The Nigerian Village Square - Why Obasanjo Misgoverns Nigeria

Why Obasanjo Misgoverns Nigeria

Monday, 13 December 2004

On encountering the majesty and infinite immensity of Plato‘s philosophical system; the unparalleled brilliance of its profundity; its pervasive appeal and unprecedented diffusion across all human disciplines; its precise and accurate anticipation of future trajectories of thought; and its projection or spilling of its value and vitality across centuries of the accumulated heritage of human intellectual achievements: the Process Metaphysician, Alfred North Whitehead merely gasped in trepidation, and succumbed. He bowed in humble meekness and confessed in trembling awe that: “all philosophy is but a footnote to Plato”. What fitting tribute than this can brilliance wear? What other befitting garland can possibly crown the heads of genius? This eulogy was a crown of praise, spun by sincerity, and laid at the feet of talented greatness. Plato’s ideas re-echoed far into the future, many centuries after its birth around the Aegean Sea; transcended the narrow confines of ancient philosophy to gravitate Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists. It is this patrimony that suckled one of the greatest African intellectuals of all times; St. Augustine of Hippo; who grew to assume the enviable stature of the greatest intellectual giant, and most important Christian writer after St. Paul of Tarsus.

Plato celebrated his genius in Political Philosophy in “The Republic”. This treatise on the art of government and administration of the affairs of the State, laid down for all ages, what would serve as the most credible platform, upon which to erect a government and create a socio-political matrix, where the good of man, in its whollistic harmony, is the paramount operative principle. There he recorded one of his most famous observations: “Unless Philosophers become kings or Kings, philosophers” the state is bound to fail as an enterprise of reason designed for the welfare of man. Plato’s observations were informed by the factual ordinance of history, which has watched helplessly on so many occasions, while fools and certifiable imbeciles stole and sauntered stealthy into the corridors of power, through the unlatched backdoors of our collective social laxity. On those occasions good men inadvertently left their moral or ethical flanks defenceless and unguarded. Crooks at that instance capitalized on this culpable oversight to perpetrate their regime of pompous knavery and debauchery, on the commonweal. Plato to that effect remarked that, “the only prerequisite necessary for evil to triumph, is that good men do nothing”. This is to say that the silence and inaction of good men, is the only condition sine qua non for the triumph and inglorious reign of evil.

In Nigeria of today, good men seems to have slumbered in idiocy and emasculated inaction, while different categories of fools and various brands of brigands patrols our shores hawking the unhealthy socio-political ware of political roguery and plunder. Since Independence, the fact cannot stand the scrutiny of reason, if we advance that a philosopher has ever ascended the Nigerian tribune of power. All Nigeria had ever been saddled with have been different shades of political pirates sailing under so many false flags, which hide unvarnished roguery and superlative selfishness.

The facts are home today. The Obasanjo led anti-democratic government ranks among the most dysfunctional, ideologically deficient, and mentally challenged misgovernment ever to saddle Nigeria. The congress of political vampires manning the key sectors of that government have shown us their true colour; namely that we never elected them, and to that effect, they owe us no explanations in relation to what constitutes our welfare. All they care about is what conduces to their rapacious and brazen exploitation of the Nigerian masses. This is the ideological incoherence that informs for instance their abandonment of the price regime of Petroleum products, meant for domestic consumption to the capricious vagaries of market forces. A country so generously endowed as Nigeria, has been abandoned to the capricious wiles of administrative quacks, that fiddle while the country plunges deep into the waters of leadership orchestrated problems. It has always beaten the imagination hollow to watch as Obasanjo presides over the liberal pauperization of Nigerians. The government keeps on mouthing the same mantra of laissez faire capitalism which obtains nowhere in the western world whose advice it takes. This is the same moral poverty, and ethical insensitivity, which informs the feet dragging of Obasanjo’s government, while treason, criminality and audacious impunity is celebrated by Chris Ubah and his gang in Anambra State.

