₦airaland Forum

It is not funny when too many problems and contentious issues demand your attention – all at the same moment. Somehow, a columnist who feels concerned about numerous contending issues sometimes has to deal with the inability to come up with an engaging topic. However, that should not be a big deal in a society where all manner of issues crave attention. Yet, for hours, I just could not think of any catchy headline or any issue worth any critical analysis. Because the polity has become a huge canvas of controversies, the monotony of the discourse, I imagine, is beginning to weigh me down. Perhaps nothing could be more irritatingly perplexing than this tortuous task of playing the role of the bird with the broken beak while those that ought to make a positive change sit on their hands. How can the society change when it continues to pile one unresolved problem on another?


http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/columnist/saturday/yomi-odunuga/13302-when-is-enough-truly-enough.html


Sometimes, you just cannot help having this gut feeling that we may have surrendered our collective fate to the masochistic fatalists in government. It is shocking that, in spite of the harvest of tragic moments in our national life, elected and appointed leaders who ought to step up to the challenge of nationhood often wring their hands in submission to what fate has dropped on their laps. Why did they step into the kitchen when they could not stand the heat? Where you expect them to display exemplary leadership qualities, what you get are lame duck promises that get soaked in the waters of a fresh crisis. And, gradually, we immerse ourselves in the ocean of dreams and fantasies. Of course, if tough words were all that we need to heal our wounds; this nation would not be bleeding today. But because those words are mere dud promissory notes which are never backed with commensurate action, our nation is soaked in blood, weakened by an endless cry for help.

Come to think of it: how many times have we barked ‘enough is enough’ to those things that threaten our unity without backing such with appropriate action? How many of us truly believe in the oneness of this Lugardian contraption beyond playing to the gallery while, deep inside us, we are nothing but ethnic jingoists and tribal irritants? Shame! Can anyone remember the last time we collectively agreed to confront the many evils of nationhood as one people without those contaminants of ethnic and feudal slant? Well, that is a topic for another day.

It just occurred to me that the truckload of crises weighing this nation down could be reduced if our leaders can put life into their ‘enough is enough’ canticles. The inability to put action to these words is at the heart of our problem. For instance, if something had been done in the past to rein in the so-called cabal that has taken the oil industry by the jugular, most Nigerians would not be suffering under the yoke of kerosene scarcity today. If simple agreements had been complied with by willing parties, university lecturers would not be threatening to embark on another round of strike that has the potential of shutting down tertiary education and temporarily abridging the hope of many students. If the government had properly evaluated the consequences of an increased wage bill for all civil servants, it would not have signed an agreement that it now wants to implement in the breach. And so, the nation was almost shut down once again until the nationwide strike by organised labour, which remains a major threat to internal security in this season of anomie, was aborted at the dying minute! How can a country this blessed be recycling the same problems?

In all this, the most annoying was the cheap excuse tabled by state governors to justify their inability to pay the N18, 000 minimum wage. Agreed that, in a true federalism, the proper thing is to allow states to negotiate directly with their workers while the Federal Government does same. But, as we all know, that can only happen if the nation agrees to operate the principles of fiscal federalism whereby state governors will not have to do the monthly cap-in-hand trip to Abuja to share from the Federation Account. In fact, it has made some states so lazy that they have refused to fully tap from the potential within. The Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of some states can barely take care of the bloated security votes of the executive governors or pay the jumbo wage bill of the leeches glued firmly to the governors’ knickers. They call them political appointees. But because there is a golden well where which everyone rushes to in Abuja, nobody is asking questions. Nobody, not even the governors who are feeling the heat of our monolithic economy, is talking about diversifying the economy as a way out of the recurrent economic quagmire. Instead, the agitation for the creation of more states is growing by the day. Interestingly, now that workers are asking to be paid something that, in reality, cannot be said to be close to a living wage, the governors suddenly remembered that crazy thing called fuel subsidy. That argument is, to say the least, tendentious. It is hogwash and cheap blackmail. How come they never think of doing away with fuel subsidy whenever they pad up their jumbo salaries and emoluments or when they appropriate billions of naira as security votes amidst the killing insecurity pervading the land?

