By BASIL OKOH
I think of Godswill Akpabio today and I remember another Senate president of a previous putrescent era, Joseph Wayas. Joseph Wayas was the senate president under the Shehu Shagari presidency 1979-1983.
Joseph Wayas was a native of Obudu in the old Cross Rivers State which included at the time, the present Akwa Ibom State, where Godswill Akpabio the reigning Senate president comes from.
Godswill Akpabio has been governor of Akwa Ibom State and the EFCC has been chasing him for missing billions of naira from his state coffers. He was also a Minister of the Ministry of the Niger Delta Affairs, where so much gore was exposed first for groping the dainty chief executive officer and also for the theft of billions of naira.
In 2023, Akpabio enrolled for the APC presidential primary to contest for the presidency of Nigeria. He was cut to size in that primary election and rudely brought back to his senses. He did not have enough dollars to buy the smallest portion of the primary electors as others did and he shamefully ran back to his state capital Uyo, where without contesting any primary election, he commandeered the ticket and gifted himself a Senate seat. The Supreme Court affirmed the heist just to confirm that the primaries was no better than a small town bazaar. Comparing Akpabio to Joseph Wayas would therefore be grossly unfair. Akpabio is a hillbilly while Wayas was truly a cosmopolitan playboy.
Joseph Wayas was a well bred and well groomed gentleman who always turned out in the best suits and gabardine dresses. Joseph Wayas was also well spoken, with fine words for everyone and an endless stream of humour even during sessions in the Senate.
Joseph Wayas didn’t like me, a young snoopy, correspondent of a leftist newspaper, at the time. He berated me one day: “why are you always looking for and writing about skeletons and bones in dark places when every other journalist is joining us to eat the flesh. You must be a spirit, always looking for things that are hidden”. When I reminded the distinguished senate president that spirits don’t eat, and that my job category was investigative journalism, he asked Jide, my old school mate and friend who was his aide and who arranged the meeting, to ask me out of his office for being rude. I complied, only for him to call me back and we ended up having a rollicking exclusive interview.
Joe Wayas had the special knack for looking after his people of the Cross River. He uprooted the very talented Ray Ekpu from Calabar to be editor of Sunday Times. Ray was hundred times a better writer in Calabar than he could ever be at “The Sunday Times”, even though he raised circulation from less than a hundred thousand to a million copies at a point.
And Joseph Wayas did “eat” flesh. He hounded many girls in the then NTA and recruited entertainers from across institutions in the country. And not just educational institutions. He had an eye for beautiful women of every description. He didn’t recruit them for just the bedroom, even though he didn’t mind if it happened on the couch or in the garden. He loved fine dining, particularly with his friends at the exclusive Quo Vadis restaurant in Lagos, accompanied by beautifully coiffured women. He wanted beautiful women around him always. And he also made sure they left with his signature tunes and tons of money, Nigeria’s money. But all that passed away with the Senate in 1983. Joe Wayas was never heard of after the Shagari government.
We now have another Senate president from the same “hospitality industry” zone of the South-South. Godswill Akpabio is an Annang man from Akwa Ibom state and he has done well to electrify the road from Ikot Ekpene to his village. For these people, the bedroom must by design be the most active place in the home; sweat, hard work, day and night.
As a Youth Corper with the Nigerian Chronicle newspaper in Calabar those days, I met a staff in the features department where I was tethered for primary assignment. Idiong was asleep almost the entire day at work. We went out for lunch one day at the canteen and got talking. He confided that he had few hours to sleep most nights. Most nights, he had to make the run eleven times with the wife. Sometimes more and sometimes less but he thinks the average number was ten rounds a night. I hollered in the canteen. “You kill yourself every night just to impress a woman? He swore it is his duty.
I think Godswill Akpabio shares the same problem with Idiong, my friend at The Chronicle. He is required by the gods of Annang land to lay ten women every day, or else. And because he is a man of stolen means and prominence, he has to do it with different girls and women who hanker after his loot. The gods have made him a stud with stolen state funds and he will continue even while gasping for breath.
Like Jo Wayas before him, Akpabio is having the time of his life. So no one should try and stop him. The gods of his land demand a lot of activity in his bedroom as his atonement for keeping him on the Senate president’s seat. Their goodwill is what is keeping him on that much coveted seat. Every description of woman; tall, short, big breasted, small breasted, white, black, not so black and not so white, gazelle face, barracuda face, pouted lips, big ass, small chiseled ass, all of them must line up for Akpabio. You don’t get to be a senate president with billions of money to throw around and not have every specimen of Eve running after you in a hungry Nigeria. As Ukpabi Asika once said, “onye ube lu li, ya lacha” (The man whose pear is ripe should be allowed to lick in peace) Empty treasuries can always wait to be filled back again. There’s always a next budget. So let Akpabio lick his pears and other things.
Every Nigerian government looter thinks Christmases last everyday forever. Until another regime dawns. We always have endless supply of inventive looters. The only problem is that there are never any women around when the looter sings his nunc dimittis. We never get to hear of the women when looters are forced out of public office.
Joseph Wayas was left lonely on his hospital bed in London for a long time until he died. For many years he was going from one federal Ministry to another offering “more blessings” and asking for favours to survive for the day. He’s dead now but there’s no one and no money to bring his miserable cadaver back home for burial in Obudu. He lived above his means and has died above his means. I give no thanks to the loudmouth Oscar Wilde who made up the phrase on his own death bed. He was the stormy petrel of the English public life of the Victorian era.
For a long time before his death, Joseph Wayas was a lonely man, unheralded by anybody, not even by any of the many women he had for “dinner”. Many of them, old now, are still living in the houses built with the proceeds from the tryst they had with Jo Wayas. But Jo Wayas is gone now and no woman remembers the good times he gave her.
Men always think that they leave great impressions with women after a night of intensive romp. But it’s all in the line of business for the woman and always a good time while it lasts. Women are forever looking for new and better romps and free money. And you, man, is past tense. Akpabio will soon be past tense. If you don’t know, the women know. No penis leaves a lasting impression on a vagina. And no one man can exhaust the resources of a vagina. You may not know it but your sweet mother sure knows it. You will do well to ask her.
@basilokoh.
•Editor’s note: Joseph Wayas died in December 2021, his remains flown back to Nigeria on July 10 2024.
