'Why Chuka Umunna will neither become Labour Party Leader nor British Prime Minister.'

If time had permitted, I would have dashed off - typed, really - a short piece entitled 'Why Umunna will neither become Labour Party Leader nor British Prime Minister.' This would not only have been prescient, it would also have come across to some as cynical, if not 'un-Nigerian.' 'Un-Nigerian' because last year, a prominent Nigerian newspaper had misreported that Umunna might become British Prime Minister this year. I made a brief comment under the link: well-meaning or not, this was a lazy, if not idiotic, piece of misinformation. Chuka Umunna was a member of the opposition party and however high-ranked he was he could not become British Prime Minister this year for the simple reason that he was not the leader of his party. As it turned out, even the leader of the party, Ed Miliband, did not become Prime Minister; he had to resign after the last election, trounced and bruised.
But I know why the false prognosis that Chuka Umunna would become prime minister was made. Like three other MPs in the British Parliament, he had a Nigerian parent - his father. Perhaps owing to a misplaced sense of ownership, Nigeria (personified) has always had this vain and prideful quirk of claiming someone born and raised in Europe or North America and has made good as its own. This is all very well. But that this attitude may be carried too far, as with the mendacious newspaper report. And certainly, some of these Nigerian ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’ abroad do not shy away from their Nigerian connections. Tinie Tempah, aka Chukwuemeka Okogwu, declared during a cookery programme that he likes jollof rice; Jimmy Akingbola likes dodo; David Oyelowo can do the Yoruba accent to 'gbam;' Chiweitel Ejiofor sees his participation in ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ as homecoming.
And politician Chuka Umunna, Tempah's friend, isn't embarrassed by his Nigerian side, either. But that is where it all ends. These guys - or blokes - are British. Though they likely carry both Nigerian and British passports, I'll leave which of the two takes precedence over the other open. But before I go back to Umunna, I'll again detour. Idris Elba has Sierra Leonean and Ghanaian parents, so he is as African as Akingbola or Ejiofor, but in so far as he fits the bill for the 21st century James Bond better, his name has come up many times as a potential 007. Reactions in Britain have been muted and British - that is ironically demure. But the American radio rant artist and right-wing jerk Rush Limbaugh went to town on Elba; he argued that the Brit could not be James Bond because he was black - Bond must be white, eternally, essentially, white. It is easy for 'liberals' like me to dismiss Limbaugh as a Tea Party loony, but you may not be surprised to learn that what Limbaugh voiced out chimed with what many others did not, both in America and here. But then, despite Limbaugh and his fellow travellers, Elba, or some other black 'dude,' can be James Bond. Just as Obama could be - and became - American president despite Rush and the likes of him.
Of course, Rush Limbaugh would foam at the mouth and rave about Chuka Umunna not looking like the textbook British Prime Minister - as if it should matter to him what a British PM should look like. A radio presenter here fancies himself as the British Limbaugh, tubbiness and all, but he is a watered-down, shock-lite version of the American. His views about Umunna weren't overly poisonous – scabrously sour, certainly. Even the Daily Mail, an old-guard British rag and its proudly politically incorrect readers, commentariat and army of often spiteful commenters only used the feint of their overt support for the other main political party to lay into Umunna after he declared that he was going to stand for Labour party leader. He was derided for being a ‘champagne socialist,’ slated for being a jumped-up urbanite, lampooned for describing himself as 'British Obama,' accused without solid proof that he edited his Wikipedia page to reflect this, which was a subtle way of dismissing Umunna as a dreamer, a faux-Obama, a black Walter Mitty. There was considerable ethnic-baiting, too: in other words, Umunna had come in for Obama-Osama-type slurs, particularly with his first name, Chuka. Barbarisations like Chukka, Chuggy, and Chucky flew around, and there was the odd Chaka-Chaka Umunna and Chuka Lumumba. And it did not help that the young man showboated his new girlfriend a couple of days before he put himself forward as a prospective Labour Party leader, a girlfriend who, contra-Obama, happened to be white. There is no accounting for love or with whom one falls in love, but is it a coincidence that most black British men who belong, or aspire to belong, in the top drawer often parade svelte white women as significant others. I wasn't surprised to see Umunna stepping out with his, well, semi-svelte girlfriend (and there is no overlooking the fact that he is half-white, anyway). When someone called in during a radio show that being mixed-race might negatively affect Umunna's chances of becoming Labour leader and prime minister, the presenter disagreed. Britain is now the avatar of a post-racial society, he affirmed. Is it, I asked myself? Even though  Britain is not America and that ‘minorities’ constitute between 10 and 14 per cent of the British society (of which Africans and Afro-Caribbean are only 3.5 per cent), I still wanted to believe the presenter’s assertion, but all I could do was to leave it open-ended.
Then, suddenly, Chuka dropped out of the race last week or ‘chucked in the towel’ as a newspaper reported. I was as surprised as many, even the Daily Mail reader who had wryly suggested that Umunna should wait for scores of years before declaring that he wanted to be Britain’s prime minister would be surprised. The only reason Umunna gave was that he could no longer take the pressure of media ‘scrutiny’ - of his life and those of his loved ones. This is all very well, although the commonsensical question as to why Umunna should expect anything but scrutiny has come up a number of times. But this is the least uncharitable of the responses. The muck-raking is still ongoing in the right-wing press. What skeleton has he got in his closet? Speaking of 'closet,' there have been vague and rather specious speculations that  ‘metrosexual’ Umunna may be gay, which, of course, would not really have mattered had he not been escorted by a woman, with the implication that he was dissimulating. There has also been speculation that Umunna was embarrassed by his own image, his oft-reported slickness, dapperness, and the fact that he belongs to a London exclusive club that flaunts its decadence and opulence. There have also been reports that both Umunna and his mother have profited from the proceeds of tax avoidance - which is not illegal but a rather morally wretched thing to do. In the more shit-stirring newspapers, there is a tenor of reportage which depicts Umunna as all facade and that if the surface is scratched, the real Umunna will be teased out, scrofulous and rotten. Ultimately, only Umunna and those close to him know why he left the race, but it might just as well be that he could not muster up enough Labour MPs to support his bid. Aspirants need 34 members of parliament to gain candidacy. Anyway, Umunna is out and I hope I won’t be reading it in a Nigerian newspaper in the next four years that he is set to become prime minister in 2020 after Cameron.

