Tag: Ernest Shonekan

Much more than the mileage the Jonathan presidency hoped to achieve with the emblazoning photograph of past Nigerian rulers wearing their medals and displaying their centennial award certificates late last month, the picture actually tells a far more poignant and iconic story. There were seven of them: Abdulsalami Abubakar, Muhammadu Buhari, Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo, Shehu Shagari, Ibrahim Babangida and Ernest Shonekan. Smack in the middle was, of course, President Goodluck Jonathan himself. Given his predilection for sham celebrations, it is surprising he did not seize upon the same argument of the centenary to award himself a certificate of honour. In any case, Dr Jonathan was the only one in the pictures published on March 1 newspapers not brandishing a certificate. Others dutifully wore their medals and/or displayed their certificates, thereby indicating their concurrence with the queer and questionable philosophy behind the centenary as well as the disgraceful rational for picking the honourees.

The photograph, though powerful and resonating, nevertheless tells the very depressing story of futile uniformity and lack of rigour. It tells the story of former rulers whose unquestioning perspective and fondness for the meretricious led them to embrace a project as wasteful as it is truly and totally mendacious. None of the seven questioned the ideological basis for the centenary, nor joined issues with the financially oblique accounting system that made the celebrations possible. None of them was politically conscious enough to appreciate the centenary’s distortionary effects on our history and identities. There was none of them with enough sagacity to disprove the base and conflicting logic that underlined the compilation of the list of honourees, thus indicating that the former rulers were insensitive to their own individual legacies and unable to disambiguate legacy as a word and concept.

The group photograph of former rulers should illustrate the power and glory of Nigeria, of our best men and leaders, of the rich custodians of our politics, culture and essence. Instead, the group photograph illustrated something so surrealistic it is a miracle the country has not collapsed under the weight of their collective obscurantism. They had no idea what our history says, of how we were humiliated and traumatised with a lasting injury by colonialism, of how Lugard’s foundational rule and years of self-misrule combined to misshape our values and enthrone a vicious form of mental and economic slavery. It was therefore okay by them to celebrate, and to carry out that sickening exercise in company with one another, the liar with the perjurer, the tyrant with the murderer, the inept with the experimentalist.

The photograph inferentially tells the numbing story of how and why the country decayed so badly for decades, and by their admission, now needs revolutionary work to salvage, if indeed, as one of them said, it can still be salvaged. If they could not question Dr Jonathan’s frivolity and rebuff it, if they did not understand the history of the country they led for decades, and if they were unable to share its pains and sorrows, how indeed could they fashion brilliant and workable plans for its development and greatness? How could they make it the pride of the black race? To participate in Dr Jonathan’s revelry, they must have gone to extraordinary lengths to muffle their consciences, and to shut the tap of remorse which a clear mind and ample soul sometimes lead a decent man and patriot to demonstrate.

The photograph of the eight men reminds us how our country was ruined. Gowon dishonoured his word and rendered it impotent; Shagari’s stolidity and indulgence clogged the national arteries until we choked; Buhari had little or no appreciation of the rights and freedoms of man, and how man is ennobled by these attributes; Babangida was the inappropriate watershed between the age of innocence and the age of vice, as he gave birth to the worst in us; and Shonekan was the bemused and amoral inheritor of a stolen legacy. Abubakar’s misguided and messianic reign produced the highly schizoid Obasanjo who had, and still has, no capacity for differentiating between truth and falsehood. And Obasanjo archetypically begat meddlesomeness in such a manner that the country’s ruin was complete under his predecessors.

Yes, it was just one simple photograph published in newspapers. But, alas, it told a million sad stories, unknown to the former rulers who lined up quizzically for the photograph on February 28, and perhaps unfeeling.