Tale of the tapes
WELL, the priest remains a player. A priest is what Abu Bakr insists he is but he keeps playing the political game. Backed against the wall by the court’s determination that his Muslimeen are liable for damages wrought during the coup, the Imam bounces back with what seems to be a set of incriminating tapes all of which we have not heard and the best of which, like the wine in that other Holy Book, he may well be keeping for last.Say what you will about Mr Bakr, and people continue to say plenty, the man still has a trick or two up his sleeves and whatever his terrorist credentials, he has been all but legitimised by the regime in power, given that early election embrace and the revelations of the very first tape which Mr Maharaj, in a telling attempt to escape unscathed, suggested was a put up job when it was plain to see that the Imam had outfoxed him taping his every word even as he waxed eloquent against the oligarchs of what his boss used to call the parasitic oligarchy.
Now, Mr Bakr is back again with tapes and I find it curious that nobody, as far as I know, has questioned the Jamaat’s story about how the tapes made their way to Mucurapo not so much to deny the possibility of them having been dropped off by some anonymous “spoiler” as to explore both the identity of the original “tape man” and the reason for his choosing the Jamaat as the repository for his revelations.
Mr Bakr is gleefully promoting himself in calypso sobriquet style as “The Tape Man” and I don’t see how he is not going to win bigger and bigger audiences as he moves to drop mark after mark and I don’t see either, how the regime is going to rein him in, they never having been able to do that even when he and the Government were close, the regime refusing to heed the advice of those who warned against mounting this particular tiger.
I don’t know yet, what the tales of the tape will do to the political equation, but I do know that they are bound to raise Mr Bakr’s stature among his own followers and among some of those whom the society continues to push towards the edge, all of them pleased that their leader, de jure or de facto, seems ever able to, at least, tweak the nose of the mighty and, Allah willing, drag the rug from under them completely.
Even as Mr Maharaj, trying to make “ole mas” of “The Tape Man”, tries to dismiss the contents of the tape/tapes as “stale news”, their mutual audience is now privy to a conversation in which a minister from “inside” appears to have put his political life on the line protesting against the very corruption about which others have been harping from the outside and this if, dear friends and gentle people, we are to believe Mr Bakr, is only for starters.
I don’t see how the politicians can be refraining from nervously jumping, the Imam playing out the show like a serial, dropping names here and there so that at the end of one meeting the audience, having been carried for a ride, can hardly wait to climb on for the next one not that anybody can really feel truly secure given the evidence that you cyar talk nutten in secret in this place.
Man, I am hoping that probing investigations reveal not only the context of these taped conversations (how far, now that he is clearly out in the cold, is Mr Mohammed R prepared to go in sharing with the public what he knows about the grim goings-on in you-know-where?) but also how they came to be made. Questions like rain are tugging at the public pants—how did the Tape Man I (Mr Bakr being Tape Man 2) know who to target and when? Why would he have taped Mr Mohammed and not, say, Mr Singh? And who, for that matter, is to say he has not taped Mr Singh, Mr Ting and Mr Ling and how could he have gone about his business so cavalierly and so cleverly that Tape Man 2 can now claim to have the goods on so many of our somebodies, the suggestion being that this has been a protracted enterprise, espionage on a scale unprecedented and unparalleled in these hitherto innocent parts.
What or who are we dealing with here? How much more slush and sleaze is going to be squeezed out of the body politic? How wide a brush are the Tape Men using and to what end? A dirtying? Or a cleansing? And to put all these questions in the most meaningful of contexts: Are we going to arrive at these elections in a straight line? Or are we going to get there via detours and derailments? Move following move as the movie marches on and you’d have to be as cold as ice, dead as a donut and blind as a bat not to be waiting eagerly (tremulously?) for the next insightful or inciting instalment.
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