Nyako’s impeachment and Nigeria’s return to wilderness

Finally, the first governor under the auspices of the Jonathan-led civilian administration has been impeached. The elephants who won are celebrating; the elephants who lost are quiet, while the familiar grass, never in the picture whenever the evil plot is hatched, remains in the backyard of the country, staring bleakly in abject and institutionalised solitude.

One must start by saying that democracy as a system of government is not new to Nigeria, save that in the last 50 years, those who have managed the country have not learned any meaningful lesson; those who are currently in charge have stubbornly refused to learn any lesson; and the people who should challenge this microscopic few, and either force them to learn those hard lessons or be thrown out of power, have been maniacally robbed of their capacity to do so.

From the time the British colonialists surreptitiously abandoned the government and the people of Nigeria in the hands of their cronies in the then fading colonial enterprise, the Nigerian Project has continued along a familiar line of history. Thus, while the helpless and apparently orphaned nation did continue to change hands, with each change having about the same set of characters reshuffling themselves under different guise, each of these sets of ruthless beneficiaries of the British-imposed confusion made sure they left the country worse than they met it, and each made sure that the same familiar history their unkind parents told them of how the country was run aground, was successfully retold by them.

For anyone, who is rightthinking, the impeachment of Adamawa State governor Murtala Nyako this week did not come as a surprise. Verily too, whatever plot may be in the works against Governor Umaru Tanko Al Makura of Nasarawa State is not going to end up as something new. Such events only represent a familiar chain of transaction when ruthless politicians seize the soul of a nation. It doesn’t matter what Nyako did or did not do, that counts for nothing when federal power decides that grabbing power in your state is a matter of do-or-die. Those who sponsored Nyako’s removal are not unknown – just the same way those who sponsored the removal of Adegbenro in 1962 were not unknown. They are in the seat of power in Abuja. After all, if Nyako had remained in PDP, giving strength to the PDP number, no matter what his offence may be, it would simply have been treated as a family affair.

But that is Nigeria’s familiar story; a story of history ignored, history repeated; a story of the worst governing the best. It is funny how Nyako was quickly impeached, yet worse acts of gross misconduct that have serially been carried out in PDP-held states remain largely ignored. The same way, it is only in Nigeria that Governor