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The
conventional practice, after reading
Basil Chiji Okafor’s column of Sunday,
November 8, 2009 on page 10 of
National Life Newspaper with the
above title, was to wait for the
concluding part before one reacts. In
this extant case, of necessity, one had
to depart from the norm because Basil
Okafor opted to use Dr. Tunji
Braithwaite and his defunct Nigeria
Advance Party (NAP) as a prologue for
the above-captioned title. His real
objective was to praise Governor
Amaechi’s commendable programme of
ridding his state of mosquitoes.
I was a
card-carrying member of Nigeria Advance
Party in 1979 and was influenced by the
socialist rhetorics and sartorial
appearance of Dr. Braithwaite and knew
for a fact that the party’s slogan of
ridding Nigeria of parasites,
mosquitoes, rats and roaches, “if he
ever got elected into the office as
President of the Federal
Republic
of ;Nigeria,
was a metaphoric way of saying that the
party was prepared to bring to justice,
all those people masquerading as
leaders, who overtime, had and are still
stagnating the manifest destiny of
Nigerians and by extension, the
country. The New Britanica – Webster
Dictionary defines a parasite as
something that resembles a biological
parasite in dependence on something else
for existence or support without making
a useful or adequate return. A typical
Nigerian Political Leader!
It is
apparent that Basil Chiji Okafor did not
grasp the import of the slogan,
otherwise he would not have written
that, “well, with the NAP garb of more
youthful, self-acclaimed socialist, Dr.
Braithwaite and his men, bulging muscles
and all, which gave them the looks of
raffia-masquerade dancers, such a very
fundamentally important and serious
issue as ridding our environment of
vectors acquired a rather comical hue.
So, of all Nigeria’s myriads of
problems, many a cynic queried, rats and
mosquitoes, which a few drops of “Ota
Piah-piah” should be able to deal with,
were all those court-jesters saw?”
Ignorance is really blissful! Basil
Chiji Okafor should have limited his
effort at laundering the image of
Governor Amaechi to extolling the
virtues of the programme to eradicate
mosquitoes from River
State alone and not exposing his
ignorance to the import and message of
Nigeria Advance Party (NAP) and Dr.
Breaithwaite respectively. I also know
for a fact that Governor Amaechi has
done well in River
State since he became the Governor of
the state and the Mosquito eradication
programme would be one of them when
implemented.
There
is no denying the fact that most of our
leaders are like mosquito parasites.
They have appropriated the country’s
treasury for personal aggrandizement.
It is a fact that the Military Coup
de’tat of 1983 and the subsequent
Government that emerged thereafter, was
a validation of the position of those
Basil Okafor referred to as “Court
jesters”. It is obvious that majority
of Nigerians “want to go to heaven but
are afraid to die”. The Buhari/Idiagbon
regime embarked upon the thankless duty
of sanitizing the society and they were
succeeding when the agents of the
“mosquitoes” in the military overthrew
the regime. It came to pass, that the
military regime of Babangida was even a
worse variant of military regimes. ,
that he had to be disgraced out of
office. This is not stating that Buhari/Idiagbon
could not have done some things with
human touch, but that of Babangida
behaved like the proverbial rat that
bites a human being that is asleep but
blows air on the victim to lull him back
to sleep. Nigerians are desirous of
making omelette but are not ready to
break the eggs. We want to take
delivery of a pregnant woman of her baby
but are loath to seeing blood as if
countries like Malaysia, Singapore and
even our backyard neighbor Ghana,
attained their present status by holding
on to a Democracy we do not believe in.
That is why it is convenient for Basil
Okafor to write that “subsumed in the
guffaw provoked by the comic strip of
Braithwaite and his men, Nigerians
totally ignored the substance of his
message”. It is instructive that 30
years on, the “mosquitoes” referred to
by Dr. Braithwaite and his men, instead
of being decimated have really dug-in
are not going to be easily dislodged
with the way the Progressive elements
are behaving. Instead of uniting to
confront the “mosquitoes” they are
afflicted with egocentric considerations
because everybody wants to be a leader.
It is obvious that as atomized,
unstructured and disorganized as the
opposition parties are, at the moment,
the PDP will still rig its way to power
in 2011. The only antidote to this
happening is for the oldmen, who
obviously are of no electoral value at
the moment, to encourage Asiwaju Bola
Ahmed Tinubu to lead the onslaught
against the PDP. To do otherwise, one
predicts that, in no distant future, a
columnist like Basil Okafor, would also
write about this objective reality as
being “consigned to the scrap heap of
tomfoolery”.
Conclusively, Governor Amaechi wants to
eradicate the insect mosquito whereas,
Dr. Braithwaite wanted to and is still
desirous of eliminating the
human-mosquitoes in our midst. That is
the point Basil Chiji Okafor missed.
Chikena!
Mallam Ahmed Jaji
Executive Secretary
Never Again Group
e-mail:
neveragaingroup@yahoo.com
November 11, 2009
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