That PDP / ANPP Assault
Now, I really don't care who is listening it is just important that I vent some of what I feel about what we now seem compelled to live with in Nigeria.
I live and earn a living in Lagos, Nigeria...and just in case you do not know, this is where it all happens - forget the plastic mirage tjhat Abuja is. It is just a way to keep what they are doing out of the public view in Lagos. We still see them all the same!
Now, don't we? The other day, the otherwise reverred Dr Alex Ekweme was on television - AIT...you probably saw it too - telling the rest of us why he felt 'compelled' by God and an oppressive sense of responsibility to contest his party's primaries against Chief - General? - Olusegun Obasanjo.
According to him, Obasanjo has failed every expectation of Nigerians and therefore should go. He, at 70 has fresh ideas that will move Nigeria forward. He with very great care and academic detail enumerated the problems of agriculture and food importation, overdependence on oil, corruption,the President's autocratic tendencies etc.
See, I do not hold brief for anyone. Believe what you like. But, I feel assaulted in my ability to process data and thoughts. I was not too young when Shagari was President of our country and I know that nobody will attempt to convince me that Dr Alex Ekweme just woke up each morning, strolled to the office, drank some tea, and watched while Alhaji Shehu Aliu Shagari ran the entire country aground in four and a half years. Alex Ekweme participated. I prefer to think and believe that than think that the man was just hired to fill the Igbo quota in the political dispensation of that time.
If he participated therefore, he should have taken care to spare us his sanctimonious rattlings about how we import rice and how we could grow the crop in 120 days, etc. From anybody else, that would draw applause. Surely not from a man who not only signed away not a few of the future of this country on the altar of self and tribal satisfaction [pls don't call it preservation - they never were threatened!]. Alex Ekweme and Shagari imported all the rice we will eat in Nigeria for the next century!! Well, with Umaru Dikko and cohorts.
The political, economic and social problems we deal with in Nigeria today are direct inheritances of the Shagari/ Ekweme regime. Consider that it was Shagari who changed the positioning and attitude of the Nigeria Police through the manipulation of Sunday Adewusi, the then IG - he was a greedy myopic, fellow if you ask me -just so his party could rule at all cost.
Now, we have an incurably corrupt police.
Shagari and Ekweme devastated the entire economy of Nigeria and all of us are still paying today. Now this same man has the temerity ro reappear not as an adviser - if we can trust him with that - but as the man that will lead the rest of us!! We would have been shipped away to the farms of California by the time he'd finished his tenure. Thank God Obasanjo defeated him. But that's another kettle of fish - yes, fish.
Everything the man has done since he came into power has smelled of fishes os great variety.The man has bad personality management, and obviously refuses to acknowledge that some other Nigeriuans may have ideas. I wonder who told him to seek a second term. I think he's done some great work - GSM[now, we are able to call ourselves and our brethren in America and Peckam without having to go and wake Alhaji at 2.00am when our calls come], we don't cue for fuel anymore[you'd think that was not possible], suddenly, NEPA does not give us as many excuses about Kainji drying as we used to have [now, we actually oooh, and aaah when the light goes off! in Nigeria?!]
But I still think the man has overrated his own popularity. He's going to the polls now in a battle against General [not again!] Mohammadu Buhari! The same man who said he will Islamise Nigeria at the first opportunity, and just in case you can't remember, he's the same man who with unsmiling Idiagbon, brutilised Nigerians in the name of teaching us how to behave.
But it's OK for him to contest, now. Did Chief Dr Chuba Okadigbo, the Oyi of Africa [whatever that means] not gang up against John Nwodo and Rochas Okorocha, Harry Akande, et al at the ANPP primaries so he could become the running mate? I think that sucks. Couldn't the man have worked to become Number One? One would think that for all his exposure and obvious intelligence [is it deviousness?] he would be brimming with enough ideas to make him a viable alternative to all the older turkeys.
But then Nigeria is such country. A country of old leaders in strong towers of steel that the feeble, half hearted arrows of the young generation can never penetrate.
So, we wait for them to die, then maybe we can pick up the pieces and see if we can make sense of them.
Are you thinking? I'm going for supper. No more, they cannot surprise me after the ANPP primaries. No, not amynore. So, we wait....
See, you on the other side.
Bimbo.
:x
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