Fellow Nigerians,
Happy and prosperous new year 2011! In the next 48 intervening hours from now we shall be bidding farewell to 2010 as it becomes history, ushering in another brand new year 2011. The year 2011 will define and re-define our troubled nationhood in the sense that the general elections are slated to hold April next year. The presidential poll in April will produce a President that will make or mar the Nigerian prospects of greatness. That is why we must be vigilant, prayerful and patriotic as the new year comes upon us with new hopes, dreams and aspirations. May God bless us all and give us more wisdom to be able to survive 2011!
I come before you as an angry patriot seriously disturbed by the way and manner our great nation is being run down by the mediocre ‘leaders’ since our flag independence from (the) Great Britain on October 1st 1960 — even when I was not yet born. I come before you with both fear of the Most High God and utmost respect for your Nigerianess (which is ebbing very fast). I come before you as one of you from the South-east based abroad but hugely concerned about how our fatherland is faring for decades. There is a crying need for change and that is what I offer to undertake as we approach the 2011 general elections.
Therefore I am hereby declaring my ‘candidacy’ for the presidency come next year’s general elections. I believe I am better qualified than some of the murderers, predators, fraudsters, looters of our commonwealth, ‘juju’ priests, scoundrels and unpatriotic elements jostling for positions on their various party’s platforms. I have no skeleton in my cupboard and I have never benefitted anything from Nigeria, not even a Kobo of billions of petro-dollars that Abuja spends sometimes against our interests — like buying sophisticated weapons for the ‘kill-and-go’ mobile policemen to use and extort money from us and oppress us.
Make no mistake about it dear compatriots: the 2011 general elections will be the defining moment of our nationhood; its outcome shall solidify our unity in diversity or signal our disintegration! Our country is, without doubt, right now at cross-roads; we are heading towards a major crisis unless we manage the next general elections very well — that is producing a free, fair and credible poll in which the victor and the vanquished will all recognise the outcome as the true voice of the people expressed in a democratic way.
Like Jerry John Rawlings of Ghana who stepped forward, risking his life and everything, to rid Ghana of the menacing corrupt Generals holding the West African nation to ransom, I put my life forward as the revolutionary ‘saviour’ or messiah you have been waiting for! Yes, I put my life on the line in the brutal battle ahead for the soul of the nation. If my blood is shed fighting for your ‘liberation’ from the clutches of political oppression and economic bondage then so be it! After all our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ of Nazareth died at the age of 33, so if I die today I have nothing to regret, I will meet Him in heaven!
At 37 I believe I have lived a good life and contributed my little quota to the struggle for our collective emancipation from decades of imposed vacuous and diffident leadership especially at the centre. Through the internet in the last five years I have waged an unrelenting ‘war’ against the criminals and thieves ruining our lives. As the late great Che Guevara admonished us before his exit: “Our every action is a battle cry against (dictatorship) . . . wherever death may surprise us let it be welcome so long as our battle cry may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may reach out to pick up our weapons”.
The politicians back home have disappointed all of us as they continued promising us ‘heaven’ and delivering ‘hell’; instead of giving us ‘bread’ they always gave us ‘sand’; instead of giving us ‘light’ they were giving us darkness; instead of hope they gave despair; for their today they have murdered our tomorrow! As the late German 1st world war leader once said: “the issues of the day are better settled with blood and iron!”
Fellow compatriots, I believe we are all agreed that this ugly situation has endured for a long time; the time is now to commence the long march to freedom. The future is now, we can no longer afford to be treated unfairly by those we are constitutionally entitled to command but who have turned around to be commanding us without any iota of consideration and respect. We must stop them now in their tracks! The task ahead of us is intimidating and even dreadful but we must defeat the enemies of our potentially great nation.
I am at home with the Yorubas, the Hausa-Fulanis, the Igbos, the Ijaws and what have you. I can confidently describe myself as a ‘Wazobia-Nigerian’ who had travelled to Jos, Ibadan, Lagos, Abuja, Benin City, Port Harcourt, Ilorin and other places within the Nigerian landscape before I ‘escaped’ during the late Gen. Sani Abacha military banditry. I am a newbreed ‘politician’ fired up by the patriotic zeal to serve my suffering peoples. If you are up North I say: ‘me’e suna n’ka?’, if you are in the Yoruba axis down South I say: ‘kini oru k’oyi?’ and if you are found in the South-east I say: ‘gini bu afa gi?’ — all meaning: what is your name?
I am asking what is your name because I want you to answer your father’s name in defending our rights of existence and prosperity under the Nigerian federation devoid of injustice, crime, unemployment, kidnapping, poverty, bad roads, NEPA darkness. We must declare in unison ‘let there be light’ as God decreed in the very beginning of creation in Genesis. We must make the dry pipes in our homes gush out fresh waters again after years of digging boreholes and water pits. We must repair our bad roads and put our economy in strong footing. We shall create jobs, fund universities and provide social security for the weak and elderly.