And why did I come to the conclusion that he could not have become Labour Party leader, let alone prime minister? I can’t say with any certainty. His relatively young age of 36 and experiential brevity as a parliamentarian, which, of course, had raised a few eyebrows? However, Conservative Prime Minister Cameron became the leader of his party at 39, and few suffered conniptions on account of his age. Umunna's colour - mixed-race? Just like Obama, he is taxonomically and sociologically ‘black.’ Is Britain ready for a black prime minister? Well, enough Britishness has seeped into me to make me baulk at giving a negative answer to that question. For now, the Great Black Hope has retreated behind the barricades.                

The 'God Factor.'

Olusegun Obasanjo, former Nigerian president, reveals in his overly God-slathered book, My Watch, that the grounds of Aso Rock where Nigeria's presidential residence is situated, have all of four mosques and two churchlets, otherwise called chapels. It was one churchlet to four mosques but when Obasanjo got there, like a kind of retro-Levite, he said to himself: 'In the name of the Lord we Christians will not be outmatched here.' So, he built yet another Christian praying house. After Obasanjo, the state house has been tenanted by two presidents. The Muslim Yar Adua may have added yet another mosque before he died, and the ever-kneeling, equally God-proud Goodluck Jonathan may have tried to raise the tally of churchlets in the state house. Even if the statistic remains the four mosques and churchlets that Obasanjo left, six places of religious worship in the abode of the Nigerian president are still alarming. What is the point of four mosques and two chuchlets on the grounds of the so-called villa?

