Having skipped my SR column last week, I was working rapidly on this piece when I saw Majekodunmi Adega’s effort on the same topic. A refreshing voice in the progressive camp of Nigerians in Canada where pro-Abuja poltroons tend to be too shamelessly loud, Adega’s remarkable essay has only one mistake: he talks of 2011 as a disaster waiting to happen, prepares us for it, and cautions against vain optimism. I think we can by now begin to write about 2011 in past tense. It is a disaster that has already happened.
Those who accuse Moloch Yaddie of competing with the snail and the tortoise in the race to determine who is slower forget that he can afford to be slow. What we have on our laps is the self-assuredness of a man already certain of another four years in office beginning on May 29, 2011. Why hurry about 6000 megawatts, jobs, roads, education, health, food, security and other minor issues that have zero effect on how people of his ilk “capture power” in Nigeria? 2011 is pretty much a done deal for our reactionary traducers in the PDP, unless a miracle or something seismic happens to alter the inexorable course of events. Let the post mortem begin with the following questions: How did Moloch Yaddie and his fellow oppressors of Nigerians “capture power” and defeat democracy in 2011? How did this man pull off an even more spectacular electoral heist than he did in 2007?
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First things first: we must congratulate Moloch Yaddie, David Mark, Dimeji Bankole, Vincent Ogbulafor, all PDP Governors, Senators, Reps, and all the fawning enablers of the status quo at home and abroad for being blessed with Nigeria. This unholy bunch of scurrilous Nigerians is blessed with one of the few remaining fragments of the world where it is possible to serve unmistakable notice of your intention to rig and rape democracy in your bid to “capture power” and still get away with the act in broad daylight. Even President Mamadou Tandja of Niger Republic had sufficient regard for the sensitivity of his people not to give prior notice of the fact that he had been infected by the Obasanjo virus and would want to tinker with the constitution to get a third term in office. He was delicate enough to spring that travesty on his people as a surprise.
President Tandja’s Nigerian Professors in Abuja have no time for such considerations. They are blessed with a theatre of the absurd that even allows them the privilege of repeated public rehearsals in preparation for the real rape of the nation: Ekiti was Moloch Yaddie’s and Dimeji Bankole’s rehearsal for the deal they have for us in 2011. They went there to chant war songs in broad daylight. Anambra will soon provide them another opportunity to attempt to ‘correct’ whatever ‘mistakes’ they made in Ekiti. Those who are screaming “kai, they cannot try Ekiti in Anambra!” are either suffering from amnesia or they still do not know our fiends in Abuja. Did Olusegun Obasanjo not practically destroy that state using two sons of the soil, the Uba brothers?
As I have already stated, President Yar’Adua and his handlers will not vary that script. They are sufficiently unimaginative and, at any rate, they don’t even have to. They know that we are are sheepish enough to allow them try Ekiti in Anambra. They may find other contemptible characters from Anambra to replace the Uba brothers but the plot will remain unchanged. In essence, we may accuse these people of non-performance and other unpatriotic sins against Nigeria but we cannot accuse them of fraud and hypocrisy. They have always delivered what we know they would deliver and perpetuate: the dysfunctional Nigeria that we all agree needs to be seized from them if she is to stand any chance of admission into civilization.
If Moloch Yaddie and his enablers are neither hypocritical nor fraudulent in terms of what their political philosophy represents for Nigeria, how did they pull off 2011, especially given the fact that we had 1999, 2003, and 2007 as ample evidence of the permanence of spots on their leopard? They pulled off 2011 because we, the people, committed crimes against reality. We committed crimes of demission, complacence, and even complicity by refusing to undermine the purposed roadmap to another round of rape that the usual suspects did not even bother to hide from us. Every indication that Moloch Yaddie and his fellow traducers of Nigeria gave us about our fate in 2011 amounted to the creation and reinforcement of malevolent realities we ought to have truncated. We committed crimes against reality by not categorically rejecting what they had to offer. The road to 2011 was mined from the start by our fiends in Abuja and they gave us sufficient notice. There are countless reasons why the unthinkable happened in 2011. I will focus on four as reflected in the roles of four personalities, carefully woven into the plot to rape Nigeria in 2011:
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Farida Waziri
Thankfully, nobody is in any doubt about the provenance of this woman. Michael Aondoakaa and the conclave of looters he protects had to have her at the helm of affairs at the EFCC at all costs. Nuhu Ribadu had taken his job too seriously and too literally and had inflicted serious damage on our fiends in the status quo. It was necessary to reverse every gain Ribadu made in the struggle against corruption: Waziri was the perfect woman for the job. Her first priority, predictably, was to find a soft landing for Moloch Yaddie’s bosom friends, Lucky Igbinedion and James Ibori. Next, you catch one or two insignificant small fishes – preferably yahoo-yahoo boys – try them sensationally to distract the nation; next you declare that you can’t find any of Nuhu Ribadu’s case files against corrupt governors; next you release a funny list of corrupt Nigerians from which Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida, and James Ibori are miraculously absent; next you divert the nation’s attention towards your predecessor, Nuhu Ribadu, and his friend Nasir El Rufai, make maximum noise and try to portray them as the two most corrupt people ever to bestride Nigeria. Put these kindergarten strategies together and a clearer picture of the script written for Farida Waziri emerges. She was not just instructed to turn off the heat from James Ibori and Moloch Yaddie’s other friends, she was also assigned the more crucial task of keeping any perceived threat to the President’s second term bid busy with corruption charges, paint them black, keep them outside of Nigeria if necessary, and destroy their credibility with constant threats of extradition. Poetic justice: her chief collaborator, Mike Okiro, was caught with his hands in the cookie jar of corruption two days to his retirement. God catch dem!
