The Nation Newspaper

Tag: absurdity

  • Absurdity of the Nigerian psyche

    Nigerians are always in a hurry. So much so, that we want everything done yesterday. Not done today, or tomorrow, but done yesterday. The average Nigerian would sacrifice order and procedure to do what is needed to be done so that he would hurry to the next point of call. Yet, when you engage such a Nigerian in a conversation, he would propound the need and benefits of order and procedures. He would tell you that in “advanced countries such as the US, U.K, Germany, and even in South Africa, people follow the rules, maintain order and procedures.” Then he would add “when would we get to that point in this country?”

    One is then constrained to ask, “Are Nigerians schizophrenic by nature?”

    Nigerians seem unable to live with what are intended and wished for, and that which are actually practiced. Could this inability to contend with what we want and what we do be ascribed to our environment, the water we drink or the air we breathe? Otherwise, what advices this absurd psyche?

    Take the issue of leadership in Nigeria. So much has been written and said about “the lack of leadership in Nigeria.” The international community joined the Nigerian intelligentsias to bemoan the wasted opportunities and untapped potentials of Nigeria because of lack of leadership. When that concept of leadership is x-rayed from the classical and operational perspectives, we discover that leadership requires among other qualities; vision, courage, selflessness, high morals, honesty and integrity. A good leader must also possess the will to motivate, encourage, cajole, push and drag the led to where they ought to be even when they are reluctant to go there.

    Nigerians instinctively and by practice know all these. And they know that for Nigeria to be all that she could become, given her vast human and material resources, such leaders are needed in Nigeria. Yet, when persons with these qualities appear to lead, the same Nigerians would stand in their numbers, not only to condemn the actions taken on their behalf, but to call for the head of the individual taking such actions.

    This makes Nigerians to resemble the Israelites of Moses’ era. In that era, the Israelites were under penury in Egypt and they wanted out. They also knew of a land flowing with milk and honey which had been gifted to them to possess. All they needed to do was to get out, and get to that Promised Land. At every turn as Moses led them, the Israelites were impatient, and always in a hurry to have the next point of their promise shown and proven to them. They revolted often against their leader and the rules of engagement.

    Such are the mantra in Nigeria since the country came into existence. Nigeria as a Promised Land with milk and honey in the vast human and material resources that she is endowed with has corruption as the penury that has kept her from becoming all that she could become. Nigerians know this. One does not need western education, or input, to feel the impact of the scourge of corruption in Nigeria and on Nigerians. What is needed is a leadership that would drag Nigeria and Nigerians to that potential place of being. Nigerians also know this.

    The recent suspension of Justice Walter Onnoghen by President Muhammadu Buhari is such an action of dragging Nigeria and Nigerians to the right place. In taking this action, President Buhari, did not dance around the concept of “political solution or soft landing” as is often enounced in Nigeria as a way of dressing up corruption. He, therefore, ought to be commended for having the courage and will to take such action despite the narrative and optics of a pending general election in which he is a major candidate. That is leadership!

    Such decisive courage is often traded at the altar of politics, ethnicity and religious considerations to the detriment of Nigeria, hence, Nigeria’s inability to achieve her potentials.

    In the often cited western countries that Nigerians are in a hurry to emulate, the Honourable Justice would have done the honorable thing by resigning voluntarily in the same breath that he used to acknowledge that he forgot to list several bank accounts in his asset declaration documents as are required of him by law. Once his several years of forgetfulness became public, rather than resigning honorably, the Learned Justice quickly lawyered up and went into cover up and stone-walling modes. As a result, lawsuits, counter lawsuits, appeals and injunctions that are not obvious and available to the average Nigerian started flying around.

    Since he did not resign honourably, the president showed leadership by suspending him. Otherwise, the legal web and knot being weaved would take the rest of the tenure of the former CJN to untie. The mercantile lawyers and activists clamoring for procedural orderliness are not being sincere because they know that this type of leadership is what has eluded Nigeria. They would also be the first to criticize the president for “not showing leadership” if he had not taken the decision to suspend the CJN.

