After General Olusegun Obasanjo’s letter, the APC and the Presidency have been on the road show. They are sweating things out trying to explain themselves. Particularly itching to them, it appears, is the horrendous accusation that President Muhammadu Buhari is nepotistic and clannish. That is perhaps the harshest charge any prince of power can lay against another in this game of modern governance.
Modern governance, by logic, is the greatest good of the greatest number. Of course, it is trite conclusion that nothing for us without us. And Buhari, in Obasanjo’s assessment, has fallen severely out of reckoning in matters of best-practice governance, in matters of inclusion. Buhari is running a government, in fact, Obasanjo said a nepotistic court, of large-scale exclusion of others. Only Buhari and clansmen own and run governance, according to the Owu-born General.
In a bid to explain things, APC and Buhari sympathisers have hit the airwaves and are stirring the noises and signals. On January 29, for instance, there were two of such on both AIT/Kakaaki and Channels/Sunrise channels. They were explaining how Buhari is an all-inclusive guy and leader.
But is he? And they gave the reasons that while the “security architecture” is Northern-Muslim heavy-laden, such is also the case in the economy, which, according to them, or they tried to imply, is Southern-Christian-heavy.
Moreover, their PDP counterparts in both TV shows were unable to provide ready answers and rebuttals. They failed themselves and the nation at this. However, the subject is important and evidently goes beyond the PDP and party sympathisers. So we add our voice to it.
The fact that southerners or Christians dominate the economy is fake news. It is being propositioned to fool even the elect. The real details are as follows. Nigeria runs a mono-economy. And it is based on oil, crude oil. Crude oil and associated business earn Nigeria just about all her foreign exchange. By one account, it is about 95 per cent. And any time the price of crude oil tanks, Nigeria runs into economic straits.
Now, it is clear that Nigerian economy is crude oil and crude oil is Nigerian economy. As statistics show, Buhari is the Minister of Petroleum. Buhari is northern. Buhari is a Muslim. Following him is Dr. Ibe Kachikwu. Kachikwu is a junior minister almost without consequence. Nobody reports to him. At least, not the NNPC, as the boss-man there confessed. And the boss-man, by the way is Muslim, a northerner.
Next to the Ministry of Petroleum comes the NNPC and other associated and subsidiary bodies of the said petroleum ministry. And what is the statistics revealing? It is that these bodies are exclusively a composite northern lake, sharks and all. They control, draw from, drink, dispense, and this almost exclusively, the ecology and food chain of the crude lakes.
So, as the economy goes, Nigeria is totally in northern hands too. Why say so? A recourse to the management style of the imperial Ottoman/Turkish empire and present Saudi Arabian state will explain. In these two places, power is characterised into two. There are, [1] the powers of the princes, as contrasted with [2] the powers or better offices of the viziers.
The princes are those who own the empire. And it is understood and things are so structured that only they can rise to ultimate power, to become kings and presidents and emperors. Viziers are brilliant commoners, sometimes slaves, who are technically proficient and gifted. They are tapped as helping hands, to aid keep their princes and kings in power. They are headhunted as props to help run the state or aspects of it, for their potentates, these kings, these princes.
So, in power, Ottoman-Turkish terms, the petroleum and associated parastatals form an exclusive lake of the princes and kings of Nigeria. In the Ottoman experience, this must necessarily include the military or what folks term the security architecture. So, it is by now clear what source of inspiration by which Buhari toasts his nation and runs shop.
And to control these, the security and economy, is to have controlled the entire chain, both downstream and upstream. That is to say, the southerners who work in central banks, ministry of economy, et cetera, are at best mere viziers, lovable fools, as we called them in stock exchanges in America.
So, it will be a scandal for the APC and Buhari sympathisers to compound their nepotism, according to Obasanjo, by confounding truth with lies. The point is that NNPC is not a part of the mix of the Nigerian economy. NNPC is the mix. The rest are vizier-like components, garnishes.
Our presumptive messiahs have lost their mojo all over again
When I ranted against the Nigeria Intervention Movement (NIM), maybe a few would have held a doubt or two. But unfolding events show that these NIM guys are at best one of a kind. And it is a difficult and, if you like, an outcast kind. And like the typical Nigerian, the NIMers are too lazy even to awake from their dream. Slouching in the couches, they can’t even break any sweat to get the mechanics, simple mechanics of what they are about, right.
With names like Femi Falana, SAN, disowning membership of the group, the matter has gone nuclear. Repeat, not just Falana, but a coterie of names are washing their hands off NIM, disassociating themselves from its aims and or processes. Or stating for fact that they were not consulted a priori. The question then is, are the NIMers poaching identities of willing and unwilling agents? Or they will to recruit their co-conspirators after the fact?
Even if they come back to claim that it is in goodwill, it smacks of gross insensitivity. How dare an honest one enlist the names of people without consulting them. It is like a throwback to the thuggery of military coup-makers. The military boys would just do their coups and begin to announce peoples’ names on radio as beneficiaries, that is, come-and-chop members of cabinet, boards, etc. And Nigerians, hungry for power, for privilege, go for the chance of robbing it off a nation. Robbing a nation while asserting they are doing it in the interest of the nation.
However, the military were, at least, on hindsight, nicer. They were more honest. They knew that coup-making, however else it is sold, is really robbery, at least political robbery and possibly too treasury-looting procedure. So their game was to invite a horde of innocents and so-called eminent persons. Their real aim, however, was to bait these innocents and eminent persons on board, with open-sore opportunities to join in the robbery innocently. It was a scheme to confuse the citizenry. So, if the citizenry saw their favorite professors, eminent persons, etc, charmed into being robbers or accessories to robberies, they are easily persuaded to suspend disbelief. And let the music, sorry the robbery, go on.
As is clear, these NIMers are now about the ways and means of the armed political robbers, aka coup-makers. Yet, they claim they are come to save the nation. Such a nation is possibly damned. Perhaps, the NIMers should first save themselves.
Are there not too many churches and mosques for our good?
I was reading through an online portal. A Chinese fellow answered a question on why the Chinese were able to get economically liberated in so short a time. He answered in part: “Atheism. Chinese people don’t believe in God or gods, we believe in ourselves. Prayers don’t bring food to the table. We don’t waste time on things which were written in some random books by some random people thousands of years ago.’’
He gave his name as Ricky Zhang. I consider him a living sage.
Anyway, it may be difficult to find a causal link between atheism and economic development. This is especially because, in history, many apparently religious civilisations have done well. Anyway, what the Chinese have proved is that one does not need god to do well economically. This is so since they have done it themselves without god.
We are not canvassing folks should go out there and throw out their gods and close their chapels and mosques. But it is time we reconsider. Are we not too religious for our own good? Are there not too many religious holidays in Nigeria? Is religion not dividing us the more? Are all these divisive religions not imports? Christianity and Islam all come from the Middle East/Europe. They are as strange to us as melanin is to white men and Arabs. If they were not, we would not as a people be fighting over them, would we? It won’t do us any great harm if we came to knowledge. Our religiousness has not baked more bread for us than atheism has for the Chinese. Nigeria ronu.