April 13, 2010
The creature named Atiku Babangida is the strangest political animal of all ages. This creature is so strange that one ought to write about it in plural, being Siamese twins joined at the stomach by one of the deadliest sins of all known as gluttony.
The creature named Atiku Babangida is the strangest political animal of all ages. This creature is so strange that one ought to write about it in plural, being Siamese twins joined at the stomach by one of the deadliest sins of all known as gluttony.
But the strange creature insists on being addressed in the singular because it is perennially in pursuit of one career: being the president of Nigeria. Not even in the magical realism novels of the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the epochal One Hundred Years of Solitude, would you ever meet a character like Atiku Babangida, a very weird creature with two heads, two mouths, four eyes, four ears, four buttocks, four legs, two foreheads, but only sharing one stomach made very fat by corruption.
The contradictions issuing from the two mouths of Atiku Babangida over the years would have made for the best farce in the world, slapstick comedy of the most infantile staple, except that the creature wants to be taken dead serious. Like the curious amalgamation known as Nigeria, the creature under discussion is a cranky amalgam of big-for-nothing credentials, encompassing civil pretensions and martial crudity. If you are of the school that believes that one could not eat one’s cake and still have it, then you know-next-to nothing of this monster. In one breath, the beast claimed to be at one and the same time a military general and the country’s president. The creature made some strange noises about not just being in government but in power, whatever that means. The pathetic creature’s boast about being the master of violence hurt many ears, yet the odd fellow insists on now being elected as a democratic president! Come to think of it, this selfsame creature once annulled a free and fair election won by a human being and now hopes that anybody will accept an election that declares this monster the winner! Well, who can stop an evil virus from hoping against hope?
With its other mouth the creature uttered the nonsense that political harlotry is the very essence of democratic demagoguery and best practices. Like in the Nigerian Customs Service where bribery is the chief good, the creature acutely believes that suborning the due process is the only highway to democratic survival. It is not unlike the creature to be shouting “Power to the people” with the goons of the ruling party this moment only to change the very next moment into the toga of the Action Congress (AC). Before you can catch your breath the new song in its mouth is “Mega Party”, only for you to see it suddenly eating the vomit it left behind in the ruling party with a graceless return to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)). That is the mark of shamelessness that defines this creature of no known ideology except chopping!
You can shout all you like about speaking with both sides of the mouth, but then our creature does have two mouths, and it is entitled to speak with both of them! And a mouth that eats its own vomit cannot but emit smelly things. The boasts of the past achievements, or lack thereof, of this creature can be spellbinding. The creature takes splendid credit for leading the country into the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) in its first incarnation back in 1986. The fact that the surreptitious move nearly led ill-starred Nigeria to a religious war cuts no dice with this slapdash creature. In making its comeback this time around of Boko Haram and the Jos pogrom the creature may yet decree a theocratic state and expect a grandstanding applause. Of course the swashbuckling creature boasts of re-engineering Nigeria in its first jihadist journey, yet the Financial Times of London that it doted on like a sedulous ape dismissed the odd one after it stepped aside for taking a middle-ranking nation to the rock bottom of the world! For the dastardly creature death was the rule rather than the exception: name them, Dele Giwa, Mamman Vatsa, umpteen workers, unarmed students, and so on. It suffices to just celebrate the creature’s fat stomach as one large graveyard where the billions of petro-dollars earned via the Gulf War windfall were buried…
The other mouth, not wanting to be out-talked, instantly spoke up that it delivered the presidency on a platter of gold to ex-President Olusegun Matthew Okikiola Aremu Obasanjo, when the then poor fellow could not deliver his ward in Ota, Ogun State. Then the creature, sorry, its mouth, upped the ante by claiming that Nigeria has suffered ten years of wasted democracy but for the first three years in which the creep was a dominant participant. Mum was the word when issues were raised as per why corruption charges hang on to him as coat to tie or vice-versa!
