08 May 2006 |
|
|
Olusegun Obasanjo has decided to ruin Nigeria. He makes no pretences anymore. He is acting the script. Greed has eminently seduced him. He has prostituted himself to the army of scoundrels clamouring for the sustenance of a status quo, where avarice is king. To that end, shamelessly imposing himself on Nigerians after he has exhausted the mandate he stole in 2003, is a mission targeted with all weapons of cant in his arsenal. The ranks of the cheerleading mastiffs and dogs, campaigning for the enthronement of volte-face as an absolute instrument of governance grows by the day. They are dogs who have convoked a meal off the bones hung round their necks. Many of these minstrels wear the garbs of respectability, which covers their sepulchral rottenness and ethical decadence. Many of them are delinquents of irredeemable value. What impudence? Accomplished charlatans have commenced a song of sycophancy to lull power to sleep; in an Abachasque fashion. They now tell us that without OBJ, Nigeria will wither and desiccate, whereas under OBJ we are yet to record progress in the living condition of the average Nigerian in the streets. Obj has engineered a process to mutilate the constitution to accommodate his inordinate craze for an eternal latchment to power. He squandered an eighth-year tenure pursuing inglorious shadows; achieving nothing save a sad chronicle of buffoonery, witch-hunting and wasted opportunities. Under his watch legitimate opposition to his excesses was eviscerated and disembowelled with the decisiveness of a bloody tyrant. He brooked no challenge to his tyranny. Audu Ogbe became a testament to his mean excesses. This man started out as a cheerleader for this ogre. He cheerled for him as he gobbled up all opposition and voices of reason. He installed puppets without minds of their own, which he teleguided into opprobrium. In the courts of this eminent tyrant, opposition is an invitation to decapitation. Alternative opinion is treason. This is because he wields a monopoly over wisdom. He knows it all. Why the “Conqueror of Odi” and “Lion of Zaki Biam” would be seeking a third term baffles my understanding. His cheerleaders are bereft of rationality and reason. Reason in the views of Alain de Botton, “allows us to determine when our wishes are in irrevocable conflict with reality” (Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy: London, Penguin Books, 2000, p.109). If these guys ever consult their reason, they would have long realised that their wishes are not only chimerical, but simple bovine stupidity. By propping up Obasanjo as their Man-Friday, these guys, that have in their ranks, an intoxicated beer-manufacturer, whose actions betray him as consuming an excess of his product, are telling the world that over 145 million Nigeria are so stupid that we can never find a leader outside Obasanjo. This arrant nonsense of a cant is reminiscent of the truckload of shit that Daniel Kanu and other debauched youths that yearned for Abacha in 1998 attempted to push down the throats of Nigerians. We would have considered the Third Term campaign as a product of some alcoholic crapulence, if not for the signs of a co-ordinated campaign and doublespeak emanating from presidential quarters. At first we considered it as some granulated superstition hawked by a disembowelled opposition. But with the financial muscle wielded by “corporate Nigeria” bankrolling this profanation, we began to see the invisible hands of Abuja on these machinations. But I am consoled. The voice of reason is a treasonable felon in the eyes of the lawless. Rationality is a traitor in the courts of tyranny. Every one who in history has stood to protest the rampaging indiscretions of unchecked power has always been labelled an impious heretic to the unholy trappings of political debauchery. But I am consoled that eternal moons after the meteoric reign of tyranny, history rightly reverts the traitor to the patriot that he is; canonizes the heretic the greatest saint; while consigning the tyrant, his courtiers, wandering minstrels, and inglorious cheerleaders into the miry pits of eternal irrelevance. Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Ghandi are perpetual footnotes to this. I am equally consoled by the fact that tyrants must consume themselves in the heat of their own unwisdom. The trajectory is immutable. Evil is its own recompense. It contains in its core, the seeds of its own destruction. All history has witnessed it. Those who elevated themselves to the Olympian heights of the gods, always fall greatly into disgrace. Shakespearean Julius Caesar’s light bearing of Olympus sealed his death warrant at the hands of the conspirators. Macbeth’s rape and murder of sleep; the divine rejuvenator of weak bones married him to perpetual insomnia. Richard Nixon’s unconstitutional indiscretions gave him the not eminent position as the first American president to resign office. Abacha’s festival of coups, and crimes against humanity and democracy, attracted for him a “coup from heaven” Nero and Caligula were studies in tyranny. Their reigns were abominations of desolation for imperial Rome. While their madness lasted, they wrote themselves into eternal