No genuine follower of Nigerian politics and our politicians of the present time will not be pained by the issues and circumstances hopelessly confronting us, and which our dramatis personae cannot arrest. And we don’t need to labour or over-labour the point that we need genuine, non-partisan, unsentimental observers and critics, be they newspaper columnists, television presenters and anchors, university persons and writers and non-university academics and professionals and opinion leaders, or tender-minded commentators in our respective sanctuaries of God, who can speak the truth that is true to our political dramatis personae. We sincerely need the listed critically-minded personages who can speak with particular and touching urgency to the issues facing our politics today.
Of course, many of us have been talking and talking and writing and writing about the politics, the bad politics, impeding our progress as a nation, but it is seemingly clear that the heads and hearts of our politicians are not equipped with libraries for our country’s progress.
Call my allusion to the heads and hearts of our politicians as to where there are no libraries for our country’s progress a metaphor; label it as such, and you are not going to be marked down. But you will be superlatively applauded if you see in the metaphor at least a dose of drama to the actual shenanigans of our current politics.
Not long ago Abba Kyari died. Abba Kyari, Buhari’s chief of staff since 2015, died – not long ago as we already know. And his death and burial elicited exciting doses(s) of drama in the land, but especially so in the presidency.
The ‘rule’ or ‘law’ which the presidency rolled out to us pertaining to social distancing or physical distancing or both on account of COVID-19 was violated without qualms by those who rolled out the ‘rule’ or ‘law’ against large gatherings and concentrations of persons for any event until COVID-19 dies.
To date, no presidential violators of the COVID-19 restriction order when Abba Kyari died has been appropriately chastised. How we sensed the sensations of presidential drama that overshadowed the apparent pain COVID-19 wrought in president Buhari’s library-less heart and mind! Earlier on, in Lagos, two popular Nigerian entertainers, female and male, who disobeyed the COVID-19 restriction order, were arrested and chastised accordingly after their guilty plea.
And when the presidencynologists dramatically exiled their own restriction order when Abba Kyari died, as afore-said, the drama of political selection, of the political division of superiors and inferiors, was sensationally brought to the fore in a bewilderingly laughable manner. George Orwell’s Animal Farm rekindled in the consciousness of some of us, and we didn’t know whether to weep cathartically for the departed Abba Kyari or derisively for our country, where the politics of the disobedience of laws, rules and orders are never a problem full of surprising possibilities.
Last week Governor Godwin Obaseki, APC governor of Edo State crossed over to the PDP which makes him now the bona fide governor of Alhaji Abubakar Atiku’s party. In other words, Godwin Obaseki has, by the de rigueour of our current politics and politicians, made Edo State a PDP state – meaning that the only once-upon-a-time APC state in the South-South of our geopolitics has immediately become a super PDP state with or without prejudice for the drama of cross-over politics. All those who welcomed him to the PDP fold at the party’s secretariat in Benin City last Friday clearly demonstrated that they had (and still have) a derry on the law he recently promulgated against large gatherings in Edo State. But their daring spirit is a carry-over from the presidency where almost everyone, every big gun, there has a questionable record of derring-do against the laws of our land. How many times have our presidencynologists not disobeyed orders of our courts with doses of drama?
The ruling APC governments almost everywhere particularly at the central level have seemingly exiled themselves from all of us. Even the majority of the members of their National Working Committee (NWC) have every now and then derided our courts. Hence, for example, their court-suspended national chairman dared an Abuja Appeal Court to do what compelled Godwin Obaseki to do what many persons thought he would never do. Surprisingly, the NWC is still pursuing every agenda of the suspended chairman without due regard for the order of the Abuja Appeal Court and without any sense of calling a broad NEC meeting relating to the issues facing their party in Edo, Ondo and Rivers States. I don’t understand why. We don’t know why.
This past Sunday, I think, I saw some members of the NWC on television discountenancing the idea, suggestion and request that the NEC of the party should meet soonest to discuss the issues tearing or that are likely to tear the party apart. Their spokesperson made it known that even an emergency meeting was not on the real table evidently on the excuse of the presidential order against the restriction of large gatherings because of COVID-19! What a dose of drama the man displayed in his presentation of his evidently specious reason for not wanting an NEC meeting, emergency or not! It will be well to consider for a moment what it is that is compelling the factional members of the NWC to run from an NEC meeting of any sort. What is the truth of their action? Is the truth of their action superior to that of the factional national chairman of the APC who obviously has the order of the Abuja Appeal Court in his favour? It will not be out of place to reason that the sounds which can be elicited by the acting national chairman’s rapping the table of justice, so to say, are not the sounds of what they seem, but of what they are: the sounds that will ruin the ruling APC sooner or later. I may be wrong. Yet the one thing I know is that the doses of drama the APC politicians are giving us are the doses of “madmen and specialists,” to borrow Wole Soyinka’s term.
Valuable intra-party communications among the APC top men, among the party’s “madmen specialists” who are definitely experts in divisive politics, are now very realistically impeded. It is my hope that the current drama and monumental problems of the party will not create a monumental problem for our country led by a leader who apparently is not a leader he seems to be. We have never had it so bad – as a people and as a country. Maybe Jonathan and his people should return. What a new provocative and exacting proposition our APC’s “madmen and specialists” are offering us! Phew! I am creating a new political drama in Spain! Phew! We must tell all of us the blunt but simple truth: Dr. Jonathan’s time and tenure are better by far than GMB’s. A bi I dey lie? Answer me well well to make devil shame, to make debolo shame. Yes, we must to make debolo shame, debolo wey make us waste our votes for GMB. A bi I dey lie? Phew!
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.
