By Iliyasu Gadu
I should feel flattered that a seasoned columnist with ‘The Nation’ newspaper, Dr Femi Orebe, would collaborate with an unnamed ‘’Professor” to subject my article, ‘Who will lead the North?’ to a thorough analysis.
In his reaction to the article in his column in the Sunday edition of ‘The Nation’ on September 1, Dr Femi’s opening paragraph read thus: ‘In a 2-part article deployed primarily, I suspect, towards asphyxiating the entire Southern Nigeria into a state of somnolence ahead the 2027 presidential election when, because they are born to rule, the North would again mount the presidency of Nigeria even if President Muhammadu Buhari – a Northerner – spent his two full terms (2015-2023)…..’’
Dr Femi further stated that as he used to do in order not to appear to be personally prejudiced on issues of national import: ‘I contacted a university professor, to ask for his views on this very important article’.
Duly obliging him, the unnamed ‘Professor’ proceeded to state; ‘To describe it (my article that is) as horrifying will be an understatement. It portrayed a mind left behind in the primitive morass of feudal nostalgia and delusional pomposity, earnestly celebrating excessive entitlement mentality; something that has become an epidemic of sorts with our Northern politicians. It defies logic and benumbs reason but, unfortunately, yet persists’.
Homing in on my take on the recent nationwide hunger protests, Dr Femi stated ‘…that selfsame protest was dominated in the North solely by uneducated urchins who know practically nothing, besides shouting whatever it is they are told to shout, Putin inclusive; and regardless of whether Tinubu had, himself, earned their angst in the process of trying to clear the Augean stable of the clueless eight years which preceded him’.
Having read it, I was utterly disappointed that two supposedly enlightened minds would produce such a lame conclusion on what is without a shadow of doubt, the overarching existential challenge of our country. That Nigerians are now overwhelmingly agreed on the fact that the Tinubu administration has atrophied following abysmal handling of the country is not contestable. What is more only but a minority of Nigerians now believe the president possesses the capacity to remedy the situation he had plunged us going forward.
My thinking was that those two were either immersed in a bubble floating somewhere in the furthest reaches of the stratosphere or were behaving like the proverbial Ostrich who for one inexplicable reason or the other decides to bury its head in the sand in order to avoid seeing what has become obvious to objective minded Nigerians.
And if any proof was needed that President Tinubu cannot by any stretch of the imagination ‘clear the Augean stable that preceded the clueless eight years that preceded him’, on Tuesday, September 3, just two days following Dr Orebe’s article, the Nigeria National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) announced yet another increase in the pump price of fuel from N690/N700 to N855. This is the third such increase within the little over one year that ‘Mr Augean stable clearer’ Tinubu, had been in office. Under the watch of President Tinubu, Nigeria has been inexorably inching towards the Hobbesian state of nature.
But rather than acknowledge what every Nigerian now knows and feels about the dire situation in the country, Dr Orebe and his ilk prefer to instead direct their withering fire on the poor, hapless victims who he derisively described as ‘urchins’. Do these people need to have a doctorate degree before they could qualify to come out in protest against a most wicked and brutal policy that has shattered and negatively affected their lives and livelihood? Indeed did not a similar protest take place in 2012 inspired Ironically, by statements and speeches of ‘Mr Augean stable clearer’ Tinubu against President Goodluck Jonathan’s hike in fuel prices? Did Dr Orebe or anybody for that matter refer to the multitudes that paraded the streets of Lagos and other cities in Nigeria in exercise of their constitutional rights to demonstrate, as ‘urchins’ at that time?
Those he uncharitably referred to as ‘urchins’ in the north were probably among the people who voted for President Tinubu in 2023. These are the same people President Tinubu will be seeking their votes in 2027.
The kernel of my article is that as President Tinubu has clearly demonstrated a deficit in capacity to run the country, Nigerians should in the exercise of their constitutional right, begin to earnestly prepare to replace him in 2027. The argument being proffered that we should somehow persevere with President Tinubu’s glaring incompetence and cluelessness just as we did with Buhari is hare-brained and belongs in the minds of folks not in tune with the principles of democracy.
President Tinubu’s determination to seek a second term is his right but it must be subject to the will of the voters. The constitution does not provide for automatic second term willy nilly for incumbents, whether they perform or not. If we persist in that notion, we are providing an incentive for incumbents to take us for granted and also to attempt to alter the constitution to suit their own whims, as President Tinubu is now doing rather surreptitiously.
Already we have seen dangerous tendencies of that in the way President Tinubu has pocketed the National Assembly, an independent arm of government, to do his personal bidding on issues of national import. And since we have detected a proclivity on the part of the president not to adhere to the rules-driven process of democracy, we the people should not for any reason be swayed by dangerous sentiments aimed at circumscribing the constitutional rights of the voters in determining his fate.
Yes, the immediate past eight years of President Buhari were a disaster from which we barely survived but in the less than two years since he has been in office, majority of Nigerians now believe President Tinubu has done far worse than the totality of the Buhari years. Nigerians should not be made to suffer the double whammy of Buhari-Tinubu for 16 uninterrupted years.
Dr Orebe’s claim that I did not expose the failings of the Buhari era was a wild shot. If he had cared to check he will discover that I had been an advocate for people’s causes since the Abacha years for which I was detained unjustly. Indeed, I make bold to say that, unlike his principal, who fled the country, I fought the cause right here in Nigeria. I will also invite Dr Orebe to check my articles on Buhari and challenge him to mention if anybody had ever written anything more critical in the stable of The Nation newspapers. And if I may ask, did President Tinubu ever say or wrote anything critical of President Buhari during those years that Dr Orebe described as ‘clueless’?
Perhaps that is why media platforms owned by the president have taken it upon themselves to distract Nigerians from the failings of the administration. We saw this clearly during the nationwide protests.
Because he was so intent on toeing this line, Dr Orebe chose to produce a drivel of a response which sought to redirect the culpability of President Tinubu in the ongoing multifaceted crises of confidence in the country. And as a celebrated columnist, his sarcastic reference to northerners as having a ‘’born to rule’’ mentality was objectionable as thrice they had voted southerners (Obasanjo, Goodluck and now Tinubu) since the coming of the present civilian dispensation.
Iliyasu Gadu, a former Foreign Service Officer who served at the Nigerian Missions in Germany and the United Kingdom (UK), is a columnist with Daily Trust