    In the final analysis, now that the fight against corruption has landed on the doorsteps of the judiciary, Nigerians are eagerly awaiting when it would be the turn of the banking and financial sectors, and the religious institutions of Nigeria. Then, we would be getting somewhere in our march towards realizing the full potentials of our land of milk and honey.

     

    • Obiakor writes from Ogidi, Anambra State.

     

  • Absurdity

    Ogun State Governor Ibikunle Amosun wants the public to accept that he is on course politically. But the issue is whether his political course is acceptable.

    Amosun further publicised his political course at a service to mark the 60th birthday of the Archbishop of Lagos Ecclesiastical Province and Bishop, Diocese of Remo, Most Rev. Michael Olusina Fape, at Our Saviour’s Anglican Church, Ikenne, Ogun State.  Vice President Yemi Osinbajo was there. Both politicians are members of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

    The governor, whose second term ends this year, defended his endorsement of the governorship candidate of the Allied Peoples Movement (APM) instead of his party’s governorship candidate. According to a report, Most Rev. Solomon Kuponu had observed that Amosun’s preference for a candidate different from his party’s candidate could confuse the electorate and create discord.

    Amosun was quoted as saying in response: “I won’t take our people for granted and it is for us not to have violence in the state and to continue to live together in peace, that all of us in All Progressives Congress, in Ogun State, took the decision. It is rather unfortunate that the people fighting us right and left, do not know what we have all agreed, since two years ago, that in the spirit of fairness, justice, equity and peace in Ogun, let us now look at our brothers from Ogun West Senatorial district.” This is Amosun’s story, saying why he is supporting the APM governorship candidate, Adekunle Akinlade, and not supporting Dapo Abiodun of the APC.

    But Amosun wants to be senator, and he is campaigning on the APC platform. Why does he want to be an APC senator, and not an APM senator?  If the APM candidate is good enough to get his support and the APC candidate isn’t good enough to get his support, there is more to this than meets the eye.

    Amosun is free to support Akinlade, but it is absurd that he is doing so at the expense of Abiodun, his party’s candidate. No rationalisation can make this rational. It is interesting that Amosun was quoted as saying:  “For me, in the final analysis, anyone that wins should win and I will personally embrace the person, because I don’t want anything to spoil the good administration that the good Lord has helped us to build in the state.”

    But Amosun doesn’t want his party’s candidate to win, which is an absurdity.

     

     

  • Absurdity

    Repetition of falsehood doesn’t make it true. But does Nnamdi Kanu know this truth? The controversial leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) last weekend repeated an absurdity. Kanu claimed in a radio broadcast that President Muhammadu Buhari was dead and a look-alike from Sudan, Jubril Aminu Al-Sudani, was in Aso Rock, the seat of federal power.

    Kanu’s words: “Jubril is in Aso Rock. The reason he is still there is because we have not come for him. In any reasonable country around the world, the citizens should by now commence a worldwide protest to demand the identity of their president. Why is this Sudanese impostor in Aso Rock?”

    If the citizens are not protesting as Kanu expects, it is because they don’t know what Kanu claims to know about Buhari. And what Kanu claims to know is an absurdity. His illogic:  ”There was once a rumour that Obasanjo was dead but he came out and said ‘I dey kampe.’ Jubril can’t do that because he is not Buhari. Nigeria must fall. It is going to collapse under the weight of this fraud and deception of Jubril. I am not going to make trouble. I want them to return Jubril from whence he came. We can no longer be part of this fraud.”

    Some thinking is needed here: If there is a Buhari double in Aso Rock, what is the point of impersonating the president if he is unable to publicly assert that he is Buhari? If the alleged impersonator is unable to declare that he is Buhari, then it is an absurd impersonation.

