By
okey ndibe
Tuesday,
July 24, 2007
Mass amnesia—collective forgetting—is an ally of anybody, or group,
whose agendum is to violate the public interest. I suspect that Nigerian leaders,
or, at any rate, those who wreck Nigeria while posing as leaders encourage docility,
passivity and forgetfulness on the part of the citizens. If Nigerians discover
the secret to keeping a comprehensive ledger of official misdeeds, then the
days of many of their so-called leaders would be numbered.
Sadly, memorylessness remains a bane. It does profound harm to the citizenry,
but is deeply prized by Nigeria’s band of false messiahs, snatchers of
dreams and stealers of hope who are versed in the hollow rhetoric of "moving
the nation forward." Since their main job is to fatten themselves at the
expense of the rest of us, these villains go out of their way to keep the rest
of us in a state of blindness.
Blindness—an apt figurative description for a state bereft of memory—gives
public officials the license to act with impunity. At the end of his powerful
novel, A Man of the People, Chinua Achebe offers us a moving metaphor of the
kind of monstrosity borne of an atmosphere of moral complacency. Achebe writes
about "a regime in which you saw a fellow cursed in the morning for stealing
a blind man’s stick and later in the evening saw him again mounting the
altar of the new shrine in the presence of all the people to whisper into the
ear of the chief celebrant…"
Achebe’s thief—despised one moment and the next moment seen treading
the sacred ground to commune with the priest—can thrive only by securing
communal indifference or nonchalance. In like manner, Nigeria’s agbada-sporting
knaves who fleece the commonwealth prize memorylessness. Day and night, as they
plot, and act, to siphon the nation’s resources into private pockets,
these men and women seek to deflect our attention. They succeed only when the
rest of us forget.
That’s why it behooves enlightened citizens to keep themselves informed,
to retain a healthy skeptical stance in relation to officialdom’s narcotizing
nostrums, and to ensure that the mechanism of social remembrance is in a permanent
state of activation.
In the spirit of keeping memory alive and vital, an antidote to the spew of
falsehoods supported by official imprimatur, one has decided to exhume a few
recent issues and controversies—lest we forget.
Lest we forget, the Olusegun Obasanjo regime ‘revealed’ to the world
in April that security operatives had apprehended a truck loaded with explosives.
The truck’s immediate mission, the government alleged, was to bring down
the offices of the Independent National Electoral Commission.
Nigerians were even shown pictures of a handcuffed man, the alleged suicide
bomber who drove the bomb-laden truck. Government spokesmen spoke volubly about
those behind this Iraq-style terror plot aimed at thwarting INEC’s conduct
of the elections. The unnamed sponsors, we learned, were desperate politicians
who’d divined their poor electoral prospects.
Government officials gloated. Their frustration of the horrific plot, they said,
testified to the preparedness of the nation’s law enforcement apparatus
to deal with mischief-makers. Sunday Ehindero, then Inspector-General of Police,
weighed in. He promised to prosecute the plot’s faceless masterminds.
Were the story true, it would have represented a dark and disturbing new chapter
in Nigeria’s experience.
Some Nigerians, perhaps many, fell for the poppycock. A credulous friend called
me, his voice quaking with awe and dread. ‘Okey,’ he said, "Nigeria
is finished o. We’re now getting suicide bombers too." He was scandalized
when I told him I didn’t believe a lick of it. "Do you think the
government—any government—would make up a story like this?"
His innocence was touching. "Governments regularly make up this kind of
story," I retorted.
Three months later, there is nothing but conspicuous silence about this suicide
bomber jiggery pokery. For all his huffing, Ehindero made an ignoble exit from
his perch at police headquarters without muttering another word on the issue.
Ehindero’s successor, Mike Okiro, has (wisely) been mum on the matter.
Not even Obasanjo, author of the do-or-die strategy that must have spawned the
‘terror attack’ script, or any of his battery of apologists, has
shown any inclination to revisit the drama.