It is amazing that state governors could make such a big fool of themselves by portraying themselves as victims of a forced marriage. They said they were not parties to the agreement reached between the Federal Government and organised labour, yet they sat back and never made　as much as a whimper when the bill was signed into law! And the Federal Government? Maybe its representatives were under the influence of some psychoactive substances when they negotiated with labour to prune the initial figure of N52, 000 to N18, 000. Or maybe they were not thinking of the aftershocks when they bargained for N18, 000 on the altar of political expediency. Whatever it is, it is too late in the day for any of the parties to chicken out since the bill has become a law. Too bad. Enough of this needless distraction.

And still on the fuel subsidy issue, has it occurred to the government that the benefits hardly get to the poor? The so-called subsidy gets recycled into the pockets of the untouchable cabal within the system. If the government cannot clear the mess, it should, at least, be able to live with its incompetence instead of passing the bulk on a populace that has already been pummelled to a pulp. Why should the masses endure the most inhuman treatment from a monstrous cabal that has continued to feed fat on government?

I believe the time has come for whoever is in charge to take the bull by the horns and save the nation from this cycle of doom. President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan already has his hands full with the threat posed to our national security through the activities of the Boko Haram sect. While the various security agencies are battling to restore peace to a society that seems to have been fragmented along religious lines and ethnic affiliations, it would amount to double jeopardy if something urgent is not done to forestall the planned strike by organised labour and university teachers.

I dare say that the Federal Government’s promise that occasioned the suspension of the strike may not be the end of the game. It is a known fact that the FG is an expert when it comes to broken promises. If you doubt me, ask ASUU. The coast is not clear yet. What we have is a temporary reprieve as the grumbling governors have reportedly gone to Aso Rock to ask for more money. The strike will truly be over when the FG fulfils its promises. National strike, no matter how short, poses a serious danger to the President’s transformation agenda. Regardless of what people say about Nigeria’s elastic capacity to absorb shocks, there comes a time when the leader stamps his authority and halts the drift to anarchy. For Jonathan, the time for assertiveness is now! Will he live up to that role and back his usual tough words with action this time?




You cannot be too certain. I am not too sure either. Neither is the man next to you!

It was not supposed to happen, the apology. Governors sit on peacock thrones, and walk in high places. One thing you least expect of them though is apology. Imagine any of them teary-eyed, defaced, stooping, head down, hands behind their backs as though in a pose of worship.

“I can believe anything,” wrote Oscar Wilde whose life still reads like a mystery, “provided it is quite incredible.”

Governors command. They are the hubris of the system. People grovel and stoop before them and worship and flatter them. No one expects any apologies from them except as an act of condescending comedy. A highfalutin self-mockery. It would be, as playwright Samuel Beckett put it, a laugh laughing at itself.

You might have said so of the three governors who apologised to Boko Haram a few weeks back. But if you examined the language of the men, the obsequious tone, and the desperate repetitiveness of the mea culpa, you would know that this was not only comedy. There was comedy in the possibility of it. But it was not your normal comedy. It was a big man begging. That in itself was funny. It was not so funny though. Nothing is really funny when you know a head may roll. But you cannot help laughing before you realise you ought to be sad.

So we have a tragi-comic matter on our hands. Ali Modu Sherriff ordinarily is a tragi-comic man, who ruled his state with a sense of burlesque drama. He said his people of Borno State did not read or understand English and the press could slam him as much as it wanted but his people would not know.

Now, this man takes advertisement on pages of the same newspapers to apologise. He expects the same people who were not supposed to touch newspapers to read them.

Isa Yuguda has acted as an emperor in a democracy, reckless in rhetoric, peacock in defiance, although opportunistic in romance. He executed an about-face over his poisonous outpouring about youth corps members slaughtered under his watch. He never apologised. He railed back that he was only misquoted. That perhaps was the beginning of his public humility. Now, he begs for forgiveness.

Danjuma Goje is a little different. He has been more than a little showy and vainglorious. But he has not cut the figure of a potentate like the others. If you want to be sorry for anyone, it is Goje.

