Obasa: Lagos na wa!, By Festus Adedayo

Lagos State and the drama of its embattled lawmaker and ex-Speaker of its parliament, Mudashiru Obasa, appropriately answer to an idiom in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Insatiably curious about the mysteries of Wonderland, Alice had used the word, “Curiouser and curiouser” to express the mysteries of how she shrinks after drinking a potion. When Obasa emerged on Saturday to claim that he remained the Speaker of the parliament, Alice’s wonder at the mysteries of Wonderland became a fitting description of the theatre of the absurd that Lagos politics is.

Before now, everything that emanated from the January 13 impeachment of Obasa was wrapped in rumours. Persuaded that evil and good exist contemporaneously, Yoruba say Ìbí nbè nínú ire, ire nbè nínú ìbí . This was what Ray Laurence of the Macquarie University set out to theorise in his paper, ‘Rumour and communication in Roman politics’. Tracing…