The speech last week in Washington, D.C. delivered by the Special Adviser to the President on Niger Delta, Kingsley Kuku in which he threatened the Americans that oil would not be mined in Nigeria’s Niger Delta if the President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan does not get a further term of office from 2015 should officially mark the commencement of the mandate government has given to persuaders.
In that famous speech, Kuku was reported by ThisDay as insisting that “the current peace, safety and security in Niger Delta was tied to the continued stay in office of President Goodluck Jonathan in office”. Does that remind you of Wada Nas?
Kuku who spoke at an interactive session with very Senior State Department officials led by the Deputy Assistant Secretary (Bureau of African Affairs) Ambassador Donald Teibeltaum, said that it is “only Jonathan Presidency that can guarantee continued peace and energy security in the Niger Delta.”
As Simon Kolawole brilliantly wrote in 2010 in an essay “Youth Earnestly Ask for Jonathan,” this is a path we have trodden before.
Simon wrote in that piece that persuaders, of which Kuku eminently qualifies as one “all claim to be doing some good and fighting for justice and equity and fairness. The impression being created is that the President does not know anything about it. It is Nigerians who are trying to exercise their freedom of speech. But haven’t we been here before?”
The campaigners for Jonathan’s second or is it third term are not in any significant manner different from those who campaigned for military dictators such as General Sani Abacha, and those well-known faces who stood there to canvass for President Obasanjo’s constitutional amendment to make for a third term of office.
Chief Anthony Anenih, Senator Ibrahim Mantu and Ojo Maduekwe, three very powerful men now around President Jonathan played exactly the same roles for Abacha; for Obasanjo and they are now doing that for Dr. Jonathan
Also in that infamous league is Ambassador Greg Mbadiwe, a former Ambassador and Chairman of a succession of important federal boards including the Federal Road Safety Commission, FRSC, who Newswatch quoted as saying: “the UNCP must not renege on the decision to present General Sani Abacha as its flag-bearer. For, contrary to utterances by a few people who have access to the press, the majority of the people are in support of continuity of General Abacha. They are in alignment with the regime’s efforts and eagerly want to give him a stronger mandate come August 1, 1998.”
In words similar to those read out by Kuku in America, Daniel Kanu, leader of the Youths Earnestly Ask for Abacha, YEAA, said “the youths will not only go on hunger strike but would cripple the economy and make the country ungovernable if Abacha refuses to succeed himself.”
In that Newswatch report, the late Sultan Maccido said of Abacha: “we have looked carefully around and hasten to say that you are the person fully qualified to occupy the seat”. For Prince Arthur Eze, “our lives are in the hands of Abacha. It is either Abacha or war.”
During that period, even men of scholarly bent and of sound erudition like Dr. Ibrahim Tahir lost all moral courage and temperament to join the bandwagon. Tahir said since George Washington was adopted, there was nothing that stops Abacha from being adopted like the former American President.
Pundits like Simon who try to make a distinction between what Jonathan is trying to do and that which the army Generals did miss one point. The words of a man are his band. If a man voluntarily enters into an agreement on a given matter as Jonathan did with the Governors, he or she is bound to keep that. He stops being a gentleman the moment he gets no constipation from eating his own words. In politics, the greatest sin is hypocrisy, which is saying one thing and doing the opposite. No constitution or court of law can absolve a man of his moral burden in situations of honour such as we are dealing with.
The Americans to whom Kuku went to launch the President’s politics of brinkmanship cannot be swayed by cheap blackmail. Don’t forget that the U.S. just called the bluff of the North Korean dictator, the dangerous 29-year-old Kim Jung-Un and the skies have not fallen. To say that Niger Delta will boil and the amnesty will crash if Jonathan doesn’t get four more years in 2015 is a silly threat. In any case we are already there. Amnesty in the Niger Delta has broken. Today, pipelines are being broken and oil to the tune of 300,000 barrels per day is being stolen. This is three times more oil than Ghana proudly produces. Is it also not a fact that the killing of soldiers and policemen has resumed? What about piracy, for which Nigeria is rapidly gaining a renown? We just overtook Somalia as the world’s most dangerous maritime waters. As I write, five sailors were kidnapped in the morning on Nigerian waters aboard their ship. Can it get worse than this?
As one politician in the North said in a recent newspaper article, Niger Delta leaders should call off such threats as saying that they would stop restraining their youths. The question he asked such “leaders” is that are you the only ones who have youths?
The Kukus of this world should break out of their cocoons and wake up to a wisened, democratic Nigeria.