disrepute with broad strokes of debauchery and tyranny. Nero murdered for fun. In fits of his megalomania he convoked orgies of sex and bloodletting. But history paid their recompense in the coins of opprobrium. Their memories were entombed in disdain. Nero and Caligula mutated into names that parents dread to associate their posterity with. They are today names reserved for rabid dogs to attest to their congenital propensity to inveterate wildness and unprovoked violence. These are ancient examples. Medieval Europe witnessed other crooks and villains on royal thrones. They so much painted royalty with filth that the peasants across so many kingdoms rose to demand a community, where the people would forever decide their fate. In 1789, the Bourbon Monarchy was sacked in France as the people stormed the Bastiles, which symbolized Bourbonic oppression, with Liberte, Equalite, Fratenite as slogans of liberation. In as much as ethics forbids me “from importing into scenarios, where they don’t belong, pessimistic interpretations of others’ motives, it prohibits me from acquiescing in inaction, while the silent machinations of men of power threaten to devastate the aspirations of my community. That is why I am writing. I write to lend my voice to reason. Nigeria is greater than one man. Be he Olusegun Obasanjo and all those mercenary victims of god-complex, who believe that Nigeria will go to hell, if they relinquish their hold on stolen power. Neither Obasanjo, Greg Mbadiwe, Eze Odemegwu; the beer seller, Oluesgun Alebiosu, or the thieving governors across Nigeria, Ibrahim Mantu, Ojo Maduekwe, Ahmadu “Ali must go”, etc., are potent enough to ride Obasanjo roughshod over the head of Nigerians, to a rogue third term in office. Let them keep manipulating the constitution. Nigeria is already ripe for disintegration. They should simply quicken the process. Their greed is at an end. Some may contend that we are in a democracy and that if the constitution is changed through democratic means, that it is okay. My response to the proponents of this view is as follows: Democracy without ethics is like a vehicle without a brake. It pushes the state headlong into a pit, where it implodes on its weights. This is because democracy has a dangerous side-effect. It conduces to the tyranny of an inglorious majority. The majority elements have not always been the wisest elements of the state. The tyranny of insipid numbers have aided and abetted the rise of rogue governments. Hitler was a product of democracy and its tyranny of numbers. The Nazis with murderous hate as their manifesto infected a whole population with their venomous version of eugenic and social engineering. It was democratic. The whole world used this as an excuse to do nothing, thereby conspiring with their silence in Hitler’s murder of six million Jews. Jurisprudence or legal philosophy assesses the validity of every law, against the demands of natural justice, equity and good conscience. Any law which violates these canons, are purveyors of injustice and decadence. Democracy advocates the rule of law. So when the law is manipulated in utter affront to natural justice, equity and good conscience, like the third-term constitutional amendment is about to effect, that law becomes an aberration, with consequences that will perennially rebound and colour the hues of democracy as long as Nigeria lasts. Why shift the goalpost in the middle of a game? How can you be a referee in a game you are playing? Is this not against the lofty principles of justice? Equity empowers no man to be a judge in his own case. The law should be neutral to individual whims and caprices. For one to translate his caprice into law for the society is the stuff of tyranny. This constitution brought Obasanjo into power, stipulating a four-year term renewable only once. He contested on that basis. He had a first term. He never deemed it fit to initiate moves to change those provisions, early in his administration if his intentions are for the political advancement of the country. He took a second term under circumstances deemed very fraudulent by both local and international observers. Eight years is enough regime term for a visionary to leave his imprints in the sands of time. Clinton did it in America. Mandela ruled only for a single four year term. What does Obasanjo think he would achieve that he has not achieved after eight years? Whatever he did not achieve at the beginning of his first term, while he had fresh ideas, how did he think that he would achieve them now that he is nearing the points of his executive incompetence? The wooden apologetics of the third term advocates flaunts the mean-spirited mendacity and scurrility that avarice shamelessly consults, as it wriggles unsuccessfully to legitimize its malodorous indiscretions. Avarice has the same quintessence in all circumstance. Its accidents changes with the tides of affairs. The Nigerian sycophants today cheerleading for Obasanjo were the same quality of compromised consciences that sang in Abacha’s self-perpetuation orchestra. Their subject may have changed. But their voice and song remains the same. Their arguments and submissions in furtherance of this crass agenda, is