Give the Boss a break

Helloooo village people,

With the Nigerian polit-volcano getting increasingly fiery, we must expect a horrendous eruption sooner or later. Obviously, no right thinking Nigerian today is ignorant of the reasons why the polity has become overheated, but instead of continuously flogging a dead beast, it might be wiser to find out why the horse at the stream is refusing to drink water, before it too crumbles under its burden. I do believe that the time has come for us to be more discreet with our agitations and utterances because we might just be chasing the wrong foe.

Rather than focusing on the political misconstructions of the Boss, I think it is the hidden agendas of his minions and, not the least, those of some mean imperial predators from outside that we should be taking to the laboratory. Going by the president’s past records, his age, his life’s experiences, his exposure and his much publicized achievements so far, it is difficult for me to believe that he would voluntarily turn deaf ears to the loud and eerie wails of an ailing nation.

Our whipping boy might not deserve it all after all. I suspect that OBJ would’ve, unbeknownst, walked down a dark and hideous alley where he has suddenly found himself in the mangle of too many opposing interests, in a position where he has become susceptible to uncanny blackmails. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown is a known dictum but worse off is the head that wears a crown decorated with too many false ornaments.

These fawners who surround him like flies on a big shit would go to any length to ridicule him before his people and the whole world, otherwise they would have told him how indecorous it was for a whole president of a country to star in a TV commercial for his county’s tourism industry and worse still to say such a ridiculous thing like “Nigeria, the heartbeat of Africa.” Nigeria has a lot of young men and women in the industry whose appearance could’ve given that spot more verve and plausibility. 

The worst enemies of this president and the nation as a whole are the insincere advisers, sycophants and praise singers that enshroud the presidency. I bet that amongst them are those that hate president so much they would take advantage of his supine stance to settle private scores with their personal adversaries knowing too well that the citizenry, which they themselves have heated up by frequently advising the president wrongly, would not hesitate to point accusing fingers at the president for crimes committed by them.

This is a classical criminal ploy where the evidence of a crime is manipulatively placed on the doorsteps of an innocent person in order to lure the attention of the law away from the real criminal. Such criminals usually take advantage of scapegoats who unwittingly provide plausible motives without alibis. But once smart law enforcement agents discover that such evidences were planted, they know where to find the real criminals because they are very often within the closest neighborhood of their victims, armed with inside knowledge of their privacy.

While I do not underrate OBJ’s astuteness, I simply cannot ascribe, solely to him, such hideous crimes as cold-blooded murder of his political opponents and such human right violations like selective heavy-handedness on denigrating communities as he is often accused of, just for the purpose of perpetuating himself in office. I am inclined to believing in his claims of being a Christian and I also believe he meant it when he first said he was yearning to go back to his farm, vowing that a third term was out of question.

When he made those pledges, he obviously underestimated the dastardliness of the oikish folks surrounding him. The only case I have against our old man is his failure to descry the fact that, whoever uses his “daunting achievements” in his legitimate period in office as an argument to justify unconstitutional third-term tenure for him, cannot mean well. Such a person cannot be a friend to him or to the people he swore to protect their best interest.

I have no doubt that they are aware of the execrable precedent they are setting by their unholy counsels. In effect, what they are saying is that any future president of Nigeria is justified to highjack the nation as long as he or she can lay claims to any little achievement while in office! Why then did we have to go through all we did to oust democrazy and install democracy? Or are they now telling us that out of a hundred and fifty million Nigerians nobody else is capable of carrying on from where Obasanjo stopped and possibly improving on whatever achievements they ascribe to him?

For safety’s sake, let me quickly iterate that my last posit excludes all those insatiable power mongers who have had their chances at tormenting this nation before and are now back sniffing and angling for chances to grab power again to continue from where they had stopped. Even when they are convinced that Nigeria is their private hacienda, they must finally accept the fact that their time is gone and gone for good.

If they take a closer look at some of the progressive nations of this world, like Britain, Germany and the US they would see how many generation changes have taken place in the leadership echelons of those nations since they left office. The leaders of those countries who were contemporaneously in office with them have retired and are no longer prepared to come rubbing shoulders with counterparts that could be their grand children. That is how it should be, self-respect!

Leadership is like a relay race. When you pick up the baton, you put in your best and hand over to the next leg before you are completely exhausted. If you insist on doing your leg and the next leg, you would not only be flouting the rule of the game but you would also be guaranteeing the total failure of your team.

Now back to Baba again. Why the sudden volte-face? I wonder how many of you have read the “Economic Hit Men” by John Perkins. John Perkins was interviewed in “New African” #444. The imperialist schemes of the US as were exposed in that interview by John Perkins, himself a one time EHM, were quite frightening. The fact that OBJ’s third term issue was hardly mentioned during his last trip to the US and the alacrity with which Charles tailor’s ostensible escape was employed as a red herring was quite indicative. Anyone who reads John Perkins’ interview would never get two if he or she puts two and two together.

You can imagine the kind of nightmare that man must be sweating through every night. To be honest I wouldn’t like to be in his skin. Crooked advisers, unabashed lackeys, economic hit men, and last but not the least we, unrelentingly yelling foul! May be we shall be helping our course a lot more by assuring the old man that we shall be there for him when he leaves office, that we shall protect him at all cost if only he can come out and tell us what’s eating him underneath. The people we should really watch out for are those roguish advisers and external espionage; otherwise no matter who we eventually install as the president, nothing shall change. 

Robot  # 1 | 22.04.2006 15:47

With the Nigerian polit-volcano increasingly fiery, we must expect a horrendous eruption sooner or l...Read the full article.