What one had dismissed as a rash of illusions, brought about by other political improbabilities that surround us, however, is being given an air of plausibility by individuals and groupings to which one had earlier attributed a sense of relevance of historic actualities.”- Prof. Wole Soyinka
Looking at the horizon of Nigeria’s political pedestal, it is clear that Nigeria is in serious trouble. Serious trouble, because they have been offered two decadent and reeking eggs from the same gallinaceous bird. It is not by happenstance that Nigeria has found itself in this situation. No, it is not. It is because this is the destiny of a country in which no one has any faith but on which a few placed the hope of looting and cannibalizing. It is this cannibalizing that will eventually guide Nigeria to the port of its destiny through balkanizing.
Having had a good enough time to assess President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan in the last six years, one has come to the conclusion that he is not fit to rule Nigeria. He has shown a convincing degree of plowed spinelessness, inebriating incompetence, nauseating befuddlement and an odious detachment from reality that could only be equalled in History by the French King Louis XVI who was beheaded on January 21, 1793. He has allowed things to spiral out of control.
Jonathan, with due respects, has brought all PHD holders to unspeakable opprobrium. He has engaged in acts that are comparatively reflective of an intelligent quotient that is a little above that of a nincompoop. His dour demeanor drips with dumbness deodorized with drabness. His colorless and often nauseating approach to issues switches off the brightness in every environment. Safe all the paraphernalia of office around him, his presence alone could weaken the strong, defuse enthusiasm, discourage the valiant, incinerate aspiration and or make your really sick to the point of puking.
Jonathan is a perfect study in how to manufacture complicated confusion. His physiological being exudes lack of confidence in a cowed and intimidated persona. He comes across as someone without balls and totally bereft of any form of courage. Devoid of a vision, he wanders around the halls of governance like an inebriated sailor, unsure where to bank his boat. For someone who came from a persecuted and exploited minority tribe, he has no sense of History or a sense of mission. Jonathan behaved like a shackled slave, hopeless, gutless, arid in imaginations and unable to fathom freedom, but easily satiated with just food and water. In most ramifications, he is a certified disappointment and a beatified disgrace.
As a result of his ingratitude to the Yoruba Nation, he shot himself in the foot and complicated the misfortune of the PDP by making the Party an orphan in Yorubaland. He thus made himself vulnerable to his enemies and detractors alike. He fertilized the political ground of his enemies while allowing his own to become arid. He allowed the security of the country to worsen and used his respect for untoward personalities in the polity to be the basis of his governing Nigeria. He sought to satisfy so many gods and ended up with none of them giving him any form of blessing. He has appropriated the sobriquet “clueless” because of all this.
He is now in contest with a cruel, wicked and mean-spirited soulless human being called Muhammadu Buhari who in recent weeks has added to his long list of atrocities, the alleged forging of a credential. Buhari has no feeling. He is sadistic. He is cold –blooded (that is assuming there is any blood whatsoever flowing in his vein). He is a critter. He lacks in totality what William Shakespeare referred to in his play “Macbeth” as “milk of human kindness.” He is a simple looking dangerous human being that is psychologically impaired. He is a socially certified psychopath. His calm mien is a cover for a troubled and perverted mind. The only person in History closest to Mohammadu Buhari in severe psychosis is Adolf Hitler, the man who killed millions needlessly without justification.
In Buhari’s schizoid world, facts have no place; truth is a travesty; morality, an anathema; fairness, an abstract and integrity, a clog in the wheel of injustice. A comparative analysis of Buhari and Hitler shows that they have in common, some fundamentals in nature and character – lonely, mean, unfeeling, cold, perverted stoicism, aloofness, paranoia, siege mentality, supremacism ( a more severe form of racism) – among several others. Buhari is mentally unfit, academically incapacitated, philosophically warped and emotionally watery.
As far as this writer is concerned, Jonathan is not fit to rule Nigeria anymore. The PDP has run its course. The PDP is a gang of criminals who ran out of ideas and have been cornered in their get-away car. But if the PDP is a gang of criminals, the APC is a gang of born-again criminals. Their get-away jet has just developed chronic engine troubles and karma is about to render its judgment. Jonathan is not fit to be President and Buhari is not the alternative answer. Putting Buhari in Aso Rock would be from “fry pan to fire” for Nigerians. Those who will benefit from this impending tragedy of Buhari Presidency, if it ever came to pass, are the amalgamated economic, religious and political perverts, their hypocritical criminally tendentious sycophants, hangers-on and sentries congregated in the top echelon of the APC.
One should not forget to mention, because this is very important, that there are still few decent exceptions, individuals of conscience and integrity, unwittingly corralled, trapped and enmeshed in the contaminated water of criminal enterprise of the two political parties. These individuals are victims of a genre of politics that is against the run of decency, a modicum of morality, dignity, sense of history, vision and the well being of the greatest number of our people.