In fact, man may have been a political animal according to Aristotle, but Obasanjo is a democratic aberration. One foreign journalist blinded by the feigned goodwill of obasanjo; the obverse of which Nigerians are well acquainted with, wrongly claimed that Obj is a good man surrounded by crooks. But the obverse of that statement constantly pops up to be the sad, unholy fact. Obasanjo is a crude tyrant, surrounded by inveterate hypocrites, callous and spineless cowards, jobbers, and political undertakers. He is gloriously presiding over an ethically obscene government that seems to be bent on scuttling Nigeria and her posterity. The Obasanjo government, by commission or omission, seems to be in possession of a Nazi-like extermination blueprint, designed for the controlled and systematic elimination of majority of Nigerians. There seems to be a grand conspiracy by the PDP government of Obasanjo, to give a final solution to the Nigerian problem, by gradually killing us all off; sending us all to the gas chambers of suffocating poverty. He is hell-bent on seeing through an economic programme whose best feature is the gradual, slow, steady and certain economic impoverishment and social strangulation of Nigerians. We are being bludgeoned into chill penury by the government that subsist either on our mandate or our silence.

Obasanjo‘s political and economic programmes have succeeded in liberalizing bad will; chill penury and gangsterism across the length and breadth of Nigeria. It is now so very easy for ordinary Nigerians to die, because they cannot afford to live. At the patronizing and inglorious instance of government’s policies, 1 percent of the population has now effectively cornered 80 percent of the wealth. At the same stroke, gangsters are empowered to insult our poverty and pain, with their ostentatious and brazen celebration of criminal impunity. Under Obasanjo’s presidency, men who are supposed to be doing time in jail, dine with the president; men who have infringed the laws back to back and those who have ensured the corrosive erosion of our values, are given national awards and recognitions; making Nigeria the only part of the world where crime pays abundantly, both in the short term and in the long.

Today, the Nigeria governed by Mr. Obasanjo is simply a 923,768 square kilometres of poverty, pain and corruption; a dysfunctional environment that destroys initiative smothers creativity and shrivels patriotism. Nigerians today are residents of a poverty quadrangle, bounded by socio-economic and geopolitical insecurities. One then begins to wonder how one who is not a hypocrite or on the fringes of lunacy, could muster any genuine patriotic spirit, for a land that has been engineered and configured, to perpetually dehumanize his present life and abort his posterity.

In the face of all these, a fundamental question has continued to assault my gastronomic convenience, with a nauseating urgency and persistence. Sleep forcefully flees my horizon whenever these questions arise with their characteristic and phenomenal insistence. And these questions haunt my waking moments with a regularity that dwarfs my resistance. Are Nigerians ontologically created to eat crap at the instance of every crude, uncouth rogue or renegade who is able to hijack state power? This is a question that has continued to unsettle my convenience and conscience. Why have Nigerians not risen like the French rose in 1879 to kick out the debauched Bourbon Monarchy? Why have we not risen in righteous anger like the Bolsheviks rose in 1917 to kick out the corrupt House of the Romanovs headed by a weak Tsar Nicholas, and ran by the unholy alliance of a self-conceited wife and the renegade Monk Rasputin? Why have we failed to rise like the Romanians rose to kick out Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989? Are we possessed of a congenital propensity to endure and suffer evil? Why can we not rise like the Georgians rose in 2003 in the Rose revolution to send Eduard Shevardnadze into a well deserved voluntary retirement? Why could we not rise the Haitians that rose to reject the degenerate Bertrand Aristides in 2004? Why have we consistently failed to borrow a leaf from oppressed peoples like the Ukrainians in their Orange revolution of 2004? Why couldn’t Nigerians kick out Obasanjo’s government like the Spaniards kicked out Aznar over some diplomatic economy with the truth about the terrorist attack in March 2004?

These questions are really nauseating, when asked over Nigeria. Nigerians have a series of example to borrow from. Yet, we still hide under incurable timidity in the face of oppressive tyranny. By our silence and inaction, the pirates in power and the buccaneers that have hijacked our ship of state, are unwittingly empowered to continue their drunken revelry, while our ship lists to starboard on its way to sinking to the bottom. I will never succumb to the temptation to think that Nigerians are either fools or that they are stupid. This is because, known facts does not support that construction. The amazement becomes debilitating, on why they have been silent in the face of government’s recklessness. Why have they failed to realise that this ship takes everybody under, once it sinks? It has beaten my comprehension hollow to consider these questions. Have our people failed to realise that when brigands are in power, the people are sold into a socio-economic and political slavery that stands only to benefit the slave masters? And since the facts have come home to every observer that Obasanjo’s government is out to decimate Nigeria, why have we persistently failed to act? Have we lost our sense of self-preservation?

