Holding a Nation to Ransom

As has become customary, the murderous Islamist group, Boko Haram, attacked three churches in Kaduna state on Sunday, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Also, in what is becoming a saddening routine, youth affiliated to the Christian faith carried out reprisal attacks on nearby mosques and many innocent Muslims got caught up in the ensuing violence.

Death And A Mourning Nation

Before that Dana plane crashed into a tenement building in Iju-Ishaga suburb of Lagos, Nigerians died in the hundreds every day. They died on the road, victims of bad roads or the highwayman’s bullet. They died in their homes, bodies riddled with bullets fired by armed robbers. They died in churches and mosques, victims of those who say evil deeds can be used to achieve godliness. They died across Nigeria, untimely and unpleasant deaths, victims of a government’s insistence on continuing paying lip service to progressive social development.

While some of these untimely taken belong to the class people have come to believe are elites, the larger percent are masses, the new age commoners, without renown beyond their immediate environment, these ones are not mourned by the nation. No media adverts extol their qualities, no social media buzz is generated around their pictures, no websites are created to tell about their lives and the deep pain their passing wrought on those they left behind. Nothing is heard of them other than the wailing of relatives and friends, and that too is soon muted as the world winds on. While the government habitually gives last warnings to those who kill the masses and promise to fix the roads that mangle their flesh and suck their blood, the dead are buried, sometimes in mass graves, their deaths in vain still, unknown in life, silent in death.

However, these are the nameless dead, the ones without keys to the fabled rainbow’s end. Their fate is not for those who could zip around in airplanes. For these ones, the passing is loud, with a nationwide call to tears.

It is common street knowledge that planes are not for the poor, even those who eat three solid meals with meat to spare have nothing to do with it. For many of us, it is a privilege to travel from Lagos to Abuja on a plane. Why not, the cost of a one-way ticket is more than the national minimum wage. So it is a testament to the privilege and position of the victims of the Dana Air crash, at least those on the plane proper, that the buzz generated by their fate remains at giddying heights, or how else would fellow elites and wannabes mourn the passing of their peers?

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Democracy: An African burden

English: The King of Swaziland Mswati III at the reed dance festival 2006 where he will choose his next wife.. Deutsch: Der König von Swasiland Mswati III bei dem Reed Dance Festival 2006 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Uneasy, they say, lies the head that wears the crown. That adage, apt for a time when kings were a law unto themselves, when they had the power over life and death, still finds strong expression in this age.

These days, kings, except they are of Middle Eastern or Asian stock (let’s add Swaziland to the number), are largely without the powers to decide the fate of a nation. The powers that made them all-powerful in the past now reside with the commoners; or so it would seem.

Nations, having shed that feudal system that perpetuates the lordship of one family over the whole generation after generation, have now generally embraced the one that allows people to have a say on who rules over them. People now have the liberty to put their views to vote and the purview to remove a leader that is not working up to par—in an ideal scenario.  Democracy, the system of having a say in the selection of one’s leaders, in its ideal sense, is one that cannot be faulted.
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A black Sunday in a Nation already in darkness

The first news of a suicide bomber attacking a church during Sunday service was not strange or overly surprising, not in a nation already used to bomb blasts and the attendant casualty rate.  The second news, of a plane ramming into a Lagos suburb, was more alarming and elicited more than the resigned “not again” that greeted the first. With social media abuzz, two things struck me: The plane crashed in Iju Agege and the proximity of my house from the scene.
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The General, GEJ Voltrons and Hyperboles

I used to admire General Mohamadu Buhari a lot. In him, I saw an Incorruptible Nigerian, whom given the chance, could rid our country of its greatest challenge—corruption in high places.

My view of Buhari’s incorruptibility remains unchanged, but in view of his actions and inactions in the wake of the crisis that followed the April 2011 elections, I do not consider him qualified to air ideas about Nigeria’s snail paced crawl towards political and economic emancipation from the brigands that now hold her captive.

Buhari, I have said before, lost all rights to talk when elder statesmen are called upon, just as he has lost the goodwill that has ensured he returned time and time again to compete for that exalted but oft raped position of this nation’s president. While I still say that Buhari did not ask his supporters to take to the streets and slake their rage on innocent Nigerians, doing nothing to call them to order painted him in colours that are not so different from those he was seeking to oust.

Anyway, this post is not really about what the man did, or didn’t do, after the elections last year. This post is about what the man is doing now and what he intends to do come 2015. Buhari as he is wont, warmed his way back into national consciousness by declaring in no small words that come 2015, naija masses will revolt if INEC does not allow for free and fair elections.

Hmm...here we go again, was my reaction when I saw reference to the statement on twitter, knowing the dams would soon burst and all hibernating GEJ Voltrons, as tweeps call them, would awake and be up in arms. My, my, was I right? Reno Omokiri, a young man most armchair activists like myself have come to expect the most uncouth behaviour possible in the course of defending his government pay cheque did not disappoint—kind of reminds one of pre-activist FFK’s brashness. Reno attacks on Buhari’s audacity to attack the hallowed PDP machine signalled other hibernating voltrons into action and the battle to ‘call Buhari to order’ was on in earnest.

While I think the PDP, and GEJ’s camp, are right to defend themselves if someone wrongly accuses them of wrong doing, in this instance they are absolutely wrong.

Why? Simple.

First: Because Buhari, though he might have accused them of rigging elections in the past, was only warning of the fall out of any attempt to rig the 2015 ballot. Second: Other, both highly and lowly placed, Nigerians have issued similar warnings in the past, and no one bothered to send out the verbal attack dogs.

I think GEJ is still missing the whole point of being president. He has to understand that as president he is number one and therefore the first target when things go wrong, and also the first when praises for things being done right are dished out.

Also, most of the technocrats drafted into government to help this unassuming man navigate foggy landscape of government-citizen relation are still dozing in the zombie days of military dictatorships, where any and every ‘his/her Excellency’ is sacred. Gaddem! This is a democracy, no matter how flawed, and people should be allowed to have opinions. I think it would serve GEJ and those who purport to speak for him to stick to the substance of opinions, not insinuations and hyperboles.

For PDP and its supporters: you may have ruled naija for the past 12 years, but you are not Nigeria and do not represent the masses. It is not given unto you to react to every statement from perceived political opponents as if you are Nigeria.

For Buhari: you lost your chance when it was clearly there for the taking. Go home, rest and advise younger protégées on how to take political opportunities. Also, talk smart, you are no longer in the army.

For the naija people: it is coming again, and we are losing ourselves once again to that sectional divide. When did Boko Haram stop being a PDP invention abeg? We need to wake up and smell the beans before it burns once again.