GOodluck Ebele Jonathan, president of the Federal Republic, feasts with his centenary crowd, over their centennial wonder.
But the nation — or more correctly, the country — over which he and his foreign and local revellers swoon, sinks more into the quagmire, of a hundred years of pretence.
The grim trophy: slain school children and mass bombing by Boko Haram; and paralytic fuel queues that show the Nigeria of Jonathan’s celebration is no more than a centenary joke!
That was the grand contrast, that faced luckless Nigerians, in the last week of February.
Even at a crucial crossroads, there appears no link between Nigeria’s rulers and the ruled.
In that cynical spirit, President Jonathan beatified a horrible past, with the fond hope that would blot out the hard present, which portends a grim future. Some hope!
Dazed Nigerians, not a few caught in a debilitating ennui, could only look on and wonder!
Talk of the beatification of horror, and the so-called centenary honours list jumps into the mind. Sitting atop the list is Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, Lord Frederick Lugard and even his girlfriend — as far as the Nigeria story goes — Flora Shaw.
Now, the queen is a wonderful personage, adored by her people. But as far as Nigeria’s British colonisation goes, she heads a bandit state — every empire is a bandit state — that stole from, and raped the peoples of Nigeria, simply because it had superior arms and inferior conscience. And all these under the grand hypocrisy of Pax Britannica!
So, for beatifying the queen in the context of Nigeria’s colonisation, is Jonathan endorsing that evil? That is house negro complex taken too far!
As for Lugard, he did his job as a patriotic Briton. But that boon to Britain was — and still — is a mess to Nigeria. That Lugardian mess is still being sorted out by the Nigerian people, even if the Nigerian state appears to have made its peace with the unconscionable Lugardian court.
It is only such a soulless court that can proceed to celebrate as epochal, a non-event as 100 years of Nigeria’s slavery — and, to boot, in the midst of intense anguish in sections of the country, especially in the North East.
There, Boko Haram continues to spill innocent blood, the most outrageous being the 29 minors, killed at the Federal Government College, Boni Yadi, Yobe State. Phew! A federal government that cannot secure the lives of its young citizens, in its own secondary school, must find time to clink glasses! Does it not know it is the raw blood of its slaughtered youngsters it drank as wine?
Away from foreign colonisers, Jonathan’s centenary honours list crawls with local colonisers. To start with, the ace thief, Sani Abacha! Abacha was a classic example of how not to be a citizen; yet, no thanks to the mechanical balancing of the dysfunctional Nigerian state, he is a Jonathan winner!
Still, none of the rabble of ex-Nigerian leaders that queued for the so-called centennial honours could be said to be morally superior to Abacha. Sure, Abacha was their collective image at its most decayed, but their image all the same!
Gen. Yakubu Gowon would perhaps enjoy most of history’s sympathy. His, from military rule’s days of innocence, is perhaps a charge of culpable omission. Not the others!
Gen. Ibrahim Babangida wilfully annulled the freest election in Nigeria’s history. He stands legitimated charged, for Nigeria’s current rotten public morality.
His two successors, Abacha and Gen. Abdusalami Abubakar, take the can for the fate that befell MKO Abiola, winner of that presidential election of 12 June 1993.
For insisting on his mandate, Abacha locked up MKO and threw away the key. MKO died in custody under Abdusalami’s charge, even if the general had the presence of mind to quickly release Olusegun Obasanjo. Yet, the duo are honoured as national builders, while their acts, by commission or omission, could well have pushed the country over the cliff.
Gen (President) Obasanjo was, of course, key to the continuation of the old order under a new guise. So, scratch the Ota farmer, and you probably would locate the roots of the current unease. He is the author and finisher of health-challenged President Umaru Yar’Adua, whose death in office has brought about the peculiar mess of the Jonathan presidency.
Though Obasanjo now cries the cry of the innocent and the wronged under Jonathan’s onslaught, perceived or real, it is rather the deserved shriek of a plotter snared by his own trap!
As for Chief Ernest Shonekan, who neither staged a coup nor won an election, his sole ticket to centenary honour was being the chief tool of sustaining the crime of annulling MKO’s mandate. Now, how can that be a motivation to Nigeria’s generation next — that perfidy pays?
These were the unconscionable leaders that have left Nigeria in a ditch at the turn of its first century. Yet, these leaders (more of power dealers!) toast themselves to high heavens, not caring a hoot about how prostrate they have left the poor people in their charge!
Indeed, reading Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s book, Adventure in Power Book Two: The Travails of Democracy and the rule of Law, clearly showed Nigeria’s leadership crisis started from the very beginning — at independence.
Instead of envisioning a bright future for their new country and working hard towards it, the federal leadership at independence was rather fixated with crushing Awo’s Action Group (AG); and with it, all its developmental strides.
But even if Awo was biased for himself, as he articulated his own case in his own book, how the Tafawa Balewa federal government milked the Western crisis to get at their perceived nemesis is all too clear, from accounts from that troubled era.
But the moral, in the context of Nigeria’s centenary mis-celebration, is that that fixation turned out a grand distraction, with the tragic consequences of a relay of bad leaders, of which Jonathan is only the latest.
But just as well: the bright sparks in Nigeria’s opaque skies — Wole Soyinka, the families of Gani Fawehinmi, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and the grand martyr of Nigerian democracy, MKO — have rejected the centenary awards.
Still, the irony is that, pound for pound, they are far more deserving of the awards. Despite the long haul in the wilderness, they have shone brightest; and demonstrated what dazzling heights Nigeria can attain under the right leadership.
If any good can come out of a gaffe, the Jonathan honours list, with its parade of leadership fat cats, has shown something: those leaders are the direct opposite of what Nigeria needs to be great.
So, as the country takes its first gingerly steps in its next century, Nigerians must vote the direct opposite of these past leaders. Much more importantly, the National Conference must radically restructure the country for productivity and sustainable development.
If not, a second centenary for Nigeria would be a pipe dream, for Nigeria would have sunk without trace, in the violent ocean of its own contradictions.