The reality on the ground now is that the ruling PDP is saddled with Siamese-twin presidential candidates in the one strange creature named Atiku Babangida. Two heads may well be better than one, as the well-worn proverb says, but the great fear is that with the two mouths of fearsome corruption eating into one fat stomach of legendary corruption this may in fact turn out to be a clear case of sure kaput for the dear country. Let there be a sharp and sudden surgical operation!
But the strange creature insists on being addressed in the singular because it is perennially in pursuit of one career: being the president of Nigeria. Not even in the magical realism novels of the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the epochal One Hundred Years of Solitude, would you ever meet a character like Atiku Babangida, a very weird creature with two heads, two mouths, four eyes, four ears, four buttocks, four legs, two foreheads, but only sharing one stomach made very fat by corruption.
The contradictions issuing from the two mouths of Atiku Babangida over the years would have made for the best farce in the world, slapstick comedy of the most infantile staple, except that the creature wants to be taken dead serious. Like the curious amalgamation known as Nigeria, the creature under discussion is a cranky amalgam of big-for-nothing credentials, encompassing civil pretensions and martial crudity. If you are of the school that believes that one could not eat one’s cake and still have it, then you know-next-to nothing of this monster. In one breath, the beast claimed to be at one and the same time a military general and the country’s president. The creature made some strange noises about not just being in government but in power, whatever that means. The pathetic creature’s boast about being the master of violence hurt many ears, yet the odd fellow insists on now being elected as a democratic president! Come to think of it, this selfsame creature once annulled a free and fair election won by a human being and now hopes that anybody will accept an election that declares this monster the winner! Well, who can stop an evil virus from hoping against hope?
With its other mouth the creature uttered the nonsense that political harlotry is the very essence of democratic demagoguery and best practices. Like in the Nigerian Customs Service where bribery is the chief good, the creature acutely believes that suborning the due process is the only highway to democratic survival. It is not unlike the creature to be shouting “Power to the people” with the goons of the ruling party this moment only to change the very next moment into the toga of the Action Congress (AC). Before you can catch your breath the new song in its mouth is “Mega Party”, only for you to see it suddenly eating the vomit it left behind in the ruling party with a graceless return to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)). That is the mark of shamelessness that defines this creature of no known ideology except chopping!
You can shout all you like about speaking with both sides of the mouth, but then our creature does have two mouths, and it is entitled to speak with both of them! And a mouth that eats its own vomit cannot but emit smelly things. The boasts of the past achievements, or lack thereof, of this creature can be spellbinding. The creature takes splendid credit for leading the country into the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) in its first incarnation back in 1986. The fact that the surreptitious move nearly led ill-starred Nigeria to a religious war cuts no dice with this slapdash creature. In making its comeback this time around of Boko Haram and the Jos pogrom the creature may yet decree a theocratic state and expect a grandstanding applause. Of course the swashbuckling creature boasts of re-engineering Nigeria in its first jihadist journey, yet the Financial Times of London that it doted on like a sedulous ape dismissed the odd one after it stepped aside for taking a middle-ranking nation to the rock bottom of the world! For the dastardly creature death was the rule rather than the exception: name them, Dele Giwa, Mamman Vatsa, umpteen workers, unarmed students, and so on. It suffices to just celebrate the creature’s fat stomach as one large graveyard where the billions of petro-dollars earned via the Gulf War windfall were buried…
The other mouth, not wanting to be out-talked, instantly spoke up that it delivered the presidency on a platter of gold to ex-President Olusegun Matthew Okikiola Aremu Obasanjo, when the then poor fellow could not deliver his ward in Ota, Ogun State. Then the creature, sorry, its mouth, upped the ante by claiming that Nigeria has suffered ten years of wasted democracy but for the first three years in which the creep was a dominant participant. Mum was the word when issues were raised as per why corruption charges hang on to him as coat to tie or vice-versa!
The reality on the ground now is that the ruling PDP is saddled with Siamese-twin presidential candidates in the one strange creature named Atiku Babangida. Two heads may well be better than one, as the well-worn proverb says, but the great fear is that with the two mouths of fearsome corruption eating into one fat stomach of legendary corruption this may in fact turn out to be a clear case of sure kaput for the dear country. Let there be a sharp and sudden surgical operation!
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