Work in Progress: To Love a Woman By Sunny Jack Obande

Sunny Jack Obande

Wilfred was indeed surprised when he got home at few minutes to six that evening and met Rita’s absence. It was unlike her; she usually arrived home before him especially since her office closes at 4pm, an hour earlier than his does. In addition, on the occasions that she opted to stop over either at her hairdresser’s place or to pick a few confectioneries from the stores, she’d always put a call through to intimate him of her movements.

At first, Wilfred figured she might possibly have taken a stroll to the mall in the neighborhood to get one household item or the other. This thought was reinforced when he remembered she had complained days earlier on the need to restock the condiment in their food store, as they were already low on supplies. 

He thought to himself that the quarrel they had the previous night might be the reason she had refused to call him. He picked his mobile phone to dial her number to know where she was, but sheer pride got the better of him and he quickly changed his mind. 

After a brief consideration, he reckoned that he should not be the first to break this particular deadlock. Rita had really disrespected him by daring to open her mouth and called his actions childish. She should learn to apologize anytime she misbehaved or said something wrong. 

With these thoughts, running through his mind and giving him a feel-good air of vindication, Wilfred decided to attend to his plants in the small garden at his backyard while he awaited her return. He loved to spend time with these plants whenever he was less busy. To him, gardening was a form of leisure that should be cherished. Moreover, his plants were flourishing thanks to the packet of specially formulated fertilizer that Mr. Wang had brought to him as a gift from China.

Mr. Wang was one of the foreign experts engaged by NIGCOMSAT to oversee the company’s other ground control base station located in faraway China. He had gradually taken a liking to Wilfred in the course of his repeated consultative visits to the Nigerian office and had promised to bring him this special fertilizer on his next visit after learning that Wilfred loved gardening. 

The Chinese man had eventually delivered on the promise and even gone ahead to demonstrate to Wilfred, in faltering English, how to sprinkle the fertilizer uniformly around the mulch soil of each plant after which he should endeavor to irrigate immediately.

“Do...every two weeks... for good plants... grow... fast,” Mr. Wang had gesticulated to him in his funny English, smiling proudly to show off badly stained teeth. He was a gangly man with smouldering cigarette sticks eternally hanging from the side of his mouth.

Wilfred had done as he was taught by Mr. Wang and his garden had assumed a new healthier look since after, the tomatoes and peppers especially. Presently he even noticed more fresh fruits have sprouted that were not there the last time he was here to tend the garden. He fixed the long hosepipe to the tap head beneath the kitchen’s window and proceeded to water his plants and do some pruning. 

He was still preoccupied with tending to the garden when, from over the walls separating them and their neighbors, Bruno, the neighbor's dog began to bark and trash excitedly around in his cage on sensing his owners presence at the front gate. 

Few minutes later and Wilfred could hear the gate being unlocked and the neighbor’s car driven into their house. He heard the car’s doors being opened and closed, followed immediately by the children’s chattering as they ran into the house. 
He checked his watch. It was a couple of minutes to 8 o’clock and Rita had not returned. What could be keeping her? A sudden thought crossed his mind and he became a bit worried. Could it be that she had seized on the opportunity that they were having a little misunderstanding to visit any of those her anonymous male admirers? Wilfred pictured his Rita sitting on the laps of a stranger and felt blood rushed to his face. He imagined Rita smiling willingly as this imagined stranger whispered lewd words to her. He pictured the stranger’s hands fondling delicate parts on his Rita’s soft skin and he involuntarily clenched his fist so tight it began to hurt.

Without a second thought, he fished the mobile phone from his pocket and dialed her number with shaky hands. “Where are you right now?” he almost screamed immediately she picked the call.

“Please come and open the gate for me,” Rita replied from the other end. She was already in front of the house.

Only then did Wilfred realize his heart was already pounding so fast as though wanting to burst out of his rib cage. He heaved a controlled sigh and tried to steady his breathing as he hurried round the building and made for the front gate.

“I’m very sorry I stayed out this late,” Rita began to apologize as Wilfred opened the gate for her to come in, “I couldn’t get a cab coming this way on time-”

“Where are you coming from?” Wilfred queried with a glare.

“I followed Buki home from the office.”

“When did you start following Buki home from the office?”

“You are raising your voice, Baby,” she tried to caution him.

“What if I raise my voice? Do you realize it’s almost 8 o’clock?”

“Please, can we go inside?” Rita begged and tried to touch him on the shoulder, “I will explain.” 

Nevertheless, Wilfred rebuffed her gesture angrily.

How Political Power Damages the Brain—and How to Reverse it

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

I was one of seven professors who facilitated a leadership training in my university here in Georgia for local government chairmen from a major Nigerian southwestern state. In the course of the training, I adverted to a January 13, 2018 column I wrote about how power literally damages the brains of people who wield it and causes them to be dissociated from reality.

A few of the chairmen at the training initially said they “rejected” what I said “in Jesus’ name.” But the more I expounded the research on the psychology of power, the less resistant they became. In the light of the interest it excited among these local power wielders, I thought I’d share a revised version of the column for the benefit of other people in power.

