Nigeria’s Imperial Family By Babayola Toungo

Nigeria is in trouble. Big trouble. We are in a ship
in turbulent waters with a big, ugly iceberg ahead of
us and our captain is claiming not to see it. Worse
still, his crewmen are telling him that the road
onward is clear. That the next port of call, 2015,
can be reached even if all those who paid (with their
votes) for a smooth cruise will die or fall in the
water before the destination is reached. While the
captain is playing dumb, his hired rabble-rousers
are busy adding more coal to the engine while the
ship is fast cutting short the distance between the
ship and the iceberg. Some of the passengers, who
may be on a death wish trip, are urging the captain
to maintain course and whoever criticizes his
leadership of the ship should be thrown to the
shark-invested ocean.
I am at a lost at how a country of 170 million people
got saddled with a president with an addled brain –
a country of brilliant and intelligent hardworking
men and women, including a noble laureate.  We
have a president with a one-track mind tagging a
wife bent on embarrassing Nigerians in the
international community with her lack of basic
knowledge on either how a country is governed or
the role of a presidential spouse. Things are made
more worrisome when you have a security
leadership that is willing to be summoned and
abused by a person with no known constitutional
role or responsibility aside from entertaining her
husband.  Here I am referring to the Borno State
Commissioner of Police who presented himself to
be insulted and disgraced by Patience Jonathan.
We can count ourselves lucky that no provision was
made in our constitution recognising the spouses of
elected officials. Well, at least for now.  One may be
celebrating prematurely – what with the way Ike
Ekweremadu, the Deputy Senate President is
lending himself as a vessel for the introduction of
unpopular presidential Bills.
While the whole world is mourning with Nigerians
on the abduction of over 200 of its kids from a
school in the north east, Patience Jonathan decided
to audition for a Nollywood flip in front a crowd
made up of governors’ wives and a compliant
media. For a B rated movie, the performance was
an insult on our amateurish movie industry. Even
though the movies that are daily churned out are
insults to the word movie, hiring Faka (Fake?)
Jonathan based on the performance that Sunday
night/ Monday morning will be visiting violence to
the movie industry, no matter how bad they are.
She came across as a bad play act even with
almost three weeks of rehearsals. Patience’s
actions that weekend were insensitive, callous,
uncouth, heartless, uncalled for and an unmitigated
disaster to her image (if she has one).
The verbal violence she unleashed on the
traumatised parents, relations and teachers of
those poor girls, who has been in the hands of
killers for about a month now, was the height of
superciliousness by anyone whose primary
responsibility is to keep the bed of the president
warm. Many people were amused by her display of
contrived emotion.  I was not.  To crown her show
of power and disdain for the devastated parents and
officials, she ordered the arrest of some of those
who came to represent some parents who couldn’t
make it to Abuja from Chibok for one reason or the
other.  Apart from the mental anguish they are
going through, they don’t have presidential jets to
ferry them to be at her Imperial Majesty’s
presence. I don’t blame her for the insults she
hurled at the Borno state officials.  I blame Kashim
Shettima for allowing them to answer her
summons, though his wife wisely opted out. Would
the punishment for not attending the ‘meeting’ be
worse than the verbal violence they were subjected
to?
I have been trying to twig in what capacity did
Patience Jonathan subpoenaed these people and
coming three weeks their kids have been whisked
away – potential first ladies. What was she doing
all this while? If she really cared, wouldn’t she have
gone to Chibok the morning after and not send her
husband to be dancing with Sani Danger and
Shekarau in Kano few hours after the dastardly act
was done? Accusing the aggrieved of “sharing
blood” is a notch higher than insensitivity. And then
she went on to practically accuse them of stage-
managing the whole thing to mortify her husband,
in cahoots with those against his 2015 ambition.
Mortify Jonathan?  Is it possible?  Has it crossed
her mind (if she has any) that these people are in
unspeakable anguish not knowing what
unimaginable things their daughters are going
though?
While she was acting her script, her husband was
catechizing officials of the Borno state government
on whether the students have actually being
abducted. What a slur! While Jonathan and his
wife were sleeping in the three weeks that the girls
have been away from their parents, these people
that he is grilling couldn’t get a wink because of the
pressures they are subjected to by the parents of
the kids. To compound their tomfoolery, they
introduce sectional dimension through our current
moron-in-chief, Asari Dokubo and a religious angle
through the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN),
in particularly the not long ago formed Northern
Christian Elders Forum. While the whole world is
united in outrage over what happened to these poor
innocent kids, the president is exploiting our
fissures to escape from responsibility. As far as he
has shown, he is angry that the abduction has put a
hold to his junketing across the country
campaigning for an election we are told he may not
contest.
The anger shown by Jonathan towards the
members of the House of Representatives for daring
to invite his favorite Minister, Deziani Allison-
Maduekwe was more real than his animus towards
the terror merchants who rendered a whole
community sad and miserable. What gave the
members the audacity to label Allison-Maduekwe
corrupt? Don’t they know the difference between a
thief and a corrupt person? Saint Deziani is not
corrupt but only a thief who intermittently dips her
hands and pilfers some billion dollars. They are
lucky he doesn’t have the power to sanusi them.
They should ask the Danmaje who couldn’t even
travel to neighboring Niger all because he labeled
the saint of the Petroleum Ministry corrupt.
Goodluck Jonathan and his wife are ready to play
Russian roulette with the lives of not only those
poor abducted girls but the lives of all Nigerians just
so that they can remain in the Aso Villa for may be
another four years. They always recourse to
ethnicity, regionalism and religion whenever their
incompetence is manifested by one avoidable
mistake or the other.  And we always buy the
scam. From being a shoeless poor fisherman’s son
from a minority tribe to being hated by northerners
for being southerner, to well publicised church
pilgrimages, we are gradually being diminished by
Jonathan’s actions. And we always buy into his
scam. While we are at each other’s throats, the
couple are steadily creating and Imperial dynasty.  I
just pray there will be a country left by the time they
take their final bow.
And there are clowns like Doyin Okupe and the
recently kicked out Ali Gulak wiling to do hatchet
man’s job for their Imperial majesties. Instead of
admitting their incompetence, they unleashed the
likes of Okupe or Asari Dokubo to remind us of how
low we have sunk as a nation. When a nation’s
policies or lack of it; when a nation’s leader’s image
is managed by those who are more comfortable
living in the sewers than in comfortable, then the
nation has retrogressed to prehistoric times.
A badly written script, acted by amateur thespians
to a divided house. God save us from this
combination.  Chai, there is God wo!