I cooked this piece’s title from Alice Urquhart Fewell’s ‘Soups for the Sick’ published in 1920. I went for it after I found William Bascom’s ‘Yoruba Cooking’ (1951) very inadequate for my lessons on what has been happening in the kitchen of Nigeria since the current chef took over.
President Bola Tinubu met the 36 states broke, sick and malnourished. He thought of what to do. His diviners whispered the solution in his ear. They took him into the kitchen and showed him how it is done. And he did just as he was told. One dollar that gave Muhammadu Buhari N470 started giving him N1,500. Like Orunmila who rejoiced and danced after achieving a major spiritual breakthrough, Tinubu went back to his diviners; he ‘praised his priests and his priests praised Olodumare.’ What was not enough now abounds in excess.
One day in February 2025, Tinubu told his APC state governors to their faces that monthly allocations to their states had tripled under the watch of his wizard: ‘If you were getting N40 billion before, you’re now getting N120 billion.’ February 2025 was not the first time the President would count increased FAAC money as a product of his genius. He and his government have repeatedly driven that nail into the vulnerable heads of the governors. In July this year, he told some obas from Oyo State that ‘states are taking four to five times more money than in the past.’ He took the credit for that, describing the billions as ‘the money I am pushing to the states’. That is very true. But truth sometimes has adjectives.
Alice Urquhart Fewell’s ‘Soups for the Sick’ is a century-old five-page recipe for feeding the infirm: plenty of water, a little meat and bone, then hours of simmering to extract whatever nourishment is left. That appears to be the manual our chef read backwards. The man poured a bucket of water into the family pot of soup. Now the pot is full and everyone has something to lick and drink. But has anyone been better fed?
Who would tell the chef that what he cooked was a pot of conflict between nominal abundance and real nourishment? Could that be why he repeatedly supplements his own 52.68 percent share with borrowing and more borrowing? Drum makers grapple with exactly that problem when the hide is not enough to cover the face of the talking drum. You may stretch the hide, but stretching does not create more leather; it only makes what you have thinner and more vulnerable to rupture.
If you are a Tinubu person and you insist that volume is nourishment, maybe you should read Franz Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’ (1922); you may also go a little further back and read Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel ‘Hunger’. Check their protagonists and their encounters with water.
What is the way out? Nigeria’s problem is not the quantity of the medicine but the appropriateness of the prescription. Someone should tell the self-adulatory to stop beating his chest of bare bones. The right diagnosis should prescribe the right medicine. If we do it the way it should be done, it will turn out the way it should. The way we pound boiled yam is not the way we pound dried yam: pounded yam binds into a cohesive mass; dried yam crumbles into powder (Ìgún iyán kò j? ti èlùb?´; mímú ni iyán n mú, kíkù ni èlùb?´ n kù). Wrong diagnosis and wrong medication are tickets to the theatre of death. Someone should tell the president that his medicines are complications for the sick. The casualties are all over the country.
When you have an almost empty pot of soup and you think the only way to make it go round a hungry household is to pour a bucket of water into it, what you produce is not more soup but more water and a household condemned to perpetual hunger and malnutrition. That is a fitting metaphor for Nigeria’s watery billions.