Sunday, August 21, 2011

No Honor Amongst Thieves


It has come to light that two former presidents of Nigeria are having a feisty and open verbal clash. They are presidents IBB and OBJ. This public spat on the pages of national dailies would have been comical and highly entertaining were it not for the lamentable reality that one is forced to contemplate.

Former President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida came into power on the back of a coup against the Buhari government in 1985. He then ruled Nigeria with despotic tightfistedness for 8 years. Indeed, he would very much have wanted to continue his maladministration were it not for a widespread and seemingly national outcry against his continued reign. He finally surrendered power after having looted the country to her knees. In 1999, President Matthew Okikiola Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo took office; like IBB he ruled for 8 years as well. And much like IBB, his government was characterized by misappropriation, mishandling and wholesale plundering of the national coffers. Guess who bore the brunt of their administrative incompetence and malfeasance? Yes, you are right—the impoverished, desperate and struggling masses.

How lamentable it must be for these unvarnished brigands to strut around insulting the sensibilities of the long-suffering Nigerian by unashamedly claiming to have respectively governed Nigeria well! It is one thing for a pair of feuding septuagenarian erstwhile generalissimos of the Nigerian armed forces to rubbish their respective governments for their glaring incompetence. In that, I wish them well and I encourage them to highlight all their sordid past records for all to see and remember. If anything, it shows that these godfathers of Nigerian politics are altogether not oblivious of the pervasive rot and decay that has characterized their respective administrations—no matter how much they pretend to be disconnected from the cries and plight of the suffering masses. They know too well how they have pilfered to the tune of billions of dollars, and how that has manifested in the shambolic infrastructure, a culture of looting, and the incompetent institutions they bequeathed to successive administrations.

Nevertheless, it is an entirely different matter to brazenly claim their respective governments to have been beacons of progress, stability and excellence. It requires an amazing dedication to duplicity for them to present their myopic and niggardly records as though they were architects of massive economic boons. The unfortunate thing is that there are many downtrodden Nigerians who would undoubtedly find themselves unwittingly drawn into one of the two camps: cheering loudly for their perceived hero and lobbing vicious accusations at their perceived villain. The truth however is that these two feuding former Aso rock occupants are really two sides of the same ugly coin. While some are cheering on the national show of shame, there are already concerned former stakeholders and generals convening meetings to get these ugly fiends to sheath their swords so as not to unwittingly upset their stringent hold on power. As far as I am concerned, they could call themselves FOOLS till they literally turn blue in the face; they could expostulate against the perceived mischaracterizations of their respective tenures in office till the cows come home, alert Nigerians will always refused to be suckered in. How true it is that there is indeed no honor amongst thieves.

4 comments:

Want To Share Your Thoughts Or Comments? That's awesome! Please consider joining my site to make the process smoother. Click the link near the top left sidebar.

OR, you can use your online ID as your profile (Google, Yahoo, Livejournal, AOL, Hyves, Blogger, Flickr, Wordpress, Verisgn, etc).

Don't have any of those? Well, you can still comment. Just grab an OpenID here

Thanks!

  1. akinyemi jegede8/22/2011 2:58 AM

    I was bewildered when I read this two (God please I don't want to call them idiots)....., are fighting on the pages of national newspapers. To say they have so much in common is an understatement. How can? What happened? Where did the crack in friendship come from? Honestly after the death of their wives,I thought they would lap up every inch of the accolades and retire from public life for good. But alas that would not be the case. The friendship of necessity is now exposed and in due time the root cause analysis would be laid bare for the world to see. I hope every peace move would fail and let them go at each other's money clogged vein in an Alien vs Predator move.

    GF, long time! How are u doing n how is the family?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good to hear from you again Pen. We are all well over here. I was made to understand that you couldn't make it to the Bunibuni Naija Reunion. Whatever happened, bro?

    You are absolutely right. You would expect these two to retire and spend the rest of their ill-gotten riches quietly. You would expect them to try and act like statesmen who would be called on occasionally to opine on matters of great national import, like respectable ex presidents in other countries do. But it would appear that these two are forever jostling for relevance as they keep inserting themselves into the current news cycle. And there is no shortage of sycophants in the mass media to stroke and massage their bloated egos.

    ReplyDelete
  3. akinyemi jegede8/22/2011 11:30 PM

    Yeah GF, could not make it to the re-union. Upgraded my Blackberry operating system so I lost all my contact cause I did not back it up properly. Was not able to reach buni for the address.

    ReplyDelete
  4. They both remind me of "the joker" in the movie Batman(The Dark Knight)..........

    ReplyDelete