Yar Adua Cannot Lead Nigeria Anywhere

By Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh

An airbus A380 can carry up to 500 passengers. It is unthinkable that in this global world changed forever by September 11, that reasonable passengers will assent to a pilot’s decision to allow a blind, deaf, dumb and illiterate boy pilot the plane to any destination except in Nigeria. A country of 150 million people acquiesced to a politically deaf, dumb, blind and illiterate who never wanted the presidency to preside over their country. And they are expecting him to work miracles. This is the height of foolery. You can take this to the bank. Yar Adua will waste the first four years of his presidency on inanities. He will seek re-election, which he would rig like all others. And he will go on to waste that as well without achieving anything worth the while. Like his predecessor did. Obasanjo wasted 8 years screaming a homily of due process from the rooftops, which, unknown to many unsuspecting Nigerians was a smokescreen to one of the monstrous looting enterprises in Nigeria’s history.

Yar Adua will never lead Nigeria anywhere because he came armed with dysfunctional baggage that would forever scuttle every attempt to do the right thing. First, he was never elected by the Nigerian people. He was selected by Obasanjo and rigged into office on a stolen mandate. This confers upon him an illegitimacy, which is so very difficult to retire, as well as tying him to the moral apron-strings of those whose monies bankrolled that electoral heist. That was why consolidated thieves like James Ibori, who bankrolled Yar Adua selection are in the process of getting off the hook, thanks to a deal struck with the presidency as a consideration. Secondly Yar Adua never wanted the presidency. To that end, he had no clear cut idea what he would do with it, if he got it. He was brought out of virtual nothingness by an Obasanjo who never wanted to leave office, but to give himself ample chance of either coming back through the backdoor, or of his terrible records been historically laundered and made to pale into insignificance by the worse performance of a grotesquely incompetent successor. Furthermore, Yar Adua has an unfortunate baggage conferred on him by his fragile health and frame. History has attested to the fact that whenever potentates fall sick, or incapacitated by health indispositions their henchmen, wives or their wives’ lovers, mistresses, sons, or illegitimate heirs become the real powers behind the throne. From all indications, Yar Adua’s wife and the tiny power centres surrounding the disgraced Kingibe are the real power brokers in this administrations; quite reminiscent of the Kaduna Mafia that were the power brokers during the reign of another congenitally enfeebled Obasanjo creature; namely the puerile Shehu Shagari.

Yar Adua’s problems lie in his incompetence. This incompetence is catching up with him on the national level. This president achieved nothing of repute or note as the governor of Katsina State. He became a presidential candidate in fulfilment of Obasanjo’s Machiavellian power play. As a president he became a victim of his own ambitions. He like all of them loved the trappings of power, and forgot the content of service that should come with it. And before long, he would start viewing the journalists who report on his actions and inactions as the real problem with his administration. He would amble about in inaction, only to vent his fangs on those who convoke enough audacity to tell it the way it is. This is why journalists are going to be the next endangered species in his realpolitik.

But that does not frighten me. What scares me to death is the abiding ignorance, nay timidity afflicting the Nigerian leadership corridor and society. It scares me shitless! This is because the worst thing that can happen to a man is to bury his head in ignorance, pretending that the roulette wheels of chance will land his life at the harbours of progress and wellbeing. To this end equally, the worst character flaw in a leader of men is IGNORANCE. And the worst thing that can happen to any people is the reign of ignorance. James Madison was right. Knowledge must forever govern ignorance and those who wish to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives. Nigerians and their leaders are either an ignorant lot or they are a foolish lot. Reason can only walk in the direction of this conclusion. Anyone canvassing the obverse must first retire the inglorious question: why Nigeria is still in the clutches of a faceless cabal of leeches, who neither know the way nor are ready to show it.

Ignorance can be retired by the desire to know, which Aristotle in his metaphysics designated as an attribute of humanity. But in Nigeria, there seems to be a concerted effort at patronizing ignorance at all levels. An example of this could be gleaned from the fact that the Nigerian president does not read newspapers. Obasanjo told us as much. Nigerian politicians don’t either! This explains the sustained burial of their heads in the sands of unconcern to the plight of those they claim to govern. Since they patronize ignorance like a sex-addict does prostitutes, they seem timidly unconcerned about the plight of the people the claim to lead.

The discontent of the Nigerian populace is boiling like molten lava, whose eruption will dwarf every volcanic explosion ever witnessed in human history. But these politicians have been blind to it. The Nigerian people cannot fathom government’s inaction at the mind-boggling embezzlements of Olusegun and Iyabo Obasanjo; James Ibori, Chimaroke Nnamani and the rest of the governors? They are insulted at the wooden attempts at whitewashing this sepulchral rottenness by Farida Waziri, the crooked woman at the head of EFCC! They are scandalized that after the rogueries of Patricia Etteh, that the House under Dimeji Bankole could not purge it from being a theatre of equal opportunity embezzlers! They are scandalized that the house are tainted in scandals of incomprehensible proportions in purchasing cars for lazy and incompetent lawmakers, who care more about their pockets than about the plight of their constituencies. They are angry that Yar Adua posts only excuses at the State of Emergency he promised to declare in the power sector at his election. They are utterly disappointed at the insensitivity of fools like Enugu State law makers who budgeted to spend over 200 Million naira of Enugu state’s money on organizing a useless conference in America, when the health sector in Enugu State is yet to be fixed. The list of factors fuelling the discontent of the Nigerian masses are to be seen everywhere.

