NIGERIA, OPUTA AND 100 DAYS IN LONDON
Finally the movie is out, 100 Days in London. What a movie, the definition of what we had become in just 100 days. A movie about so much noise daily made, with many things left unsaid. A movie we all had pretended to see as corruption fighting back, preferred to regard as the dying declaration of the opposition, but one that nonetheless found its way into the cinema of our minds. A comedy, a tragedy, but a movie nonetheless with a cast that can only be collected in a nation where truth is an abomination and hypocrisy has come of age.
When the Chibok girls were abducted under an ungodly government, it took Mrs. Obi Ezekwesili and a few. They laboured for weeks, for months, until the year rolled over. Among the lot, she was called names, insulted, and mocked as being jobless and in search of a political appointment. That circle ended and Ezekwesili retired into silence. The President has been imprisoned by his own moral deficit and now it is Charles Oputa. Suddenly he is an outcast for trying to see with one eye in the land of the blind. He has been scorned, cursed and even attacked by exuberant ethnic zealots, for daring to ask a question that 170 million people should. Very soon, he would be emptied and retire with Ezekwesili into yesterday. The same group that took to the streets when former President Umaru Yar’Adua refused to abdicate power, the same is today looking the other way because this is their government. The prophecy is fulfilled – never mistake authority as the truth, but rather take the truth as authority. Shame everywhere and no one is covering up. A nation prudent in courage, extravagant in hypocrisy.
Suddenly, CHANGE is dead, 15 million votes gone down the drain, and it is all about praying abstract prayers for Buhari. Some $30 million spent on an ailment unknown to the people, a Presidential jet grounded like forever accumulating fees in a foreign land, and unending weekly pilgrimage going back and forth on ‘ran ka de de’ in London. All in an age when slavery has ended. Our season of pictures! Give them photos whenever they cry. The lowest form of knowledge in governance. A president on props, masqueraded in garments, packaged and presented in psychedelic slides. Rationality is thrown to the bins, intelligence aborted and a return to 1984. All hail the One Eye King! The Man of Integrity who cannot be wrong!! The best President Nigeria cannot replace!!!
In other climes, the social media is known as a powerful tool bringing down governments, in our land it is where government children defecate under a round of applause. Every nation deserves whatever it gets, every people deserve whatever chariot they are driven in. If at every corner of our national life, hypocrisy is lavishly having a beer over chicken with ethnic bigotry, we should not blame strangers for our eventual destination. The countries that make valuable progress know what sacrifices they make; the countries that beg know what garbage they take. Charly Boy Oputa you have my respect as well as my pen which is my voice. I am persuaded you will not succeed in this endeavour of yours, but that you spoke is all that matters. All I want is to be satisfied by history. Olusola Adegbite, Faculty of Law, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife