THE EXPLOSIVE PRESIDENT

By

Prof. Mike Ikhariale

"Shut up! I took the opportunity of being here to see what could be done. I don’t need to be here."

Who could have imagined that the above dismissive statement was made right at the scene of a colossal national calamity which the recent Ikeja armory inferno has become for countless Nigerians, and not an inebriated outburst at an Owanbe gathering? And more importantly, how could any rational listener not think that such a terse statement was by a reclusive and anti-social practitioner of the science and art of sadism, instead of its being that of the democratically elected President of the same nation that her people have just been wasted by an accident that qualifies in all material respects as a monumental act of official irresponsibility? To put it mildly, the statement, as credited to the President which some news media aptly reported as haven stunned his listeners, is by all characterization, yet another explosion by itself, far more insidious and far more damaging, than the first one for which the great President himself "took the opportunity" to pass by!

Obviously realizing the extent of his misspeak, the President was reported the next day to be saying that he did not know the extent of the human carnage while he was right at the scene in Ikeja. In other words, his rather banal comment at the scene of the explosion was as a result of his poor comprehension of the dimension of the tragedy. That again raises the question of his own level of seriousness: How could a president fly all the way from Abuja to Lagos with all the paraphernalia of the Presidency on the strength of the bad news he received and still failed to avail himself of the direct opportunity to appraise what lawyers call the real evidence at the locus in quo?

If he had sent someone else, it would easily have been the case of a failure to fully account to the boss but, in this case, the boss was there live by himself and yet he failed to see what every other person saw – carnage, raw carnage! It is therefore of little significance if a day of national mourning is subsequently declared because the President is now acting only on hearsay testimonies even though he was there physically. And for a nation that mourns daily, what does it amount to nowadays setting just one day aside for hypocritical official wailing and gnashing of teeth? What is happening in Nigeria requires more than the usual tokenism of official proclamations without the slightest intention to carry through the sentiments being so openly canvassed. Next appointment? The Minister of State for Mourning in the Department of Homeland Grief and Lamentation! It is no telling to say that this will not be the end of the harvest of disasters that have visited the nation of late. The symptoms are the gory and needless loss of lives; the real causes lie deeply in the realm of official irresponsibility and the steady failure of the Nigerian State.

After the recent verbal assault on the nation’s academia whom he unfairly defamed as useless individuals and enemies of education; after the face-saving but ridiculous gimmick of trying to wash his hands off the shameful forgery of the Electoral Act which was contrived to rig the election in favor of the candidate of the ruling party, we thought we have heard enough of him. But quite characteristically, the President again shocked the nation when, faced with expose of their evil electoral scheme, glibly said that he was only trying to fulfill the partisan design of his party, forgetting that his oath of office was solemnly directed to the service of all Nigerians and not just the PDP (the Party that Destroys Nigeria?) and, of course, after the latest precision verbal bomb that he threw at the hapless Ikeja onlookers, it should be clear to us now that there is an urgent need to help the President out of a serious language quagmire. It should not surprise anyone if tomorrow he picks up the megaphone to declare that it was the will of God that the ammunition disaster should happen particularly in these days and age when frantic blasphemous appeals are being made to God Almighty to step into the sinful re-nomination process of failing politicians!

Nigerian leaders think of it as a favor whenever they are called upon to perform the duties of their offices. Our rulers have come to see leadership as merely an avenue to exercise unduly aggrandized power and ego pumping without accepting the corresponding quid pro quo of discharging the responsibilities of such high offices. A very keen observer of the disposition of Nigerian leaders aptly remarked sometime ago that it is only in the context of Nigerian governance that political leaders curiously grow fatter, look ‘younger’ by the day and develop a typically Nero-like demeanor while in power. Elsewhere, people who are lucky enough to be assigned with national leadership immediately go into accelerated aging and pronounced physical and mental fatigue. Youthful leaders like Bill Clinton and his British counterpart Tony Blair went into the rapid graying process just within months of assuming office. In Nigeria, that would be the right time to ‘know the world’, eat fat and make merry!

Why things are like this in Nigeria can only be understood through the prism of the logic of Denis Diderot, the French writer, who once said, "It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it." And for us Nigerians, we were not born brutish and mean. It is the human environment that has made it seem as if we now celebrate the misfortune of one another in an unending orgy openly orchestrated by sadism. So whether it in the religious sphere or in the din of the market place, all we hear from both the high and the low, the secular and the spiritual, are: "crucify him", "stone her", "execute them", "kill am", etc. - all with some fiendish gusto! Nothing could be more illustrative of our collective trek into the highway of perdition by the twisted diversity in the appreciation of the evil that the murder of Bola Ige represented. It was awful to know that some people openly celebrated that perfidy. It was a rude betrayal of humanity - worse than cannibalism. This silly and federated warped orientation as to matters Nigeriana has its illegitimate ancestry in the invasion of national leadership by peppersoup-drinking, fun-loving, light-fingered and do-nothing military juntas. And because every elite imposes its preferences and idiosyncrasies and, indeed, its culture, on the followership, an incurable animalistic siesta syndrome, a socio-political phenomenon that allows people to wield enormous power with neither vision for the commonwealth nor a bona fide commitment to verifiable standards of attainment justly moderated by positive human values, has become the dominant ethics of our national leadership.

