I woke up this morning feeling very angry
for a reason I cannot grasp. I looked
around my room and went through my mind trying to locate the reason for my
anger but couldn’t. Then it hit me –
Jonathan Goodluck is going to declare to Nigerians what they all know since –
that he will contest for a “second” term.
The sheer cruelness of the declaration less than twenty four hours after
more than forty nine students were bombed to smithereens and at a time millions
of people have been chased away by terrorists from their homes and almost a
whole geographical zone has been surrendered by the Nigerian Army to the
terrorists with its attendant consequences.
I then thought is Jonathan Goodluck human at all? Is there an atom of humanism in him? I then said to myself he won’t dare declare
while most of the soil in my part of the world is soaked in blood – the blood
of innocent young kids which is yet to dry.
No, common sense will prevail. In
the event Goodluck decides to go ahead with his declaration, I tried to
convince myself that all the northerners with him would withdraw their support
or at least abstain from attending this celebration of death and destruction.
Alas, Jonathan declared and northerners were
falling head over heels to be recognised as attending. This got me really angry to the extent I
began questioning my sanity. Are these bunches
of unfeeling, politically disconnected, grovelling politicians, genuflecting
before Patience Jonathan, truly my representatives? Do we really think for a moment that the
people I saw around Jonathan care what happens to us – whether we live or we
die? Have our senses being so dulled to
pain by docility and timidity that we are ready to accept these people as our
leaders and condone their behaviour to the detriment of the whole northern
region in particular and the country at large?
Have we been so mentally defeated that we acquiescent our fate with
fatalism? What kind of leadership will
sit back and dine with those who doesn’t care whether their people are
annihilated or not?
In the aftermath of the Kano pogroms of
1966, which itself was caused by the brutal murder of northern political and
military leaders by a largely Igbo officer corps, Odumegwu Ojukwu as governor
of the Eastern Region ask all Igbos then living in the north to go back to the
east and declared the Biafra Republic.
Ojukwu did that ostensibly to protect the Igbos from being
annihilated. Whatever the demerits of
his actions then, Ojukwu displayed leadership qualities by trying to protect
his people from being massacred, as they saw it. While half of the northeast is taken over by
terrorists, politicians from the zone are lining up behind Jonathan in Abuja,
back –patting with plastic smiles on their patsy faces.
My Adamawa state has been reduced to two
Senatorial zones from three because Adamawa north Senatorial zone is now
effectively under the control of the terrorists. This zone is home to two minsters – Boni
Haruna and Zainab Maina, the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshal Alex Badeh,
the governor and Speaker of Adamawa State House of Assembly, a senator and two
members of the National Assembly. All of
them have remained mute on the happenings in their area. While their people have ran to the bush, they
are ensconced in the comforts of Abuja and most of them are with Jonathan at
the Eagle Square today, mocking the memory of the dead and those whose lives
have been permanently dislocated.
The coterie of northern politicians queuing
up behind Jonathan is guiltier of the murders taking place in the region and
they should know their hands are dripping with the blood of the innocent. I hope to God that their consciences (if they
have any) should continue to disturb them and the ghosts of the dead should
deny them peace for the rest of their miserable lives. The people of Adamawa state are now living in
perpetual fear of being overrun by the terrorists, yet some people from the
state are blaspheming on the good things Jonathan did to the north and the northeast. How did these people ever get to where they
are? Riding on the back of corpses, of course.
It is terrible. Poor northerners. What the politicians at the Eagle Square
forgot to mention is the introduction of violence to a region hitherto known
for its tolerance. And fittingly enough
it all started at the Eagle Square, the very place they gathered today to pay
homage to Satan and Satanism, on October 1st, 2010 the first time
Jonathan celebrated independence day as President.
Northerners in Jonathan’s corner are not
conscious of their responsibilities to their constituents and whatever God they
worship or their traditions of being their brothers’ keepers. It is for them a very lucrative undertaking. It is left for the ordinary man on the street
to have the courage to face those crooks whenever they feel safe to come home
from their abodes in Abuja. The ordinary
poor must accept the shocking fact they “he is on his own” and elevate his
survival instinct to a level he could be able to outlive the carnage going on
around him. The ordinary Nigerian should
endeavour not to let his intelligence be hamstrung by any sentimental concern
promoted by propagandists, but to permit cool reason guide his choices in 2015.
Though Jonathan can be described both as mendacious
and malignant, he had a collaborative host in the leadership of the north. This accidental president has destroyed the
region and the north should therefore unite and vote him out of office. The Quislings among us should be left to the
vagaries of time. Goodluck Jonathan has
degraded the office of the president of Nigeria by reducing it to a clannish
enclave and debauched our democracy through reptilian cunning and divisive
policies. Most Nigerians are aware of
this apart from the crowd from the north – the region that bore Jonathan’s
destructive brunt.
Our politicians should know that allowing
themselves the vain corruption of safety is not theirs and must therefore be
bold enough to tell themselves that neither Jonathan nor them can give them
that. Them and we are all human beings
on this earth and in Nigeria, with minds, heart and limbs that could be easily
hurt or broken like the poor souls in our troubled areas. The politicians may believe their own
position to be high, but no higher than the man in Limankara whose family were
wiped out and he was unlucky to survive and bear the pain for the rest of his
live; or the woman in Pakka who had to bear the pain of labour in the bushes of
Maiha without a midwife or medical attention; or the child in the wilderness of
Kuburshosho, wandering the mountain sides, living on legumes and roots for sustenance
while grieving the loss of a mother and father.
They should feel no more secure than the
school child in Potiskum or Buni Yadi, who while hiding in terror, saw how his
schoolmate was brutally murdered while the government and its operatives watch. If the ordinary man in Hildi or Abadam could
be killed or maimed, so could they.
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