The Nigerian Village Square - Of Babangida and His Rented Crowds

Of Babangida and His Rented Crowds

Monday, 19 July 2004

As the rented, emasculated and moronic crowds of morally compromised simpletons step up their nauseating refrain, all engineered towards the re-installation of a thief as the President of Nigeria come 2007, the monochromatic debauchery of this man in question and his coterie of sycophants   gradually unfolds and comes into sharp focus. These cheap crowds of minstrels, rented and purchased to sing the praises of a thief; a diametrically corrupt embezzler extra-ordinary; and a rapist of the collective aspirations of Nigerians have not really sat down to do the moral arithmetic in respect of the social costs of re-admitting a thief into the halls of power.

It beats every sane imagination, to contemplate what Ibrahim Babangida thinks or hopes to achieve in a country he nearly single-handedly bludgeoned to extinction, in a tenure that lasted nearly a decade; which was a decade of executive recklessness, arrant impunity and celebration of thievery and roguery as well as a free reign of syndicated gangsterism in the highest echelons of power.

The actions of these wandering minstrels who go abroad beating the debauched drums of support for Babangida’s comeback does not surprise me. This is because birds sporting identical plumage would always consort or conglomerate, in punctilious obedience to the ontologic promptings of their genetic blueprints, which the plumes are but external manifestation. Biology hardwired every living being with an infinite cocktail of interconnected instinctual propensities as well as proclivities. This constitutes the basic raw material with which these beings, especially at the higher levels, write out the existential essays of the personal as well as the social dimensions of their sojourn in existence. The same applies to these men and women of broken integrity whose stock in trade is the fluid willingness to auction off their moral stands to anyone who can pay for it. Their conscience and sense of responsibility is a big time casino of moral relativism, where gamblers square off and purchase what is hawked by these moral prostitutes. They owe no allegiance to any worthwhile principle. They only bend their knees at the wooden feet of their greed and the goddess of profit. The whole structure of society can collapse. They do not care so far they are able to steal or skim off enough money from whatever questionable source to keep on lubricating the engines of their greed or to keep on pouring luxurious libations to satiate the goddess of their narrow egocentricities.

A casual glance at the profile of the men leading this assault on our auditory sensibilities of trying to convince the rest of us against all the evidence and testimonies of history, logic and experience, that IBB who is the black goat of Nigerian political arena, has the key to our redemption,   without any ado, reveals a long line of “who is who” in corruption and doublespeak in Nigeria. Most of these men where the creatures, beneficiaries and collaborators of IBB’s reckless and mindless project of plunder and destruction of Nigeria. Others are the heirs; who incidentally were the moral bastards issuing from IBB’s adulterous liaisons with corruption at the expense of Nigeria’s social hygiene.

Governance and democracy has always been predicated on some canons of civility and integrity, which serves as the cornerstone of the social contract. Whenever and wherever this fails to obtain, anarchy reigns as the people degenerates and become wolves to each other. To forestall a social descent into inchoate randomness and anarchy, we invented government to help us moderate ourselves and forestall our feeding on ourselves by convoking a carnival of cannibalism, where one of us becomes the next most proximate meal, once our gastronomic apparatus revolts in hunger or our egocentricities demands a burnt offering. Government arose to moderate and distribute the common weal for the best interest of all. Leaders emerged that served as trustees to our interests. All these, one must remember, revolved around the ethics guiding the social contract. Trustees held the commonweal and disburse it in trust for all. The position of leadership, true to type was invented and imbued with all powers to serve the interests of the subjects who willingly sub-leased their powers to this authority, in exchange for the protection of their common interests and the advancement of their collective aspirations. To this end, the principal ethical imperative operative here commands that the dog is not expected to make a meal or convoke a dinner off the bone the hung round its neck for sake-keeping, and the mouse not to help himself to the fish kept or left in its custody for safekeeping.

