“Having run a closet government with his relatives, hangers-on and Hailers, the President needs to run an open government in which all Nigerians will have a sense of belonging.”
Owei Lakemfa
Dear Mr Lakemfa,
By your past records as a diligent chronicler of political events, I can vouch that you are a practical man and not a dreamer. But reading through this essay, there seems to be a colourful weave of wishful thinking.
As usual, the final paragraph tells where your best judgment lies. I am cocksure that Nigerians, who have not been slumbering in the last four years, know without any iota of doubt that the next four years is going to be a season of “a repressive one built on propaganda, rule of might, vindictiveness, intolerance and gross incompetence.”
You know it and most thinking Nigerians know that, already we “have a country where some have a sense of entitlement; the mentality of a ruling class, and others feel like a conquered people even on their ancestral lands.”
In my humble opinion, the onus to seek a revolutionary change lies strongly on those ‘Nigerians’, who are aware of their slave status as “a conquered people”. These categories of Nigerians have a moral obligation to begin the intellectual and practical processes of seeking the inalienable rights of the indigenous people of Nigeria to freedom, equality and justice.
Anything short of an outright political and economic independence for the ethnic nations, who are unfortunately marooned inside Nigeria since 1914, is only cowardly pandering to the present Tyrant in power.
I am sorry to break the sad news. All the items on your shopping list of what this Government should do, should be doing and should not do, (like, prevent “escalating violence and descent into anarchism … stem resurgent corruption or hyperinflation, reduce the 33 per cent unemployment rate or the over 87 million under the poverty line”), to put it very mildly, is like you are unconsciously building fabulous fairytale castles in the airspace of Nigeria.
Since you are presenting these good desires to a practically nonexisting government, it means your sincere requests are not based on the reality of what is actually on the ground in Nigeria. Hence, you shouldn’t expect that your wishful prayers can ever be fulfilled.
Frankly and seriously, the awakened indigenous people of Nigeria have a duty to keep on reminding the so-called Fellow Nigerians, particularly those that see themselves as movers and shakers of public opinion, that Nigeria is not yet a commonwealth and it has no government that is built on noble covenants and mutually agreed to by all the participating indigenous nations.
That what Nigerians have in place at this sad moment in the history of Nigeria — the so-called Constitution of Nigeria —is a clandestinely written, fudged, and unjust Constitution that was imposed and rammed down the throats of the indigenous people of Nigeria by a discredited military administration on the run.
We must never gloss over the crucial constitutional illegalities and the deliberate mischief and underhand with which Abdulsalami Abubakar and his handlers dealt the country. We can not easily forget the dangerous disasters this foreboding Constitution have brought down on the innocent indigenous people of Nigeria. We must keep on raising awareness about the miserable and unconscionable foreigners among us, who are forever determined to annihilate all the so-called citizens because the citizens never stopped insisting to have back their basic human rights. We must never keep quiet about the denial of the inalienable rights to the indigenous people and the need for them to gain back their seized and withheld fundamental human rights to freedom, equality and justice.
However, every Awakened Nigerian by now knows it is only by acknowledging, returning and respecting the neglected or suspended or withheld human rights of the citizens, that the noble and beneficial practices of democracy in a supposedly constitutional polity can become possible.
Anything short of this ideal, shall forever consign the situation of the indigenous people of Nigeria to the level of a people under a conquered geographical space owned and administered by the suzerainty and covert theocratic dictatorship of the Sokoto Islamic Caliphate.
Indigenous People of Nigeria! Let us deal with this important matter of securing our inalienable freedom and political self-determination now. Or else, we shall forever remain a conquered and subjugated people on our ancestral lands.
In The Spirit of Truth.
SAM ABBD ISRAEL
SAM ABBD ISRAEL 