Nigeria is in grave danger more than ever.
There is no running away from the dire fact that things are not working properly in the country, and the incumbent government is living in denial.
It is as though all aspects of government, from the executive to the legislature and the judiciary, are joined up together against the people.
The general elections are fast approaching, and what one hears is that the federal government has teamed up with the state governors to ensure that the status quo remains unscathed.
But the people of the different states are not singing the same song with their governors, and there has been violence unleashed here and there.
The observable reality reminds me of the poem “The Solution” in which German playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht, suggested that since the people had lost confidence in the government it is incumbent on the government to dissolve the people and elect another.
The government has resorted to buying people like chattel parrots which entails former critics turning overnight into excited praise-singers.
This amounts to nothing because the vast majority of the populace cannot be impressed by the phony phenomenon.
The truth is that a plutocracy is being enshrined upon the country via the strategy of looted state wealth.
A contract for the construction of a so-called coastal road or highway or whatever was awarded to a business partner without any competitive bidding or scrutiny.
Budgets for years on end remain unimplemented, and the gist from government quarters is that the state governors have been bought with more money than they know what to do with. .
Salient questions about governance are answered with devious answers that can be seen to be neither here nor there.
For me, the Nigerian regime is a kakistocracy powered by kleptocracy, that is, the worst persons are ruling with the support of thievery and looting.
The supporters of the government have put all their odds on rigging the election while asking the opposition to go to court as mouthed by their principal in 2023, but the opposition brigade has just this reply: “No more going to court, the fire next time!”
It has to be understood that wanting to hang on to power by all means and against all odds has disastrous consequences. Ask History with a capital H!
Many concerned Nigerians have made bold to stress that all lovers of Nigeria need to work together now to stop the crooks and their hirelings from plunging Nigeria into Dante’s Inferno.
The pervasive fear is that the 2027 rigging promises to be more scandalous than NPN’s 1983 “Moonslide” rigging that led to the end of the Second Republic.
Nigeria has indeed fallen into the pathetic vice grip of shameless power supremacists who would rather burn down the kingdom in the vain bid of ruling until death do them part.
It is an accursed African matter for all shades of characters to covet power via the vehicle of democracy only to suddenly turn into tin-pot dictators boasting that no opposition can remove them from office.
Then only tragedy supervenes, and I can only repeat the words of the Fortune-Teller in James Ene Henshaw’s 1956 play This Is Our Chance: “A mighty wind shall blow. A great rain shall fall, much harm shall be done. But out of destruction there shall be calm, and all shall not be the same again.”
The government-versus-people battle being staged on the larger Nigerian stage today can be likened to the Western Regional crisis of the 1960s when the people supported the then inacerated Chief Obafemi Awolowo against the government of Premier Ladoke Akintola.
The votes of the people did not count then which led to the post-election violence of “Operation Wetie” that engendered the coups and the civil war etc.
I smell blood now that Nigeria is in totalitarian captivity.
As George Santayana wrote in his 1905 The Life Of Reason, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The pity is that the people who condemned Akintola’s ways back in time are now avidly supporting his means and ends because of tribe.
Reputations have been worsted, and it is such a shame beholding old uncles peeing in the public square in flagrante.
This reveals that in intra-tribal warfare it is cool to support what is right, but when it turns to what they now see as inter-tribal battle it is right to support “our turn”.
Savagery entails remembering that late President Muhammadu Buhari stated that Nigerians would only start missing him after he’s gone.
Nobody could have ever guessed that Buhari would be beaten in the evil chart of nepotism and prebendalism.
If you point this out to the aboriginal hacks of the government you will be the one instantly demonized as an “ethnic bigot!”
As Hitler’s unmourned propagandist Joseph Goebbels knows, a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth.
After the Nigerian Civil War JP Clark wrote the poem “The Casualties”:
The casualties are not only those who started
A fire and now cannot put it out. Thousands
Are burning that had no say in the matter.
My attention has just been drawn to the news that the presidential candidate Omoyele Sowore has just managed to survive what he calls a state-sponsored assassination attempt in Ekiti State.
My friend Senator Babafemi Ojudu has just sent me the picture of a burnt APC campaign vehicle in Katsina State.
It all boils down to Nigeria’s familiar road of the more things change, the more they remain the same or worse.
May this fire not spread!
It grieves the heart to remember that in 1983 the thriving publisher Olaiya Fagbamigbe was burnt to death by an irate mob in old Ondo State after NPN’s Akin Omoboriowo was declared the winner of the governorship race against UPN’s Adekunle Ajasin.
“They have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing” is a saying attributed to the French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand.
All I know is that no government has ever won the war against the people. Governments come and go only for the people to remain.
Even this too shall pass…
