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Agenda for the Next Republic:

March 16, 2010

This may sound like jumping the gun or swimming against the tide but frankly speaking, I have come to the inevitable conclusion that we should strategically look beyond the Yar’Adua/Jonathan presidency and all absurdities it has thrown up. We should instead channel our energy and creative resources to fashion the type of Republic we desire moving forward.

This may sound like jumping the gun or swimming against the tide but frankly speaking, I have come to the inevitable conclusion that we should strategically look beyond the Yar’Adua/Jonathan presidency and all absurdities it has thrown up. We should instead channel our energy and creative resources to fashion the type of Republic we desire moving forward.
This administration has more or less come to a dramatic un-eventful end just like the ones before it. Dissipating energy in finding a meaning to a meaningless regime is very unproductive. We have wasted forty-six years before this regime came on stream. When you add the four years of the Yar’Adua/Jonathan misadventure, we would have rounded it up to fifty hefty years that the locusts have eaten. A golden jubilee of disaster; you dare observe! What do we do? Keep crying over spilt milk and have the same scavengers lurking by the corner to usurp the remaining half of this century or seize the momentum created by their ineptitude to snatch the future and shape it the way we would want it?

I am convinced beyond all reasonable doubt that what we see as today’s abyss in our polity is our advantage in disguise. Our nation is today in the deepest part of hell. Issues hitherto un-imaginable has happened not just in our recent past but also in the last fifty years that has generated the highest level of aghast in our collective sense of outrage. In an uncanny way, perhaps we needed this type of shock therapy to shell us out of the complacent hole of inertia we jointly condemned ourselves. I say this because when one is at the bottom of a pit, there is no other place to look but up. This is our chance to look up. Analysis about Yar’Adua and Jonathan supporters is rather diversionary. The truth is there are no Yar’Adua and Jonathan supporters. Those groups represent themselves and are only loyal to their personal interest. The duo of Yar’Adua and Jonathan are mere pawns in their political chessboard. While the so-called Yar’Adua supporters are busy violating his human right by not letting him receive the best medical treatment available in an atmosphere devoid of all these mess because of their selfish interest, the self-recruited Jonathan supporters are pushing him to commit political hara-kiri in order to get closer to the national purse.

I don’t want to join the excursion of lamenting lost opportunities and also become a champion in chronicling our past woes and failures. We have done all those in the past and the result is additional misery. I, just like you deserve something new, something refreshing, some attainable hope and a genuine desire to dream again. It is our right. When I say we should confine the past to the dustbin of history, it does not necessary mean we should forget the people that gambled with our future and brought us to this sorry state. They even permit themselves to be called leaders and states men. I am talking about those visionless men/women that kidnapped our collective hope and dreams and murdered them. They are scattered in different age strata, tribes, regions and professions. You will find them in the military, politics, banking, civil/public service, business etc. Some of them have been romancing power since independence and retirement is not in their agenda.

As we get set to usher in the next republic, they are once more in the prowl brandishing the same expired and irrelevant credentials. They have mastered the act of preying in our fears. Fears they created for the sole purpose of capturing power and making a mess of it. They beat the tired drums of ethnicity, religion and nepotism and abandon that soon after they have captured power. Where is Yerimah and his Sharia grunts in Zamfara? He is inconspicuously warming a chair in the Nigerian Senate. His seat-neighbor is infamous Nnamani of the Ebeano fame. The same man that elevated public speaking to an enviable art has lost his voice where it mattered most. After they have captured power, you begin to hear things like my brother governor and my fellow distinguished senator or honorable member when most of them can define neither distinguish nor recognize honor when they see one. They conveniently forget their tribal and religious leanings until the next election. If you doubt this assertion, please enlighten me if these vampires have ever disagreed once on issues of tribe or religion unless when it is convenient to advance their political ends. When was the last time a Nigerian President, Muslim or Christian gone out of their way to do anything to advance solely the cause of his faith at the detriment of the other faiths? Do we have un-interrupted power in the North as a result of the number of years the northern power mongers have held the reign of miss-rule? They whole idea of power sharing between the North and South is selfishly contrived. When you say north, where exactly do you have in mind? The Fulani herdsmen that committed one of the most horrendous atrocities in human history in retaliation to the January 10, 2010 carnage committed against them by their Berom neighbors in Jos are all meant to be Northerners for whom Jonathan  {an Ijaw} has to subordinate his presidential ambition in obedience to a PDP autocracy. What a contrivance? Similarly, the greatest opposition for Jonathan’s Presidency and why he has held on to nothing in particular in the ensuing dispensation is coming from no less a quarter than his ‘brother governors’ from his zone, both serving and retired. From media accounts, the duos of Timi Sylva and ‘comrade’ Oshiomole led the gang of governors that said the constitution should not take its course in the Yar’Adua brouhaha. One wonders whether they are from Northeast.

