“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Many watching the goings-on in Nigeria today are still awestruck. Yes, awestruck by how hitherto boisterous Nigerians of good conscience have all of a sudden become taciturn. They have left only a few compatriots screaming for righteousness and justice. Nobody is seeing or hearing anything again. All the crusaders and activists have become suddenly reticent. The game is called “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
Only a few are singing solo and hearing themselves because there are no choruses. Otherwise, well-meaning people are either mum or defending the indefensible. By the time Nigeria is through with the Tinubugate, a fresh list of conscientious commenters will be compiled. The great scam would have succeeded in turning around the entire Nigeria, exposing the duplicitous nature of the local elite.
It would be clear that going forward, all the moralizing in the past by certain persons as being the conscience of the people, fighters for the downtrodden, and crusaders for a just society are mere window dressing. Their previous positions were merely in tandem with their ethnic, religious, and stomach interests. Where are those who reduced Goodluck Jonathan to nothing even with his genuine Ph.D.? Where are those who made Muhammadu Buhari look like a nonentity?
You won’t see Prof Wole Soyinka talk again on national moral issues. No, not when the issue at stake clashes with ethnic interest. It’s a settled case already that where any of the variables as we have seen since the unraveling of Bola Ahmed Tinubu clashes, sincerity will be stalled. This conspiracy of silence is not limited to individuals, even groups, and civil society bodies. Most of them have been dumbstruck.
The Nigeria Union of Journalists and the Nigerian Guild of Editors have kept mum even as Journalist David Hundeyin is facing a series of threats for his investigative frays uncovering what is turning out to be the biggest political scam of the century. No word of encouragement from his professional body or colleagues, apparently because the breadgiver is involved. The Nigerian Bar Association, which usually screams at anything immoral in government and society, has been visibly compromised and it not only looks away at evil but defends it.
Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, a former NBA President who qualifies to be the father of the civil society in Nigeria has hidden his forthright self and talks in a confusing language, contradicting his past.
Femi Falana, the most vocal human rights lawyer since the exit of the Senior Advocate of the Masses, Gani Fawehemni, has been noisy on less important things, looking away from the main issue that is at the point of bringing the nation down.
Femi Fani-Kayode and Festus Keyamo have since gone and now sing the song of the stomach.
The loquacious former Kano Emir, Sanisi Lamido Sanusi, whose voice has been impactful for speaking truth to power which largely contributed to his dethronement in Kano and at the Central Bank of Nigeria, has also been missing in action as the nation faces its worst political moral burden. The humorous civil society voice from the North, Senator Shehu Sani, has diverted his jokes away from the main issue to irrelevant matters.
The eccentric Islamic cleric, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi has been busy fighting for Palestinians in the faraway Middle East, looking away from the main issue tearing his homeland apart. Not to talk of the frontline pastors and prophets whose prophecies are daily proving to be stomach-induced. Even the garrulous Rev Fr Ejike Mbaka has been ineffective these days on national issues.
Catholic Bishops of Nigeria whose united voice has been weighty and sometimes shook the nation, uttered everything but refused to hit the nail on the head by asking the President to step aside. If the church cannot fight certificate forgery and immorality at the highest level, if the now dumb Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU is looking away at certificate forgery, what is left? Is the release of four months’ salary arrears to them a bribe or thank you for being mum?
Even our highly venerated Nigeria Incorporated, Generals Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida, Abdulsalam Abubakar, Theophilus Danjuma, Sultan of Sokoto, Obi of Onitsha, Ooni of Ife, among others, are all hiding and waiting for the Armageddon to befall us first. If they cannot call a spade by its name, who is left? Their voices calling Tinubu to resign in the interest of the nation will be difficult to ignore.
They all are watching as a stinking rich desperado “grabs power and runs with it” before everyone’s eyes. And as if the electoral robbery was not enough, his questionable background, bordering on every aspect of his bio-data, name, age, origin, schools at all levels, past place of employment, and moral requirements still exists.
As it stands now, Nigeria has a President whose claim to anything about his past is becoming unverifiable and difficult to process by any legal, moral, or ethical reasoning. Perhaps the only thing not in dispute about Tinubu today is his humanity.
He attended St Paul’s School Aroloya [This school never existed.] That he attended Government College, Ibadan is a debunked story. He attended Government College, Lagos, and graduated in 1970. [The school never existed by 1970 but was established in 1974].
He attended Southwest College (now Richard Daley College). He never did. And that he attended Chicago State University. Maybe, but with a questionable identity. That he graduated from CSU. Not at all and that the certificate he tendered to INEC in the 2023 presidential election came from CSU. [CSU has since denied the certificate emanating from there. That his date of birth is 1952. If you believe this, you can even believe that Israel and Hamas are not at war. But there are even other objective questions about his age with fresh documents showing his dates of birth as March 29, 1954, and 1955 with the answer likely to be none of the above.
Also absurd and hard to believe is the claim that the $460,000 proceeds of narcotics deals he forfeited to the U.S. government in 1990 was a charge against his account, not against him. Even the claims that he worked with Deloitte, have also been debunked by the company. The nation’s anti-graft body, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, has also not denied that it once wrote to the American Federal Bureau of Intelligence, to confirm if Tinubu attended CSU and they wrote back that he was never there.
In the midst of all this, logical advice from good heads that the President should save the country from embarrassment and come out to reintroduce himself and clear the air has been flagrantly ignored. Instead, all energies are being exerted in the US Court to halt the release of further documents and to bamboozle and doodle our Supreme Court hearing the case.
As you read this piece today, Justices of the Nigeria Supreme Court are reading their judgment on the charade of February 25, 2023, and they are hurrying to ignore the evidence for the political exigency of the criminal gang holding the nation aground.
Rather than lovers of democracy to speak out and save the day, rather than statesmen and women to intervene and save our democracy, rather than critical stakeholders to push for what is right and just in this circumstance and which will present the country in a good light, everyone is pretending that all is well.
Instead, what you get is a conspiracy, a stratagem tilting towards a coverup, not minding its far-reaching implications to our already decadent larger society.
What should they do, you may ask? Simply, they should see Nigeria as a corporate entity where they are the directors and agree with themselves if they will hand the running of the affairs of their company to such a person whose curriculum vitae is full of contradictions and whose antecedents do not add up. He would be in court to stop the Police or the DSS from making public their records on him.
Rather than speak up and save the country, what Nigeria’s “Board of Directors” is doing is indulging in doublespeak, forgetting that posterity is always harsh on hypocrites.
The opening quote above as the opening quote to this conversation came from a German Lutheran theologian, anti-Nazi dissident. He was a founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity’s role in the secular world are widely known and influential. He was also known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, for which he spent time in a concentration camp and was eventually hanged. He lived up to his advocacy and paid the supreme price. He died 78 years ago but he is still remembered globally for being a martyr for truth.
What the Nigerian elite are not learning from the copious exhibition of duplicity in our current political quagmire is that passively accepting or supporting an unjust system is tantamount to cooperating with it and, by implication, becoming a participant in it.
America’s popular novelist, the author of Sounds and Fury, William Faulkner, succinctly expressed his advice by saying, “Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty, truth, and compassion, against injustice, lying and greed.”
The tragedy of the silence of men of conscience, their deliberate indifference is that it appears as an endorsement for wrongdoing. And such gnarly tends to open the way for the devil to operate and do further damage to society. May God help us avert the oncoming calamity.