By Chris Agbedo
In the cosmology of many Nigerian communities, not all spirits announce themselves with thunder or terror. Some arrive quietly, mischievously, almost playfully, appearing where they should not be, disappearing when they are most expected. One such figure, known in popular folklore as Wiriwiri, belongs to this subtle category of the uncanny. Wiriwiri is not a monster in the classic sense. It is a trick-being, a restless presence associated with sudden movement, evasion, and dislocation. In village lore, Wiriwiri is said to be seen one moment, standing at a junction, peering from behind a wall, hovering at the edge of vision, and gone the next. It does not attack; it confounds. It does not confront; it slips away. To encounter Wiriwiri is to be unsettled not by violence, but by uncertainty.
Elders describe Wiriwiri as the spirit of in-between spaces: crossroads, thresholds, dusk hours, moments when attention wavers. Children are warned that Wiriwiri appears when one is careless, distracted, or overly curious. Adults know better: Wiriwiri thrives where clarity is absent and authority refuses to stay put. It is invoked when something, or someone, cannot be pinned down. Unlike fearsome spirits that dominate through force, Wiriwiri exercises power through elusiveness. It shows itself just long enough to be acknowledged, then vanishes before it can be questioned. In this way, Wiriwiri resembles the trickster figures of wider African folklore – Anansi, Tortoise – but stripped of moral lesson and reduced to pure motion. Presence without duration. Visibility without accountability.
It is for this reason that Wiriwiri survives more in everyday speech than in ritual. When something keeps happening without explanation, elders mutter its name. When a figure appears briefly, acts decisively, and disappears before consequences mature, people say, “it is like Wiriwiri. The term has become shorthand for authority without anchorage, for influence that refuses to stay long enough to be examined.
Thus, to speak of verses of Wiriwiri on the canvas of the Villa is not to summon superstition into politics, but to recognize an old narrative pattern repeating itself in a modern setting. Folklore, after all, is history’s way of remembering behaviour before it acquires official language. When power begins to move like a spirit, appearing suddenly, vanishing routinely, leaving behind confusion and whispered interpretations; myth does not create the metaphor; it merely names it. And in naming it, prepares the canvas.
In essence, before politics learned the language of policy briefs and press releases, it spoke in myths. Civilizations explained power not by charts but by creatures, by beings whose defining talent was not strength, but movement. The Greeks feared Harpies because they arrived without warning and left without accounting. They distrusted Proteus because he could never be held to one shape long enough to tell the truth. They mourned Echo, that mythical disembodied soul, because she spoke endlessly yet possessed no body to stand behind her words. Africans, too, understood this grammar early. The Akan imagined forest beings that appeared and dissolved into leaves. The Yoruba spoke of Egbere, the crying custodian of wealth who could not be caught. In the southern Nigerian imagination, Wiriwiri perfected the art: seen briefly, gone instantly, leaving behind only murmurs and unease.
These were not bedtime tales. They were civic metaphors. They taught communities that the most dangerous authority is not the one that shouts, but the one that refuses to stay. Wiriwiri, in particular, is the spirit of the almost-seen. It inhabits thresholds such as doorways, junctions, the corner of the eye. It does not strike. It unsettles. It announces itself just enough to be acknowledged, then disappears before explanation can be demanded. In village speech, to describe a person or force as Wiriwiri-like is to say this: it acts, withdraws, and leaves others to manage the consequences.
The Harpies understood this instinctively. Zeus’s winged enforcers did not linger to debate justice. They descended, seized, punished, and vanished. The victims were left arguing with the air. Proteus refined the method. When grasped, he transformed, from lion through serpent and water to tree until the seeker tired. Echo suffered a different fate: condemned to repeat the words of power without agency, she faded until only sound remained. Even Anansi, the spider trickster of Akan lore, survived by weaving exits faster than consequences could follow. And the Egbere, crying endlessly while clutching his mat, taught that wealth is easiest to guard when one is never fully present. All these figures form a single mythic braid: power as movement, authority as elusiveness, governance as disappearance. It is against this ancient backdrop that modern Nigeria now finds itself telling stories again—not because it has regressed into superstition, but because lived experience has begun to rhyme too closely with myth.
Since 29 May 2023, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has governed a restless republic, one strained by economic shock, social anxiety, and policy whiplash. Leadership, in such moments, is expected to perform the oldest democratic ritual: presence. Not permanence, not immobility, but availability. The sense that the one who decides also stays to witness the aftermath. However, what has increasingly defined this presidency is not steadiness, but movement. To say this is not to deny the legitimacy of travel. Statesmen travel. Diplomacy requires motion. Nigeria is not an island. But when travel ceases to be episodic and becomes habitual, when departures are frequent, returns brief, and explanations thin, movement itself becomes political language. Absence begins to speak.