But the person of General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida stands in violation of all these time honoured canons. When history and engineered circumstance connived to hoist him on the Nigerian tribune of power from 1985 to 1993, then arose one of the greatest thieving conglomerate ever to grace the Nigerian political scene. We have had political crooks and monumental thieves in history. I have equally read about the debauchery of imperial courts and arrant thievery that was their stock in trade, but I have not seen a thief of the ilk of the duo of IBrahim Babangida and Sanni Abacha, since Nigeria came into being. Babangida’s crime is not only that he stole what belonged to the people of Nigeria; he brazenly went ahead to make it the official policy of his government to liberalize stealing as a norm in public office and to blackmail those who   believed that stealing is not a system of government. Tai Solarin and the People’s bank scandal comes to mind here. IBB took over Nigeria and sent her a century down the path of underdevelopment. Nigeria became such a stinking morass where every force of decadence pitched a tent under his watch. Under his tenure, Nigeria became a swindler’s paradise and a robber’s haven. Julius Berger corruptly colonized Abuja and helped this rogue to launder billions of Naira of the Nigerian people’s money; in that Bazaar of unprecedented corruption that was constructions at the Federal Capital Territory. The people groaned under SAP, while he nauseatingly luxuriated at the people’s expense, plotting his Machiavellic graph, on how to ensure his eternal latchment to power. He Machiavellically engineered a political transition programme to keep the people busy while he rapaciously plundered Nigeria. This programme gulped over 40 Billion Naira. He invented two political parties to hide his hidden agenda. The people groaned under the inglorious jackboots of his petty thievery while he amuses himself with our misfortune of having him as leader. The press in this regard courted his mischievously toothy smile, to avoid being proscribed through the despotic decrees he churns out at will. His wife struggled to be a part of this thieving conglomerate as the Abachas were. She went around hawking that economic drain pipe that was the Better for her rented women. The 1991 Persian Gulf War kicked an unprecedented opportunity for economic revitalization into our financial courts as a nation. Over $12.4 billion Dollars flowed like the river Niger into our national coffers within this period under review. Nigeria would have been better off today were this huge sum injected into her economy at that time. But that did not come about. Babangida stole all the money and left Nigeria haemorrhaging like an impaled animal. Babangida and his Brigade of Brigands kept on stealing us blind and milking us to death until 1993. There was no way he could escape conducting an election which his greed orchestrated. On June 12, 1993, Nigerians came out en masse to bid this thief farewell. The thief was not to be outdone in volte face. He reneged on his honour and cancelled an election that was free as it was fair. We tethered on the brink of implosion, save for the gods that seemed to postpone our misfortune by extending our pain under another thief; namely Sanni Abacha. The rest is history.

Today, IBB wants to, and is seriously manipulating all the variables, so that he can come back to power to continue his rape of Nigeria where he stopped. Many certifiable lunatics and rented crowds have joined this inglorious bandwagon of those screaming and “earnestly yearning for IBB to come. I know that thieves of the same feather will always congenitally flock together. Anybody in that Campaign train of those clamouring for a thief to come back and rule Nigeria is himself no less a thief than the one he is fronting.

Most of these idiots, even some idiots with Ph.D and professorships attached to their names, are in this train. Their thinking faculties have been so much compromised by greed, and immoral propensity to worship mammon, that they have persistently failed to ask this common thief, what he intends to achieve and what he thinks he can achieve as a civilian president encumbered by the checks and balances of democratic institutions, which he could not achieve as a sole administrator of Nigeria from 1985 to 1993. IBB at the twilight or dying days of his era as the rapist extra-ordinary of the Nigerian state threw up his hands in feigned resignation, to the effect that the Nigerian economy has defied all known economic solutions. These laughable words from the very man who has done almost every thing in the cookbooks, to bring the Nigerian economy to its knees had the effrontery to tell Nigerians that our situation is hopeless. He was unfortunately right. If IBB ever come back to rule us again through the electoral heist, which method, he is presently perfecting with his discredited lieutenants like Omo Omoruyi, then it would be really hopeless for Nigeria and Nigerians. Every body who loves Nigeria should work to frustrate this megalomanic dream of a crazed despot, and actively work towards his arraignment before the courts of competent jurisdiction, where he should answer to his destruction of Nigeria, and for the Nigerian people’s money he stole to enrich his depravity.

The only thing IBB can offer Nigeria is corruption, pain, liberalization of thievery and the elevation of bribery into the fine art of state policy. A bad tree can never give rise to a good fruit. A thief and a congenital liar can never make a good and upright leader. IBB is Nigeria’s waterloo. The day he comes back is the day Nigeria will be embezzled out of existence. You bet.

Robot Robot is offline
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	# 1 ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot\| 24.04.2008 15:05

Last Updated ( Thursday, 24 April 2008 )

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