The ongoing divisive and ethnic politics in Nigeria is largely responsible for the inept and corrupt regime stalking our land. You can bribe the traditional rulers to force their people to vote for you and call it democracy but you cannot protect the country from callous death, whether in the hands of Boko Haram, Niger Delta militants, OPC, or a random drunk driver. We are at a point in our democratic experiment where we need to start asking our leaders tough questions.
I found it extremely difficult to write about Nigeria in recent times. It becomes even more difficult when I lost two dear friends to avoidable automobile accidents in the last two months. Don’t get me wrong, I know death happens. We all have to die one way or another.
What irks me are the avoidable deaths and carnage on Nigeria’s roads. More so, when some of these deaths could easily be avoided by better planning, maintenance and enforcement of road laws.
Of course, enforcement of road rules is now alien to Nigeria as the wealthy and politicians live by impunity.
The first of my friends to die in a ghastly motor accident was my good friend and colleague, Sunny Ofili. Sunny as we all like to call him, was an award winning journalist and a tech savvy United States government employee, before he decided to move back to Nigeria to serve his people in Delta north.
Upon arrival, Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan of Delta State appointed him as special adviser on information and communication technology (ICT) on September 11, 2011.
Sunny had also established the first Nigerian online newspaper, the “Times of Nigeria” online as a veritable news aggregation website modeled after Drudge and Huffington post (Ojinmah and I blog frequently on that platform).
Sunny had also sacrificed his life in the past in exposing the corrupt Obasanjo regime. I recalled his late night call for help in paying to get documents from the Corporate Affairs Commission registry in Abuja - some of which proved the involvement of the Obasanjo’s presidency in shady oil contract deals in a Portuguese speaking island country in the Bight of Benin.
We also paid to have some of the contract document translated from Portuguese to English. I recalled the urgency in his voice as he tried to escape arrest by Federal government operatives who had learnt of his snooping around. He eventually had to flee to the US through the Benin route-made famous by Uncle Wole Soyinka.
He knew that route well as he had taken that same route on his way out of Nigeria much earlier as he fled the pernicious Sani Abacha regime. As we often say in Nigeria, the more things change the more they remain the same.
I restated all of these to emphasize this point: Most cats with nine lives often died feeding on a drunken poisoned mouse. The obvious irony was lost apparently lost on Governor Uduaghan in his elegy at the burial of Sunny Ofili on September 5, 2014 when he said: “Over the years, I have learnt to control my anger but on the day he died, I was very angry over the circumstances of his death.
I asked myself why Sunny entered that vehicle. He did not need to embark on that journey. When you wake up in the morning, pray not to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, pray against associating with the wrong people and pray against being dragged along with the wrong people at the wrong time.
What an irony! The vehicle Sunny should have avoided was a government vehicle. The wrong people he should have never associated with is the Ibori/Uduaghan crowd. The wrong time is 2011 and not 2014.
Obviously, the governor’s comment is in reference to the fact that Sunny Ofili chose to ride in in a Jeep driven by a heavily intoxicated driver, who also happens to be the traditional ruler of his home town, the Late Agbogidi Henry Ezeagwuna, the Obi of Issele-Uku.
Granted Sunny should never have agreed to ride in a car driven by a heavily intoxicated driver, but the real irony here is that the same Uduaghan used Sunny’s reach and influence with Delta’s first class chiefs and Obis to help his government get reelected.
The vehicle Sunny should have avoided is the disaster driven Jeep called the Delta state government. A government that has no defined policy on road management! A government that sustains itself through bribery and impunity.
The Delta state government also receives more statutory allocation than any other Nigerian state and yet too many primary school students here attend classes under a thatched roof!
I could go on, needless to say that the death of Sunny Ofili is no more a sad event than the thousands that die on that road each year under the watch of Delta state and Federal Government of Nigeria.
It is also a warning to many of us idealists in diaspora: Look before you jump!
And then there is Dimgba Igwe, of the Weekend Concord fame! He also died this week at the hand of an intoxicated driver. Along with the late Sunny Ofili, they both put the poor on the front page of newspapers in Nigeria through their rich stories on Nigerian masses.
Imagine the shock on the face of newspapers literati in Nigeria in circa 1990s, when Weekend Concord published an in-depth story on the travails of “dumpster diving” college graduates in Nigeria in the early 1990s.
Dimgba Igwe died this week in Lagos. Yes, it happened in an APC controlled state, but as long as the president continues to go around to gloat in Osun and Ekiti about how he would have loved to help the respective states but for the fact that state government is controlled by opposition party, it is fair game to remind him about the carnage in the states controlled by his party!
The ongoing divisive and ethnic politics in Nigeria is largely responsible for the inept and corrupt regime stalking our land. You can bribe the traditional rulers to force their people to vote for you and call it democracy but you cannot protect the country from callous death, whether in the hands of Boko Haram, Niger Delta militants, OPC, or a random drunk driver. We are at a point in our democratic experiment where we need to start asking our leaders tough questions.
One of Winston Churchill's pithy observations seems appropriate – “however beautiful the strategy, one should occasionally stop to have a look at the results”. Is this the democracy we fought for as student union activist and journalist?