Nigeria is in trouble. Big trouble. We are in a ship in turbulent waters with a
big, ugly iceberg ahead of us and our captain is claiming not to see it. Worse still, his crewmen are telling him that
the road onward is clear. That the next
port of call, 2015, can be reached even if all those who paid (with their
votes) for a smooth cruise will die or fall in the water before the destination
is reached. While the captain is playing
dumb, his hired rabble rousers are busy adding more coal to the engine while
the ship is fast cutting short the distance between the ship and the
iceberg. Some of the passengers, who may
be on a death wish trip, are urging the captain to maintain course and whoever
criticises his leadership of the ship should be thrown to the shark-invested
ocean.
I am at a lost at how a country of 170
million people got saddled with a president with an addled brain – a country of
brilliant and intelligent hardworking men and women, including a noble
laureate. We have a president with a one-track
mind tagging a wife bent on embarrassing Nigerians in the international community
with her lack of basic knowledge on either how a country is governed or the
role of a presidential spouse. Things
are made more worrisome when you have a security leadership that is willing to
be summoned and abused by a person with no known constitutional role or
responsibility aside from entertaining her husband. Here I am referring to the Borno State
Commissioner of Police who presented himself to be insulted and disgraced by
Patience Jonathan. We can count
ourselves lucky that no provision was made in our constitution recognising the
spouses of elected officials. Well, at
least for now. One may be celebrating
prematurely – what with the way Ike Ekweremadu, the Deputy Senate President is
lending himself as a vessel for the introduction of unpopular presidential
Bills.
While the whole world is mourning with
Nigerians on the abduction of over 200 of its kids from a school in the north
east, Patience Jonathan decided to audition for a Nollywood flip in front a
crowd made up of governors’ wives and a compliant media. For a B rated movie, the performance was an
insult on our amateurish movie industry.
Even though the movies that are daily churned out are insults to the
word movie, hiring Faka (Fake?) Jonathan based on the performance that Sunday
night/ Monday morning will be visiting violence to the movie industry, no
matter how bad they are. She came across
as a bad play act even with almost three weeks of rehearsals. Patience’s actions that weekend were
insensitive, callous, uncouth, heartless, uncalled for and an unmitigated
disaster to her image (if she has one).
The verbal violence she unleashed on the
traumatised parents, relations and teachers of those poor girls, who has been
in the hands of killers for about a month now, was the height of superciliousness
by anyone whose primary responsibility is to keep the bed of the president
warm. Many people were amused by her
display of contrived emotion. I was
not. To crown her show of power and
disdain for the devastated parents and officials, she ordered the arrest of
some of those who came to represent some parents who couldn’t make it to Abuja
from Chibok for one reason or the other.
Apart from the mental anguish they are going through, they don’t have
presidential jets to ferry them to be at her Imperial Majesty’s presence. I don’t blame her for the insults she hurled
at the Borno state officials. I blame
Kashim Shettima for allowing them to answer her summons, though his wife wisely
opted out. Would the punishment for not
attending the ‘meeting’ be worse than the verbal violence they were subjected
to?
I have been trying to twig in what capacity
did Patience Jonathan subpoenaed these people and coming three weeks their kids
have been whisked away – potential first ladies. What was she doing all this while? If she really cared, wouldn’t she have gone
to Chibok the morning after and not send her husband to be dancing with Sani
Danger and Shekarau in Kano few hours after the dastardly act was done? Accusing the aggrieved of “sharing blood” is
a notch higher than insensitivity. And
then she went on to practically accuse them of stage-managing the whole thing
to mortify her husband, in cahoots with those against his 2015 ambition. Mortify Jonathan? Is it possible? Has it crossed her mind (if she has any) that
these people are in unspeakable anguish not knowing what unimaginable things
their daughters are going though?
While she was acting her script, her husband
was “catechising” officials of the Borno state government on whether the
students have actually being abducted.
What a slur! While Jonathan and
his wife were sleeping in the three weeks that the girls have been away from their
parents, these people that he is grilling couldn’t get a wink because of the
pressures they are subjected to by the parents of the kids. To compound their tomfoolery, they introduce sectional
dimension through our current moron-in-chief, Asari Dokubo and a religious
angle through the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), in particularly the
not long ago formed Northern Christian Elders Forum. While the whole world is united in outrage
over what happened to these poor innocent kids, the president is exploiting our
fissures to escape from responsibility.
As far as he has shown, he is angry that the abduction has put a hold to
his junketing across the country campaigning for an election we are told he may
not contest.
The anger shown by Jonathan towards the
members of the House of Representatives for daring to invite his favourite
Minister, Deziani Allison-Maduekwe was more real than his animus towards the
terror merchants who rendered a whole community sad and miserable. What gave the members the audacity to label
Allison-Maduekwe corrupt? Don’t they
know the difference between a thief and a corrupt person? Saint Deziani is not corrupt but only a thief
who intermittently dips her hands and pilfers some billion dollars. They are lucky he doesn’t have the power to sanusi them. They should ask the Danmaje who couldn’t even travel to neighbouring Niger all because
he labelled the saint of the Petroleum Ministry corrupt.
Goodluck Jonathan and his wife are ready to
play Russian roulette with the lives of not only those poor abducted girls but
the lives of all Nigerians just so that they can remain in the Aso Villa for
may be another four years. They always
recourse to ethnicity, regionalism and religion whenever their incompetence is
manifested by one avoidable mistake or the other. And we always buy the scam. From being a shoeless poor fisherman’s son
from a minority tribe to being hated by northerners for being southerner, to
well publicised church pilgrimages, we are gradually being diminished by Jonathan’s
actions. And we always buy into his
scam. While we are at each other’s
throats, the couple are steadily creating and Imperial dynasty. I just pray there will be a country left by
the time they take their final bow.
And there are clowns like Doyin Okupe and
the recently kicked out Ali Gulak wiling to do hatchet man’s job for their
Imperial majesties. Instead of admitting
their incompetence, they unleashed the likes of Okupe or Asari Dokubo to remind
us of how low we have sunk as a nation.
When a nation’s policies or lack of it; when a nation’s leader’s image
is managed by those who are more comfortable living in the sewers than in
comfortable, then the nation has retrogressed to prehistoric times.
A badly written script, acted by amateur
thespians to a divided house. God save
us from this combination. Chai, there is
God wo!
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