The only conclusion here no matter how painful it sounds, remains that Nigeria is a sick society. It is a society diseased and ravaged on all parts and ramifications. This society is no longer in the Intensive Care Unit. She is now in coma; a vegetative coma for that matter. This is a society that harbours within her, the most eminent network and crosspollination of retrogressive forces, ever to conglomerate in one place at the same time, on the earth surface. If not, how then do we explain the pervasive rot, the overwhelming decadence, the dereliction; government’s vaulting criminality and the conspiratorial silence of Nigerians.

The health of every society is mirrored as well as predicated on the ethical sensitivity and impeccable integrity of its leaders, people and men of means. When leaders by commission or omission, succeeds in transforming themselves into political parasites or social leeches, with the conniving silence of the people; the social structure, which is now forced to play host to these horde of ravaging ticks, is bludgeoned into an irreparable social disability, from which she may never recover. The whole social structure is instantly transformed into one huge funeral procession.

Society gets to this level when it allows some men the unregulated leeway to swing and enthrone their capricious wiles as the unwritten laws of the land. Once this is done, stretching their grabbing arms into the public till to arrogate what belongs to all, to their private estate, like only primitive robber barons would, and then sitting atop this booty, to pontificate ingloriously and decide what happens to the majority, follows as a matter of course. This aberrational stance has the ugly tendency of being normalized, as to be construed the platform upon social behaviour is weighed and should be predicated. Even conscientious men, are unwittingly drawn into this vortex of decay; as everybody aspires to align his vision to this diseased view of social consequence. In this situation, the Hobbessian state of nature comes into a frightful existence. Might becomes right. Man then enthrones his instincts over his reason. And the fear and possibility of violent death becomes a frightening reality at every turn, as is the case in today’s Nigeria.

Whenever man canonizes his instinctual proclivities over and above his reason, he dresses himself in the robes of a challenged travesty of all that is human. He unwittingly becomes a mobile version of imbecility. He could then qualify to be identified either as moronic vestige of underdeveloped reason; a certifiable lunatic or a callous and spineless idiot. In this instance, his existence challenges reason and configures itself into a monumental affront to decency. The ethical toxicity of this swim in the debauched cesspools of egocentric narcissism generates a swirling whirlpool and vortex of corruption that defies reason and insults human intelligence. In this arena, the individual in question sees himself and his irreconciled infantile needs, as the centre of the universe. Woe betide the social construct if this unrefined travesty of humanity, by happenstance, which is most usually the case, prowls in the corridors of power. The society incurs a bad sociologically unhygienic debt, which is simply the bastardization of its ethical norms and standard and, which it can never successfully retire or even service. Any society that allows itself the unhealthy luxury of entertaining such human aberrations and giving them an unrestrained, uncontrolled and unwarranted access to its levers of power has unwittingly mortgaged her future aspirations to the islands of illusion and unrealization. When this situation is mixed with court jesters that sing the inglorious praise of irresponsible tyranny, then disaster is simply the foregone conclusion of all our strivings as a nation. And that seems to be our situation in Nigeria today.

Obasanjo misgoverns Nigeria simply because we paid him; and we have continued to pay him to do just that, with the coinage of our silence. If not, I wonder what he is still doing in Aso rock till this moment. The leader is never the sovereign. The people are. The people hired their servants to serve them, and not to lord it over them. Why should our servants serve us they way they want and not the way we want to be served, and yet we keep timorous silence in the face of it all? First our inaction allowed unworthy men access to power. Today our continued silence sustains their tyranny. We must realise that Nigeria will never retire the social deficits we would incur consequent on their executive recklessness. We should have kicked Obasanjo and his cabal of faceless undertakers ruling Nigeria out in 2003. We never did that. We by our silence bolstered their audacity. This is why we will remain under this bazaar of pain and directionlessness that is the Obasanjo’s administration. The misgovernment continues.

Robot Robot is offline
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	# 1 On encountering the majesty and infinite immensity of...Read the full article. Posted by Robot\| 29.04.2008 11:02

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