By Ikem Okuhu
‘Nrashi’
If there was a task I failed to manage successfully during my sojourn in Enugu, it was how to weave a positive narrative out of a strikingly annoying buzzword Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi had created and frequently used in referring to what he might have thought was the dispensing of democratic dividends but which, in reality, evokes only the imageries of gluttonous consumption by those close enough to his government to enjoy the privileges power confers.
Nrashi.
As annoying and suggestive of state-sponsored corruption and primitive gluttony as it sounds, Nrashi happened to be the Governor’s favourite word and tumbled out in almost all his conversations, formal and otherwise, in all its manifest forms as nouns, verbs, adjectives and the whole nine yards.
Nrashi, I must note here, was not the only favourite expression of the Governor I did not like and actually spoke to him about the need to dilute them from his identity and personal brand. The other one was his nickname, Gburugburu, an Igbo word that could be used to refer to various things, including, the “circular,” “the universe,” “the environment,” “everywhere” and everything relating to a person’s wide surroundings.
In most cases, Gburugburu, in its Igbo usage, has the same grammatical role of a bound morpheme and therefore, makes no complete meaning when it stands on its own. If, for instance, you want to chastise somebody for wasting time, running round in circles, the construct would come out like, Igba okirikiri or Igba gburu-gburu.
I got to know that the Governor took ownership of this word early in his political career and was well-known by it during his 12 years as a member of the Nigerian House of Representatives. I saw a lot of it after he had won the nomination of the Peoples Democratic Party to fly the party’s flag ahead of the 2015 gubernatorial elections. A number of the Social Media fan pages opened by friends for his electioneering campaign boldly displayed GBURUGBURU on the page banners.
I did not like the name at all. It never evoked the image and imagery of a titular sovereign of such high level.
When I had the privilege of meeting him in 2016, one of the things I recommended and which also featured in the PowerPoint presentation that I shared with him during that period, was the gradual withdrawal of this moniker from his personal brand. I made this recommendation because Gburugburu did not strike me as the title befitting of a purposeful leader. If you are a PR professional preparing someone, as I had thought I was doing at the time, to position himself as the rallying point for Igbo and even the old eastern Nigeria solidarity, the first things you should discourage are names and titles that are antithetical to the purpose. Gburugburu was a bit too village-square-ish to be one of a Governor’s proud adornments.
My protestation did not discourage him though. Littering the nooks and crannies of the state are solidarity movements and political support groups built around what I thought was an obnoxious moniker in its various adaptations. A handful of these would do:
Gburugburu Youth Support Group
Voters Support Group for Gburugburu
Gburugburu Movement
Gburugburu is a Goal
Gburus United Fronts (sic)
Gburuism
Gburugburu Babes Campaign Team
There are scores of these pro-governmental organisations (PGOs) at home and in the diaspora but in all I did as an image maker for the Governor, I did my best to avoid being sucked into the bandwagon, even if the Governor was apparently happier when the maddening crowd rumbled the name at his very frequent planned and unplanned rallies than when he is addressed as “Your Excellency,” which, in itself, was another titular vanity trip for most governors in Nigeria. In all my engagements, written and oral, I deliberately avoided referring to him by that name, even if it would have been politically more expedient for me.
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If Gburugburu sounded bad as nickname for a governor, Nrashi was a sickening joke that slowly was elevated to a political philosophy, gripping the state and its people with varying degrees of pretentious adulation and outright disgust, depending on where you are operating from.
What does Nrashi even mean?
Have you ever watched someone eat a delicious meal? Have you ever served the poor and hungry food and watched them voraciously devour it? Do you often eat with your hands and have to frequently lick your fingers, palms and all, in literal finger-licking relish of the delicious meal?
Nrashi is an Nsukka word, often used in derogation, to refer to the action of licking the fingers while eating or after eating, to ensure that the lingering bits of the meal sticking to the fingers are all funneled, through the alimentary system, to the stomach. Its colloquial use comes when you want to refer to either a poor person who suddenly finds abundance (in food and, perhaps, wealth) and is devouring it noticeably gluttonously. In this case, people would say to him or her:
“I gan’ arashi!”
Literally, this means, “You are now licking your fingers. Figuratively, it means “you are now enjoying life.”
Writing in an online news portal, www.247ureports.com on June 6, 2020, one Sam Eluma Asogwa, a legal practitioner, had this to say about Nrashi:
“Nrashi, for the benefit of those who are not Nsukka people, simply means stomach infrastructure (apologies to former Governor Peter Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State). In Fela’s lexicon, it is called Paddy Paddy Government. It is also called chop make I chop. It is the most vacuous, thoughtless political philosophy I have come to know.”
For a government that preached inclusiveness which summed its vision for the state in a four-point agenda that included; employment generation, social services and good governance, rural development, security and social justice, Nrashi was a discolouration that totally negated much vouched agenda. It even negated the populist appeal disposition of the government, projecting the Governor as propagating squander-mania, instead of mass productivity.