a class act in historical and factual revisionism. Had Obasanjo remained a Zeus, who feeds on subservient genuflection, in their perverted pantheon, we would have been contented in paying them our dues of silence and unconcern. But trying to stuff him down the throat of other Nigerians as the ONLY messiah is to say the least an outrageous prank gone awry. They canonized Obasanjo the greatest thing ever to happen to Nigerian politics, in utter miscarriage of facts. They have elevated their fictions to an ontological level. But contemporary history recorded the facts that Obasanjo’s political sins are stinking to the high heavens. Need we talk about the “conquest” of Odi or the despoliation of Zaki Ibiam under his command? Need we remind them of the Presidentially-engineered chaos in Anambra State where, “a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connection to high places” essayed to “turn the state into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom, with a brazenness that betrayed a connivance of the Presidency? Need we talk of insecurity that has bedevilled Nigeria under this president? Bola Ige’s killers are still walking the streets. So are Aminosari Dikkibo’s killers. The Presidential fight against corruption has up to this moment netted only the fries, while the sharks are still about their charges. I will resist the temptation to say that EFCC is Obasanjo’s version of Napoleon dogs, in the immortal Orwellian satire. Do we need to talk about the forceful installation of illegal and illegitimate governments in Bayelsa and Oyo states respectively? Need we talk of the abuse of the judiciary and his arrant disrespect of court orders? I would not slumber on this because the facts are there to speak for themselves. Citing the economic gains of this administration as a reason for extending the tenure of this president is an undeodorized dog-shit. The question is: Whose gain? Who profits from the economic policies of this administration? I will tell you: The IMF, PDP Stalwarts, Obasanjo’s cronies and cheerleaders. Not the Nigerian people. How far have the economic policies of this administration translated to a better life for the ordinary Nigerian in the streets? Hunger is still mangling our rural and urban-“ghetto” population despite presidential denials. Our hospitals are still glorified morgues where people go to die. NEPA or Power Holding Company as is now called is still generating more darkness and heat than light, despite presidential pledges to revitalize it. Most of the crown public owned companies have been auctioned off to interests that mock our national interest. IMF and the Paris club of creditors used Obasanjo’s administration to defraud Nigeria in an international high-stakes 419. Nigeria’s debts, against all canons, amply qualify as odious debts. That Nigerians were forced to pay up for debts incurred by illegitimate governments, which was instantly embezzled by these illegitimate leaders, with the active connivance of the lending agencies and clubs is the summary of moral depravity. Ethics recommended a repudiation of those debts. But this government allowed itself to be blackmailed by neo-colonial forces into haemorrhaging our resources into Western coffers. The high price of crude oil in the world market today has not positively impacted on the lives of Nigerians. Nigerians are being given the same archaic excuses that sugar-coats government’s ineptitude. That a cabal of avaricious men entertains no qualm in holding our future in absolute disregard is not surprising to me. What baffles me is that Nigerians are still mouthing weak opposition to the audacious attempts of some morally compromised thugs in the National Assembly, whose ethics is predicated on personal profit as they assiduously attempt to smuggle an ethically obscene change in the constitution, to allow Obasanjo to violate the constitution he swore to protect in furtherance of the caprices of his god-complex. But my joy inheres in the fact that these guys and their patrons are in for a rude shock. They are yet to realize that Nigeria is not Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Mobutu’s Zaire, Amin’s Uganda or Ghaddafi’s Libya. Nigeria is a land of infinite variables stewing together in one pot with platonic dissensions as the currency of operation among the constituents. This kind of situation has always been a brewery of freedom I will always state it the way it is. If this is treason, I pray to be a felon: Nigerians should rise and stone all these thieves and pretenders out of our citadels of power. Power belongs to the people and not to the thieves who are jostling for gain at the National or State Houses of assembly across Nigeria. It took the Georgians rising against corrupt power for their impostors to know that power is not theirs. Nigerians should teach Obasanjo and his kingsmen that they are stewards, who should take orders from the Nigerian people, and not vice versa.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
# 
# 
Your Comments
Please make The Square an enjoyable experience for everyone by refraining from gratuitous ad-hominem contributions, defamatory comments and off-topic posting. Such posts will be removed.