Many times in my private moments I empathize with the President Muhammadu Buhari. You never know the weight of what he is carrying on behalf of the rest of us until you are in the midst of politicians and see them in their daily activities and operations. Stay with them just for 30minutes and you will find out that many stand for things that are antithetical to progress. A lot of them are evil personified and what would startle anyone with sound principle would be the discovery that so many of them are not just haughty, they are greedy to the highest level possible. They want everything for themselves, this desire is not anchored on natural endowments but simply on a believed ability to seize hallowed positions and to use such to subvert well laid out processes as well as dealing fatal blows, assassination inclusive, to those who may stand on their way. It is exactly for this reason that Nigeria is exactly the way it is. As I said last week, our nation has become something akin to a wild forest with various kinds of “wild animals” preying on each other. It has moved from a game of humanity to the squaring up of smart guys who have no qualms deploying crude means in their effort to get undue advantage.
I was thinking about our nation and what it has turned out to be when I read the column of Tatalo Alamu, in Saturday Nation and it was like what was troubling me at the time was also of big concern to him. This is what he had to say about the present state of our nation: “We have produced stultified institutions, estranged and alienated from the principal goal of civilizing humanity, that assumed the punitive life of their own; political system that breeds tyrants, men without economic conscience and moral imagination, financial institutions that cripple initiatives and genuine enterprise, and intelligentsia so historically disoriented that it is incapable of reflecting on its own recondition. It is a miracle that Nigerians have managed to survive such a debilitating order even though the human toll has been quite prohibiting.”
Check the statement again and look at our nation today, you would see that what the learned scholar said is not just a fact, it is the truth. Every day in every sphere of life in our nation, hundreds of citizens are unjustly being shoved aside from where they should ordinarily stand to partake of what we know as national rights and benefits. Even when such benefits can go round everyone and still produce a surplus, one person with negative spirituality appropriates the whole thing by force for himself and not even for his family because experience has shown that some of these shady characters have no homes worth the name. The worst thing about this scenario is that nearly all of us are in it and it has continued to multiply because the few that should speak up and stop it, choose to hide in an attitude of conspiratorial passivity or blinded collaboration.
This why when the president is busy talking and fighting corruption, I sometimes wonder if he knows the enormity of the task before him. One of my friends keeps telling me that his main prayer every day is for God to take care of his friends, his enemies he can handle. I never knew the import of what he often said to me until recently when I began deep romance with our political class and I found out that the man who visits regularly and shares meals with you can be the real enemy. If you still don’t know what am talking about, revisit the event of Obasanjo’s last dance with Chuba Okadigbo as Senate President and you will get a clearer picture. This attitudinal deformity instead of abating has rather assumed a monstrous dimension leaving us with a nation where impunity has become the order of the day. We are only shocked when its disdainful outcomes happen in places we consider “hallow.” Many of us are traumatized by the Abia NDDC nomination, not just because it contravenes Article 2 subsection 1b which expressly says “an indigene”, not anybody or a person, “from an oil producing area shall be a representative to the board”, we are devastated because it is happening in APC, a party that came to power on the good philosophy of CHANGE, and we all know that a cardinal aspect of this change is on the warped manner we have gone about doing nearly everything in our nation and which has left us prostrate.
For such a sensitive and strategic appointment, and in fact for every such nomination, it should be taken for granted that wide consultation would hallmark the process and by so doing pass the test of fair play, but in the Abia case, a few persons who supplant the people sat in Abuja and appropriated what belongs to others, and this explains why the state chairman of All Progressives Congress (APC) would close his eyes, knowing he’s not from an oil producing community, boldly arrogate to himself what a national law has allocated to a designated people. Am still asking for help to find a proper designation to this kind of behaviour. I have heard the report that the usurper claimed he didn’t know how he got nominated and he could not repudiate the nomination because he needed time to find out what he called technical reasons behind the action. This angle of the argument and excuse on the surface looks fine but subjected to critical scrutiny it produces dangerous consequences for both the APC as a party and the president as the nominating authority. For the APC, this means either of two things: absence of a sound administrative setup or one that is as bad as the past one that spurred the party to adopt the slogan ‘Change’ while the second is that it is a clear attempt to wrongly portray the president as lacking the ability to take correct decisions along the line prescribed by law. Some of us know this is not true of the president. It is a clear confirmation of the presence in the commanding heights of APC of men and possibly women who came to Canaan still carrying the baggage of Egypt. Call them internal enemies and you won’t be wrong. If I were Buhari, I will show them the way out as their nefarious acts begin to dance after them.
I have also heard supporters of the nominee say “indigene” in the law refers to whole of Abia and what is more Osisioma, his local government harbors NNPC fuel depot; nothing shows how low Nigerians can go in chase of the mundane than these, if the argument were right then Kano, Sokoto, Bornu, Adamawa States should all be NDDC states since Nigeria produces oil, Kaduna also has a refinery and a bigger NNPC depot, I nearly forgot Lagos, they should all become oil producing states. The issue is about law, justice and equity. I commend Senator Enyi Abaribe for his positive stand on this matter. Political regrouping is going on and I know APC cannot excel opposition throwing away opportunities to win more converts. It is more dangerous if one man constitutes himself as the obstacle. I trust the President to do justice on this matter. Those who want to open new frontiers of conflict ought to be disgraced.

Related News