Yet, the politicians don’t get it.

I hate revolutions, because they give anonymity to the scoundrel to ventilate his suppressed orgies of crime and get away with it. But it does not take a clairvoyant to see blood flowing the streets of Nigeria in the not too distant future, if the Nigerian leadership persists in her present trajectory of looting the nation and allowing the citizenry stew in the rot. Nigeria is like a huge tinder box waiting for the right demagogue to whip up the people into a murderous frenzy that will sack this construct of decadence that has laid Nigeria prostrate.

Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. That was Santayana! The tragedy is that Nigerian politicians have a congenital allergy and amnesia when it comes to history. They neither know history nor are ready to learn from it. They choose to pose a nelson’s eye to it. But history has this funny tendency of repeating itself! When the French executed the Bourbon monarchy and the ruling nobles of the day in 1789, many pundits then were bound to think that it is a once in a life time occurrence. But the same history has shown that oppressed peoples everywhere have reached the breaking points of their elasticity, and have bounced back to murder their oppressors. In Nigeria, the oppressors of the people are our politicians. They have turned themselves into inglorious bastards, sucking the life and vitality out of the nation through their visionlessness and obscene debaucheries. We would not talk about their corruption! And they bask flamboyantly in their ill-gotten wealth, stolen from the commonweal; insulting Nigerians who are compelled to subsist in poverty, that these fools may life in obscene opulence.

On the other side of the equation resides the majority of Nigerians! They are a disembowelled and emasculated lot, who proffer a postural unconcern to the source of their predicament. Through a systemic castration, the politicians have succeeded in Balkanizing them and eviscerating the rise of collective discontent. The politicians have used primordial attachments like tribalism, religion and all what not to keep the people divided and unable to muster a common front in their own defence from the rapacious depredations of an avaricious elite. This serves this elitist cabal well. The people are forced into scratching, kicking and clawing to assuage their Maslownian needs. This busies them and keeps their eye of the major source of their problem, and abandons them to the mercy of these same wolves that put them there in the first place. This explains why there was scarcely a sustainable opposition to Obasanjo’s scheme to impose Yar Adua on Nigerians. The hungry were settled; fed for one day, and they sold their rights, like Esau of old did his for a plate of messy porridge.

This justifies my appellation and designation of Nigerians, a stock which I share, as hopeless dreamers and dysfunctional optimists. When Obasanjo kicked and crawled to impose Yar Adua on Nigeria in utter disregard to justice and due process, many Nigerians cheer-led his ethical leprosy. Timidity grilled their brains. Instead of insisting on due process and a free and fair election, Nigerians were manipulated into hopelessly hoping that a Yar Adua ridden roughshod to power is better than the august tyrant Obasanjo. Instead of saying a collective NO to Obasanjo’s crooked antics, we slumbered in idiocy, swearing only to our pillows. Today, Yar Adua has wasted over a year in hopeless vacillations that is directionless. He has neither a plan nor a manifesto to moving Nigeria forward. He has been ambling like a fish that was gotten out of water. The point is that he never had a plan for Nigeria. That was why he never desired the office. It was imposed on his fragile frames, with the expectations that the office will floor his fragile health and usher the hawks once more into office.  

But the politicians should never recline on their stolen oars. History has shown that oppression cannot be endured forever, even if a people have an infinite propensity to endure evil. Days of reckoning have this impious habit of happening upon us. This is because those who are feeding fat at other people’s expense are not given to foresight. They are immune to the fact privileges are as ephemeral as they come. They have this uncanny stupidity of believing Ian Fleming that diamonds are forever. But according to the Wise Heraclitus of old, the only thing that is forever is change.

Nigeria will change. That is for sure. But anyone hoping that Yar Adua, or this bunch of legislative buccaneers we are presently entertaining on the national and local scene, will bring the kind of positive change that Nigeria needs at the moment is deluding himself. Nigerians must wake up and smell the coffee. We have wasted donkey years in this stinking tunnel of underdevelopment. These guys are busy embezzling our posterity, forcing us into metamorphosing into irrelevant spectators at our own executions. We must rise up and kick out these inglorious bastards. That is the only option we have at the moment. No one is empowered to rule us without our consent! But before we can do that, we must bury tribalism. It is an instrument that they use to divide us and prevent Nigerians from mustering a common front against our oppression. On the day we are able to do this, development will smile on us, and progress will berth on our shores!

As for Yar Adua and his wayfarers, they are jokes! They cannot lead Nigeria anywhere! They neither know the way nor are they ready to show it. They are tainted by the unethical baggage of their lewd ambitions!

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