That is how we came about the tragic but lingering phenomenon of big government but very little governance to show for it; so much riches but an all-pervading and choking poverty in the land. At the individual level, we have traded our humanity for quick fixes even at the ridiculous extent of playing God. Can we as a people honestly say, as the Americans are wont to say, that "the state of our Union is strong" when we routinely celebrate the misfortune of one another? Spokespersons of ethnic nationalities are perpetually at war with one another in the huge national industry of contrived sectarian and ethnic hate and intolerance from which so many have lost their lives and others made or are making their fortunes. From the days of General Gowon, through a series of wayward military usurpers, till date, public leadership in Nigeria has taken the form of talking down condescendly on the citizens as a defeated, pacified and occupied people who must be lectured and intimidated all in the name of governance. Several times in the past, our leaders looked away while citizens were in serious anguish: Shagari flew away to India through the bellowing smoke of the burning NET Towers in Lagos; Babangida made merry while several young officers were waiting for rescue in the Ejigbo C-130 crash and Abacha was ensconced in his goggles playing cards while armored cars ran over hundreds of citizens in Lagos and the nation went bananas.

Against such a culture of official irresponsibility and insensitivity, President Obasanjo obviously thought of it as a big favor on his part to be able to take time off from the cozy and palatial cocoon of Aso Rock and come down to the scene of the needless loss of lives of not-too-important people, hence it was by sheer "opportunity" that he was there even as hundreds of victims lay dead and thousands of fellow citizens were in anguish. The subsequent explanation that other senior officers of the government were already billed to be there does not derogate from the obligation of national leadership to be civil, caring, compassionate and humane.

Even in war, there is still the overriding need to act humanely. We all saw what the US leadership did in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attack of that country. Bush made it loud and clear that anyone that messes with a single American messes with the full might of the American system and he clearly led the way in telling the world about that operational philosophy. Little wonder, therefore, that every American is prepared to lay down his life defending the US flag. On the contrary in Nigeria, we are used to leaders who assumed office by hook or crook just to terrorize, rob, snub, brutalize and dehumanize us. How can we, in good conscience, demand of our people to be patriotic when those who constitute the elite are busy trivializing their sacred assignment?

When the President tells his fellow citizens to "shut up", "go to hell" and other unprintable epithets, as he had been reported in the past to utter, there is a clear and present cause for concern, and for many reasons too. As the alter ego of the nation, making all necessary allowances for the foibles of man, the President of the Republic should be the embodiment of all that is good about our society. For example, the current monstrous level of insecurity, dishonesty and animosity in our society are the immediate outcome of the many years when soldiers who are largely devoid of morality and ethics of public service held sway. And to a large extent, the abysmal decline in the level of self-esteem in both the legislative and executive arms of government in the current dispensation is due to the fact that most of them were recruited from the highly debased generation of military hangers-on and active participants in those inglorious eras. But we expected that the President should be different, not withstanding that he is himself a former military leader, because, at the end of the day, the Buck stops at his desk. And for all intents and purposes, he is supposed to be a role model for the nation.

Our angst would naturally have been directed at those whose paid duties include the task of packaging the president for public and official consumption. But when one considers the endless refrain from them that he does not accept genuine advice and that his standard response is "I have seen all that before", even in a totally changed and ever changing political scenario, one is tempted to say, Gotcha! But it is a lot more than that. There is no doubt that most of the time the President means. I believe he is inside,a good man, but remember that the Holy Book teaches that it is out of the abundance of man’s heart that the mouth speaketh. He should therefore cool down on his temper and act presidential whenever he is the public or the language of the Bible which he now reads, bridle his tongue for a man is judged mainly by the words of his mouth while any other evidence adverse to him are merely circumstantial. Take it or leave it, whenever the President goofs, it is the entire nation that is brought down. And whenever he throws his verbal nukes around, it is the entire nation that is also rocked. Consequently, some tutorial in verbal decency would be a good investment for both the President and the nation at large, for, as was rightly put by the great Frantz Fanon, "I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization". But who will bell the cat by telling that to His Excellency, the President, whom they say insists that he has "seen all that before"?

Cambridge, MA

January 2002