Once upon a midday gloom in Nunyãdume — the land where proverbs are laws unwritten, and drums echo truths no one dares speak aloud, a strange affliction has seized the Elephant Clan. The New Ones, bred with patriotism, sons of Everlasting Life (Daa Nkwa) and Best University Student In Africa (BUSIA), stood rudderless. Their slogan was “Service, not Self,” their anthem — “Breaking the 8.” Once carved by sages and oiled with ancestral truth, the sacred drum now throbbed off-beat. The gods did not answer. The people did not dance.
The elders of the Daa Nkwa Clan gathered under the Baobab of Diagnosis. “This is no seasonal flu,” they said, “but a full-blown Leadership Crisis Syndrome.” The symptoms were unmistakable: moral fever, grassroots paralysis, intellectual vertigo at the top, night sweats of breakaway movements like the ButterPhant and the New Front, and whisperings of rebellion.
When King Akpefu-Adu lost the golden stool, the family constitution passed the staff of leadership to the National Chairman — a man noble in heart but weary in health. Yet, unlike the days when an MP from the Rooster Clan could transmogrify into their clan rose to hold the fort, the Vice-Chair now looked like a misplaced stethoscope in a shrine — present but unable to detect any heartbeat of unity, or rather, lacks the intellectual rigor to detect any heartbeat at all.
They tried traditional herbs: thank-you tours, cleansing ceremonies, and royal declarations. But soon they abandoned even those rituals. The party’s body convulsed with confusion. The grassroots grew numb. Even the elite, once cloaked in certainty and swinging thuribles of Kenkey party incense, now whispered in cloisters not of piety, but panic: “Is there no balm left in Nunyãdume? Is there no physician among us?”
A question not meant for the gods, but Jeremiah. For the wounds of the Elephant were grievous, festering with hubris, betrayal, and silence — and no healer came forth, only the high priest of fiscal prophecy, once clad in white raiment and soft-spoken parables, and perfumed excuses for Kwesi Peter, aka Special Prosecutor.
Then came the strangest cure of all — an election scheduled for January 2026, a full 35 moons ahead of the next contest. The village healers gasped. “But the family constitution says ‘not later than 24 moons before the Great Vote!’ Why then this haste?”
“The patient suffers Intellecto-Pompositymiasis,” declared the clan scribe, adjusting his ceremonial spectacles. “A debilitating condition marked by verbose proclamations, anaphylactic reactions to grassroots clarity, and a compulsive press conferences marked by an outrageous overgrowth of superfluous words but a malevolent pernicious anemia of meaning. It is often transmitted in air-conditioned conclaves, especially when TV3 microphones are present.”
“So, our remedy,” he continued with grave absurdity, “is a 2028 K4 gallons of Sisi Fiaa bitters daily enema for each aspiring candidate.”
“But that’s not the diagnosis!” cried the watchers, “or what syringe, in Nunyãdume’s name, can hold it?”
So here the Clan of Patriots now stands — staggering between misdiagnosis and mistreatment, applying bandages to spiritual wounds, and laughing in public while weeping in its hidden tents.
The youth no longer chant. The gods no longer dance. And even the sacred sideɛ, that bowed up to 17 times before the trumpeting one, no longer buys silence — for the people have seen the x-ray. It was not turned upside down like the Angel Dr “Who Knows” did in his church while speaking to God on the phone.
The leadership crisis festers not because there are no leaders, but because the ones who remain have mistaken power for pulse, and convenience for conscience.
The old women of Nunyãdume, the custodians of the Healing Ways, recommend:
- Restoration of the sacred calendar with a quiet recalibration of the clock by postponing.
- Let a neutral committee of elder drummers hold the sacred sticks
- Take the bitter herbal truth, not with borrowed hymns but the gospel of what went wrong and where the rot began. A deeper wound calls for ideological physiotherapy.
- Finally, Name Opportunism. Tame Populism. Shame Cronyism—or risk tusk amputation by history.
But should the poultices fail and the wounds deepen, the elderly women warn of a surgical path — the excision of fibrotic networks and a ritual reform of the Elephant’s bones.
In Nunyãdume, even the elephant must bow to the healer’s wisdom — lest its trumpeting become a funeral dirge.
“If the healer forgets his herbs and starts eating the patient’s yam, he will cure nothing but his own hunger.”
And so the people wait — not for slogans, but for sense.
By Papa Dee, the Stammering Linguist of Nunyãdume
Author:
Dr. Eugene K Dordoye is a Consultant Psychiatrist/Senior Lecturer at University of Health and Allied Sciences, Ho