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Prebendalism versus Nrashi
If Nrashi was thought to be a political philosophy of inclusiveness and which would be the contribution of Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi to the body of governance literature, its manifest dialectics tended towards what I will call representative prebendalism – a term that I use in referring to a political system where elected officials and government workers feel they have a right to a share of government revenues, which they would use to fundamentally benefit themselves and a few of their influential supporters, co-religionists and members of their ethnic group.
Incidentally, the word, prebendalism was coined in 1987, by Richard A. Joseph, an American Governance and Politics professor, in direct reference to what he described as the “patron-client or neopatrimonialism in Nigeria.” Prof Joseph wrote thus to explain his new theory at the time:
“According to the theory of prebendalism, state offices are regarded as prebends that can be appropriated by office holders, who use them to generate material benefits for themselves and their constituents and kin groups…”
If prebendalism, as theorized by the American professor was a misnomer as a political philosophy, representative prebendalism was even more preposterous. While prebendalism spoke to the “sharing of government revenues among one’s constituents or ethnic groups”, representative prebendalism had to be understood, on the basis of the limited amount of what was to be shared among those flying the flags of the state’s constituent communities at the government dining table.
By this, I mean that those officials are increasingly using government resources for themselves, but on behalf of the people they represent. In other words, once you had a representative in government who was well taken care of, you were, by that very fact, benefitting by proxy, even if nobody is throwing any of the residual crumbs your way.
The rotation of key elective offices around senatorial districts, local government areas and even hamlets had reinforced the dangerous philosophy. Representative prebendalism had successfully been entrenched as a political culture in the state, manifesting in cyclical nepotism in which one section of the state plunderously gnawed away at the state treasury and exploited available opportunities and resources at the expense of others.
When the Governor, therefore, says to you, “Okwa te g’ n’arashi?” (Is it not true that you are now one of those licking your fingers?), he is inadvertently telling your constituents not to complain because they have someone sitting on your behalf at the dining table.
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Various efforts were made in futility by those around the Governor to mainstream Nrashi into a plausible political philosophy that reflected an elevated and refined form of communalism. Even while I was there, I did a lot in wrapping the distastefully sticky term around the noble ideals of equitable sharing of resources, but the more you tried, the more the Governor used the concept in ways that inspired sundry suspicious [negative] interpretations.
Nobody in his government seemed to fancy the term but they would not even mention to their principal how bad they truly felt, mostly for fear of getting kicked out of the Nrashi hall. But these same people, in private would confide in you how disgusted they felt about the use and overuse of the word.
Even the most ardent supporters of the Governor’s brand of politics have struggled to forge an acceptably positive narrative in favour of Nrashi. In all the literature woven to explain and festoon the dialectics of Nrashi in resplendent colours, what was of note were the acknowledgment of even the writers themselves of how the concept had been misunderstood, misinterpreted and misapplied by the people.
One progovernment periodical, Accountability Watch, published by one of Governor Ugwuanyi’s closest allies, Onyekachi C. Ugwu, carried an article that was said to have been written by one Justice Chidi (people who work for the Governor use a lot of pen names and aliases names to publish their articles to give the impression of widespread third-party support) and it had this to say on Nrashi:
“The best and noblest ideas and intentions can acquire the repugnant trappings of negativity, courtesy of the narratives surrounding them. Often, such narratives feed from conjectures, dripping with the epistemic arrogance of disoriented characters, carelessly, lay claims to omniscience. NRASHI, a concept that owes its patent to the Ugwuanyi administration has been distorted, misrepresented and misinterpreted by some merchants of shallow intellect. Without recourse to the psychological context that gave birth to the concept, the fault-finding assessors of Ugwuanyi’s administration have reduced the noble philosophy to something akin to stomach infrastructure (apologies to Ayo Fayose). They clad the concept with derogatory gown of parochialism, squandermanianims and cluelessness. The above only points to access to syphilitic information with regard to the governing philosophy of the government of H.E. Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi; or a jaundiced, deliberate effort to misrepresent. However, in a loose sense, and within the contextual coordinates of the concept, it can best be captured as DIVIDENDS OF DEMOCRACY. The interpretational violence visited on the noble concept of NRASHI could be attributed to intellectual poverty. For instance, assessing the concept from the periphery, one can easily see that the tongue has been assigned a central mandate, since NRASHI involves licking [something]. This explains why the uncritical assessor, hastily, equates NRASHI with Stomach Infrastructure, given the fact that the tongue and the stomach are biological relatives.”
Beyond the invectives poured on those who criticised the Governor and his Nrashi political philosophy, the writer of this article added no iota of flesh to the gaunt, primitive concept that, for all the value-scaffoldings manufactured to prop it up, epitomised nothing but entitled favouritism and government-approved misallocation of resources to a privileged few on behalf of the rest. Once a person from your community was at the dining table, you should be belching, rather than yawning; the person at the table was eating on your behalf.
(Excerpts from Ikem Okuhu’s new book ‘Eighteen Months in Neverland: Chronicles of My Daze in Government’)
• Okuhu is a Journalist, Brand Expert, Author and former aide to Gov. Ugwuanyi of Enugu State.