“Of course, we know that human beings change. What the claims of personality change or transformation impose on us is a rigorous inspection of the evidence, not wishful speculation or behind-the-scenes assurances. Public offence, crimes against a polity, must be answered in the public space, not in caucuses of bargaining. In Buhari, we have been offered no evidence of the sheerest prospect of change. On the contrary, all evident suggests that this is one individual who remains convinced that this is one ex-ruler that the nation cannot call to order.”- Prof. Wole Soyinka
Practically everything about the atrocities of Mohammadu Buhari is in the public domain and one is not going to regurgitate them. But one is presently concerned about his soullessness and wickedness. Any human being who professed disdain for “the Truth” as Buhari did in 1984 is a soulless person. Buhari told Nigerian journalists in 1984 that it did not matter if they wrote and printed “true” stories, if he Buhari or his administration did not like it, they would be jailed. Soulless Buhari went ahead, after jailing Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor, to promulgate pro-active laws to murder three innocent Nigerians – Lawal Ojuolape, Bernard Ogedegbe and Bartholomew Owoh. He has never shown any remorse and he has never apologized.
It was under the Buhari administration that Nigerians first queued for what was then known and called “essential commodities” such as milk, sugar and beverages. Buhari never showed mercy. Rather he gloated, intimidated, threatened and persecuted. He was really mean and cruel to Nigerians. Worse of all, he has not changed a bit. Those who are postulating that he could not do that under a democratic set up are being naïve and uncritical in their thinking. Such people are oblivious of the power of the Nigerian presidency which is imperial in nature and dictatorial in character. The fact that Jonathan is a weakling as a President is irrelevant.
He allowed Umaru Dikko and Ubah Ahmed (who was actually arrested and detained) to escape to London after the coup of 1983. But because Umaru Dikko would always run his mouth and he was criticizing Buhari’s administration in London, Buhari decided to crate him like a merchandize and have him imported to Nigeria. If not for the vigilance of the always culpable British government, the Nigerian Customs were getting ready to clear Dikko as an expensive luggage. It would be a travesty and a tragedy rolled into one, to have Buhari as the President of Nigeria. Buhari is a dangerous being not fit for any decent society. To install an iniquitous person like him as the President of Nigeria is a disaster waiting to happen.
“The grounds on which General Buhari is being promoted as the alternative choice are not only shaky, but pitifully naive. History matters. Records are not kept simply to assist the weakness of memory, but to operate as guides to the future.
Prof. Wole Soyinka
Those with “calcified memory” who are turning History on its head by revising it and painting a villain like Buhari in glowing terms are destroying the future of Nigeria and its peoples. They are essentially saying that it does not matter how crooked and criminally tendentious you are in your trajectory you could still be rewarded with leadership position. It means an Ibrahim Babangida, if young and healthy enough, able to buy the press and engineer an effective propaganda to spread falsehood, could come back and rule Nigeria tomorrow. It means that a Sanni Abacha, if he was alive and well, and able to do the same, could come back and rule Nigeria. It means that all the things we teach our children – the difference between evil and good – mean nothing. It then portends that very soon, we will be grabbing armed robbers and assassins from the streets to rule over us!
“To deprive a people of volition in their own political direction is to turn a nation into a colony of slaves. Buhari enslaved the nation. He gloated and gloried in a master-slave relation to the millions of its inhabitants. It is astonishing to find that the same former slaves, now free of their chains, should clamour to be ruled by one who not only turned their nation into a slave plantation, but forbade them any discussion of their condition.”
- Prof. Wole Soyinka
Some other arrangements are better than a Jonathan Goodluck presidency. But anything, a repeat, anything, would be better than a Mohammadu Buhari Presidency. This is where the Obasanjo’s idea of an Interim Government comes to consideration. One has no idea who and who would be in this arrangement and or be part of it. And no one really knows how it would turn out. But two things it would guarantee: (a) The ridding of a clueless incompetent from Aso Rock and (b) the absence of a Hitler-like religious fundamentalist ruler in Aso Rock. The Interim Government should be given a serious consideration before a descent to permanent abyss.
Though, one does not believe in this Nigerian Project, but if Nigeria must burst at the seams and balkanize, we should endeavor to save as many innocent women, children and men as possible. We can all be commonsensical, come to the table, divide this country into its constituent nations and move on in our different directions to our different destinies. The modalities of accomplishing this would be determined when we get to the bridge to cross it. The fact that we all know that this Nigeria would still fail no matter what should not be an excuse for needless bloodshed.
Obasanjo’s idea of Interim Government would be acceptable to one because one does not want to vote for Goodluck Jonathan. And as for Buhari, anyone conversant with the contemporary Nigerian History, can never in good conscience vote for a peccant like Mohammadu Buhari. If there are still powerbrokers out there, who care a little, not about Nigeria per se, but about the peoples of Nigeria, then it is time to begin putting together a preventive solution to the tragedy that is about to unfold. Jonathan is not good news, but Buhari is a patented bad news for Nigeria and its existence.
“In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.”-John F. Kennedy, in his Inaugural Address January 20, 1961
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