But if those who manufactured this elaborate hoax have opted to abandon it,
Nigerians cannot afford to forget. It was calculated to scare the hell out of
Nigerians, and to portray the country to foreigners as a terrain in which the
bloody modus operandi of the suicide bomber was going to come into play. Show
me who came up with this stunt and I will show you the most unpatriotic Nigerian
alive.
Lest we forget, Obasanjo—in the dying days of his misrule, used the occasion
of his last media chat to make a sensational claim. He told the nation that
the police had discovered the identity of the man who ordered the assassination
of former Attorney General Bola Ige. According to Obasanjo, the culprit was
a drug baron. Many found the timing of this presidential revelation suspect.
Funsho Adegbola, Bola Ige’s oldest daughter, rose to a quick dismissal
of this bit of presidential fiction. Mrs. Adegbola said—in language whose
highly revealing import was not lost on Nigerians—that the new fangled
speculation meant that the ghost of her late father haunted Obasanjo.
At first, Ehindero seemed incapable of mustering the gumption to legitimize
the president’s weird theory. He spoke to reporters in an accent that
suggested that he was demurring. But a malleable man with no spine soon falls
for any bait. "Properly briefed," Ehindero came out the next day to
parrot the president’s line along with a pledge to parade the drug baron
in question. But the farcical drama of exposure, poorly rehearsed, collapsed
at Ehindero’s hands. The alleged mastermind openly scoffed at Ehindero’s
puppet show, complete with a masked witness. Seized by uncontrollable guffaws,
the alleged sponsors of the assassins told a discombobulated Ehindero: "This
is like going to a theatre."
He might have added, "Puerile theatre." To his credit, Okiro has kept
his distance from the Obasanjo-Ehindero script. Nigerians must demand: If the
former president’s fantasy about Ige’s killer is going nowhere,
then who, really, killed the former attorney general?
Lest we forget, armed thugs swept through Anambra in November of 2004 and, in
burning every major public facility, left us a frightening portrait of man-made
disaster. The arsonists swarmed the state in a convoy of numerous trucks and
they operated for three days.
Contrary to what might be expected of hoodlums engaged in the most reckless
of crimes, these ones wore no masks. They were without a tinge of fear.
Understandably, for the state police command was apparently under strict orders
not to hinder the arsonists in any fashion—but, in fact, to facilitate
their dastardly work. The police did an impeccable job of it, hailing the slash
and burning horde from the sidelines—all of this captured on television.
So outrageous was the wholesale assault, and so open the complicity of the police,
that Audu Ogbe, then chairman of the ruling party, was compelled to scold Obasanjo
in a public letter. In a hectoring response, Obasanjo claimed that the police
had arrested some of the arsonists, and would soon bring them to justice.
Three years later, if anybody has been charged to court on account of that affront,
then, it is a secret known only to Obasanjo. But Nigerians must ask: Who paid
those thugs to burn and destroy public property?
Who instructed the police to give the relay of arsonists unhindered roaming
rights?
There are many more events that we must continually seek to bear in mind—lest
we forget. There is the genocide of Zaki Biam and Odi. The lending of the police
to political great grand godfather Lamidi Adedibu in his drive to sack Rasheed
Ladoja from the governor’s office in Ibadan. There is the smuggling out
of $170,000 on a presidential jet bound for New York city. There is the scandal
involving Chioma Anasoh, a woman linked to former Aviation Minister, Femi Fani
Kayode. On June 27, she was caught on her way to London—allegedly with
more than a couple hundred thousand dollars she had failed to declare.
There is the scandal of Obasanjo’s presidential library and the billions
of naira funneled into it by businessmen and governors alike.
Those who reap from such violations of our patrimony would want us to forget,
for that’s how they win. We, whose aspirations and dreams they abort,
must insist on remembering—and on seeking restitution. That is the recipe
for salvaging our collective promise.