’ in our societies, with ritualists, criminals, and human organs’ peddlers acquiring more socio-political and economic spaces in the name of ‘Yahoo Yahoo’. We are surely confronted with the beginning of the end, as the airs of uncertainties pervade the horizon, seeking to make a success of year 2021, and say ‘Happy New Year’ soon!