“ I dey laugh o”, erstwhile president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo announced to a battery of reporters as he braced up for a meeting. “ I dey laugh too ooo”, his number two while he called the shots in Aso Rock, intoned in witty fashion a few days later. The twosome may have been part of the reasons some organisation once termed Nigerians, the happiest people on earth.
“ I dey laugh o”, erstwhile president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo announced to a battery of reporters as he braced up for a meeting. “ I dey laugh too ooo”, his number two while he called the shots in Aso Rock, intoned in witty fashion a few days later. The twosome may have been part of the reasons some organisation once termed Nigerians, the happiest people on earth.
And as I write this, I am perched on a sofa, laughing in all the indigenous languages in Nigeria, you would think I just inhaled a jar of Nitrogen 1V oxide. The laptop must probably be laughing too, I guess, because the cursor is unusually playing tricks on me. It is that season of laughter, reader, where the ‘joke’ that is our country plays before us again shortly before and after major polls; where the will of the people is trounced and subverted by our ‘oppressors’. In 2011, they would be attempting to make a complete sham of ‘Democracy’ as the West has come to know it, cooking up election figures before our very eyes while being guarded and shepherded by a hapless police force. Little wonder, they are laughing at us.
It is the guttural, rancorous, raucous and uncontrollable laughter of the ‘noveau’ rich. It is that laughter that hits you as you watch them emerge from a Federal Executive Council meeting (FEC) or that of the National Council of States( NCS). With one hand tucked in their undergarments where plenty of stolen cash inevitably reside, they make their way out of meetings rolling in laughter and pumping hands as they do so. They would have just emerged from a meeting where billions of Naira worth of contracts has been awarded to themselves and their cronies. They laugh because they know that 80 per cent of those sums would ‘disappear’ into thin air. You probably saw them laughing on the news last night, or the night before. They are a happy, laughing bunch. They laugh at our expense all the time.
They momentarily stopped laughing this week when the Governor of the Central Bank announced to the world that most of their ‘honourable’ laughing members are bleeding the country dry; awarding as much as 25 percent of budgetary allocations to themselves. So, they called him to explain why, with bursts of laughter punctuating their every word. They know his public expose has been in the public realm all along. They know they are just playing to the gallery; that their hedonistic lifestyle is not about to be punctuated any time soon by a ‘professorial’ CBN Boss.
They are forever laughing; this bunch-- as they talk on the phone, hurl University girls to five star hotels for a fee or as they socialise at expensive functions with the scent of your Naira lining their pockets and strewn on the floor for you and I to make a dive at.
Next year, they would come laughing again for votes they are sure won’t count. If we don’t stop them, they would be attempting to herd us into early mass graves, laughing all the way. These are a callous, laughing bunch who are well aware that we do not revolt. They know we take whatever is thrown at us without as much as asking questions. They strip our coffers bare, lacerate us with their inhumane policies and hand us their campaign posters which we gladly accept to decorate our streets, homes and sidewalks. They know we can be that gullible.
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Little wonder, as we head to the polls next year, they just can’t stop laughing at us.
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