“Those that don’t got it, can’t show it. Those that got it, can’t hide it.” –Zora Neale Hursston
By CHIDI OBINECHE
He comes as hard as he looks. When he talks on a hate- subject, deep furrows form on his foreface. As a non- career Comptroller- General of the Nigeria Customs Service, Col Hameed Ali Retd has stoked more fire, raked in more mud than the messianic assignment he was given. Brushing aside all known rules of the service with its internal and external publics, he stirs with the sleight of the dragon about to devour the sheep. He stalks with the condescending arrogance and disdainful devil- may- care attitude of a boy whose father has sent on a stealing mission. To boot, the errand boy would rather smash the door than engage in hideous explorative niceties to gain entry.
Hanging on a hemlock of receding extant rules, Ali has courted firestorms, engaging everyone in a frenetic battle. More deaths have been recorded in all time in his battle with smugglers. Yet, the monster roars with even more combustible energy. And that is just the red – herring, the wagging tail of the tale. His men brusquely invade homes and shops in the chilly dead of the night to cart away bags of rice, flagrantly let in by own corrupt officers at the border. The nation has since turned to a cesspit of Customs menace; with checkpoints littered all over and uppity patrols in ugly eyeful. The service has come round like the proverbial Jealousy, which like the dragon slays love rather than keeping it alive. Like most Nigerian institutions, he is enmeshed in the old ways of doing things; redressing some with nothing new, effectual or cerebral in his outbox to combat the intractable ogre of smuggling.
And then, the full circle. In time and space, the regalia, complete with epaulettes are known trademarks of officers of uniformed services, except spy or intelligence corps. It is the pride of any Force or Service. Some even keep variegated forms for different occasions. Others take them home as keepsake after retirement. The anecdote is in a man who loves his job but is not proud of it. A man who despises the rat meat but relishes the sauce; a man who would eat the yolk of the egg but recoils at the sight of the albumen. And therein lies the difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter- an act. It is even more vividly captured in A. W Tozer’s The Pursuit of God, which says that “ The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and pretense.” The daring comptroller general in the miasma of indiscretion forgets that when you wear a mask for too long, you forget who you were beneath it. In his pride and prejudice, he claws at agnosticism, he bares the fangs of scopes- trial, he enjoys the perfect idiocy of pretence, of the stubborn child, ordaining himself the enemy of the people, flattering his soul as the ultimate umpire of form upon soul. He is evidently purchased by the weight; and those snaky golden locks which make such wanton gambols with the wind.
In his strides, one gleans in the words of Dejan Stojanovic that “ pretence cannot sustain blind power.” And to the subsisting laws that govern the obnoxious Customs policies and vile raids, if you weren’t born with anti- social passions – narcissism, meanness, greed, hunger for power, why the need for untoward conduct? Ali is over the top forging unexplained fury. After all, you may be pretty and talented, but nobody will remember that, if you are mean. As the Cubans would say ; “listening looks easy, but it’s not easy. Every head is a world.”
Born on January 15, 1955, he was appointed to the position by President Muhammadu Buhari on August 27, 2015. A retired Colonel of the Nigerian Army; he was the military administrator of Kaduna State from August 22 1996 to August 1998 during the military regime of the late Gen Sani Abacha. He is married to one wife and has four children. As governor, he was said to have sacked about 30,000 striking civil servants in Kaduna state and detained 18 local government chairmen. A journalist who reported on the sackings was allegedly arrested, severely beaten, then taken to the Government House and further tortured. The story published in the defunct Tempo magazine with the caption “Goodbye Justice” was later discredited and proven to be false. After retirement, he became the secretary general of Arewa Consultative Forum, a northern socio- political group.