Chief Tony Anenih
When Moloch Yaddie yanked a septuagenarian, Chief Tony Anenih, from his king-maker role in Edo state, where he was carving out a fiefdom after eight heady years of service as President Obasanjo’s notorious Mr. Fix it, it was clear that the Nigerian people were being put on notice that Moloch Yaddie was ready to start building his financial war chest for 2011. No serious reader of Nigeria’s political script could possibly have missed that detail. The traducers of Nigeria are so psychologically dependent on our sheepish acceptance of rape that they have become quite unimaginative and do not even bother to vary their strategies. Hence, if President Obasanjo used the Nigerian Ports Authority to steal money and fund his do-or-die political philosophy, with Chief Olabode George serving as the cash funnel, Moloch Yaddie would use the same source of slush funds to secure the heist in 2011. In essence, every second Chief Tony Anenih spent at the NPA was swelling Moloch Yaddie’s war machine by the millions. That’s the unmistakable reality of Tony Anenih’s appointment, never mind that the usual presumptuous defenders of the status quo believed that a septuagenarian who served as one of Nigeria’s worst ministers of works still had fresh ideas to bring to the table in terms of sanitizing the NPA. He was there to secure a vital source of electoral heist funds for Moloch Yaddie and his co-travelers in the PDP. The reality of Tony Anenih’s NPA was foisted on us without a whimper from the critical mass.
Elder Stakeholder Chieftain James Ibori
More than a name and a persona, Elder Stakeholder Chieftain James Ibori is a reality manufactured by Nigeria’s ruling tribe for two reasons: (1) to serve as the Facebook or Twitter version of all the purulent traits of their tribe; (2) to serve as an early warning signal on the limitations of Nigerians’ legendary capacity for endurance. The day Nigerians rise up to say no to the James Ibori phenomenon, those who created him will take that as a signal that the game is up. In a fast-paced world reduced to the production and consumption of fast-foodish information, James Ibori serves as a Twitter version of the Nigerian tragedy. Just think of him and a tableau of everything that is wrong with Nigeria’s rulership appears like a tweet. It takes a lot of hard work to supersede Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha as the official face of corruption in Nigeria and that is precisely what James Ibori has pulled off in the shot span of his public career. Lets pass on the fact that Moloch Yaddie swore a public oath of loyalty to this totally dubious character and went ahead to put the entire machinery of the Nigerian government at the disposal of a thief; lets also pass on the fact that James Ibori became one of the puppeteers controlling our marionette-president. What should detain us here is the fact that Moloch Yaddie’s government awarded a N40 billion agric contract to Notore Chemical Industries, a company controlled by James Ibori. If we weren’t dealing with Nigeria, one’s sense of outrage would have been limited to trying to locate Moloch Yaddie’s moral compass: why award a contract to a character facing an EFCC corruption (sham) trial? But this is Nigeria and I daresay that there is more, much more, to the forty billion naira largesse showered on Ibori. I do not believe that a single bag of fertilizer ever reached any farmer in Nigeria as a result of that contract. I believe that the money was part of the build-up to 2011. James Ibori was just the trusted custodian of an electoral slush fund disguised as an agric contract. Add Ibori’s forty billion to whatever Chief Tony Anenih was able to secure at the NPA and a clearer picture of how Moloch Yaddie put together the financial resources to rape Nigeria in 2011 emerges. We knew this and did nothing.
Maurice Iwu
No comments on this disgrace of a Professor. You already know what he did to secure Moloch Yaddie’s victory in 2011. What did you do to stop him?
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