By Anthony George-Ikoli SAN
Respectfully, there is absolutely nothing new, noble or elevating in these political peregrinations or defections; just ahistorical juveniles and their soulless “Excellencies of straw “responding to the gnawings of their extended bellies.
Our political leaders tell us and have defined our brand of politics as the only vocation requiring unquenchable appetite as mandatory qualification , and as a game for accessing power to satiate personal interests.
They make of the gods of their politics, undisciplined totems with grasping, ochre hued talons in unremitting quest to propitiate their stomachs at whatever cost, and they say principles be damned.
They make of the soap box, no more than a contraption to levitate inexactitudes and harvest the gullibility of the great unwashed. They betray their stolen and over padded sinecures without flinching; in cavil, making cant of everything sacred and conflating their hustle with the epistles of self determination approximating ijaw nation’s well being to their personal survival.
There is however something deeply, unmitigatedly immoral about these developments; “broken, cranially denuded and thinking nerves challenged, political knaves, unmoored, amoral, and hollow persons “take decisions without appreciation for the consequences of their acts.
Perhaps some contextualisation is imperative at this chaotic juncture: Upon attainment of flag independence in the 1960s, the first concerted actions of the post colonial states were to centralise power in the hands of the “Pontifex maximuses “ who emerged from the colonial gaols as successors to the departing colonialists. Lacking proper democratic grounding, sturdy credentials and still as yet untutored in the full ethos of governance beyond their intolerance for contrary expressions; they corralled their parliaments to enact a slew of “preventive detention” laws that empowered them to experiment with the one party systems and in the process turned the nascent democracies of the still wobbly post colonial states into giant gulags for their dissenting compatriots, and the result?
But of course in time; with dissent squelched, from that mockery made of the electoral process, the barracks belched fire and we are still picking up the pieces from those political misadventures today. The present is on the road to that Golgotha and our hard won innocence and our freshly sutured virginity will be sundered anew.
We are regaled ad nauseam, and harangued ad infinitum that “those , who’d not learn as appropriate from the discomfiting lessons of history are bound to repeat them” and so, like is now unfolding, the appropriation of the commonwealth for ends other than the patently altruistic is complete and the wild, giddy, vulgar, triumphant celebration of that achievement is now infamously the preoccupation of the purloiners and carpet baggers.
And we the people look on flummoxed and rue the promises of Nigerian democracy without Nigerian democrats .
In Domino Confidimus.
Like, the Pied Piper piped the rats into the river of damnation, perhaps these defecting, clowning fools are the latter day rats of our dysfunctional political class and are unwittingly but fittingly defecting and being piped into perdition; just maybe, indeed just maybe and then we, the clairvoyant resolutes shall now have a sane realm to live in.
Peace, my troubled soul; these bewildering days too shall come to pass and a glorious political dawn will come to light.
At heaven’s gate or hades door mouth, there shall be salvation yet.
Dear readers, we really need your support to keep on serving you with authoritative, truthful, and juicy stories everyday. For your support, please reach out to the editor @gavelinternational66@gmail.com