    Kanu deepened the absurdity by claiming that US President Donald Trump never met with the real Buhari. What he means is that the April meeting was between Trump and the said Jubril.

    A report said Kanu “argued that pre-2017 photographs of President Muhammadu Buhari’s left side outer ear had a deformed lobule and a straight antihelix,” adding that those features could no longer be seen in the president’s recent photographs.

    Kanu’s observation suggests that he has become an anatomist of sorts. It is absurd that he insists on the accuracy of his absurd claims. This is yet another stunt by Kanu who has moved from stunt to stunt in the course of leading the separatist group.

    A reasonable stuntman should know that there are limits to the stunt business. Kanu’s performance so far casts doubt on his reasonableness.

  • Absurdity in Zimbabwe

    president Robert Gabriel Mugabe and his beleaguered country are in the news once again for another wrong reason. Mugabe, always a crafty politician even in his old age is now scheming to make his wife Grace succeed him as the President of Zimbabwe. In order to achieve this aim, he has just orchestrated the removal of his long-time associate, Emmerson Mnangagwa as the Vice- President of the country. Mnangagwa is accused of ‘consistently and persistently exhibiting traits of disloyalty, disrespect, deceitful ness and unreliability’. Mugabe and his cronies in the ZANU– PF have not told the world when the Vice-President started exhibiting all these unwholesome traits but the world knows that for many years the man has suffered pungent verbal abuses from Grace, Mugabe’s wife who has never hidden her feeling that getting rid of Mnangagwa and his supporters would guarantee her the post of the President of the country after the exit of the aging Mugabe.

    The action of Mugabe and his cronies is nothing but a primitive mode of political nepotism clothed in absurdity and which should not be tolerated in Africa in this 21st century.

    Before analysing the implication of this Dark Age political shenanigan in Zimbabwe, I will like to trace the journey of how Robert Mugabe brought himself and his country to possibly irredeemable political infamy.

    When Zimbabwe, formerly known as Southern Rhodesia became an independent country in 1980, Robert Mugabe who became the country’s first Prime Minister was the toast of millions of freedom loving people all over the world because of his dogged role in the liberation of his country. The independence struggle of Zimbabwe was grim as the British government under the imperious Margaret Thatcher was unwilling to grant independence to this country. After the independence of Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) and Malawi (formerly Nyasaland), Britain sat on the independence of Southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) because Britain wanted to make it as a buffer between independent African countries above river Limpopo and the racist apartheid South Africa which was under a minority white government.

    Britain was however forced to change course because of the liberation struggle which was strongly supported by Nigeria under the then General Olusegun Obasanjo’s military government which nationalized Shell BP owned by Britain. This action of Nigerian government jolted Britain. Nigeria also helped to broker peace between Mugabe and his rival Joshua Nkomo to form a united front called ZANU–PF. With this united front, the two of them were able to confront successfully the racist government in Southern Rhodesia under the wily Ian Smith and independence was achieved for Southern Rhodesia and named Zimbabwe. At independence in 1980, Mugabe became the Prime Minister and the charismatic Nkomo became minister of Internal Affairs and was rightly regarded as ‘the father of the nation’ because he started the liberation struggle before Mugabe who shot into limelight by taking over the leadership of ZANU from Ndibanige Sithole in what can be regarded as a palace coup when they were in prison.

    Few years after independence in 1980, Mugabe and Nkomo disagreed violently as the two of them suspected one another because each of them was seen as representing the two major tribes in Zimbabwe that had been having age-long debilitating competition among themselves. Mugabe is a Mashona , the majority tribe while Nkomo was a Matebele,  the minority tribe. Mugabe in order to get rid of Nkomo in the post-independence government unleashed a reign of terror on Matebeleland. Mugabe used fiendish soldiers trained in North Korea to decimate Matebeleland and many people were killed and maimed and Nkomo himself had a narrow escape to England. By this act, Mugabe became the undisputed leader of the newly independent Zimbabwe and through his actions Nkomo’s people in Matebeleland became more or less serfs to the Mashona people of Mugabe. Nkomo died in 1999, broken and disgraced despite his tremendous contributions to the independence of Zimbabwe. The Mashona people now today call the shots in political and economic activities in Zimbabwe.

    Initially Mugabe used the contentious land issue in Zimbabwe to consolidate his hold on power. He blamed Britain for the land problem in his country because Britain reneged on its promise to make money available to pay compensations to the white farmers who were to give up their choice land for the new black African farmers. This led to his famous quip that ‘ the only white man you can trust is a dead white man’. However, the lands appropriated from the white farmers were distributed among Mugabe’s cronies instead of being given to the deprived landless black farmers who needed the land to eke out their sustenance. The new land-owners lived in the capital at Harare leaving the land untended. The net result of this was that the once vibrant agricultural sector in Zimbabwe based on tobacco production collapsed and it has never been revived. From that time, Mugabe lurched from one political crisis to another as the economy collapsed and currency of Zimbabwe became worthless. Inflation went over the roof. He blamed everybody except himself for the economic woes of his country brought about by his poor economic policies.

    After 37 years in the saddle as the iron fisted ruler of Zimbabwe, the 93-year old Mugabe has lost steam and turned his country to a pariah state. As he knows that he cannot live for ever, he is now making desperate efforts to install his second wife, Grace who he met when she was a low grade secretary in his office as the President. The obvious scheming of Robert Mugabe to make his wife who is 52 years old and who is more than 40 years his junior as his successor is a sad reflection of unsavoury political development in Africa. We saw this selfish action in Togo where the late Eyadema, after ruling the hapless country for 38 years, was succeeded by his son Faure. The same odious situation assailed the sensibilities of Africans in Gabon where the late diminutive Omar Bongo after ruling his otherwise rich country for almost 40 years was succeeded by his son. I am sure that Museveni, the aging dictator in Uganda and Paul Kagame his counterpart in Rwanda are waiting for their sons to succeed them. Some African leaders are trying to create political dynasty in Africa not through democratic processes but through dictatorial fiat.

    What Africa needs at the moment is not primitive political dynasty as exemplified in Togo and Gabon and which is being copied in Zimbabwe.  Africa now needs business dynasty where entrepreneurship is supported by family lineage.  I know of many family enterprises in Europe which had been sustained over the years by family members. Here I will give an example of Burton and Colier tailoring enterprises that had been run by family members since the 18th century in England. Unfortunately this trend is very rare or non-existent in Africa. Africa should now focus on how to develop family enterprises in the continent not on spurious family succession in governance which is nothing but political jobbery and nepotism. This is the nauseating political absurdity that Mugabe is trying to foist on the hapless people of Zimbabwe. If Mugabe succeeds in making his wife to succeed him, he will be replicating what Juan Peron the Argentine dictator did in the seventies when he made his wife Isabel Martinez de Peron to be his Vice President between 1973 and 1974. The wife subsequently succeeded him as the President of Argentina and ruled between 1974and 1976. This arrangement triggered off many years of political and economic instability in Argentina which only abated when democracy was restored in the country in the eighties.

    No country in Africa should copy this political nepotism with its attendant instability.

     

    • Prof. Lucas writes from New Bodija, Ibadan.

     

  • Absurdity unlimited

    •   Soldiers’ invasion of Kogi House of Assembly is unacceptable

    There seems to be no end to the shocking news emanating from Kogi State since last year’s governorship election. It is affecting all aspects of life in the state. Only last week, armed soldiers sacked the policemen on duty at the state house of assembly and effectively sealed off the complex. This is yet another puzzle. We find it difficult to understand why soldiers who are trained and armed for the war front could be drafted into what is purely a civil matter.

