Poor Olisa Metuh. In him, we see a man who derives perverse enjoyment in publicly demonstrating that he occupies a position that is much too big for him. Through his own actions, he is found wanting. Through his own words, he shows that silence would be his best policy.
In his latest tirade, Metuh seeks to criticize the APC because of the party’s reaction to the departure of the dour yet overly ambitious Tom Ikimi from the APC. Strange that Metuh feels he must leap to the rescue of such a ruthless and shameless political fighter as Ikimi. Stranger still is that Metuh seems more concerned about the Ikimi departure than the APC is as a party. Ikimi suffers from delusion of grandeur and in the PDP he will find his co-travellers. He needs his ego constantly fed and in PDP he will be lucky not to have it starved.
His recent attempt to denigrate the leadership of the APC, its leadership and the person of Bola Tinubu is merely the ranting of an ant. It falls within the same time worn and tenuous arguments. It offers no fresh thinking, but simply offends our nostrils. Like, his paymaster, Olisa is shadow boxing where there are no shadows. He is engaged in dynamic inactivity. His feeble attempt to talk down Tinubu is easily dismissible. If not for the PDP that gave him a job, his ilk will never have such temerity to speak the garbage they spill out.
Metuh seems to occupy a strange universe where the personal feelings of Ikimi are more important to him and his mission as PDP mouthpiece than are the national security and welfare of millions of our people. Strange man. Strange party. The PDP represents everything that is wrong with Nigeria. A party of ill-breds and career politicians. Metuh’s babysitting services is more needed by a cruel Presidency that profits from the misfortunes of the citizens.
The fact of the matter is that Metuh thought Ikimi’s departure would be a bombshell, fatally wounding the APC. He was set to take advantage of the matter. He may even have huddled with the carpetbagging Ikimi to help him craft his evil epistles against the APC. However, the bomb Metuh expected turned out to be a small, damp firecracker that could not even illicit a spark much less an explosion.
Investing hope that Ikimi’s departure would seriously injure the APC, Metuh was not only barking up the wrong tree, he had entered the wrong forest. Metuh had entered deep into fantasyland. Thus, let us endeavor to give him a piece of reality so that he might stop these flights of fancy and actually devote some time to the serious questions most Nigerians now ask of his party, PDP when it comes to their security and economic welfare.
In a sane party, Olisa Metuh would be confined to the fringes. But here he is given a national platform to insult the sensibilities of millions of Nigerians with his twisted logic and rationalization of the actions of Nigeria’s most inept and clueless leadership. Rather than face up to the failures of the PDP government, he seems have been placed on full time detail attacking the APC and its leaders. When you have no positive account of your own, and then attack that of the other party. This seems to be his motto and strategy. It is both naked and corrupt.
Olisa Metuh represents the pettiness and arrogance that has made this government blind to the fact that unprecedented tragedy had occurred on their watch while they were busily preening themselves and reveling in the sweet soft things that high office provides to those who care mostly about themselves.
While Boko Haram attacks us with guns, bombs and bullets, our very government fights us with deceit, trickery and lack of moral courage. Boko Haram assaults the body but this government and ruling party ambush our national spirit. So that we may reach our finer destiny, both need to go and to take their broken megaphone, Olisa Metuh, with them.
It would behoves the errant messenger of the errant ruling party to waste less time in his sophomoric examination of the APC internal dynamics and spend more time trying to figure out and explain the grand failures of policy and promise committed by the party to which he is so proudly a member. Why hasn’t this government rescued the girls of Chibok who have now been missing for nearly six months? It seems we are no closer to their freedom then we were the day they were abducted from their families.
Why did the government deploy so vast an array and arsenal of security forces and weaponry, including hooded gunmen, to intimidate and scare people during the recent elections in Ekiti and Osun? Is this a harbinger of what is to come during the 2015 general elections? If government musters such an energetic armed presence in peaceful states, how come it can’t deploy such a massive contingent in order to checkmate Boko Haram advances in northern Nigeria. Book Haram appears to be gaining ground daily, even declaring a caliphate. Yet, Metu is silent to this momentous challenge to national sovereignty and safety. Yet, his pen drips with poison because some APC members and Tinubu tell the truth about Ikimi.
The APC is undergoing a winnowing process. Those whose personal views or ambitions are incompatible with the party will leave. Instead of hurting APC, this helps the party because it makes it more coherent and united to her core principles. That the PDP can be home to anything and anybody no matter how craven is not a virtue. The ability of the PDP to be an indiscriminate receptacle only shows the party’s moral bankruptcy; it is not evidence of ecumenical appeal.
In this winnowing process, numerous people may depart but again the APC will be the better, more harmonious for it. Ikimi left and the APC still stands.
- Dare is Special Adviser, Media to Asiwaju Tinubu