Constitutionally speaking, Nigeria is a secular country, and there shouldn't be any monument to religion in the president's estate or, if any, there should be balance. Or, if for the convenience of the distinguished tenured guest of that rarefied space, a church and a mosque were built - six of one and half a dozen of the other, if you ask me - then there should also be shrines to Ogun, Amadioha, Olokun and the thousands of deities that populate Nigeria's ethnic enclaves. After all, Obasanjo, who now struts around as a born-again Christian, was a self-proclaimed 'traditionalist' in his first coming as head of state; he even advocated the use of juju and voodoo as the sole armament against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Doesn't this again show how Africa has lost its way - honeycombing the so-called presidential villa and its surround with 6 sancta of foreign religions in one of the most important countries on the continent?

I am irreligious in every sense of the word, so I do not have any time for 'African religions' either; their shrines or altars should also not have any place in the government house. Okay, maybe a fire-belching, hawk-eyed head of Sango installed in a shrine would be better than the hypocrisy and the cultural mimicry inherent in building churchlets and mosques. If the presidents are superstitious enough to believe in a foreign god and build many shrines to it (taking cognisance of the fact that Allah and Yahweh are indeed Tweedledee and Tweedledum), it might not be beyond them to impute the powers of a purveyor of 'retributive justice' and sulphurous punishment to Sango like Obasanjo once did.
One has to read Obasanjo's book to know how fixated he is with what he describes as the G-factor or God factor: parrotlike he repeats God, sings God, snorts God, burps God, spews God, bloviates God, spits God, farts God, he blusters and bullshits with God, the portly former president of Nigeria sweats God from every pore of his Sir Toby Belch-like frame. The word 'God' is repeated in the book several hundred times, so much so that what Obasanjo calls the God factor I'd call 'God complex,' a kind of Freudian-Oedipal over-attachment to his 'heavenly father'. The project of making Mr Adeboye the Billy Graham of the Nigerian polity began with Obasanjo and peaked with lame-duck Mr Goodluck Jonathan, who used every opportunity during his presidency to kneel before the all but pontificated pastor, seeking some kind of benediction or 'favour.'
Now, I don't have any problem with anyone following whatever religion they like or namechecking God as many times as they want. I could easily stop and get on with something else if I felt too irritated by Obasanjo's life story. But I had to keep on plodding through the man's 1,000-page ego-trip out of curiosity and because of what I had gleaned from a couple of his earlier books: an attempt to reconfigure Nigerian history not only from his sometimes insightful perspective but also in his own self-adulatory image - although by all appearances this last tome may have been ghosted by any number of hacks. 
As I pointed out above, the presidents are only tenant-occupiers of the state house, and I think there is a certain satire, if not an absurdity, to the way the men are ingathering mosques and churchlets in (and around) their taxpayer-supported grace-and-favour residence. Beyond satire, it is simply lamentable. All right, there are worse ways to squander Nigeria's money than scattering religious follies around the presidential compound, but this is still evidence of the lack of accountability and the civic irresponsibility which drives decision-making in that country. In a saner secular state, building a single place of religious worship would call for debate, consensus and compromise. Niceties like the separation of religion and state have no place in a superstition-laden society like Nigeria. But this bombastic business of interplanting mosques and churchlets in every free soil of Aso Rock is very much symptomatic of the 'belief' and 'faith' meme which has eaten into the very core of our being. I shouldn't be surprised that Aso Rock boasts six Abrahamic temples, or even sixty; this is a reflection of how the whole society has tatted itself up in pious vestments; it is indicative of the collective religiose monomania that has taken root in the country. Would I be miffed if I heard that the president's living quarters had all of six libraries and/or reading-cum-quiet rooms? Yes, as I might argue, that six were too many - more so with the likelihood that they were underused. Even then, I would still feel better that the rooms and spaces were devoted to something more worthwhile than being shrines to the 'invisible man' whose more thoughtful worshippers now argue might not be resident in the sky after all but might be some kind of 'spirit' or 'presence' or whatever.