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The
Inauguration of Illegitimacy
By Emmanuel
Franklyne Ogbunwezeh
1. The day of Infamy
On the 29th of May, 2007, the bovine
Caligula that tyrannizes Nigeria at the moment; in
association with the thieves that rule us, their camp
followers and retinue of sycophants will convoke all
resources at their disposal to ensure the successful
inauguration of illegitimacy. On this black Monday,
Nigerians will watch in an admixture of civic timidity
and postural inaction, as Umaru Yar adua, dressed in the
borrowed robes of congenital illegitimacy is sworn in to
the presidency on a stolen mandate. On this day,
monumental fraud will be installed as the basis of our
national legitimacy. It will be a black Monday. On this
godforsaken day, Nigerians will once again witness the
triumph of audacious impunity. We will complain to our
pillows, make noise in the beer parlours, and go back to
our various holes with our heads bowed, as our
rendezvous with greatness is once more postponed
indefinitely; buried once more by the treacherous
debauchery and visionlessness of a mad emperor awaiting
the resurrection that can only be engineered by the
righteous anger of an oppressed people.
On this day of days, illegitimacy
will be installed on the Nigerian tribunes of power. On
this day, impunity will be enthroned. This day is
destined to crown the programmed charade of a(n) (s)election
conducted by rascality to select a new horde of
political scoundrels to take over the Nigerian baton of
leadership. On this day, millions of Nigerians will be
forced to bear unholy witness, as Umaru Musa Yar Adua is
seduced to perjure himself; lying under oath as he lays
claim to a mandate that was never conferred on him by
the Nigerian people. He is to commence his entrance
into office by lying to himself that he won an election
that was largely stolen and handed to him by Olusegun
Obasanjo. This guy is a fence, who is in custody of
stolen goods. No amount of detergent can wash this fact
away. The Eagle square, Abuja would host this monumental
defamation of a people’s collective integrity;
reinforcing Nigeria’s reputation as the only place on
the earth surface, where illegitimacy convokes a party
to celebrate impunity.
Obasanjo on this day would be
contributing his inglorious quota in ensuring that
thieves must always be imposed on the Nigerian people.
The fault is not his. The fault is ours. In choosing
Obasanjo in 1999 against better qualified candidates who
fought the Abacha junta, we chose the best of the worst
instead of the worst of best. On this 29th
day of May, 2007 the Nigerian Herod; Mr. Jeremiah
Olusegun Obasanjo, will take decency to the Golgotha of
impunity, and had it crucified among his college of
select thieves. Truth and justice had already been
bludgeoned to death under his watch. To conclude his
reckless amble in the tribunes of power, he desires to
sign off with a mockery of decency. And that he has
achieved. By botching the 2007 election, Obasanjo has
cast an eternal doubt, which history can never retire,
on his integrity and sanity. He has carved-out a
pedestal for himself in our halls of shame.
Obasanjo like a common blackmailer
had been on the offensive blaming everybody else for his
self-constructed, greed induced problems. Obasanjo as a
man lacks character. He is a crude bully, who would
rather pull the roof down, than allow a challenge to his
presumptions. This is a classical symptom of
incompetence, self doubt and inferiority complex. This
combination is fearfully abhorable in a zoo-keeper, let
alone in a leader or manager of men and resources. But
they all built a house in the fractured psyche of Mr.
Obasanjo. It is high time, Nigerians demanded
psychological tests for those who aspire to leadership
positions. Our power corridors should not be allowed in
its present trajectory of being a casino for fragmented
personalities whose greed quotient is abnormally high.
Obasanjo used the apparatus of state to blackmail most
of the candidates that showed interest in the
presidency, so that he could impose a guy who neither
desired the presidency, nor is healthy enough for the
demands of that office. In lieu of all these, a May 29th
which was supposed to be a well spring of good tidings
that would banish the abomination of tyranny from our
climes has through the narrow insularities and
misadventures of Obasanjo’s vicious vindictiveness, been
consecrated a day of infamy.
