He is a lawyer and holds two master’s degrees. A former member of the House of Representatives; House Leader, Edo State House of Assembly; Supervisory Councillor, Oredo LGA; and former chairman, Edo State Lawn Tennis Association, Partick Obahiagbon speaks with a lot of bombast; and he is widely known for that, even on facebook and twitter. This interview was a deliberate engagement to draw him out. He was indeed drawn out. The aspects of this interview which contain high-sounding words are explained below in italics. It is an interview for all seasons.
Excerpts:
What is the meaning of Igodomigodo? So many people would want to know?
Igodomigodo is a political sobriquet I have habilimented or if you like togarise my identity for a period of aeon to emblematize my culturico-spiritual fons et origo. It was an advertent stratagem to cosmopolitanize my genealogical matrix and arcane trajectory since it was not by accident that I originated from the land of Igodomigodo.
The interesting thing is that IGODOMIGODO, being the pristine nomenclature of the Bini man, evokes in me the alacritous presence of the invisible “gods” of my progenitors which, by itself, invokes a luxuriation in an ancestral egregore of pristine resurgimento.
(All that he has said here means that he adopted the name Igodomigo to give meaning and pleasure to his belief in his Bini culture. Fons et origo means source or origin)
How did you actually come about the bombast with which you speak?
Well, this question can be answered from a bifurcated fons et origo.
One, I had a singular privilege of having a martinet for a father. My father was, and remains a very strict disciplinarian of puritanical and quixotic predilection. What that meant, my brother, in practical terms was that I never saw the streets of Benin outside my father’s compound after 7p.m., until I became a practising lawyer. I didn’t know how Benin looked like after 7p.m., except of course when I had to go to school.
If you grew up under that type of ambience, you cannot but put your nose to the grindstone. And more germane was the fact that when my father traveled abroad, he brought with him a flyer to the effect that good speakers have ruled the world, and if you want to rule the world, you cannot but be a good speaker.
I was very impressionable when he gave me this flyer which he had bought from London and for me who have always had the primus mobile and gravitating force to want to be part and parcel of the political higgi haggar of my milieu, I said to myself that if being a good speaker was the condition sine qua non for ruling the world, then I was going to do everything possible to be a good speaker and that was how I acclimatized myself very voraciously to the Students’ Companion and read all there was to read that came my way.
It was indeed a period of mental lucubration and intellectual gymkhana but more fundamentally is the fact that – and I’ve always said this – for most people, the dictionary is a reference point; but, for me, for over 25years now, the dictionary is a vade mecum – constant companion that is.
(Because his father bought him a flyer which says to rule the world you must be a good speaker, he started reading all there was to read with a view to becoming a good speaker because he wanted to influence the politics of his area – that’s all)
How?
I have spent nothing less than an hour on a daily basis on my dictionary for the past twenty five years and this could go from the pedestrian dictionary to the Encyclopedia and even to the Encarta dictionaries.
What purpose do you want to achieve with that? Just to speak, or to confuse people by being bombastic and verbose?
Let me tell you an incident that occurred that I want to bring under focal hiceps and biceps when I had the rare privilege to peregrinate through the green chambers, the House of Representatives, specifically. I’m talking about when I had the opportunity to describe the intended legislative gambadoism of my colleagues as amounting to legislative rascality. You remember I was to be committed to parliamentary seppuku for that idiolect.
(An incident that occurred when he called his colleagues in the House of Reps legislative rascal).
To be continue.........
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