Why are these men blaming themselves? Normally people blame themselves before others tar them as an act of pride. They want to be the ones to say sorry. Better for them to humiliate themselves than others.

Oscar Wilde again: “When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has the right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”

These three governors’ case is different. They blame themselves, not out of humility, not out of pride, but out of desperation. This is not quiet desperation. They are public desperados proclaiming their remorse. They dread Boko Haram. They also still loathe Boko Haram. They apologise not because they are sorry. They apologise like a man under duress. They would say whatever they have to say to move, breathe and have their beings. After years of infallibility as governors, they must be appalled at their own fragility, their own humanity. The fear of Boko Haram is the beginning of their wisdom.

That is not what interests me here. This is the first time that a governor or prominent political leader would apologise with such an extravagance of public contrition. I would have wanted this often in our public life. I would like to see presidents, governors and party wheel horses apologise for their sundry sins. What a country this would be if those who stole came out and apologised!

We would like to see governors and presidents and local government chairmen seek forgiveness for the various woes they leave behind. They should apologise for the poor, for power failure, for dud hospitals, for roads that take away more than they give, for poor educational standard. We would like to see them stoop and beg on television, on campaign rallies, at the market square. We would like to see their tears sully the television screen.

Not quite long ago, U.S. President Bill Clinton issued two apologies, one institutional and the other personal. He said he was sorry for his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He also apologised in a separate context to Africa on behalf of his country for the butchery of slavery and slave trade.

German leaders have apologised to Israel over the holocaust, and political leaders in South Korea have apologised serially over corruption.

In our country, no one has to apologise. We do not have the culture of shame we had in rural Nigeria. The advent of the white man ironically has rid us of it even though it is an important part of their story.

Recently, Rupert Murdoch apologised over the phone-hacking scandal of his scandal sheet, News of The World. Some commentators said he merely put up an act. He did not mean his mea culpa.

Defiance is what greets our acts of foolishness. Rather than apologise over the massacre of Odi, Obasanjo applauds himself. Rather than apologise over poll rigging, we go to court. In the North, the governors probably saw the youths as soldiers for electioneering. That was the story in the Niger Delta. After the cessation of conflict between the Itsekiri and Ijaw, the idle youths became militants on behalf of the governors then. They were their election foot soldiers, matadors of rigging.

How great it would have been if men who were governors then came out and apologised. But they carried along as though they never helped to stoke the fire. It took two governors with different approaches to end it. Governor Timipre Sylva of Bayelsa State with the olive branch approach with amnesty and Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State with the stick approach. Both succeeded.

How refreshing it could have been if IBB apologised for June 12 rather than proclaim himself the evil genius. But apologies are not always easy. In fact, they can deflate the penitent. If IBB apologised, who would have believed him? Some did not believe the Clinton apologies. They claimed he apologised because he was caught. Graceful men don’t get caught, claimed a writer. There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. In spite of the turbulence of Watergate, Nixon sought renewal in other ways. He became elder statesman, writing books and advancing sublime suggestions. He never said sorry.

I wonder though if after apology works once or twice in Nigeria, it might not become a commodity. Everyone would apologise to become hip and popular. “I apologised, so I won the vote” may become cliche. Apology may become an end itself. We would have abused not only penitence but also mercy.

In Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov, the principal character abuses everything he touches. Nigerians have abused love, power, God, the church, the vote, the naira, the visa, brother, sister, zoning, the Good Samaritan, heaven and hell. So why not abuse the apology? Yet, it will be interesting to see how that drama unfolds.

Clerics have apologised, though not on this soil. They committed either adultery or financial fraud. But they sometimes attract forgiveness. Politicians ride sins to victory, especially in our clime. So who needs apologies when you can sin to win?

That is the irony of our own apologia. When our governors decided to kneel down with palms together to say sorry, it was not to heal the system but to save their own heads. They apologised not as governors, but as human beings in flight for their lives.

Scash:
c now. . . no one wld c mikuz, bin gbagbo, studio, n bright here.

bright007:
**trying to smile but this is dry**