2. The Genesis of an Aberration
A shrew stinks in obedience and
pursuant to the congenital disadvantage etched in the
core of its genetic blueprint, reinforced by the
vagaries of its chequered evolution. The same is the
case with Nigeria. We remain an amalgam of mutually
corrosive persuasions that has no confluence. The
question could be: why did it fall on Nigeria to be
historically contradicted by its potentials and
endowments; to be disappointed in her hopes and
aspirations; to be deceived and cheated by a series of
wicked rulers and political prostitutes; to be a vassal
to the undefined interests of a cabal of local and
foreign leeches?
History attests that the decline of
any civilization or social construct is never an event
or an accident; except in cases of natural disasters
like the ones that purportedly purchased the decline of
Atlantis, or Pompey. This decline is always a process.
Nigeria got to this point where she cannot even organize
anything credible for herself due to the fact that we
are not a nation; but a conglomeration of isolated
pockets of tribally minded federations, led by the greed
of visionless men. These men surrendered the common
interest of their various peoples at the altars of their
private avarice. That is why Nigeria is being ruled by a
cabal of elitist thieves that transcends the tribes.
They came together at the national level to pursue their
private interests. Nigeria is configured into their
greedy computations only when it serves as a smokescreen
to masquerade their real interest; which is private
profit.
To that end, we cannot even organize
a credible census. Our census figures turn every
rational, demographic computation on its head. It
canonizes the crudest falsehoods that make national
planning a disaster before it takes off. Nigerians do
not know how many people that inhabit this space. The
population commission gave us an incredible range of
figures. It did not take long for Obasanjo who supported
the lies to come on air and gave us a contradictory
count; showing that if enough rope is handed to liars,
that they would spin a noose to hang their lying
tongues. And after the failures of the politicization
of the census figures, it was a foregone conclusion that
we could ever organize a credible election, since we are
good at politicizing numbers and creating monsters out
of every little procedure. To that end, the elections
were simply a disaster waiting to occur.
3. Abomination of Desolations
The 2007 elections was an abomination
of desolations. It was the triumph of rascality. This
was the worst exemplar of bare faced fraud that any
government worth its name could ever contrive. A select
assemblage of government approved-scoundrels, with the
blessings of a conspiring president staged and
allegedly won an election, which was programmed to be a
walk-over for roguery and fraudulence. This is a shabby
swindle perpetrated by Obasanjo and his cronies, using
Maurice Iwuh as their inglorious hatchet man. Credible
elections would have offered Nigeria a first class seat
on the flight enroute development. But our problem is
not that we missed the flight, but that we did not even
arrive at the airport as to catch our flight. The
election was a planned charade.
Nigerians supposedly went to the
polls to elect a new democratic dispensation. That
opportunity was transformed into an essential arena for
the thorough embarrassment of all that goodness and
decency stood for. That occasion witnessed the
convocation of the worst elements and characters that
rotten leadership could contrive. Till today, it baffles
reasons that a man like Olusegun Obasanjo would work
tirelessly to anoint himself a monumental scoundrel.
That this president is a monumental scoundrel is only
surpassed by Maurice Iwuh who has posted an
extraordinary performance in anointing himself a first
class idiot.
The elections were an unfunny joke.
Across the land, election materials arrived in many
instances late. In some others they never arrived. Some
of the election materials never left the warehouses
where they were printed in South Africa; creating
artificial scarcity of the documents. Many candidates’
names went MIA. In some other cases, PDP thugs and
agents were allowed a leeway to access the materials to
contrive their fraud. Many of them were caught with
lorry loads of thumb printed voting cards. Some INEC
officials were held up at gunpoint and dispossessed of
the ballot boxes by agents of the ruling party.
In Enugu state, the GOC of the 82
division was used to break open and pry away the
materials from INEC officials in obedience to PDP’s
promptings. The minister of information, Frank Nweke Jr.,
was at hand to intimidate the opposition as PDP’s
hatchet man in Enugu. In Anambra State, there were
practically no elections anywhere. But Andy Ubah won a
landslide. The same was the case almost all over the
country. Yet PDP and Iwuh have been singing a tune that
no one ever recognized as the case in Nigeria. At the
end of the day, PDP was a landslide in a non-election.