 

On Nov. 20, 2014, Buhari, Amaechi, Oyegun and other APC honchos protested in Abuja against the increased insecurity and killings in the country. Insecurity and killings are worse on their watch than at any time in peacetime Nigeria.

Almost everyone I know wonders why people in power change radically; why they become so utterly disconnected from reality that they suddenly become completely unrecognizable to people who knew them before they got to power; why they get puffed-up, susceptible to flattery, and intolerant of even the mildest, best-intentioned censure; why they appear possessed by inexplicably malignant forces; and why they are notoriously insensitive and self-absorbed. 

Everyone who has ever had a friend in a position of power, especially political power, can attest to the accuracy of the age-old truism that a friend in power is a lost friend. Of course, there are exceptions, but it is precisely the fact of the existence of exceptions that makes this reality poignant. As the saying goes, “the exception proves the rule.”

Abraham Lincoln once said, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Look at all the power brokers in Nigeria—from the president to your ward councilor—and you’ll discover that there is a vast disconnect between who they were before they got to power and who they are now.

Also look at previously arrogant, narcissistic, power-drunk prigs who have been kicked out of the orbit of power for any number of reasons. You’ll discover that they are suddenly normal again. They share our pains, make pious noises, condemn abuse of power, and identify with popular causes. The legendary amnesia of Nigerians causes the past misdeeds of these previous monsters of power to be explained away, lessened, forgiven, and ultimately forgotten. But when they get back to power again, they become the same insensitive beasts of power that they once were.

So what is it about power that makes people such obtuse, self-centered snobs? It turns out that psychologists have been grappling with this puzzle for years and have a clue. Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California Berkeley, extensively studied the brains of people in power and found that people under the influence of power are neurologically similar to people who suffer traumatic brain injury.

According to the July/August 2017 issue of the Atlantic magazine, people who are victims of traumatic brain injury are “more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.” In other words, like victims of traumatic brain injury, power causes people to lose their capacity for empathy. This is a surprising scientific corroboration of American historian Henry Adams’ popular wisecrack about how power is “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.”

The findings of Sukhvinder Obhi, a professor of neuroscience at McMaster University, in Ontario, Canada, are even more revealing. Obhi also studies the workings of the human brain. “And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, ‘mirroring,’ that may be a cornerstone of empathy,” the Atlantic reports. “Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the ‘power paradox’: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.”

Take Buhari, for example. Before 2015, he was—or at least appeared to be—empathetic. He supported subsidies for the poor, railed against waste, thought Nigerians deserved to buy petrol at a low price because Nigerian oil was “developed with Nigerian capital,” and so on. He even said foreign medical treatment for elected government officials was immoral and indefensible, and wondered why a Nigerian president would need a fleet of aircraft when even the British Prime Minister didn’t have any.

Nothing but power-induced brain damage, which activates narcissism and loss of empathy, can explain Buhari’s dramatic volte-face now that he’s in power. This fact, psychological researchers say, is worsened by the fact that subordinates tend to flatter people in power, mimic their ways in order to ingratiate themselves with them, and shield them from realities that might cause them psychic discomfort.

“But more important, Keltner says, is the fact that the powerful stop mimicking others,” theAtlantic reports. “Laughing when others laugh or tensing when others tense does more than ingratiate. It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from. Powerful people ‘stop simulating the experience of others,’ Keltner says, which leads to what he calls an ‘empathy deficit.’”

Researchers also found out that excessive praise from subordinates, sycophantic drooling from people seeking favors, control over vast resources they once didn’t have, and all of the staid rituals and performances of power conspire to cause “functional” changes to the brains of people in power. On a social level, it also creates what Lord David Owen, a British neurologist-turned-politician, called the “hubris syndrome” in his 2008 book titled In Sickness and in Power.

Some features of hubris syndrome, Owen points out, are, “manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence.” Sounds familiar? You can’t observe Buhari’s governance—or, more correctly, ungovernance—in the last four years and fail to see these features in him.

But it’s not all gloom and doom. Powerful people can, and indeed do, extricate themselves from the psychological snares of power if they so desire. Professor Keltner said one of the most effective psychological strategies for people in power to reconnect with reality and reverse the brain damage of power is to periodically remember moments of powerlessness in their lives—such as when they were victims natural disasters, accidents, poverty, etc.

They should also have what American journalist Louis McHenry Howe once called a “toe holder,” that is, someone who doesn’t fear them, expects no favors from them, and can tell them uncomfortable truths without fear of consequences.

Winston Churchill’s toe holder was his wife, who once wrote a letter to him that read, in part, “I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be.” Was Aisha Buhari performing the role of a toe holder when she publicly upbraided her husband in the past? I doubt it.

Her disagreements with her husband are often opportunistic and self-serving. They are triggered only when her husband’s puppeteers in Aso Rock limit her powers to nominate her cronies for political positions and to dispense favors to friends and family.

Another potent way to reverse power-induced brain damage is to periodically get out of the protected silos of power and solitarily observe the quotidian interactions of everyday folks—their humor, laughter, fights, etc. — without the familiar add-ons of power, such as aides, cameras, security, etc. This helps to stimulate the experiences of others and restore empathy.

This is particularly important in Nigeria because power, at all levels, is almost absolute and unaccountable.