This is why I insist we have gotten to the time to pull the rug from under their feet. It is not as complex as we think. Just listen to the names being bandied around and you lose hope again: Babangida, Aliyu Gusau, Buhari, Adamu Aliero, Shekarau, Saraki, Duke, Odili, Tinubu etc. These are same of the same. These burial / wedding attending leaders seek power for power sake. They love the sound of their names as leaders and are clueless as to what to do with the power they go to great length to grab.
Most of these fellows cannot set up a simple power point presentation to articulate whatever it is they claim is their mission and vision in government. They are blind to the new ways of running affairs of modern states, most times not because they are eternally wicked but because they are largely ignorant. When you mention twitter around them, they believe it is a new album released by these hip-hop guys for which they should pay no attention.

For instance, exactly what does Babangida want in Aso-Rock again? He has two sons one of whom is more than forty years the last time I checked. They guy has even taken a lead over him in some human endeavors. He has two wives at least and perhaps still counting. When will he become President of Nigeria? What is his brother-in-arms, Buhari who has become a serial presidential candidate coming to do again? Perhaps to round up his twin objective of war against indiscipline and trade by barter that was the hallmark of his blind reign. Someone should please remind them that the world has moved on. They sing the unceasing mantra of passionately loving Nigeria without the requisite the skills to govern her.  This means nothing and could indeed be dangerous.

We should crystallize the momentum created by the current impasse to look beyond these men. We have seen their best efforts and these efforts are simply not good enough. We have another opportunity for a new beginning, a divine call to come together, design a new leadership template or borrow from countries that have passed through our experiences. And urgently search, identify and project men and women that posses the right temperament, the intellectual capacity, the love of country borne out of deep believe in the awesome powers of the almighty God and go out there and insist that they must lead us to greatness in the remaining half of these century. We have to do this urgently not only for our sake but also at least for the sake of our children and unborn generation. The men and women I talk about must not be slaves to the primordial instincts of tribe and religion. They must be personalities that see tribe and religion only as tools for national development. The infrastructural challenges we face are self-inflicted. When we design this paradigm shift and make it ours, we shall not go to be bed believing that we have erected an immutable structure that can never be penetrated by robbers. We must be on constant watch to ensure that they new leadership do not fall back to the very attractive lucre of corruption that destroyed our previous republics. As already observed, it was not as if our first republic leaders, arguably the best we have had were all greedy and visionless, far from it. The fault was ours. We trusted them too much and carried on with other mundane things refusing to watch over our collective wealth and as it is usual with human beings, some of them developed itchy fingers and resorted to self-help. By the time, we knew what was happening, the virus has eaten too deep that the successive regimes only helped to institutionalize corruption as a national ethos.

The next question is how do we get started? Simple: we should all encourage and begin to participate in the emerging culture of civilized protest. It is about us and not Jonathan. He does not even resemble or deserve to be a symbol of this brilliant initiative. However, we must thank him for allowing the police and other law enforcement agencies see us as humans and not species that could be used to test the efficacy of new improved tear gas. We should equally identify with any political party of our choice where we could use our sheer numerical strength to enforce ideological leanings that is presently lacking in the existing political structures founded and funded by political jobbers. We should also insist that the party or parties must be funded from stipends coming from not political investors but us. We must attend their meetings or send trusted representatives when crucial decisions concerning the people are to be taken. The present scenario where PDP is owned by a few powerful cabals and AC is owned and funded by Tinubu and pockets of other privately owned political organizations will never enthrone the kind of democratic governance we desire no matter what the electoral reforms says. If we creatively employ the right mix of technology, quality human capital with superb organizational skills, perseverance, patience and the special grace of God for a people joined by a common goal to recover their lost patrimony, no amount of political shenanigan by these yesterdays’ men will stop the momentum whose time has come. It has worked in other places and Nigeria should not be an exception because we are not a creation of the devil.
 

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