| The Price of silence |
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| Saturday, 04 December 2004 | |||||||||||||
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Silence may be golden when it suffices as an indictment to the hypocrisy of self-advertisement and noisy exhibitionism, but not when injustice risks being allowed a walk-over. This is because, the only thing it takes for evil to triumph and be crowned or canonized a norm, is for good men to grovel in silence and inaction. In cases like this, silence amounts to a collaborative and quiet conspiracy with the evil that is on the wings of asserting itself over right and justice. To this end, whenever and wherever evil fights and claws to gain pre-eminence over justice and good conscience, the onus then lies on good men to rise resolutely in vehement opposition to it. Good men should never pretend to go to bed, or slumber in tranquillity, when the bell tolls for a decisive battle to be done to the arrogance of evil. This is more instructive when one realises that bullies have never been deterred by our acquiescence or silence. Instead of these postures deterring them, it fires and energizes their audacity. But when they are stood up to, they back down, because their courage is erected on the basis of fear, cowardice and intimidation. Every bully has a fractured personality that was built on layers of cowardice and the constant fear of his insignificance. History as well as psychological studies attests to this. For instance slave masters and employers think twice before confronting self assertive slaves, servants and employees. But the passive and quiet ones without self-esteem are more brutalized as their masochist demeanours seem to attract and fire the sadistic passions of the ogres in charge. Even the non-violent movement was never passive. It was an active defiance of the raw might of the establishment. On the scales of right, the establishment armed with its advertisement and consulting of brutality backed down when the active non-violent defiance of protestors met, pierced and peeled off the layers of pretences guarding their cowardice and insignificance. If good men by commission or omission decides to take this imbecilic, cowardly and senile path of silence in the face of monumental evil, as a short term posture to a problem with an ontologically far reaching implications; then since no one could bury the truth in the bowels of the earth, the problem will resurrect with more dangerous tentacles, to the chagrin and constant embarrassment of those who buried their heads in the sand, or hid in buck passing, when the occasion called for courageous action and resistance to evil. But when courageous men stand up to evil; stare it straight in the eyeballs and tell it to take a hike to hell and remain there till hell freezes over, then evil will be eternally denied a nourishing humus upon which to germinate or sprout. But the obverse will empower evil to mutate into a more reason and solution-resistant variety. The fact has arrived safely that we either have a paucity of good men in Nigeria, or that we have an abundance of cowards. There is no midway here. Those who sit on the fence are the worst products of our climes and cannot safely gain admittance into any of the spectral extremes. They are neither cold nor hot. They are brainless monsters occupying the material space between convenience and hypocrisy. They are ready as a matter of nature to latch onto the current and prevailing opinion to steal into an unearned and unmerited relevance, at last when the hurly burly according to the Shakespearean weird sisters, must have been done or the battle lost or won. When a society thus empowers the rogues to celebrate impunity and reckless intimidation of decency, it unwittingly contracts an insupportable social debt burden that it can never retire. The society is condemned to pay heavily not only in tangible and quantifiable empirical or material terms; as lives and property are laid to waste; but it equally suffers a corrosive erosion and irreversible destruction and rape of its fragile morals and social felicity. In the same stroke, the society rapes the morality of its posterity. We through our silence and inaction lay it down for future generations that a thief would always get away with his thievery; no matter how brazen they are, if he could commit it on a scale that would shock the society into silence and inaction. In the last few weeks, a gang of paid mischief makers, reminiscent of a similar band of stolid idiots that effected the arrest of Innocence two thousand years ago, at the portals to that garden at Gethsemane; have been audaciously breaching the fragile and desired peace of Anambra State. These bunch of depraved rogues, actively supported by thieving conglomerate of Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo, who by some accident marrying fraudulently engineered electoral contrivance, happens to be the President of Nigeria; have successively and progressively written an essay of destruction, pillage and desecration of public structures in Anambra state. One must remember that Obasanjo`s bout and brand of fiery anti-Igbo policies and hatred, have over flooded every bank of common sense, reason and even pretences to political correctness. The peace of Anambra, one must remember, was crucified in-between two PDP thieves, in 2003. One of the thieves may have succeeded in stealing the paradise of favourable public opinion. But the other who feels short-changed has continued a scorched earth policy of “Since I am excluded here, let everything go to hell” variety. It has always vanquished reason, to contemplate how “seemingly intelligent” men could all keep mum and eat garbage from men living on borrowed intelligence. Anambra is ablaze today, as a price we all have to pay for our collective silence and inaction. When Chris Uba desecrated the altars of our local democracy, we all should have arisen to chase him out of our land, which he has so wantonly desecrated. We never did that. Our silence bolstered him up. Our silence conspired with his audacity to sire an outrageously brazen contempt for our peace and feelings. He moved straight from bad to the worst, without bridging any comparative gap. He became more daring. Some of us collaborated actively with this godforsaken piece of human excrement to short-change our posterity. Today thugs and touts have colonized Anambra State. Their pretences to decency have been dashed to the winds. They no longer hide their evil machinations