Votes were allocated to other candidates to make it look
like a contest. That was election Nigeriana.
4. The Ugly and the Beast
That Obasanjo is a monumental
scoundrel is only surpassed by the fact that Maurice
Iwuh is a first class idiot. This pair is an
irredeemable fraud at the service of lewd avarice. Obasanjo
never planned to get out of office. He avidly desired a
third term in office, against constitutional provisions.
He plotted for it. He tried to purchase the legislature
with sordid money to get them amend the constitution to
suit his craze. But the moral integrity of a Ken Nnamani
and some other senators who valued their historical
reputations more than their avarice saved the day for
Nigeria. At the failure of that notoriety, Obasanjo
grudgingly changed tactics. He was pressured to go. But
he would not leave until his puppet is installed as his
replacement. He proved himself no better than the other
rogues that have desired to die in office in Nigeria.
Nigerians made one mistake at that instance. They failed
to realize that if a man wants to die in office, that
the only way to quicken his dream is to kill him in
office so that he dies in office.
To hoist this fraud on Nigerians,
Obasanjo needed a thoroughly compromised electoral
umpire, who has no integrity to defend or reputation to
cherish. He chose a beast. Maurice Iwuh is his name.
This man was a two legged dishonesty. This is a
fraudulent pseudo-scientist who laid claims to
discoveries that were glorified fakeries. The basis of
his credentials entertains some deep holes that are
unexplainable as they are fraudulent. Obasanjo
cherishes such compromised consciences for such offices.
He knows they are corruptible, and could easily be
blackmailed into kissing his ass. He hired; thoroughly
compromised, and unleashed this aberration to go head
the Nigerian electoral commission. This beast was by
default constructed to spontaneously configure himself
into a dog for the sake of bones.
Like a dog, he is thoroughly bereft
of conscience. With no reputation to defend, he was ever
ready to acquiesce to the directions of privileged
roguery. His conscience came from Aso rock. Even when
he knows the truth in himself, he is so emasculated by
his antecedents and character to offer any rational
resistance to the onslaught of falsehood on his
conscience. He is compelled by who he is to parrot the
syndicated falsehoods engineered by Obasanjo and his
rogue cronies. To this end, after conducting the worst
and most incredible election in Nigerian history, this
fool kept dancing naked on the world stage. In primitive
societies such fools are only fit to be sold into
slavery. In savage ones, suicide is recommended for
them.
Maurice Iwuh kept criticizing anyone
who ever disagrees with the outcome of the brazen bazaar
of fraudulence and rigging which characterized the
elections he was essaying to legitimize. Maurice Iwuh ,
in the thraldom of myopia and midget god-complex
refused to open his eyes to the rigging engineered and
implemented by him against the will of the Nigerian
people, whose tax defrays and underwrites his salary.
Iwuh like every other dog in Obasanjo’s administration
like Fani Kayode and Frank Nweke jr., was totally
poisoned by Obasanjo’s gospel of arrogance. His bearing
was superlative in its being unbecoming of a public
official. To this end, any shred of hope that Iwuh
would have done better than the charade he organized is
like signing a pact with Satan to cast out the devil.
5. Give Shit a chance
Obasanjo and Maurice Iwuh; the Ugly
and the Beast are so vehement in their vociferations
that Nigerians should accept their fraud and give their
shit a chance. These two clowns base their arguments on
the fact that a perfect election does not exist anywhere
on earth. But like the frauds that they are, they are
oblivious of the fact that the choice in this case was
never between a perfect election and an imperfect one;
it was a choice between standard procedure and
superlative fraudulence. America may have had a
system’s failure in the Florida votes, but the police
and thugs never prevented Americans from casting their
votes as was the case in some states in Nigeria; no one
was accused of hijacking the ballot boxes at gunpoint;
in no instance were results announced in precincts were
no elections took place as was the case in Anambra
State; in no instance did the GOP or the democrats win
an election where they entered no candidates as was the
case in a senatorial district in Oyo state; in no
instance was the result ever doctored to give a
candidate more votes than the number of registered
voters; in no case was the elections regarded as the
greatest sham and 419 of the century.
