Where are our prophets? (2)
Nigeria today is a typical example of ancient Israel when there was no king and everyone did as he pleased. For more than three times when the above bible text is recounted in the Book of Judges, something horrible happens, to show that the absence or old age or infirmity of a king comes with severe consequences and at a great price for the kingdom. It is often a time when kingmakers and powerbrokers take advantage of the king’s predicament to foist their own will on the kingdom. All sorts of bitter intrigues, betrayals, conspiracies and power play take the centre stage of governance, thus weakening the kingdom and opening it to vicious attack from inside and outside forces. In the end, it is the mass of ordinary people who suffer. That is where Nigeria is today.
We seemed to have returned full circle to the year 2010 when former President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua tied the nation down to his infirmity and plunged the country into a political crisis of monumental proportions. Addressing members of the National Unity Forum (NUF) who visited him at his Kaduna residence on March 9, 2010, retired General Muhammadu Buhari urged the federal executive council to save the nation from agony by declaring then ailing president Yar’Adua incapacitated, in order to set machineries in motion for his impeachment by the National Assembly. This, he said, was the only solution to the political logjam in the country at the time.
Barely seven years later, we
1. Love To Be In The Temple. David said, ‘I was glad when they said let us go the house of God’. This miracle happened because of the location of this man. He was not at home but in the temple. His disability did not prevent him from attending church. Mount Zion is where deliverance is. It is God’s appointed place for solution. You can have a miracle anywhere in the premises of the POWER HOUSE. Keep coming and your day of encounter will come. Those who stay away from church lose out.
2. Pay attention to the right person. Pay attention to those who lift you. Most people pay attention to their TV, newspapers, rumours and listen to the wrong persons and wonder why things are not happening in their lives. Do not pay attention to people who speak about your problem and criticize you; pay attention to those who speak solution to your problem. Pay have found ourselves in similar circumstances, with another ailing president who seemed determined to tie the fortunes of over 180 million people to his bed of infirmity. Buhari has defiantly refused to heed the pleas of voices of reason urging him to relinquish power and attend fully to his health. Members of his cabinet, governors and party stalwarts are spending huge public resources to visit him in London, at a time when the nation’s economic fortune is on a slippery slope. Obviously, the famed man of austerity and incorruptible integrity is certainly not bothered about where the funds for their travel expenses are coming from. August 16 2017 marked 100 days since Buhari began his medical vacation in the U.K; and as I write, there is still no official disclosure of the nature of his illness.
Buhari’s media men say that the health of the president is a personal matter and that Nigerians are overreaching themselves by asking to know the name of the ailment afflicting their leader. However, they find nothing wrong with using public resources to fund his medical safari. We pay to treat a man who doesn’t think we need to know what is wrong with him. If that is not the height of executive arrogance and audacious insolence, I don’t know what else to call it. A government that promised to change the manner in which the business of statecraft is conducted seems stubbornly stuck in its hardened and impervious ways. It is a way of saying that the mantra “change begins with me” is good for the people, but not for their leaders.
66-year-old Charles Oputa, alias Charlie Boy and his cohorts have started a daily protest, similar to the “Bring Back Our Girls” coalition, urging the ailing president to ‘return or resign.’ Their mantra is ‘Our mumu don do.’ Yet, when they took their demonstration to Wuse market in Abuja on Tuesday, August 15 2017, they met with mob reprisal from Buhari’s sympathetic acolytes, a warning sign that some Nigerians are still very much comfortable with the status quo, and that if anything untoward happens to Buhari, Nigeria might be engulfed in a bloody crisis. A few days earlier, some members of the group suffered police brutality when they gathered at the Unity Fountain for their public demonstration, another sign that some freedoms of association are outlawed.
In the mean time, Boko Haram has continued its relentless onslaught against innocent Nigerians in the North East, killing scores of people regularly, while a helpless military looks on in exasperation and confusion. Badoo cultists in Lagos are having their field day, while ruthless kidnappers and daredevil armed robbers have upped their tempo. Unknown gunmen who effectively launched a bloodbath during Sunday Mass in a Catholic Church at Ozubulu are still at large. Southern Kaduna is still seething with anger, hate, animosity and impunity. Nnamdi Kanu and his mammoth IPOB followers seem determined to hold the nation hostage; a sign of the irrepressibility of voices calling for a change in the way Nigeria is structured and governed. On Monday, August 14 2017, ASUU embarked on an indefinite strike action, thus placing the education of Nigeria’s future in serious jeopardy.
The daily carnage on our roads must certainly be counted among the gravest crimes against the human person in contemporary Nigeria.