Abians must be the happiest people in today’s depressed and repressed Nigeria.
How do I mean? They are doubly blessed.
Like the rest of us, Abians went to the polls last year to elect a governor. They voted for one governor but, as fortune would have it, they now have two. Now, that’s a classical case of ‘Buy one, get one free’. Isn’t that the stuff great marketing promos are made of?
In fact, it could have been better, if a certain judge in Owerri did not wake up on the ‘wrong’ side of the bed. He could just have tripled Abians’ joy by throwing a third governor into the mix. And, wait for it, it would have been a Governor Nwosu. What a narrow miss for the Nwosu clan!
But I will leave the lawyers and the political hirelings to freely foul the air with their legal jargons and partisanship. I won’t interfere. I won’t even talk about a certain Nwuruku, or whether I suspect that he was high on something cheap. I won’t even say a word about INEC or whether it was too much in a hurry to issue certificate of return.
Even when I’m silently rooting for Uche Ogah, I really have nothing against Okezie Ikpeazu – for the only thing he is guilty of is what the Catholics would call the ‘Original Sin’.
This original sin, in the case of Ikpeazu, is T.A. Orji, who installed him and whose baggage of eight years of misrule and self-adulation he would have to carry.
And talking about T.A. Orji, I futilely watch every senate plenary to hear his contributions to debate, but the man seems very comfortable just warming his seat and putting up a puffy mien, which makes him look like he just swallowed a live bee. But, I digress.
Of course, I also feel for the people of Abia-South and their legitimate quest to produce the governor of the state. I just pray that this quest does not become divisive – pitching Abians against themselves.
But if you’re in doubt that Abians are a happy, lucky lot, consider the fact that as we were celebrating three-day holiday lavished on us by a conspiracy of celestial elements and the rather curious non-sighting of the moon to mark the end of Ramadan last week, Abians actually got two extra days of holiday. Of course, it was not to ensure that the courts did not open to perform any clandestine swearing-in of anybody. It was just another evidence of a governor’s love for his people and the need to accord full respect to a fallen hero, Ojo Maduekwe. And, mind you, there is nothing ‘idiotic’ about this.
But if you think the happenings in and around the Abia governorship are not strange enough, what would you think of a situation whereby somebody has taken the promise of the Buhari government to turn agriculture into a money-spinner literally?
Yes. When PMB promised to diversify the economy, from over dependence on crude oil and pointed out that there was money literally waiting to be harvested in Agriculture, some people took up the challenge. And, as Speaker Yakubu Dogara told some editors at the weekend, these ‘ambitious’ ones went to plant (sorry, bury) money in their farms. I guess they were either hopping to harvest more money in a few months time. Maybe, if you ‘planted’ Dollar, you’d harvest Euros and Pounds Sterling? Or maybe, if you planted N100 notes, you’ll harvest N500 and N1000 notes.
Just how low are we going to degenerate in this country? Why do people keep looting money they and their children would never finish in two lifetimes?
My prayer for them has always been the same: May they spend all money paying hospital bills and curing mysterious ailments. Did I hear a loud Amen? May their children and children’s children discover the joy in cocaine and gambling. Another Amen!
No matter how much dollars they plant, may they harvest the type of corncobs the Yoruba call Olomo sikata. Amen.
And when they abandon our run-down local schools and send their children to Ivy League universities, may those same children return to serve those of us who trekked several miles to attend Edda community secondary school in the backwaters of Ebonyi State. Amen and Amen and Amen.
Of course, I’m not one of those sold on the propaganda that every money that came out of Col. Sambo Dasuki’s office was meant for arms to fight Boko Haram. My take is just that the slush fund of the last Jonathan years was domiciled in the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA). In another four or eight years, we would also get to hear where the present government has domiciled its own slush fund – or where the APC got the money to run its own campaign. However, I feel scandalised to learn of the shenanigans our military chiefs played in office. Were they so dumb? No attempt to cover their tracks? Was it impunity? Was that why they were too unintelligent to come up with a workable strategy to battle Boko Haram? How did these Generals pass Staff College? Even a Mumu like me can ‘chop’ money more neatly. Haba!
…And more strange things
Foreign airlines operating in Nigeria are no longer accepting our Naira. The Dollar, Pound and Euro are going up and coming down like yoyo. The CBN claims the Naira is now floating. In fact, everything is floating, as hunger and hardship continue to stare us in the face.
Well, I have one note of warning to sound to all of them: I don’t want to wake up one day and discover that Nigeria floated with the Naira and fallen off the map. Or that, in the spirit of floating Naira, the country has floated to Sao Tome. Or Indian Ocean.
Of course, I wouldn’t mind if we float to Europe – maybe, they’d then let us replace UK in the EU.
But, jokes apart, the country is really in a tailspin. IPOB and MASSOB are tearing at one side. Herdsmen are still on rampage. The hide-and-seek game with Boko Haram is still going on in the North East. And as we reclaim territories from the insurgents up North, we’re rumoured to be losing territories down South to a new set of insurgents. Cultists are over-running the South-south. And we have not even brought the Avengers into the equation. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, the people we have entrusted with finding solutions to all these are still busy consolidating their hold on power (power for power’s sake, if you ask me). They’re busy bickering over who controls what, in a country that is fast vanishing. Rather than control a small percentage of something, they want to control 100% of nothing.
Others are busy bursting their veins over who owns the oil, without thinking that there might soon be no oil at all. They are busy trying to grab land (or refuse release of land) for grazing reserves, without knowing that much of the land has even been eaten away by erosion and flood and drought. Or are we going to graze cattle inside gullies and deserts?
But it’s not all bad news. There’s good news coming from NNPC. They said the oil behemoth finally returned a profit – for the first time in 15 years. In other words, in our years of surplus, we made no profit, but in lean times (with reduced output and fallen prices) we managed to make a profit. Unbelievable! I know fellow wailers would readily say the period under review fell under Jonathan’s administration, but I know this same profit would have entered ‘voice mail’ if the fear of Buhari had not gripped the people at NNPC.

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