My greatest problem is not that Iwuh
and Obasanjo’s veracity combined, was a shade above that
of the father of all lies himself. It is that these guys
are so woolly in their thinking to presume that
Nigerians are sold on their wooden apologetics. The
choice is never between two kinds of election; it was a
choice between standard, acceptable election procedure
and a non-election. It was a choice between freedom and
impoverished criminality. And Obasanjo and Iwuh happen
to be the logos of impoverished political criminality.
The calls to give Obasanjo’s stooge a
chance, may be noble in intent. But the basis for that
call is ontologically flawed. How could one base
national progress on the foundations of illegitimacy?
Over and above that, there is something ethereal and
pathetic about these calls and the purchased
advertorials congratulating the success of the PDP’s
hijack of the electoral process. It is as if these guys
live on a different planet, and have no more
understanding of what is happening in Nigeria than of
what might be transpiring in planet utopia. Nigerians
are being called to give shit a chance.
Will Nigerians resist? One seriously
wishes we could. Obasanjo lost every moral capital to be
our leader. He degenerated into a crude tyrant. This guy
in his present incarnation adamantly refused to cast off
the frozen baggage of his feudalistic pedigree. He clung
tenaciously to his tyrannical propensities. This
explains why he nursed and nourished a belief, which he
used his office to elevate to the ontological level of a
private dogma. This dogma, he masquerades as loyalty.
Here loyalty means absolute loyalty to the Fuhrer
Obasanjo. This crude tyrant demands loyalty above
conscience. And the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war
criminals dumped forever this obnoxious obscenity into
the trash cans of history as an inexcusable stupidity.
Obasanjo demands that everyone
genuflects in subservient veneration of his farts. He
sees himself as the omniscient, Omnipotentia, whom all
Nigerians must unquestionably obey. He demands loyalty
to party over and above the constitution. This crude
power-crazy president forgot that the constitution is
the supreme law of the land; and that any attitude, law,
persuasion or patronage that stands inconsistent with
the constitution is to the extent of that inconsistency
null and void. This means that Obasanjo broke and
brought to disrepute the constitution which gave
legitimacy to his occupation of that office, and which
he swore to uphold.
Our will to resist this crude
imposition will be dissuaded and dispersed by the
menacing brutality of a heavily armed, but grotesquely
incompetent police force that has been “authorized”
against the dictates of consciences and fundamental
human freedoms, to crush the people’s will with
superlative impunity. This police force has failed in
all its statutory responsibilities except that of
advertising high-level corruption, incompetence and
brutality on unarmed civilians, whom they were recruited
to protect. This colonial invention crafted to protect
the interests of power and privilege has no place in a
civilized society. On this day, this police force will
be complemented by some military detachments to inflict
and visit unadulterated terror on anyone who dares
protest Obasanjo’s brazen imposition of Yar Adua on us.
On this day of infamy, Nigerians will be muzzled by the
police from protesting their own death sentence. We
would be prevented from saying a resounding “No” to
Obasanjo’s catastrophic follies, reaching its apogee in
imposing his man-Friday on us.
Would Nigerians recreate an African
rose or orange revolution as was the case in the Ukraine
and Georgia? Will Nigerians defy the terror and
brutality of a rogue police force and reclaim their
sovereignty? If historical precedents are anything to go
by, there will pockets of protest which will filter out
as soon as it began. Those protests will be broken up
with brutal relish by an inhuman police establishment
that has been allergic to human rights and conscience in
the discharge of their duties. And Nigerians will
acquiesce in the comforting illusions that things will
change someday and the good man will come to power.
