If there is any nation on earth that is blessed and cursed that nation is Nigeria. It’s blessed in the area of human and natural resources but cursed on the side of management. And if there is any person on earth that has luck, that person is President Olusegun Obasanjo. He has become Nigeria’s ‘longest’ president, as a military and civilian president.
I was reading the bible today and came across this statement: “For he comes out of prison to be king, although he was born poor in his kingdom”, Ecclesiastes 4:14. The thought that engulfed me was, could this ‘king’ here be Obasanjo? And if this, by any means, relates to Obasanjo, what has Obasanjo learnt in the prison? Was he made king to liberate his people, since he has gotten prison experience, or to lead his people into prison? Your guess is as good as mine!
But another portion of the bible says: “Whoever rewards evil for good, evil will not depart from his home”, Proverbs 17:13.
Today, anywhere you go in Nigeria people are crying of hunger. People are jobless and homeless. They resort to armed robbery and other vices. Unemployed youths are roaming the street only living on hope, while we read Obasanjo’s government having created ten to twenty million-job opportunities for Nigerians on the pages of the newspapers.
Not minding the dearth of jobs, everyday, government is retrenching workers. The labour market is everyday increasing without any serious job for the labourers to do. This has hampered the already saturated labour market. And an insensitive head of state, I remember, was saying that those retrenched should go and farm in the village. But one would hide his head in shame regarding the infrastructure the retrenched would farm in the village with.
Obasanjo’s government has applied every measure to making sure that Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, looks neat to attract the eyes of foreigners by the minister of the federal capital Mallam El-Rufai demolishing houses and shops. We all know that feigning righteousness is for a moment.
Does Obasanjo not know that Nigerians, apart from those in the corridors of power, are living in cellars and slums? Obasanjo’s government has increased petroleum prices for more than ten times in the past seven years while salaries are not reviewed for more than once.
Obasanjo’s government tells Nigerians that one of its reforms is to accumulate huge foreign resources. But of what importance are such resources while hunger has snatched a lot of our beloved ones from us? For whom and for what is this amount doing in foreign accounts?
Today we hear Obasanjo being proud that his government has done many positive things. I believe he won’t be surprise to hear that his reforms are hurting; the citizenry is hungry, hungrier than they were before the emergence of Obasanjo as president. No price of any staple today that is not ten times what it was seven years ago. Obasanjo’s government is like the Tsunami; it has washed Nigerians to paupers.
The People’s Democratic Party, PDP, is today priding that it’s going to sweep all the states in the April elections. I also have read Obasanjo saying that he is making sure that a ‘vampire’ does not succeed him.
This, I have asked, what are the criteria of a ‘vampire’? Except that such successor won’t come from the PDP. Like Prof. Wole Soyinka once described PDP, PDP is ‘nest of killers’. Its activities have caused Nigeria more perils than progress. Under a PDP led government, how many people have lost their lives in the hands of assassins and road accidents in Nigeria?
Obasanjo and his vice, Atiku Abubakar owe Nigerians a gigantic apology to the level they have dragged Nigeria into the smelling mud today.Instead of the former two gentlemen meeting the mandate Nigerians gave to them, they began to quarrel because they have seen that the government they head is a failure. Their feud is as ugly as the face of an owl.
How could just the word ‘loyalty’ have caused us trouble? And as they are fighting, it is applicable that Nigerians are engaged in the fight because of what we don’t know the head. I remembered observers asking, loyalty to whom and for what?
Obasanjo and Atiku should be loyal to the people, which is the only loyalty that has a history in sensitivity. The obverse is insensitivity! Any man who has failed in fending for his family only uses quarrels, abuses and harsh voice to cover his face in shame.
And instead of the ruling PDP quelling the inferno blazing the hopes of Nigerians caused by Obasanjo and Atiku, PDP, which Obasanjo is the ‘head’, is rather sharing blames to each’s faction: Obasanjo camp and Atiku camp.
How can we achieve the Millennium Development Goal? PDP is a ‘choir boy’ singing its praises to the high heavens, claiming itself as Africa’s largest political party, even larger than Nigeria, while Nigeria burns?
I am afraid if Obasanjo’s aides told him the truth about the complains of Nigerians as can be seen in the media, that his government has not brought smiles to the faces of the masses, and posterity may not be very kind to him.