Given the fact that the life of the average Nigerian has neither improved nor has any prospect of improvement in the near future I step forward as a redeeming catalyst. I desperately offer my services as an organized ‘rebel’, one with a patriotic cause to clean up the Augean stable. I seek to do it the democratic way by creating my own political party and mobilizing your support and votes to kick the ‘ass’ of the mis-ruling class. Please join me in your prayers as the greatest force in this universe remains the Trinity: God the father, the Son and the Holy Ghost!
I shall be returning home soon from my station to seek my party’s registration but if Prof. Jega’s INEC refuses to register my party (The Nigerian Diasporan Army Party (NDAP)) then I will have no other option than to emulate Charles Taylor positively by forming something similar to his National Patriotic Front of Liberia, in this case changing the Liberia with Nigeria; that is, the National Patriotic Front of Nigeria (NPFN). With God on our side we shall fight our way through to Abuja even through the bushes and trenches.
Unlike the First Lady Dame Patience Jonathan who was obviously elated at the performance of our girls at the Under-20 Women World Cup in Germany few months ago — hosting them to a reception and praising them for ‘carrying second’ position — we must not be content again with the second best; playing the second fiddle in a nation bestowed with human and material greatness by providence can no longer be tolerated. As my college proprietor in Benin City always admonished us week after week as we prepared for our terminal exams we must not settle for anything but the best because according to the no-nonsense man: “the better best is the best!”. Yes we must go for the best always as we are the best in the world!
We cannot afford to be happy taking silver whereas there is gold to be grabbed. In a new world of the internet, an era when the rest of the world are building hotel and another new ‘world’ in the moon we can no longer allow ourselves to be distracted by petty politics and men of yest
erday’s ideas. We must endeavour to send our own Neil Armstrong to the moon if only to show to the outside world that the new world being constructed concerns us and therefore should have us as players. We must join the rest of the global community in the drive for scientific evolution and revolution!
Like the barely-educated Okey Odunze whose gubernatorial posters many years ago in Anambra State read “obodo ga adi mma” (the land will be better) I proclaim ‘obodo-ga-adi-mma’ but with a tinge of irony. Because like the late Sir Winston Churchill of Great Britain who upon being elected Prime Minister in the middle of the second World War declared that he had nothing to offer Britons — at that dreadful point in time which saw the Hitler’s German military machine pounding London with bombs — but “tears, sorrow and blood” this new beginning will bring about tears, fears, sorrow and inevitably, blood. But be rest assured the initial period of difficulty will make way for a new dawn!
Fellow compatriots, Nigeria is in a virtual state of ‘war’! Yes we are in a ‘war’ over zoning, ‘war’ over arrested development, ‘war’ over kidnapping, ‘war’ over corruption, ‘war’ over lack of power and drinking water, ‘war’ over deteriorating roads and hospitals, ‘war’ over academic confusion; over squandered potentials, ‘war’ over leadership failure and state failure. So by the time we succeed by ‘snatching’ back power from the oppressors I shall declare a holy war against the parasites making life hard for all of us. There will be a positive war against indiscipline, war against low intellectual productivity in our universities, war against inflation, war against political mischief, war against institutionalised corruption. We shall wage war against everything militating against keeping a date with our collective destiny of greatness.
And when the bloodless revolution succeeds we shall then make it bloody by hanging or shooting through firing squad the Nigerian nemesis like Generals Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida. Yes, we shall kill them to give our liberated motherland a new lease of life! OBJ and IBB have murdered many Nigerians so if we ‘murder’ them God will see reasons with us! We shall not spare anybody whose records in public office is dirty. I have dutifully compiled their list and they are much less than 1 percent of our entire population, that is, the bad eggs holding our nation down. We shall apply jungle justice if need be to teach them a gory lesson. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. reminds us: “behind every civilization is a theme of barbarism”.
While I hereby seek for your support, dear patriot, wherever you are, I promise solemnly that we shall strike together with certain patriotic force and dictatorial precision. Our would-be ‘victims’ will definitely cut across all ethnicities and creeds so that in the end when we use their blood to water our progress as a new nation born under God no one in his or her right senses will ever accuse us of ethnic or religious bias. We shall ‘hang’ or decapitate the so-called largest party in Africa, the PDP. Or to put it in a better way, we shall disband the PDP so that the political contractors and thieves that hibernate in the behemoth will be rendered jobless. We shall eliminate the ‘eliminatables’ within the party and recover the ‘recoverables’ in terms of billions of petro-dollars they have stolen since 1999.
Get prepared, therefore, fellow compatriots, as 2011 announces itself on the horizon of time. I leave you with this quotable quote from Frederick Douglass: “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe”. Think about that!
Good luck (minus Jonathan) to our planned elaborate revolutionary efforts! May Jehovah, the Omnipotent God, the spiritual father of Emmanuel Jesus the Christ, take absolute control. We put our hopes in Him for in Him there is no betrayal or sabotage!
Yours ‘Wazobially’,
Mr Sunday Ozodinukwe Christopher Okenwa
