I intend to draw readers’ attention to an assessment of the leadership and followership we have in the entity referred to as Nigeria. We have leaders who ordinarily are to be followers but mistakenly voted or appointed to leadership positions. Some of those leaders are in power for a specific personal interest and those of their nuclear family and by extension, tribal and religious folks.
The recent brutal banditry attacks on Kukawa in Kanam local government area and parts of Wase local government area all in Plateau State, convinced me of the existence of selfish interest in public offices as displayed by the present acting national chairman of All Progressives Congress (APC), Nentawe Goshwe Yilwatda.
As Minister for Humanitarian and Disaster management, and son of Plateau State who contested the 2023 gubernatorial election in Plateau State and massively voted in the two embattled local governments, although defeated, Nentawe never deemed it necessary from point of duty to even commiserate with victims of the brutality but was quick to visit Riyom local government in same Plateau State when suspected Fulani herdsmen attacked their attackers, killed, maimed and destroyed properties as reprisal.
Nentawe not only hurriedly visited but donated N15million on the spot to cushion the effects of the attack on his brothers and sisters in Christ.
But those Muslims in the two local governments of Kanam and Wase were abandoned to fate and ignored. That exposes a typical case of selective concern by supposedly a politician who asked for a mandate to govern a state so desperate for peace, unity and love.
The State Governor, Caleb Manassah Mutfwang who ideally could have sent words of empathy for concern, also pretended as if nothing brutal had happened in Kanam and Wase but was an early sympathizer at Riyom.
Then the most annoying portion of the abandonment was two separate statements from those who still believe in anything Nentawe. They tried in-vain to exonerate their ‘Idol’ from blame but lacked substance of sincerity of doing that convincingly without blemish. Their statements were at variance in points to convince even the most jaundiced mind. What an insult!
Yet, after, it was the same abandoned victims and their senseless leaders that went to town celebrating the appointment of same Nentawe as APC acting National Chairman as if it was Nentawe that planted them in leadership. What an insult to belonging and commonsense!
APC members in towns, villages and hamlets trooped to the streets celebrating what they stand to gain nothing from. Nentawe’s haphazard appointment has an attachment for 2027 selfish interest and the usual clowns rotting away in towns and villages are eagerly waiting for marching orders to vote cluelessness under the guise of party membership. What a clear case of madness!
And there is nothing more or less to say than sheer selective concern displayed by Nentawe and Mutfwang. It was a typical case of abracadabra. The more you look, the less you see. The more you see, the less you understand. It takes me to say that Karma is our open secret. In Nigeria, it is our sacred, secret space ignored in plain sight. It becomes our ternenos or ritual precinct, of rewards and comeuppance.
In this divine, marked off terrain, the moral code of the universe operates at its darkest and most mechanical – there are no emotive shingles of pardon or persuasion, just causes and effects, actions and consequences.
In 1932, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget found that by the age of six (6), children begin to believe that bad things that happen to them are punishments for bad things they have done. The Nigerian society however, fights futilely to suspend the karmic laws of cause and effect, insulating individuals from the injurious effects of vice and poor judgment. Local gender activists, like their European and American models, abandon more progressive causes to pervert birth control and abortion in duplicitous bid to detach sex from its natural results or consequences. Politics is equally rigged to reward greed, bestiality, indolence, illegitimacy, thuggery and so on.
Lest we forget the pervasive political, economic and security crisis bedeviling the country as the nation’s woes originate from leadership moral lapses of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Endemic poverty, substandard healthcare and education, ethnic and religious bigotry, bribery and other forms of corruption manifest by leaders’ poverty of morals and humane ethics. We elect greed, thieves and regional leaders to pilot our affairs. We consciously request for appointments, assistance and support from our thieving leaders.
Hence those guilty of corruption escape the consequences of their wrongdoing in connivance with a bland, treacherous government and compromised judiciary. The karmic consequences of this anomaly are of course, better imagined-think Dasukigate, Mainagate, Diezanigate, Ahmedgate, Abbatigate, Edugate, Oduahgate and several others. Until Obasanjo established EFCC and ICPC, there were no punishments for the wicked and no deterrence for the corrupt and the public fund thieves. Sadly, Nigeria was pilfered under the watch of serving presidents, and governors sucked the blood of their states to unconsciousness. The country was persistently sodomized and defiled by rampaging hordes of moral perverts. There was no good or evil. The cult of moral grayness bloomed on those leaders watch, and thus our karmic reality of chronic indebtedness and bankruptcy.
Then in 2015, arrived Muhammadu Buhari on the political turf as president on the platform of All Progressives Congress (APC) with the change mantra slogan. Buhari had earlier suffered the flipside of karma – from his ascension to power and ouster by military coup in the 1985, to his emergence as democratic president in 2015.
