By Busuyi Mekusi

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The nursery rhyme: ‘There is Fire on the Mountain, Run, Run Run’, was a children song that later got popularised in music. Beyond the entertaining and didactic propensity that children drew from it, the artistic reproduction of the rhyme in modern music majorly focused on the casual approach people display in the face of threats and hurts. The sensibility deductable in what some have tagged Indian Children’s rhyme collocates with the philosophical admonition in Yoruba that we do not sleep with fire on the roof (a kìí fi iná sórí òrùlé sùn).

However, characteristic of the stubborn rat that incurred deafness by recalcitrance, most people across the world today either deliberately or inadvertently sleep with fire burning on their roofs. You need no introspection before you sight the flames that threaten your patrimony just as Trump’s alleged misdemeanours have taken America to the cleaners. Is it a positive addition to Habeeb Okikiola, Portable and the Zazoo crooner, that he had his days in court at Ifo, Ogun State for assault, just as Trump has broken the record as the first former American President to be arrested and tried for record falsification?

Human societies are given to socio-economic cum political gradations and power-play. The societal contradistinctions and contestations between the haves and have nots that were later investigated by Marxists are signposting of socio-cultural prescriptions and varied placements that contrived human relationships usually throw up in any society. To this end, oppositional details like husband/wife, king/subject, leaders/followers, employers/employees, etc., tend to manifest the inequality that people believe is also found in nature. The unequal size of the fingers has been variously used to justify God’s unique preference for and balancing propensity in his commitment. It is for these reasons that some would always opine that any human with certain deficiencies would always remedy such with the availability of others that have comparative strength in such areas.

Pre-western Yoruba believed that it was for the sake of the rich that Olodumare created the poor, even as some would also justify socio-economic lowliness on the basis of the biblical notation that there would always be the poor around. Poverty as an economic index could be very fluid, apart from the systematic investigation by the National Bureau of Statistic that reported 133 million Nigerians as being multi-dimensionally poor. Curiously, poor Nigerians are now committed to getting at the rich, either discreetly or violently, to reverse the order that was hitherto believed to be natural. Is poverty indeed a natural phenomenon?

Masterhood and servanthood are economic indices of bourgeoisie and proletariat present in post-modern Nigerian economy, which is highly driven by the capitalist notion of class. Although the middle class has since disappeared in Nigeria due to receding economy, reminiscent of underdevelopment, a sizeable number of the working class still struggle to inscribe the economic status of somebody that is far removed from the lower rung of the ladder, even if this is achieved at great cost, through patronage of expensive private schools for their children; imbibing fashions in vogue; visiting supermarkets with fixed high prices as against open markets where products could be purchased at lower prices, etc.

Masterhood, in relation to servantship, is attainable in Nigeria when one: has a flourishing career or business, owns houses and cars, is left with the exigencies of having to raise children in fledging families, is affected by dislocation between spouses who have reasons to live apart from each other, is medically challenged, is confronted with the limitations of old age, etc. At the other side of the divide, human agencies belonging to the poor community are always scouted by those occupying the master’s pedestal to service their domestic needs, due to the disruptions occasioned by their status. In Nigeria, the bifurcation into master/servant plane could either be private or official, for instance as certain job and political placements could go with certain benefits that include being serviced by some domestic servants, such as chauffeur, cook, laundryman, gardener, security, etc.

Whether official or private, the occupation of the master and servant positions respectively has to do with the ownership of space. While the master is privileged with spatial ownership of the house where s/he lives, s/he is forced to share space with the stranger that has been employed and admitted into an old unfamiliar contraption, due to indispensability of his or her services. The suspension of defamiliarity by the master and owner of the space is a forced one that would automatically concede substantial space to the alter-ego in the gate house, boys quarters, garden or behind the wheel of a luxurious car, etc. Predictable of a passively disenchanted disadvantageous fellow, the space ceded to the ‘stranger’ could always be converted into a space for the performance of power, violence as well as the weaponisation of death.

It is needless to mention that so many unspeakable things take place behind the enclosed space of engagements between the master and the servant. Oftentimes, when domestic servants have access to the private spaces of their masters, they could lie on their beds, try their clothes on, eat with their dishes, or dance in the bed with their spouses or children, depending on the lopsidedness that defines such a family. While some domestic servants are victims of violence, some others are dispensers of rage, including sexual. Instances are that; security guards would get drunk and lock their masters outside the house, a driver would pose in his master’s car and clothing to deceive a girl for sexual relationship, and so on. 

As inexcusable as the foregoing might sound, it is more worrisome that Nigeria continues to record the killings of employers by their domestic servants. Some of the many unexpected heinous crimes perpetrated by domestic servants are the stories of: Lekan Adekanbi, a driver, that killed his master, Kehinde Fatinoye, his wife and only son in Abeokuta, Ogun State, for refusing to increase his salary and grant him loan to purchase motorcycle; a driver that allegedly attacked and killed his master, Femi Egbeoluwa and his wife in their house in Ikeja, Lagos State, with the £5, 000 meant for the routine medical check-up of the man stolen (their housemaid was also attacked and left for dead); Joseph Ogbu, a house-help that stabbed to death his employer, Mrs.  Oreoluwa John, in Surulere, Lagos.

Others are: the case of Sunday Anani, a Togolese cook, that murdered his employer, Ope Bademosi, the Chairman of Credit Switch Technology, in his Ikoyi, Lagos home. Very murderously barbaric was the case of Onyebuchi Ezeh, alongside two others, who raped and removed the breasts, fingers, tongue, and genitals of his septuagenarian employer, Mrs. Charity Okoli, in Umunze, Anambra State, leading to her death. Olayemi Bamitale and Daniel Ita, driver and security guard respectively, killed their employer, Prof. Albert Ilemobade, former FUTA VC, in Akure, Ondo State, and went away with his Toyota SUV Rav 4, and dumped his body in a generator house, after soaking the septuagenarian body in diesel. The mindless needless killings of masters by servants go on in Nigeria as if the past is no longer relevant.

It is a fact that servanthood is strange to most developed nations, as the services we reduce to the mandates of the poor are either provided by private institutions or undertaken by government agencies. Domestication of individuals as drivers, gatemen, cooks, gardeners, etc., is typical of the luxurious life some are given to, and the imbalanced rationalisation of the rights of the people. Aged people that are left in private domesticated uncoordinated care in Nigeria would have fared better if ready to access some of the newly established homes for old people that are examples to redirect the people from redundant old fixation. As governments increase social supports to the aged and sickly, we need a new socialisation that would promote a better deal for the elderly, who have been denied the communal support that was before westernisation and migrations of younger ones, for economic reasons, that should ordinarily provide support to them. The elderly must be ready to rekindle old communal conviviality that would promote their wellbeing, cut down on attachment to their migrating restless westernised children, who may see them as burdens, in order not to be seen as liabilities, as old age is not a curse.

As long as we continue to approach masterhood and servanthood as an economic tool, servants that are recalcitrant and vengeful, by the day, would always weaponise death within the convoluted and claustrophobic private space of an endangered master who is stubbornly sleeping with fire on the roof at his own peril. This is more so as murderous tendencies are locked up in the minds of most vulnerable poor being hired for domestic services. Unfortunately, the fire on the roof of most Nigerians is attaining the status of conflagration, due to our many noisy, chattering dumbness, touchy deafness and wilful amnesia.