Okenyi Kenechi
Some people hear the change in President Muhammadu Buhari’s voice; others detect deception and awful cluelessness mashed up in crude demagoguery. In all, he smells of uncertainty.
“Abacha is not corrupt”; “those who gave me 97 percent cannot, in all honesty, be treated same as those who gave me 5 percents”. If you add 97 plus 5 and then minus by 100, the difference is the change that we were promised. But remember that the president is not aware of anything.
Politics is “murderous”; I stopped blaming politicians for their inability to make Nigeria work. Whoever benefits from a disjointed system will never allow it to be replaced with something out of the basics. Naive is beyond belief and I am not naïve. We are the problem and its victims; we the gleeful clowns who submitted ourselves to the potency of their hypnotism. We hail them in the day and cry of hunger pangs at night. We are not serious and like Fela said, we are suffering and smiling.
President Muhammadu Buhari is to good decisions what Naira is to dollars; they can never be equals, not with the bad economic decisions that is Buhari’s cabinet. But does he care? That is a puzzle for another day.
His aides say that the President has fulfilled most of his campaign promises. It’s been months that the Buhari challenge tore social media apart; people have been asked to identify one project initiated and completed by the Buhari-led administration in its 3 years of existence. We are still waiting for their robust reply.
What we get are weekly dramas that do nothing but distract us from the fact that Buhari has not achieved anything in 3 years. They come in tranches, crude in form, with potentialities to muscle us out of our starry-eyed observation of the mountain-level incompetence that has become the order of the day.
The people are still hungry, herdsmen are still killing people, people are still losing their jobs but it seems like we have adjusted to our natural abilities to do nothing but laugh at the rate at which events change.
Read the press release through which president Buhari honoured the late Chief MKO Abiola; it was filled with errors. This is the lowest we can get, especially from a people who have the resources to hire the best brains. But that is not happening. Ever wondered why the economy tanked? Because the best brains were not working it.
Ingratitude is one of the things that are deeply wrong. I think that we should be grateful to Buhari for really bringing us back to reality, a reality that shows that we as a people cannot do anything in the face tyranny. Those of our elders who fought tyranny in the past, are the tyrants of today’s mental torture and Greed’s tragedy.
They are the intellectuals who urged us to vote for change, knowing fully well that we were never students of history; they removed it from the curriculum for a day like this, under their active supervision.
They knew that the man was chased away from power because of his ineffectiveness in 85, but because they felt that a Buhari’s president would offer them an express access to our commonwealth, they threw caution to the wind and coerced our generation into voting for change.
I have often been referred to as “anti-intellectual”. I might be everything on earth but I am not stupid or naive. The intellectuals of today’s Nigeria are worse than the politicians that they loathe in public and embrace in secret. But hey, that is not why I am writing.
When we it became obvious that the politicians were after our lives, we turned to the intellectuals for solace. It was sad to discover that they were in bed with our tormentors, helping them out with plans on how to destroy us in perpetuity.
My generation is and has suffered from a great danger, a danger of first choice. We are left in-between the devil and the deep blue sea; the politicians on one side and the intellectuals on the other side. Tired of taking sides, we chose the third option; to leave the country in droves, through the Mediterranean and Sahara desert.
It is sad, deeply saddening, that 400 years after our ancestors sailed the seas and walked the deserts, chained and beaten, we are embarking on such journeys, as economic refugees and modern day slaves.
Buhari said he belonged to everybody and nobody, but that was a lie told in the presence of our coat of arm. At the beginning of his tenure, he boasted that corruption will not be allowed to manifest in his government. We have seen that to not be the case.
Corruption is swimming in the ocean of incompetence that is his government. It is even a crime on common sense for one to claim to fight corruption with the type of constitution that we run. It is impossible and every attempt by his aides to smuggle in his much-talked-about but now known vicious lies of Anti-Corruption makes the man look more awful.
But the drama that they dish out every week, what are they shielding us from knowing? Has anyone ever tried to unravel the mystery between the weekly national dramas that the presidency dishes out? We need to be vigilant.
Dear Mr president, I might be broken but I am not stupid.