The retired soldier was widely appreciated and denounced along bigoted shoals of ethnic and religious extremists. Base sentimentality and impoverished logic fostered by the elite class and espoused by segments of the citizenry continued to afflict President Buhari and his bungling cabinet. In the presidential cabinet, subtle cues abounded, establishing the workings of unforgiving karma.
We had ministers whose appointments were hotly debated and questioned on basis of their past shameful antecedents either as governors, commissioners or other capacities in public and private sectors. Years after their appointments into the federal executive council, those ministers could only manage a hobble along the clogged, swampy corridors of the APC’s politics of “Change”.
In Buhari’s cabinet, we had fabled genii asphyxiating in the stifling grip of intellectual squalor and the grotesque, institutionalized corruption plaguing the country unabated. Nothing worked steadily. Contemporary political legend contended that some of the ministers were victims of hubris and karmic forces that trailed their emergence through vile, subterranean tactics.
Former president Buhari’s cabinet members in a nutshell, constituted impediments to his success if carefully assessed- his personal and administrative inadequacies notwithstanding, if he had a formidable team, his shortcomings as an administrator and leader wouldn’t be so bothersome.
Lest we forget the country’s 8th National Assembly presided over by Sen. Bukola Saraki and Rt. Hon Yakubu Dogara. It was an assembly occupied by responsible characters with commendable efforts of leadership, particularly from Yakubu Dogara. Some lawmakers in the upper and lower legislative chambers constituted a great, shameful burden to national purse and pride. But groupies of the ruling class and their benefactors would have none of that. Left to them, their planted cronies who had wanted the heads of Saraki and Dogara did nothing wrong while holding the legislature to a standstill position. We can all recall one Abdulmumini Jibrin and his fruitless efforts to tarnish the reputation of Dogara and other principal officers of the House of Representatives.
From majority point of view, the absence of a strong and critical electoral law and other deserving laws, are what encourage the ruling class to continue to twist the arms of probity and good governance.
In the karmic scheme of things, not only are the corrupt saved from their just desserts, the worthy and true are punished for their uprightness and industry through unjustly burdensome levels of maladministration, taxation and bureaucratic ineptitude.
In the ensuing moral sepsis, the current ruling class treats equality as a moral baseline even as it establishes prosperity and poverty as fortunate and unfortunate draws in Nigeria’s cosmic lottery. Thus public office metamorphoses to moral insult and government officials make concerted efforts daily, to subvert the law of karma.
The most prescient portrait of the Nigerian character and our ultimate fate as a nation however, resonates Hedges’ apt commentary on Herman Melville’s allegorical portrayal about the American character in his literary classic, “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Czarist Russia, argues Hedges.
In truth, Nigeria is likeable to the fictional ship, the Pequod. The ship’s crew is a mixture of races and creeds which is reflective of Nigeria’s heterogeneous society. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like the Nigerian society’s mad rush for illicit wealth, assures the Pequod’s destruction.
While Ahab and his crew eventually gained awareness of their imminent doom, very few Nigerians appreciate from experience that our prevalent culture of corrupt acquisition of wealth, fostered by insatiable greed, cutthroat politics, corporate profit and limitless devastation of farmlands, and displacement and commandeering properties of so-called settlers by native terrorists, bandits, kidnappers and herdsmen accelerates doom.
Nigeria like the Pequod’s crew, rationalizes madness, scorns prudence and bows slavishly before hedonism and greed. The society yields to the seductive illusion of unbounded luxury, wanton idolatry, limitless power, and acclaim. Thus the country unfurls to degenerate forces and systems of death.
Those who foresee the impending doom lack the fortitude to rebel. Thus moral cowardice makes hostages of all. This shouldn’t encourage Tinubu and his ruling class to scorn the subtle nudge of fact. History offers timeless lessons in the fate of Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Marshal Stalin, Mobutu Sese Seko, Paul Biya, Idi Amin, Ja’afar El-Nemeri, Bros Tito, Samuel Doe, and several other despots that ruined the countries they once administered with pride and ruthlessness. They are today part of the negative and sad portion of history. Those men rose to lead with positive intentions. In time, they did good but later, got drunk with power, losing touch with reality, causing misery for many with their own fate sealed in the Karma of their actions. Moby Dick eventually rams and sinks the Pequod.
The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one. Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it was dark. Are Nigerians victims of karma?
Finally, it brightens the political horizon as the strongest political parties holding Nigeria hostage, are already confused on how to either perfect their stay in power beyond their welcome despite glaring evidence of ineptitude and cluelessness or power wrested from the owl mismanaging the power in Emi-lokan and Yoruba-lokan style.
Whichever way they play the game, we remain revolutionaries either in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) or African Democratic Congress (ADC) and waiting anxiously for the d-day to rescue our country from doldrums, claimed Renewed Hope Agenda that renewed slavery and change the narrative for the good of all.
Cest fini!
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues..
