“Sack the service chiefs, inject new blood, with new zeal, vigour, strategy and passion. Set out a target and timeframe, for them – end insecurity or get fired!” – Adbullahi D Mohammed
The above was the recommendation made by Mr Mohammed on how to put an end to the problem of insecurity in Nigeria. I don’t think the suggestion is good enough because it falls short of the weighty evidence of total breakdown of law and order in Nigeria that he presented in the essay.
Mr Mohammed submitted a detailed and comprehensive appraisal about the lacklustre administration of President Mohammadu Buhari of Nigeria. He rightly identified Mr President’s retrogressive personality and the no longer convincing “body language” or personal integrity to make a positive impact in any area of political endeavour in Nigeria. He noted that as a result of the incompetence of the government, Nigeria has joined the unenviable class of the Failed States of the world.
Yet, despite all the identified failures and cluelessness of Mr President to address the many pertinent problems facing Nigeria, the writer could only offer a halfhearted suggestion to “sack the service chiefs” as the solution to the mega existential problems of Nigeria.
My question to Mr Mohammed is, How can the mere sacking of the military service chiefs resolve an age long systemic problem and now an existential issue that will ultimately determine the survival or the extinction of the Nigeria state?
I am referring to the neglected inter-generational political problems that emanated from:
• a cynical ideological/value orientation planted by the colonial power in the length and breadth of the country;
• an imposed and unsustainable over-centralised political structure of governance;
• an endemic untruthfulness in the nature of the political class that pretends to be forward looking and proactive while it is riddled with selfishness and reckless conspicuous consumption;
• a nonexistent unifying moral value and ethical standards across the nations;
• an incompatible and non-mingling islands of bigoted beliefs and disparate cultural values; and ultimately
• a contradictory understanding of the meaning and goal of both the physical and spiritual lives across the nations.
With such a potpourri of unreasoned mindsets and uncultivated common values among the people that make up the country and particularly among the mindless, gluttonous political class, how can a cosmetic change of personnel in the defence sector resolve the several important but unattended Nigerian Questions?
It is unfortunate that the ‘enlightened’ Nigerians are not interested in finding acceptable political resolution to the following Fundamental Questions:
• the fudged and covertly imposed Constitution of Nigeria that cleverly denies, withholds and suspends, in spirit and in practice, the fundamental rights of the indigenous people to equality, freedom, justice and political self-determination;
• the colonial fraudulent population census figures of the country that since 1960 have made real economic planning for progress and development practically impossible; and
• the refusal to challenge the prevailing conquerors and tyrannical mentality of the ruling ethnic group in Nigeria that prefers a covert centralised unitary government to an open decentralised federal government purportedly written down in the fudged constitution.
But as long as our intellectual elites continue to close their minds to these fundamental questions and decided to continue to undertake irrelevant and superficial analysis of the political, economic and social problems of Nigeria, so long shall they be in the business of merely chasing the shadows.
However, the long suffering and neglected indigenous people of Nigeria are seriously hoping, praying and expecting that the intellectual elites of Nigeria would be kind and mindful enough to understand their unbearable wretchedness, aches and pains in the hands of their political oppressors.
And the suffering poor souls of Nigeria who are in the majority, are not asking for too much. All they are expecting is for the intellectual elites to be compassionate enough to feel their pain and to lead the way in fighting the noble cause of freedom. And most importantly they are expecting the elites to offer the much needed practical, pragmatic and progressive political solutions to alleviate their pains.
Time is really running out for Nigeria. This is the more reason the Nigerian elites need to urgently find and propagate enlightened, pragmatic and practical ways to bring an end to the age long cycle of broken promises, powerlessness and hopelessness bedevilling the nations of Nigeria.
In the Spirit of Truth
SAM ABBD ISRAEL
Read more:
http://saharareporters.com/2020/06/20/insecurity-sleeping-president-adbullahi-d-mohammed
SAM ABBD ISRAEL 