    It is unfortunate that the corrosive effect of partisan politics has affected all institutions of state. Lawmakers all over the country no longer see themselves as officials of state, holding the sacred trust of their people and with eyes focused on the future. Men who are elected by the people to make laws, check on the likely excesses of the executive and protect other institutions of state have turned into lawbreakers. It is now common to see more of fisticuffs than debates in the houses of assembly and even the  National Assembly. It is the shame of an already gang-raped nation.

    In Kogi State, as in many other states since the inception of the fourth republic, the central principle underlining democratic rule, that is the majority having their way while the minority has its say has been subverted. The bug of partisan politics has burrowed into legislative affairs with two factions emerging, each with its own speaker. Only five members, constituting a group, sacked the mainstream – The group of 15 – and with that, peace disappeared from the house. The G-15, led by Jimoh Lawal, fled to Abuja, sought the intervention of the House of Representatives and filed an application before a high court judge.

    Unfortunately, neither the resolutions of the House of Representatives, nor last week’s ruling by the court reaffirming majority rule could break the logjam. The group of five, apparently backed by Governor Yahaya Bello, has remained adamant. It has been conducting legislative affairs contrary to expectations by all decent citizens.

    We call on all the stakeholders to respect the constitution and place the national interest above narrow selfish, partisan considerations. The military authorities in particular must realise that soldiers are not trained to handle such matters. They therefore should not be made to take precedence over the police in matters constitutionally assigned the police. It is neither the intendment of the constitution nor the law establishing the army that soldiers be dragged into partisan conflicts. We therefore call on the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai, to immediately order a withdrawal of the army of occupation from the house. The army already has its hands full with the engagement on the Boko Haram front in the north east, the Niger Delta Avengers in the south-south creeks and warding off attacks on innocent farmers by murderous Fulani herdsmen. Getting involved in partisan disputations, especially in trying to impose the minority on the majority, amounts to an assault on democracy.

    We ask: Who ordered the deployment of soldiers to the place in the first place? What action has been taken by the military high command on this affront, if it was not party to the decision? For how long is the detachment expected  to keep watch over the house? What is the response of the police to this usurpation of power and duty?

    We note that the Attorney-General of the Federation who has been particularly interested in Kogi affairs has suddenly become quiet. What is the position of the Chief Law Officer of the Federation on the absurdity in the state? Disobedience to court order cannot be tolerated in any civilised society. We expect the Nigerian Bar Association, Nigeria Union of Journalists, civil society organisations and all other lovers of democracy to speak as one on this development.

    Nigeria is not a jungle.

  • Aluko and theatrics of absurdity

    SIR: Sometimes I wonder how a man with PhD could descend the pyramid of honour to such basement as Dr Aluko presently exemplified.

    Even as a political jobber scavenging for political crumbs, there are threshold of nobility a man with family must not assail for the sake of his wife and children.

    The PDP former state secretary’s positions have been subject to several incoherent recantations creating a silhouette of a man bereft of cachet.

    Again if Aluko is Fayose’s political son as the two have jointly admitted, then it only validates the old saying “like father like son”.

    Aluko’s debacle is a reflection of Fayose’s paternity of irresponsible political denouement in Ekiti leaving in its wake Ekiti-gate, judicial rascality, legislative escapism and the imposition of Okada-concatenated hegemony.

    It leaves a sane mind in stitches how the so called “the people” being sloganized by Fayose would be so enamoured to mediocrity forgetting their heritage of scholarship and civility.

    One thing is clear: Fayose and his son Aluko are dragging Ekiti in the mud and the earlier Ekiti elders and traditional rulers repudiate instant gratification and the patrimony of stomach infrastructure and rein in the governor the better for Ekiti.

    As we speak, Ekiti State is not able to pay five months salaries of civil servants, the N5,000 social benefits legacy left by Kayode Fayemi for the elderly people have been suspended calling to question the supervening value of Fayose’s governorship beyond garrulous insubordination.

     

    • Bukola Ajisola,

    Victoria Island, Lagos