Miracles can happen as it did in Abacha’s case. But we
forget that miracles can happen to remove one man. But
no miracle has ever happened to rescue a people from
self-imposed anomie. We comfortably choose to forget
that heaven will never help those who will never act.
A lot of normally reasonable
Nigerians consulting history, see the futility of
protest and they are sincerely calling that Yar Adua be
given a chance. Though well meaning some of them may be,
they are gripped by utter confusion and a paralyzing
sense of futility. Some of these normally respectable
individuals have even shed themselves of all human
dignity to grovel before our august emperor; accepting
his choice of Yar Adua, even when Nigerians are opposed
to him. This against the backdrop of historical facts is
unbelievably stupid. The unfunny joke here is that they
are sincerely asking us to close our eyes, and give
fraudulence a chance to rule us. They are asking us to
hand our heads on a plate to the offspring of a
political adulterer.
Heeding this call is equivalent to
being gullible beyond comprehension. It is unbelievably
naïve for these guys to think that things will get
better each time we allow the usurpers of our mandate
get away with their crimes. These guys forget that
justice and equity will never brook offering a criminal
the leeway to keep on benefiting from the proceeds of
his crime. No man should be allowed to profit from his
crime. Justice will canonize crime the day it allows
such an indiscretion a walk-over. But thank goodness,
justice is an eternal reality not native to Nigeria. To
this end, no matter how much the Nigerian element tries
to mangle it, it remains what it is; an incorruptible
regulator of human conduct. And those who breach it
become outlaws to themselves; who alienate themselves
from the good nature that every human individual is
called to.
But the larger question is: why would
Nigerians keep silent in the face of this overwhelming
evil? Do we have an infinite propensity to endure evil?
Or are we so emasculated as a people as to evolve some
fatal flaw in our national character which leads us
towards self-destruction; and to be patient with evil
and their perpetrators? The price of those sorry
Nigerian collective failures to act when situations
called for it is being paid today in consolidated
poverty and bad leadership ravaging our land. This
spinelessness on the part of the Nigerian electorate
accounts for a huge price we would never fully retire.
We have lost almost every fountain of social value we
used to possess. We are more fragmented than ever
before. Our land is poorer than ever before. Our image
has been smeared more than at any other time in history.
And our redemption is not even in sight, as those who
should be working to salvage our predicament are those
causing and consolidating our predicament.
On this 29th day of May,
2007, Obasanjo would hand over the reins of a rotten and
discredited presidency on an illegitimate choice. Yar
Adua was extricated out of virtual irrelevance, and
catapulted to the pinnacle of a decrepit political
structure, that bode Nigeria no good. Yar Adua’s
democratic pretence is a mission destined to fail by
default. His administration will never retire the
congenital disability which illegitimacy confers. His
was an illegitimacy sired by Obasanjo’s tyrannical
megalomania; Maurice Iwuh’s crooked quackeries, and the
postural inaction of the Nigerian electorate. And no
reliance should ever be placed on a government that was
conceived in illegality and born with congenital
deficiencies bordering on illegitimacy. This is the
major reason why Obasanjo’s fooleries in attempting to
impose Yar adua on us would remain historically, an
extravagant failure.
posted 29th May 2007
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Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh
was born in Nigeria and currently lives in Germany. He
had his Bachelors in Philosophy from the Pontificial
Urban University Rome. Mr. Ogbunwezeh is currently
working on a Ph.D. in Social Ethics and Economics at the
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main,
Germany. His book The Tragedy of a Tribe: The Grand
Conspiracy Against Ndigbo and the Igbo Quest for
Integration in Nigeria was published in 2004. "Shots
at Immortality: Immortalizing Igbo Excellence" and "The
Scandal of Poverty in Africa: Reinventing a Role for
Social Ethics in Confronting the Socio-economic and
Political Challenges of Africa of the Third Millennium"
will be published in 2005. Additionally, Mr. Ogbunwezeh
published dozens of articles in newspapers, magazines,
internet sites, and trade journals.
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updated 4 February
2008 |