under the cover of darkness. This is because they have nothing to be afraid of. First and foremost, our resistance has been eviscerated and disembowelled by our first silence. Secondly, the Police are the major agents of the thugs, providing intelligence, logistics support and ordnance, at the orders and directions of President Obasanjo and his inspector general of Police. It may be simple coincidental synchronicity that both men share some nomenclatural affinity to the name “Balogun”. One is the surname of a Police Chief, who has risen to write himself into history as the most corrupt, brutal and lying Inspector General of the Nigeria Police. This man presides over an audaciously and brazenly corrupt Police establishment that has overreached itself in being the summary of all that is evil and decadent in Policing. His men lease their guns and weapons to robbers for a fee according to Obasanjo, which they use in terrorizing the taxpayers, whom they are salaried and constitutionally empowered to protect. This man and his men provide escort and bodyguard services to well known criminals and celebrated public enemies, while the citizens they are designed to protect are daily harassed, milked dry, gunned down and killed by men of the underworld that operates in partnership with the police. When the police are not doing this, they are killing the citizens themselves over the citizen’s inability or hesistation in paying some mandatory bribe on the roads popularly known as “roger” or they are kidnapping a constitutionally elected governor of a federating state in Nigeria. Tafa Balogun is the President of a Nigerian Police force that is the most brutal Police institution in the world. His men are so brutal, so uncouth and grossly impolite and so grotesquely incompetent, that the devil himself cannot challenge comparison, with the antics of the Nigerian policeman. Yet Tafa Balogun is still retaining his seat and priding himself in being a police chief. Honour and decency recommended and dictated his resignation, but he is allergic to honour while decency is alien to his crudity. The second “Balogun” happens to be a titled given to Obasanjo, not on merit but in the Nigerian style of being some moral bribe payed him to purchase the patronage of his office by people who are looking for some cheap political crumbs. But since this crude ex-dictator who has mutated into a civilian one in consort with gangsters, is congenitally programmed to celebrate his bovine buffoonery at the least opportunity, he tried to flex his tyrannical muscles and impose his capricious wiles on the traditional chieftancy issues of Owu, to which he got some stern rebuke, by the holders of the tradition, to the effect that being a president does not empower him to dictate over the issues of the Owu kingdom, his being the Balogun “honoris causa” not withstanding. This second Balogun of Owu Kingdom by happenstance presides over the geopolitical construct of Federated greviances, called Nigeria. As a president, this man has shown himself as worse than Nero and outclasses Caligula in wickedness. This is a man who is very busy pursing rodents while his house burns and simmers in conflagration. Like his namesake, he presides over the 3rd most corrupt nation on earth. This is a corrupt situation, which his presidency actively cultivates and encourages. Another tangent that defies every coincidence is that these two inglorious men are the major engines driving the chaos in Anambra state. What people have failed to see is that Chris Ubah is simply the hatchet man for these two ogres in Abuja. Chris Ubah wields his illegitimate powers and celebrates his criminal impunity in Anambra State all at the good pleasure of Olusegun Obasanjo. It has always floored every faculty of reason, to contemplate how a president could tell the Press on television, that Chris Ngige should go and fulfil his contractual obligations to Chris Ubah; a scandalous contract which stipulates in effect that the treasury of Anambra State should be emptied into Ubah`s private purse. This betrays a president who has compromised his moral authority to rule. That singular utterance gravitated with idiocy; and his active collusion in the whole Anambra saga has brought to the fore, the fact that Anambra may be in Nigeria but is not a part of Obasanjo’s Nigeria. Obasanjo has shown Ndigbo that he has an agenda for conquest and decimation of Igboland. But my pain is that the silence of Ndigbo and the silence of many men of goodwill are conspiring to bring his wishes to fruition. As Anambra State once more ventilates the rottenness within the Nigerian democratic marrows, the facts are now home that the Nigerian government is a phenomenal ruin of unparalleled eminence. Obasanjo is still pretending to be a president because Nigerians kept quiet. A few weeks ago, the people of Ukraine embarked on the “Orange Revolution” to let the fraudulent and corrupt establishment that rules them with impunity know that power belongs to the people and not to this corrupt establishment of idiotic elements. They are as at the moment picketing the Freedom square housing the government offices in the Ukraine capital. These people who value their freedom above their lives are defying the extreme colds of the Caucasus to stand out and protest their oppression, and to bring it home to all and sundry that they are the repositories of ultimate power. The Ukrainians have once more risen to tell the world that the people give power to governments and not vice versa. That Obasanjo is very busy pretending while Anambra State continues to explode at the whims and caprices of Chris Ubah and his horde of buccaneers, is really the price we have to pay for our silence. Ndigbo must rise. It is the patriotic duty of every Igbo man to rise with the stones of outrage and chase these inglorious bastards out of our firmament. This is a fatwa that every true Igbo son should obey. Obasanjo is our collective number one enemy. He is not welcome to Ani-Igbo at all. Tafa Balogun and his men are not welcome either. We can no longer entrust our security in their hands. If slavery is a good moral option, Chris Ubah should be sold off into slavery with immediate effect. That is recompense reserved for vagabonds like him. As for these enemies of our people, your security is no more guaranteed in our midst. You guys should better take out an insurance policy. The anger of Ndigbo may be slow, but it is steadily on the rise.
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Posted by Robot| 13.11.2005 08:56