Basi and Company was an entertaining comedy. Mr Basi, or Mr B as he was popularly known, had huge ambitions but couldn’t keep up with small things like rent and food. To the chagrin Madam, his landlady, Basi brought into his humble single room apartment his boisterous sidekick and partner in daydreaming called Alali. They were jobless but not idle. They had shallow schemes about becoming billionaires. They had mistaken their arrival in Lagos for relocation to paradise.
When they were not running away from Madam, their greedy, self-absorbed landlady, who believed that cash was the root of all triumphs, they peddled fake, ridiculous business proposals. So when others toiled, they wallowed in the delusion of becoming exceedingly rich and powerful. They seemed committed to defrauding the landlady whom they owed a mountain of debts and thought stingy.
Dandy ran a tired bar, and Johnbosco came around with his own variant of the get-rich-quick disease. Segi was young, beautiful vain, and serpentine too.
Basi and Company was produced in Enugu by Ken Sara Wiwa. Buni’s show is an Abuja production.
Buni and Company has been a truly comical political show. They have actually been extraordinary. An Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee that has spent two years doing other things and forgetting to think about a convention. The Buni and Company cast has many shallow schemers who, after a few weeks at the helm, began to craft devious hare-brained plans of becoming political gods. Access to the president was their juju. So they postponed the convention as Mr Basi postponed his due rents. They enticed the party faithful and the president with colourful defector-winning proposals as Mr B tried to confuse his landlady with many money-spinning scams.
Buni owed the party a convention. But Buni knew his monkey, and he kept it befuddled with bananas. Buni, like Basi, knew his principal had a hopeless appetite. Mr B knew “Madam the Madam” was all about cash and was open to all who were handsome and rich. So he fed her bogus business proposals. Alhaji Buni understood the intestines and heart of the APC, so his committee fed it political opportunism. With drips of defections as with drips of fake property deals in Basi and Company, the APC, like the greedy Madam, took its eyes off the ball, and Buni stayed on without meeting his primary obligations.
If Buni had stayed on to enjoy the perks of a convention committee with an extended life, it might have been bearably funny. But as the days passed, more rumours sprouted. Buni would saunter into Aso rock and saunter out triumphantly, while bemused observers shook their heads as convention dates were shifted the way street tailors shift dates.
The affliction that crippled Basi didn’t spare Buni and company. Basi wanted to become a billionaire from joblessness. Buni was already a governor. So the ambitions of Buni and company weren’t that otherworldly. However, moving from a mere convention planning committee chairman to becoming the Nwakaibeya of the APC was a spectacular trajectory. Even Alhaji Buni must have felt dizzy at the speed of his rise.
Buni and Company was supposed to last no more than 6 months. But two years after, ideas of immortality had crept in. If the party hadn’t prioritized vanity, it would have known that a properly elected national working committee would have won more members than a makeshift self-aggrandizing bunch.
Governor Akeredolu was acerbic. He described the Extraordinary Committee as black legs in the corridors of power supported by yahoo- yahoo governors. His description corroborated many allegations of widespread corruption made against the committee. I don’t think Buni and Company were black legs in the corridors of power as Mr B and Alali were black legs in Saro Wiwa’s Surulere. I don’t also think they were precisely a collection of brother Jeros. Buni is a good man. But power intoxicates. The other day alcohol took a sitting governor to national TV and made him an apprentice Clint Da Drunk.
In Basi and Company, Mr B and Alali’s plans to become overnight billionaires were matched by the buffoonish plans of the goggle-eyed, eternally bowler-hatted Dandy and his homeless homie, Johnbosco, to outdo them. Rivalry and Jealousy. In Buni and Company, the privilege of having the reins of the party and ears of Buhari possibly left folks delirious. Before long, cliques bloomed. Then internecine push and shove to out-manoeuvre themselves in deviousness ensued.
Buni has gone off the stage. The Buni and Company cast is perhaps resting. Basi and Company has been put to rest. Basi and Company was a perspicacious act. Because, soon after it died, full-blown 419 scams took over the country and made the once ridiculous proposals of Mr B look petty. Perhaps the political chicanery that Buni’s choreography espoused might blossom. We pray it doesn’t.
2023 is pregnant