Dear Jonathan my son: Greetings. I write on behalf of the Committee of Elders, Angels-in-Council, to acknowledge the kind invitation you have extended to us to come and organize future elections in Nigeria. I must apologize for the considerable delay in getting back to you. The delay wasn’t our making. Your letter of invitation went to the wrong address. You sent it to the moon. As a devoted Christian, you should know that we, Angels, have no residential address on the moon. We live in heaven where we surround the throne of the Almighty God, rejoicing and singing hymns of praise 24/7 and all year round. We were therefore surprised that you sent an invitation meant for us to the moon.
In fact, we heard about the said letter of invitation by pure chance. Hell is not very far from where we are here in heaven and one sometimes overhears what is going on there, especially when Nigerian inmates are arguing about football or cursing their leaders. Some Nigerian politicians who recently arrived in hell – very few politicians from your country have ever made it to heaven - were overheard lamenting the fact that they did not live long enough to receive their share of the five billion naira anticipatory entertainment budget already approved – and disbursed - by the National Assembly to host the Angels invited from the moon by the Vice President. On inquiry, we found out that your esteemed office had indeed sent an official letter of invitation to the moon and it was deposited in your Embassy there when the lunar postal service could not locate us.
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Retrieving the letter from the Nigerian Embassy on the moon was no easy task. Rude receptionists answered our initial telephone inquiries, emails bounced back, their website is extremely user-hostile and still has the telephone numbers of staff who worked there during the administration of Alhaji Shehu Shagari. So, we had to send a delegation to the moon to personally retrieve your letter. When they got there, Embassy officials complained that they had not been paid for over eight months. Our emissaries were therefore advised to “see” appropriate embassy officials before the letter could be given to them.
To cut a long story short, when your letter eventually came to hand, the Angels-in-Council mandated me to send a fact finding group to Nigeria to determine how to respond to your invitation and if there is any basis for us to come and organize elections there. I sent two junior Angels to Nigeria based on this mandate. They submitted their report just yesterday after which the Elders Committee held a marathon meeting to decide on our course of action. We reached an agreement, hence this letter to you.
Before I reveal our decision to you, it is only fair that I summarize for you the report of the two Angels we sent to your country. Due to unforeseen navigational circumstances, the shuttle that took them to earth landed somewhere in the eastern part of your country instead of Abuja. They therefore had to travel by road from the east to Abuja. The journey took three days instead of seven to ten hours. One of them reported that there are in fact no roads in that part of your country. The second Angel reported that not even our eternal foe, the former Angel Lucifer, who plays host to Nigerian politicians in hell, should be made to travel on the roads east of the Niger in your country. What you have there are miles upon miles of gargantuan gullies rudely interrupted by the occasional one kilometer of tar.
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At a point during their trip, they were very nearly kidnapped but were let go by the kidnappers who reasoned that Angels are of little or no hostage value since there is no easy way to contact God for ransom payment. Their terrible experiences were accentuated when they got to Abuja. At first, your electoral Czar, Maurice Iwu, would not receive them because he was not “seen” beforehand by their godfather. Reminded that they are Angels on a fact finding mission, he retorted: “and so what? Are you not junior Angels? Don’t you have Archangels as godfathers where you come from?”
As the first election we could potentially help Nigeria conduct would be the 2010 Anambra gubernatorial election, the visiting Angels asked to see some evidence of preparation. Mr. Iwu gave them his voters register for Anambra state. The register contains twenty-five million registered voters. Of that figure, twenty-four million, nine hundred thousand people are said to be card-carrying members of your political party, the PDP. All the other parties combined, including Peter Obi’s ruling APGA, share the remaining one hundred thousand registered voters. Yet, the 2006 national census puts the entire population of Anambra state at a little under five million.
Going through Maurice Iwu’s Anambra voters’ register, the Angels also discovered that the following people are card carrying members of the PDP of Anambra state origin: Nelson Mandela (26 years old), Pope John Paul II (22 years old), John F. Kennedy (26 years old), Indira Ghandi (thirty years old), Golda Meir (24 years old), Yasser Arafat (20 years old), Chairman Mao (20 years old), Gnassingbe Eyadema (20 years old), Mobutu Sese Seko (20 years old), and Saddam Hussein (20 years old). Asked by the visitors if he saw anything curious about these names appearing in his list as Nigerian citizens and valid members of a particular political party, Mr Iwu replied that God was to be praised for helping Nigeria organize the excellent voters’ registration exercise that produced the said list. He also told the visitors that Ghana and the United States were in fact inviting him to come and teach them how to conduct voter registration.
Sadly, our emissaries did not get to meet and interview the major candidates in the Anambra race. Charles Soludo said he could meet with them only if authorized to do so by his offshore godfather, Chief Tony Anenih. Unfortunately, Chief Anenih was “not on seat” when our emissaries tried to see him. Andy Uba too was not around. He was said to be out of town and temporarily resident in Lapland where he exercises full executive state power as Governor-in-waiting. Chris Ngige was said to be operating from an undisclosed location to avoid being kidnapped and dragged to the Okija shrine before January by Chris Uba’s thugs.
Dear Jonathan, this is a summary of the report of our representatives. Based on this, the Elders Committee decided not to accept your invitation at this time. Even we, Angels, fear to tread some places. Your country, sadly, is one such place. We are of the opinion that with the way your system is structured, not even God, our Almighty Father here in heaven, could conduct elections in Nigeria that your party, the PDP, would not have already won long before the first ballot is cast. It would be a waste of time for Angels to come and conduct elections in such circumstances as you have on the ground in Nigeria.
Apart from the nature of things in Nigeria, some members of the Angels-in-Council insisted that I include the following reasons for declining your invitation: (1) you, Goodluck Jonathan, do not qualify to invite Angels in the first place. Your wife still has a corruption case with the appropriate anti-corruption agency in your country. We believe that you and Mrs Jonathan are using your current office to sit on that file. A lot of money was seized from her when you were Governor of a state. We have good reason to believe that she was laundering that money for you. We also do not believe that her acquisitive appetite has abated. It has just been overshadowed for now by the far more aggressive, wobia wombiliki appetite of Turai Yar’Adua; (2) you, Goodluck Jonathan, insulted the hosts of heaven by going to a church to preach against corruption early this year, knowing the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown knowns about your wife; (3) even before we got your letter of invitation, you were already boasting in public that your party would win a hundred times over even if we were “brought in from the moon” to conduct elections.
Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan that is pride, the elder brother of a fall. We, Angels, hate pride. When you talk so boastfully, you are really pushing it, Jonathan. You are sounding like nza the bird who challenged his own chi to a wrestling match after a hearty meal of pounded yam. Jonathan, do not go about challenging Angels just because some stubborn Ijaw spirits have cracked your palm kernel so benevolently from University lecturer to Deputy Governor to Governor to Vice President and may even crack it all the way to the Ultimate Throne in Aso Rock. Beware! Be warned!
Yours sincerely,
Archangel Gabriel
Current Chairman, Committee of Elders, Angels-in-Council
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