Late December 2025 offered a telling vignette. The President departed Nigeria for what was broadly described as “Europe.” No itinerary worth the name. No public timeline. No clear articulation of purpose beyond the incense-laden assurance of “strategic engagements.” Twenty days passed. In a country where prices rise faster than wages and patience thins by the week, the silence grew louder than any official statement. When the President returned on 17 January 2026, there was relief—but it was the relief one feels when a storm pauses, not when it ends. Barely a week later, another departure followed, this time to Turkiye.
Again, Europe.
Again, strategy.
Again, bilateral.
Again, fog.
Here, Wiriwiri steps fully into the Villa.
The President appears, long enough to remind Nigerians that he is still there; then vanishes into foreign skies. Policies descend with Harpy speed: subsidy removal announced in a sentence, economic reforms unleashed with hurricane force. The social consequences land heavily on the ground. Then the architect departs. Like the Harpies, the action is sudden; like the Harpies, the agent is gone before protest ripens into dialogue.
Proteus, too, haunts the scene. Each attempt to pin down the purpose of these journeys meets a transformation. Is it economic rescue? Health maintenance? Diplomatic repositioning? Each question is answered with a different shape. What remains constant is the refusal to stay still long enough for scrutiny. Truth, Proteus teaches, is easiest to avoid when one never stops moving.
Meanwhile, Echo has taken residence in the press room. Statements issue forth, smooth, repetitive, reassuring. “Strategic bilateral engagements.” “In the national interest.” “To reposition Nigeria.” The words circle back on themselves, reflecting authority without adding substance. Like the nymph of old, the voice speaks endlessly, but the body of explanation has faded. Nigerians hear, but they cannot locate.
African folklore sharpens the discomfort. The Egbere analogy returns with insistence. Citizens are told that prosperity lies ahead, just beyond the next reform, the next sacrifice, the next foreign consultation. Yet, the custodian of this promise remains elusive, always traveling, always clutching the mat of policy, always crying that the road is long. Wealth, like the mat, seems portable. Hardship, like the tears, stays behind. Anansi’s shadow flickers too. The trickster survives by cleverness, by weaving narratives, by escaping tight corners. But Anansi stories always end the same way: laughter mixed with warning. Wit without responsibility eventually traps itself.
What troubles the Nigerian moment is not merely presidential absence, but the way absence has begun to feel like method rather than exception. Governance increasingly resembles a relay of appearances, short, symbolic, tightly managed, followed by extended withdrawals. The republic is asked to trust a process it rarely sees, to endure consequences overseen from afar. Defenders argue necessity. They say diplomacy is quiet work. They say global capital requires constant engagement. They say visibility is overrated. There is truth here. But democracy is not sustained by trust alone; it is sustained by reassurance earned through presence. Secrecy may be strategic, but opacity is corrosive. When explanations thin out, rumour rushes in. When leadership withdraws, myth fills the vacuum.
Nigeria is particularly vulnerable to this drift. It is a country with a long memory of distant rulers, leaders physically and emotionally removed from the governed. Against this history, frequent unexplained absences do not read as sophistication; they read as abandonment. Myth warns what happens next. When power behaves like a spirit, citizens stop engaging it as flesh and blood. Debate gives way to metaphor. Accountability dissolves into jokes, whispers, and folklore. Politics becomes something that happens to people, not something done with them. Yet, myths also insist on possibility.
Proteus, seized firmly, must eventually speak truth. The Harpies were banished when confronted. The Egbere could be captured, its mat reclaimed. Even Wiriwiri loses power when light is held steady and vigilance refuses to blink. Elusiveness thrives only where pursuit tires easily. The antidote to Wiriwiri governance is not stillness, but anchorage. Not fewer journeys, but clearer ones. Not louder statements, but fuller explanations. Presence, not as spectacle, but as accountability. Nigeria does not ask its President to hover endlessly over the Villa. It asks that when decisions bite, the decider stays close enough to feel the teeth. It asks that power remain human, locatable, answerable, imperfect, but present. Otherwise, leadership risks drifting fully into the realm of the uncanny: half-seen, half-understood, endlessly discussed but rarely confronted. A presidency remembered less for its policies than for its movements. A state governed not by schedules, but by sightings.
And so the canvas remains open. Here, myth and modernity meet, not to accuse, but to illuminate. Names replace spirits. Aircrafts replace wings. Press releases replace echoes. However, the old question endures, scratched into the wall of every polity that has ever watched its leaders come and go: Will power stay long enough to be held? This question, layered in Greek wind, Akan forest, Yoruba night, and Nigerian daylight, is what this piece returns to, brush in hand, laying metaphor upon reality, reality upon myth, until the picture sharpens. That, always, is the labour of *Verses on Canvas*.
