…if we carefully rummage through the lurid, the grotesque, the salacious stories of their Sex-cellencies – even at state levels with the governors – we may find anchors to how power politics in Nigeria and Africa can be explained through sex. That was also the view of Zimbabwean journalist and blogger, Fungai Machirori. According to her, we may need to study the sexual histories of our men in power. This is because, from the rhythm of the silent but jangling bells of their dangling penises, a silent compass to their politics may just as well be hiding.
Did you listen to last week’s broadside from Senate President Godswill Akpabio against former Edo State governor, Senator Adams Oshiomhole? If you did, you must have caught a glimpse of how sex threatens the Nigerian state. Historically, libido has always been a threat to governance. Psychoanalyst Robert Michels summarised this Freudian reality cleanly: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” To him, life is driven by sex, and sex itself is an expression of power and aggression. Often misattributed to Oscar Wilde — likely due to the Irish poet’s own fatal fall from artistic glory via a rascally libido — history teaches that even among the powerful, libido is king. In recent Nigerian power narratives, Akpabio and Oshiomhole feature prominently, perfectly approximating the power of the libido.
